The 4th International Seville Conference on
Future-Oriented Technology Analysis (FTA):
12 & 13 May 2011
FTA and Grand Societal Challenges:
Shaping and Driving Structural and Systemic Transformations
The Perfect Storm
Authors:
Sponsors:
Type:
Geographic
Coverage:
Scope:
Applied Methods:
Evaluation:
Impacts:
Organiser:
Duration:
Keywords:
Peter Plougmann
Ivar Moltke
email address: pp@newinsight.dk
email address: Ivar@create.dk
New Insight A/S and a number of private Danish clients
Europe, Denmark
Alternative scenarios
Scenarios
To soon to say
Avoiding disaster and utilizing endless new social opportunities
New Insight, Region Zealand
2010Budget:
Time Horizon: 20y
Date of Brief:
02.04.2010
“The Perfect storm”, quality of life, artificial intelligence, global competition, global warming,
scarce resources, new opportunities, new social navigation skills
Purpose
Please join us in this early warning FTA research in order to find ways around the “Perfect Storm” when aged society, global
warming, artificial intelligence are finally coming of age, and harsh global competition about food, water, oil disrupt the European
economies and societies. How can we navigate these fast growing threats and can we even turn them into opportunities. Can aged
society provide us with wisdom and new medicine, can global warming be an opportunity for farming, can artificial intelligence and
robots provide us more intelligent solution, can the 3rd world be the emerging market and can new values change focus from
consumption to quality of life.
Background & Context
by the current generation of politicians, even if these
politicians can initiate trade conflicts, financial crises and
even wars making the future conditions for counteracting the
impact of the “Perfect Storm” even worse.
We live in a time of great disruptions. In many ways we are
fast approaching a “Perfect Storm”. All the strong drivers of
disruption: globalization, demography, climate crisis, Moore's
law and the increasing competition for global resources are
gathering force simultaneously and exponentially. These
drivers are also to a large degree independent of actions taken
This is not a temporary crisis. Returning to business as usual
in the western societies will lead to growing public expenses,
fewer taxpayers, growing debt, increasing inequality, runaway global warming. But what are the alternatives, and how
can they be implemented in due time?
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<Title>:
This project has to a large degree been expert-driven but the
basic ideas and line of thinking have been integrated and
tested in a number of client-financed projects conducted by the
authors. Some of these projects are related to investigation of
the future of growth and job creation in Denmark.
A large number of one-day sessions involving top managers
from the private sector have also contributed to the line of
thinking presented in this brief.
Thus, the projects have so far involved hundreds of
participants from all kinds of stakeholders relevant to the
issue at hand.
Other projects have dealt with the dilemmas of developing the
health care sector of the 21st century.
And other projects have been concerned about involving
citizens in social innovation, DIY-ICT-solutions and the future
of the construction industry, and also of the future of publicprivate cooperation for delivering the public services of the
future.
As it might be expected a multidisciplinary approach was used
and both a top-down and a bottom-up approach have been
applied.
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FTA Process
Einstein once said a problem cannot be solved within the
paradigm that created it. This FTA challenges the very
paradigm of post-Friedman political economy. It can be
regarded as a wildcard scenario.
Most FTAs are based on assumptions of the production of
workers and income tax. But what if these assumptions are
flooded by a tsunami of artificial intelligence and robots?
Most FTAs are based on the concept of consumption but what
if outsourcing, public tax policy favouring the upper classes
and casino economy disrupts the distribution of and reduces
the level of the average income? A growing number of FTAs
acknowledge that resources are not unlimited but what
happens to the planet when the majority of people living in
emerging markets approaches the EU and US levels of
standard of living and consumption? Business as usual is a
highly unlikely scenario, yet all government planning,
education, investments etc. are based on a business as usual
assumption. We need to challenges this assumption.
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
This FTA process is using innovation tools to investigate wild
card scenarios outside the paradigm of Reaganomics like:
 Jobs seem to disappear in Europe, either moving out
to low cost countries or being automated in a 20 year
perspective. Is there an alternative to this
development? We do not accept the idea that
knowledge work will take over. There is a winner
takes all development in science, in art, in sports,
everywhere. So what is the alternative?
 Assuming that the automated production of goods
and services are as plentiful as now, how do we make
the owners share their wealth with all the people on
public welfare? In Denmark the number of
companies paying tax has declined from 60 per cent
to 24 per cent and next to no transnational
companies pay any tax at all. So what happens with
the public welfare system when we end up with very
few employees and no company tax?
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Will the aging society be a problem in a society
where most people are on public welfare because the
jobs are outsourced or automated? Can a society
where most people are semi- or fully retired survive?
Will there indeed be any pension? The pension
system depends on stability. When the Soviet Union
collapsed, the pension systems collapsed, millions fell
into poverty and thousands died prematurely.
The capacity of the national health care system is
increasingly utilized by people with chronic illness.
Imagine if they could be cured with stem cells and
gene therapy. Why would anybody talk about
retirement age if old people were healthy and active?
Maybe radiologist job is easier to automate than a
taxi driver’s job. Maybe almost all jobs are easy to
automate in 20 years. This year a computer won over
the world champion in Jeopardy. A decade earlier a
computer won over the world champion in chess.
Kurtzweil has focused on when computers overtake
human intelligence in some 20 years. But with
smartphones always on, the question is when
mainframes will overtake human intelligence? Maybe
Google already has above human intelligence.
A job is both about income distribution and about
recognition for contribution. If we are all on welfare,
we need to invent other ways of contributing. Would
it be possible to have a type of gift economy rather
than a money economy?
Imagine if we could measure quality of life. Quantify
it, share, distribute and trade it like money, yet it was
not money. Because it grew from being shared.
Imagine that the ministry of finance was a ministry
for quality of life. Imagine if quality of life was the
measuring stick. Would people want the expensive
things or would they choose differently? What would
than mean to nature, environment and global
warming.
What will happen to private property and intellectual
property in a winner takes all economy. Why should
the 99.9 per cent pay and respect the 0.1 per cent
owners?
<Title>:

What will happen to us when computers outsmart us?
These are not very comforting thoughts in a winner
takes all culture.
The next challenge is to imagine how such a wild card
scenario could emerge. What would make people choose the
wild card alternative and how could it survive in an open
global competition:
 Together the public employees, those on pension and
those on welfare in Denmark are already close to
being the majority of the voters, and this is soon to be
in most EU countries. What happens when those on
pension and welfare is a majority? Maybe a scenario
with everybody on welfare could win the election.
Maybe it already has.
 2 per cent of the population produces all the food, 10
per cent all the industrial goods. Is that a real
problem or an opportunity for “how to share the
wealth problem”? Could we imagine a society where
all production of food, goods and even services are
automated? If we cannot, we might better get started.
 What if artificial intelligence is better and safer than
human intelligence? Who would not prefer a safe
robot to a bored or distracted, inadequate skilled
human.
 Who would not prefer stem cells and eternal youth to
hospitalization and premature death?
 Who would not trade wealth to improve quality of life
and happiness?
So what about the economy? Are such experiments possible in
an open global economy?
 The problem is of course that the owners will not
share their wealth. Or will they? Bill Gates donates
billions to fight diseases and he is not the only one.

Open source Linux environment is for free. When the
economy becomes even more virtual, the free goods
become more plentiful and maybe the hacker
community rules. Music, movies, games and books
are hacked for free. Is the knowledge society over
even before it started?
We combine these wild cards into scenarios such as:
 Business as usual, a 0-2 per cent more GNP every
year vision.
 Kurzweil’s singularity scenario where computers get
smarter than humans in 20 years.
 A “global warming and limits to growth” scenario
where we are all forced to reduce consumption
because the supply is running out or because global
warming is happening much faster than anticipated
(it already is).
 A human centred quality of life scenario where all
economical and legal incentives are optimizing
quality of life.
 A society where age is irrelevant, where emotional
intelligence, competence, empathy rules and illness is
the only excuse not to contribute.
It would be exciting to test these scenarios in some small scale
proof of concept experiment to validate the functionality of the
scenarios. And it would be particularly exiting to conduct
these experiments and prototypes in different European
countries to monitor the effect of different cultures and
traditions.
The profound change of society demands this profound change
of mindset and values. If we keep to GDP growth as our yard
stick for measuring progress we are also stuck with the
present society. There is a great difference between economic
growth and the progress of human civilization.
Output & Impacts
We are running out of time. Empires expire. The British and
French empires expired 60 years ago, and the Soviet empire
expired 20 years ago. The American empire will also expire
and in Europe our ability to generate extra profits and wealth
will expire with that as well unless we redefine ourselves and
stop being empires entitled to wealth and glory.
The success indicator is that we can even imagine a functional
alternative to the present society and a roadmap to this new
way of living.
If we change our mindset from empire thinking to network
thinking, from atoms to bits, from property to open source and
from money to quality of life things, will be all different.
The roadmap would also create the foundation for developing
the “navigation skills” of our European youth, making them
able to turn the threats of the Perfect Storm into new
opportunities for the open society of this exciting century.
New Metrics
We need a new clock counting change of performance or even
improvement rather than minutes. Moore’s law states that the
performance of a computer doubles every 18 month. How fast
does the performance of a car or a house or a person double.
We tend to agree than an hour is an hour and a year is a year.
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<Title>:
Imagine clocks with different speeds depending on speed of
development. We want to explore the potential of a different
time measure in scenario works and timelines.
Being powerful is using power and energy. VIPs use all kinds
of resources almost without limit (like private jets etc.). If the
mindset was changed from hierarchy to network, the ones with
the most and best friends would be better off than the current
powerful VIPs using power and resources. He might actually
already be. What will the impact of such a change be on the
housing markets for instance? Most likely it will lead to a new
neighbourhood and new urbanism and it could lead to
abandoning suburbs and villas.
If things produced by automated robots become almost free,
particularly when the robots produce the robots, then human
empathy will be among the few things in short supply.
Maybe that will lead to a change in our concept of education.
Why would anybody take a university degree in radiology if
computers are already better reading the scans? Why would
we educate kids with multiple choice tests and PISA tests if an
internet-connected cell phone is better at Jeopardy already?
The term "making money" is absurd. If we limited the magic of
money by removing their capacity to breed, things might
change. If money were only a media for exchange instead of
means for creating artificial fortune out of nothing, things
would change. We could keep the benefits of the market place
without banks and derivates and speculation and gambling.
Exit casino economy. The financial break down showed us
that economy without control is economy out of control.
Outcome & Evaluation
This project is really only in a preliminary phase. Investigating the potential impact of changing a paradigm is not an easy task
and we need a lot of strong partners to do this research.
However, a number of the client-based projects mentioned have been finalised or are in the process of being concluded. Based on
the preliminary evaluations and feedback, we already are pretty sure we are on to something.
One close partner of the authors (Peter Hesseldahl) has already published a book investigating some of the basic ideas presented in
this brief (“Grib Fremtiden” in Danish, but to be translated into English soon).
For further information contact:
Peter Plougmann, managing director of New Insight
A/S
Email: pp@newinsight.dk
Tel.: +45 33 69 13 01
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