I took that picture last night from the bedroom in the Fairmont Hotel here in Singapore. Part of the ever changing cityscape of Singapore. Today was the last day of the Foresight week and I didn't keep detailed notes as I was in part preparing for the final session of the day when our conference and that on complexity come together. During the day I argued for sidecasting again rather than forecasting or backcasting when the situation is highly uncertain.
There was a lot more discussion today on technology and it's role. We talked about things like the growing loyalty to temporary communities which appears a characteristic of social computing ecologies, the expansion of the middle-class and consequent stress on sustainable development. The theme of individualism was a thread through the conversation and I made the point that capitalism has worked with infinitely available resource, but will not with the level of constraints. Neither of course will socialism, its time to move on from those opposing forces to something new and we talked about that.
Technology however was the dominant theme of the day. Algorithms replacing people, the functionality of robots, quantum computing and other forthcoming changes all had an airing. I ended up in a working group on trust and that discussion will be reflected in future blogs.
So to the final session and five us got a chance to say things and respond to questions. Again this session was videoed so it may be available at some stage. I boiled down a lot of points I wanted to make to three all on the general theme of complexity applied to governance. I also made sure they were sufficiently controversial to be memorable:
I majored on this last point so its worth a second set of bullet points here:
So that was it, I had some of the normal arguments with the modellers but then back to my room to get ready for a final, smaller and more intimate meal. Tomorrow I fly back to the UK.
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