Threat: 5 Tactless Truths About What Lies Ahead

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As a Global Futurist, a Wave Theorist and a trend-spotter, I feel that the worst of economic and sociological times (in terms of the very foundations of civilization are not behind us -- they are lying out about a year or so in the distance, and will be more horrifying and more crippling for all but the very wealthiest of the world's citizenry (dynastic families and corporations blessed by and inextricably intertwined with government -- the true nobility that holds the fate of Humankind in its collective and frightfully avaricious hands) and some of those well-placed politicians who have access to pools of public or treasury funds and the protection of executive security.

The IMF (International Monetary Fund), a combination of a developmental bank and a center for American and allied intelligence has even downgraded (albeit gently) its projections for worldwide economic growth [please see below]. I watch the IMF very carefully -- they give subtle but meaningful cues as to the longer-term economics of the real world, as opposed to the treasuries and central banks of countries, which are largely mainstream media servers of propaganda-flavored beverages. The article brief which follows, a study in mature understatement, comes to us courtesy of SmartBrief Newsletters, and excellent source of information on an industry-by-industry basis:

IMF scales back prediction for global growth
The International Monetary Fund has lowered its forecast for 2013 growth of the world economy by 0.2 percentage point, to 3.1%, the same rate of expansion experienced last year. Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard says emerging markets are entering a slowdown. The IMF has downgraded forecasts for emerging economies including Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The New York Times (tiered subscription model) (7/9), Los Angeles Times (tiered subscription model)/Money & Co. blog (7/9), USA Today/The Associated Press (7/9)

Here are the tactless truths regarding the forces that are driving this financial and social bulldozer in the direction of the entire world as we've come to know it:

1) The fall of the U.S. dollar in terms of its perceived value internationally, as well as the actual prospect of it being replaced in the not-too-distant future as the world's reserve currency for all banks within the world's countries' respective central banking systems. The US has already incurred too much indebtedness, printed too much fiat currency, and lost its edge in terms of innovation and productivity;

2) The decline of the U.S. educational system, as well as the decline of other industrialized nations' educational systems;

3) An increase in the percentage of the world's impoverished and working poor versus the total population, as well as a significant growing disparity between real wages and real prices of the goods necessary for survival and consumerism;

4) The growing instability and endless wars in the Middle East, and the continuing spread of radicalized Islam throughout the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, Asia, the former Eastern Bloc Nations, and in metastasizing cells throughout the non-Islamic world and the West, in general;

5) The slowdown in the rate of reproduction amongst educated, highly skilled persons (as well as a decline in marriages and later unions), versus the unabated and increasing rate of reproduction amongst the poorest, neediest and least-skilled groups of people worldwide. This makes for a frightening demographic.

I think I've said more than enough, and with all due respect to Paula Dean, I must apologize for my failure to vet this article and redact things which may be construed as "Politically Incorrect" (gasp), or blatantly truthful.

Respectfully,

Douglas E Castle for The Global Futurist Blog and CFI Business Growth.

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The Future Of The Human Mind - Transhumanism, Mind-Machine Fusion, And More...

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The future of the Human Mind, in its expanding abilities, creations and intentions, will shape the future or non-future of our species -- the ultimate fate of Humankind. This statement, of course does not give effect to natural disasters, radical climatic change, and other uncontrollable variables which may well defy attempts at prediction. Am then of course, there is the incredible potential of the cloud -- allowing for uploading, downloading, storing sharing and a tremendous volume of informational exchange mechanisms

With some of the technologies which we have at our disposal today, especially those lending themselves to cloud-mind interface, this "Future Human Mind" may be a synergistic multilateral polygamous marriage or fusion of a Human organ and an electronic data cloud.

Further this could be a new species unto itself, with access to resources and a thought capture and exchange mechanism that makes the potential for ideation and creation of a new reality infinite and largely unforeseeable. What some may consider a great intellectual or cognitive enhancement might, in fact be opening up the doorway to the extinction of Humankind as we've come to know it, and to rise of a collective creature (born of multiple minds in a giant router) which will supplant all of what we consider Human and reign with an indomitable power all its own.

Our minds (through our information and communications devices) are already in the cloud as a computer connectivity phenomenon ... but The Global Futurist Blog believes that it is a matter of less than 15 years (being quite conservative) before a "safe" technology is created where the connection device can be eliminated, and every individual will be able to become linked into the cloud [and the cloud, of course, linked to each of those individuals].

The fusion of the organic mind, with inorganically-derived programs and devices is occasionally regarded as Transhumanism, and is spoken of with a doubtful and negative tone. Yet, I believe, as probably did the legendary Faust, that more knowledge is better. While I am afraid of the truth, and the bliss which it will invariably occlude, I am, by my mind, of its own accord as a creature apart from myself, compelled to grow it capabilities. Every living organism has an inherent survival component inherent in its very design -- and I believe that these survivors develop, secondarily, a need to grow -- to acquire more control over more territory.

Future Human, The Matrix, Transhumanism, mind-machine merger, accelerated evolution

Following is a slightly dated but increasingly, screamingly relevant article which appears courtesy of the BigThink Newsletter, which is one of the finest resources for any Futurist worth his or her weight in Unobtainium. On a serious note, BigThink is a tremendous inspiration in terms of topics worth thinking about, writing about, and being proactive about. It is, put in my simple terms, an idea genesis machine. Read on, and remember that The Global Futurist Blog utilizes BigThink as an inspiration as well as a powerful, uniquely-original prediction resource.

Sunday Newsletter

February 10, 2013

This is Your Brain in the Cloud

Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd

We are going to create synthetic neocortexes in order to extend our own neocortexes. . . . Read >>

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I am certain that you found the article to be thought-provoking and stimulating. Remember, in The Braintenance Blog I have repeatedly stressed the point that the more that you use your brain in such exercises as reading, problem-solving and in full-sensory imagination, the more powerful it becomes -- just as any other muscle in the Human body, with an added enhancement --- as you develop your mind, it affects (electronically, magnetically and biochemically) every single muscle in your body, down to the sub-cellular level. This represents self-initiated, self-paced, personalized evolution.

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Shocking World Forecasts: 2013 - 2063

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As the author of The Global Futurist Blog, I take the more conservative road in predictions.

When I forecast for the near-term, I endeavor to keep my visionary insights turned off to the greatest extent possible, while I choose certain specific variable relating to equally specific trends which I feel will either peak and fall (in the fairly near-term), or which have sufficient gravity (as used here, I am speaking of combination of such factors as: their importance to the economy; widespread media coverage; ongoing research grant allocations and investment; the amplitude of the change they would create; the power of the established industries or technologies which they would have to -- David and Goliath style -- disrupt and displace; and the views of other futurists and prognosticators looking at the same variables in the shorter-term) to be carried forward and create a serious rippling effect,  radical sociological paradigm shift or revolutionary technological change.

I've only chosen a few items to focus on, and they are in areas where: the trending is swelling in amplitude; there are limits in accessibility to depletable resources (a finite quantity parameter); there are artificially subsidized or sustained institutions, industries or practices;
there are untenable compromises which foster instability; there are urgent changes required for society's and Humanity's survival; or, where there are institutions which are fatalistic by their nature, and have a "loot and pillage all that we can RIGHT NOW" mentality while the New Rome (or Babylon) burns, or while the Titanic slips into the freezing depths of an unforgiving dispassionate ocean.

I'll limit my global forecasts for the 50-year time frame to a simple outline form without going into the reasoning behind them in great detail:

1) The world's supply of potable water will be scarce, and Israeli desalinization technology will be used, subject to license, by many nations. There will be mass starvation and famine in Africa, parts of the Middle East, island republics and the Amazon;

2) Climate change, unpredictable and increasingly volatile, will create great damage to world infrastructure, significant alterations to continental positions, the decimation of some island civilizations and will make travel increasingly difficult;

3) There will be increased clashes between deprived and infuriated citizens (or servants or subjects) and the governments which have bankrupted them and helped to enslave them;

4) Asia will lose its economic advantage, and that advantage will move to parts of industrialized Europe, with some benefit to the United States.

5) The Caucasian and poorly educated minority of the U.S. citizenry will become increasingly armed and hostile toward the government, and violent (but media-suppressed)skirmishes will ensue; the demography of the U.S. will shift in favor of Latinos and Asians, and virtually all employment with the exception of the entrepreneurial sector, will be by governments or their agencies;

6) There will be bloody war in the Middle East and parts of Africa between Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims;

7) Fossil fuels will decrease in use and utility as their availability is compromised by surface transport issues;

8) The United States will be militarily involved in multiple wars throughout the world;

9) Complete invisibility cloaking will be in use by covert and acknowledged government agencies domestically and internationally.

10) Plasma, laser and other wave-based or radiation-based weapons will be in ordinary use.

11) Mexico will become a rogue state, run by a coalition of corrupt government officials and the drug lords. Other countries will likely follow suit;

12) There will have been a shift toward atomic energy;

13) There will have been a shift from internet to satellite communications;

14) Entire limbs and organs will be grown utilizing stem cells combined with electromagnetic technology and genetic engineering, and for the few who can afford it, the Human lifespan will have been increased to in excess of 130 years. Females will outlive males. The average lifespan due to environmental and socio-economic factors will decrease significantly from where it is today;

15) Those persons who can get work will be telecommuting from their secured residences, and most recreation will not take place outside secured zones in enclosed areas;

16) A great deal of recreational time will be spent in virtual reality, as an escape into fantasy from the harsh realities of future life;

17) Society will not have attained Kurzweil's point of Singularity, but substantially all menial, physical or clerical jobs will be undertaken by robots. Machines will build machines, but none will exhibit genuine Artificial Intelligence;

18) There will be movements amongst various governments to eliminate paper currency to facilitate better tracking of money, materiel and personnel, as well as to simplify the tax collection process. There will be riots in otherwise civilized countries over this;

19) Most device and access security will be by a combination of biometrics instead of encryption;

20) Humanity will be de-socialized to the extent that we will be living in a sort of high-technology Medieval revival, with corporate-government cartels being the lairds of their respective territories, and individuals will serve them, putting country and citizenship affiliations second;

21) Most of the world's wealth will be controlled by less than 1% of the total population -- the other 99% will be struggling for survival in a polluted, unsafe, violent world -- a world overcome by the madness that comes of hyper-vigilance and constant fear;

22) Most educated couples will choose not to have children, while the uneducated will continue to create families which they cannot responsibly support;

23) Pollution in Asia and in certain parts of Latin America will make the air quality so poor that people will not be able to spend any time outdoors, except with air filtration gear;

24) Most of the world's peoples will be living in abject poverty, and will literally be fighting for their their lives;

25) The tremendous resurgence which we are witnessing today amongst the Doomsday Preppers, the End-Times Groups and the militant anti-government groups is ultimately a foreshadowing of items 1 through 24, above. As someone once told me, "Just 'cause you's paranoid don't mean that they ain't out to get you." In these extreme cases, these groups are partially prophetic and partially a disparate self-fulfilling prophesy. There will be incidents involving drones killing innocents, planned assassinations, chemical and biological tests gone wrong and some tragedies involving 'dirty nukes'.  Rhetorically-justified lawlessness will be the privilege of  those who can either choose to be or  pay to be exempt from the law.

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I also believe that there will be the promising beginnings of colonization of other planets or their moons by the next wave of Human pioneers, and they will be Humankind's greatest hope for the future. These colonists will have wonderful, powerful technologies to aid them in their re-creation of a society, but (and this is conjecture -- not forecast), hopefully these few will have sociologically, psychologically and spiritually advanced to the point that they do not want to invest in a zero-sum game.

Instead, I hope that these few will be collaborative, and see the very notion of civilization as a goal to be striven for above all else except for the right to be different from others, but yet fully accepting of them.

Thank you, as always for reading me, and for sharing my articles with your colleagues and connections over the interconnectedness of social media.

Douglas E. Castle

Sponsored By:
CFI - CrowdFunding Incubator LLC
Global Edge Technologies Group LLC
ICS - International Connection Services

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