it we need not only to develop alternative future scenarios but also to change how we think, perceive, and deal with uncertainty. We should embrace it, and get comfortable with it as a part of our organizational culture. We need a mental reset. The cognitive operative systems illustrated by Dr. Sotiriadis should rest on the following three pillars. They use a systems-based approach, similar to strategic foresight, and allow us to understand the inter-connectivity of events and how something that looks perhaps far away or distant from our organization or mission, actually has a lot of interrelated points. They question status quo and core assumptions, figuring out how we can constantly iterate particular visions of the future. They embrace analytic complexity in our processes of thoughts, with nonlinearity, co-dependent variables, and multi-source causality. The U.S. Air Force has recently released a Global Futures Report (AFWIC 2020) that include four scenarios relevant to national defense. The project partnered with a futurist and expert of virtual reality, Cathy Hackel, and set the four scenarios into a virtual reality format, so that the senior leaders can actually live them in an immersive experience of geopolitical competition in 2035. These experiments set the stage for changing the way we make decisions, and how we consume information. Sotiriadis observed that we are living a renaissance now. Foresight has been around for a long time but many recognize now that we need it. In our “futures of futures”, proposes Dr. Sotiriadis, we will be seeing chief futurist titles in many more entities. All of this will happen on the heels of virtual and augmented reality experiments. They allow us to imagine completely new possibilities, and people who have not necessarily participated in building these preferred futures can become part of the dialogue, and develop a
64
HUMAN FUTURES
system; and begin implementation, then it would be wise to begin exploring potential governance approaches and their potential effectiveness now. Another ongoing MP initiative (in cooperation with the WFSF and the APF) is the Open Letter to the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General to support the establishment of a UN Office of Strategic Threats. The idea was raised and discussed in detail during World Future Day, March 1, 2021 . Although the UN includes agencies that are addressing many of the problems facing humanity today, there is no central office to identify, monitor, anticipate, and coordinate research on long-term strategic threats to humanity. Long-range strategic threats to the survival of humanity are well-documented, ranging from the potential of advanced AI growing beyond human control to weakening magnetic fields that protect life on Earth. A UN Office on Strategic Threats, which would centralize and coordinate information and prospective studies on a global scale, could serve international agencies, multilateral organizations, nation-states, the private sector, academia, and humanity in general. futures-based mentality in their day-today life. Innovating biodiversity data, indicators and value for future generations The EEA is a network of 32 members and collaborating countries that works with a partnership model. Its main work with the Environmental Commission is managing and reporting on core data flows related to how our environment is affected and increasingly examining how healthy and resilient ecosystems can minimize the effects of natural disasters and global climate change. EEA is currently exploring how foresight can be integrated into its work. Maintaining rich biodiversity and healthy ecosystems represents complex systemic challenges because causes and effects are multiple, and their measurement is complicated.
Futures literacy provides the ability and opportunity to accommodate to the emergent nature of unfolding complexity. The 8th Environmental Action Program (EAP) sets a systemic and ambitious policy context for the European Environmental Policy until 2030. It is connected to the European Green Deal that showed a clear need for a transformative change and for a long-term transition through a systemic approach. There are other related policies, such as the Biodiversity strategy towards 2030 and the climate law, with a systematic ambition. The European Commission has also identified foresight as a key tool to support this transformative agenda, and EEA is consequently building strategy and a vision with trusted and actionable knowledge in order to inform decisionmaking about priorities and solutions in the European policy context. Using the future would help open up the capacity to learn and respond to emergent challenges. EEA has already had a history of working on foresight through a National Reference
Centre on Forward Looking Information Services (NRC FLIS) since 2007, and it has launched a Foresight function within the agency last year, working with the Foresight 4 Action programme, an organizationwide program to embed foresight into the different streams of EEA. Transition from ANI to AGI will change learning and education Starting from some insights from the three-year international study “Work/Tech 2050. Scenarios and actions” (Glenn, 2019), a need for an International assessment of future governance models for the transition from Artificial Narrow (ANI) to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) emerged. If the initial conditions of AGI are not “right,” then Artificial Intelligence (AI) could evolve into an Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) that could threaten the future of humanity. Since it is likely to take ten years to: develop ANI to AGI international or global agreements; design the governance
Some suggestions to improve foresight and futures studies from the group discussions Group 1 discussed how we should proactively protect both humans and nature. Everything is interconnected. There are several crises potentially arising, from different sectors and they are combined (e.g. Climate migration). We should all train in futures literacy and in longerterm thinking for understanding the consequences of our actions. Group 2 focused on the difficulties to bring alternative futures into many governmental organizations, probably because foresight and futures studies are still considered non-scientific fields. The group also discussed some connections between futures studies and history research, their differences and similarities, and the importance (and the lack) of implementation of foresight in policymaking.
HUMAN FUTURES
65
