20 Crucial Terms Every 21st Century Futurist Should Know
We live in an era of accelerating change, when scientific and technological advancements are arriving rapidly. As a result, we are developing a new language to describe our civilization as it evolves. Here are 20 terms and concepts that you'll need to navigate our future.
Back in 2007 I put together a list of terms every self-respecting futurist should be familiar with. But now, some seven years later, it's time for an update. I reached out to several futurists, asking them which terms or phrases have emerged or gained relevance since that time. These forward-looking thinkers provided me with some fascinating and provocative suggestions — some familiar to me, others completely new, and some a refinement of earlier conceptions. Here are their submissions, including a few of my own.
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1. Co-veillance
2. Multiplex Parenting
3. Technological Unemployment
4. Substrate-Autonomous Person
5. Intelligence Explosion
6. Longevity Dividend
7. Repressive Desublimation
8. Intelligence Amplification
9. Effective Altruism
10. Moral Enhancement
11. Proactionary Principle
12. Mules
13. Anthropocene
14. Eroom's Law
15. Evolvability Risk
16. Artificial Wombs
17. Whole Brain Emulations
18. Weak AI
19. Neural Coupling
20. Computational Overhang
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“How is crowd organization produced? How are crowd-enabled networks activated, structured, and maintained in the absence of recognized leaders, common goals, or conventional organization, issue framing, and action coordination? We develop an analytical framework for examining the organizational processes of crowd-enabled connective action such as was found in the Arab Spring, the 15-M in Spain, and Occupy Wall Street. The analysis points to three elemental modes of peer production that operate together to create organization in crowds: the production, curation, and dynamic integration of various types of information content and other resources that become distributed and utilized across the crowd. Whereas other peer-production communities such as open-source software developers or Wikipedia typically evolve more highly structured participation environments, crowds create organization through packaging these elemental peer-production mechanisms to achieve various kinds of work. The workings of these ‘production packages’ are illustrated with a theory-driven analysis of Twitter data from the 2011–2012 US Occupy movement, using an archive of some 60 million tweets. This analysis shows how the Occupy crowd produced various organizational routines, and how the different production mechanisms were nested in each other to create relatively complex organizational results.”
