Ted J. Gordon

millennium project

Views of 55 international Artificial General Intelligence experts and thought leaders addressing 22 questions about advanced future AI.

When the coronavirus pandemic blasted into the world in late 2019, some conspiracy theorists speculated that the virus that causes the pneumonia-like disease COVID-19 was no more or less than a snippet of genetic material that had escaped from a Chinese bio-weapons lab in Wuhan China, or a terrorist weapon introduced by insane sects to kill million...

All acts have consequences; many may be unintended. Some can aggravate the very situation they were supposed to solve. Of great concern is the development of aggregate measures of an individual’s behavior and relating these indexes to propensity to commit terrorist acts. It will be easy to collect data for such indexes, but difficult to repair the...

The US has already established separate military service to treat space as a new battleground. Terror will follow into this new arena. The more space becomes accessible to citizens, the more it becomes a source of potential new threats. GPS satellites became potential targets for terror attacks—lose confidence in geo-location and earth-bound system...

Artificial Intelligence is both a promise and a curse to terrorism and its pre-detection. A promise because it may help pick up otherwise undetectable clues and “connect the dots” among seemingly independent occurrences that point to a planned attack. And it is a curse because AI can be used as a means to automate attack decisions made by the weapo...

The borders between terror and war, between low profile confrontations and full-scale wars are getting fuzzier. Sometimes one leads to the other, sometimes they interfere with each other. In addition, we should envision situations in which we won’t be able to distinguish between natural and man-made events. Uncertain and hidden aggressions became t...

One of the main impediments for developing coherent, trans-border policies and strategies for detecting and avoiding terrorist activities is simply that there is no global consensus of what actions or contemplated actions would make a person or a group be considered terrorists. To come to grip with this tripping point, we conducted a Real-Time Delp...

The intersection between the pandemic caused by COVID-19 and terrorism is discussed. China and the USA have failed to cooperate, each accusing the other of failing to take sufficient action, and of falsifying data. It should be clear to anyone who cares to look: unless the pandemic is secured globally, health security cannot be guaranteed anywhere....

When Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to President Trump, was interviewed on the TV news show Meet the Press in 2017, she invented the term “alternative facts” in the defense of an incorrect estimate made by the President of the number of people attending the 2016 presidential inauguration. Deep fakes—the growing inability to tell true facts from fals...

Future technologies open many new opportunities for terrorists to accomplish their objectives. This chapter reviews some possibilities that may be attractive to them, including nuclear technologies, radioactivity, brain research, metadata manipulation, toxicology, and entanglement to name a few. In the new field of neuro-criminology, scientists are...

With the advent of new technologies, the scope and spectrum of both—terrorism and the means for addressing it—are expanding, challenging counter-terrorism strategies and existing regulations. To help improve understanding the area and its potential future developments, a Real-Time Delphi (RTD) study was conducted with relevant experts. The question...

Small events, little things, can have significant consequences. Terrorists might seek scenarios which yield huge results with small investments and better yet, function below the threshold of detection. Frauds, small thefts, incessant hacking and harmful memes, and destructive social media are only a few examples. The butterfly effect in a chaotic...

The expansion of genealogy and other sites that tabulate personal characteristics greatly increases the possibility of positively identifying someone from fragmentary data. Databases containing information about the genetic characteristics of individuals—even those developed in the private sector—can help trace suspects and criminals even though on...

This book assesses potential developments of terrorism and ways to prevent it—the growing threats as new technologies become available — and how the same new technologies may help trap those with potential mal-intent. The drumbeat of terror resonates from everywhere; how can we stop it? What are the tripping points along the road and how can we avo...

The three scenarios incorporated input from over 250 medical doctors, public health professionals, emergency relief staff, economists, and futurists in five US and international Real-Time Delphi studies (a unique interactive survey process). These studies assessed the possible best, worst, and most likely conditions by January, 2022. The scenarios...

Could our political deadlock have its origins in evolutionary psychology, in the primal need to assert territory and defend it, in the stereotyping of an enemy, in the comfort and safety of belonging to a clan? Whatever its origins, chaos pervades the political scene. Right versus left, Democrats vs. Republicans, conservative versus liberal: Who ar...

Issue: We know that the major nuclear countries have very large stockpiles of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons and that other nations, primarily North Korea and Iran, want to acquire such weapons too. We know as well that weapons tend to be used and that there is no shortage of possible flash points and confrontations among nuclear powers in...

Some people make good decisions intuitively; they somehow feel, somehow know, and what is right to do. They use no conscious analysis, but at some hidden level of intellect, future scenarios are painted, alternatives are generated, considered, played out against the scenarios, and are accepted or rejected. For those talented in the art, the decisio...

Issue: This is the Malthusian question in modern dress. Will population growth outpace the world’s ability to support the people who inhabit it? Beginning in the mid-1970s, three forces came together unexpectedly that changed the world for all time. The event was so important that historians of a hundred or a thousand years from now may look back a...

Progress is movement toward the attainment of goals. Aha, but whose goals? Goals seem to shift as they are approached. When we agree with the goals toward which we seem to be moving, progress is good; when we disagree, progress is not progress at all but retrograde change. Given the definition of progress as movement toward the attainment of desira...

Issue: How can we know what is true when it is difficult to tell fact from lies, when social media replicate unverified assertions and imagined truths a thousand-fold, when lies interfere with decision making, when popular opinion and democratic voting lead to answers that are unappealing or demonstrably wrong? History shows that propaganda can be...

Issue: Some of the great, unanswered questions of our time are: “How did it all begin? Is there an afterlife? Why do we exist?” Was the notion of God a creation of man, a product of our idea that everything must have a beginning and an end? Did God come from divine invention, a quirk of wiring of the brain, or is God an invention of ancient man? An...

Issue: Terrorists may well have access to bioweapons that are capable of killing tens of thousands of people or more in a single convulsive moment. We call these persons “SIMADS” Single Individuals, Massively Destructive. Preparations for such attacks may be hard to detect. So, stated simply, the issue we hand to the future is avoiding killing tech...

Issue: Why do we have to die? We have futurist friends who think they may live forever. They see their life span as a race between the future date of discovery of disease cures and the dates when those murderous diseases may attack them. “The worst irony would be discovering a cure for the disease that kills me,” they say, “the day after I die from...

Issue: The problem here is that in religion, as well as in other institutions, we see corruption, immorality, ethical lapses, and abuses. It is entwinement with government and that mix raises questions about who makes and enforces laws, sets education standards, and provides security: the people, the King, or God? Does it make any difference? The U...

Unlocking the mysteries of human genetics and developing the technologies to manipulate heredity will give, for better or worse, a new dimension to our ability to set the fate of our children and through them and their children and ultimately the fate of humanity itself. It starts now. In our time, ad hoc experimentation has already begun. We will...

The issue here is: Will artificial superintelligence become our masters or will we train it to be helpful to the human condition, or maybe a little bit of both. Today, we have artificial narrow intelligence, useful for single functions (e.g., driving 18 wheelers). Next comes artificial general intelligence, a time when computers can write their own...

In this volume, the authors contribute to futures research by placing the counterfactual question in the future tense. They explore the possible outcomes of future, and consider how future decisions are turning points that may produce different global outcomes. This book focuses on a dozen or so intractable issues that span politics, religion, and...

A scenario is a rich and detailed portrait of a plausible route to a future world, including issues and decisions that might have to be faced as the future unfolds. In this chapter, we are most interested in scenario-creation processes that involve inputs from more than a single person, involve feedback, and may use quantitative models to help esta...

Events worldwide make clear that the threat of terrorism is growing, and would-be terrorists may be developing new strategies and new tools that will enable them to develop massively destructive weapons. Yet, at the same time, new measures are becoming available that could improve chances for early identification of planned terrorist acts. A previo...

Counterfactuals are turning points in the evolving future and are often used to describe how the present or future might be different if, at a past turning point, the other road had been taken. The purpose of this article is to apply counterfactual analysis that has often been used in studies of history to future studies, in particular to uncover u...

While some technological breakthroughs enable the development of increasingly destructive weapons, others will provide security agencies with new pre-detection tools. In preamble to a NATO Advanced Research Workshop on the potential role of new technologies and methods to pre-detect potential terrorism intent, an expert RTD was conducted on this su...

Never before have technological advances had so great an impact on security—not only increasing the nature and level of threats, but also for the possibility of providing the means to address the threats. Technologies that could increase security include ubiquitous and omnipresent surveillance systems, the use of new algorithms for big data, improv...

In planning, prospective policies are often subjected to “what if” resiliency tests. The question is asked: would intended decisions work as well if unanticipated events were to occur? This testing approach has two principal problems: there are psychological impediments to an unbiased choice of the test events and the inventory of events from which...

The Persian Version of FRM Ver 3.0 that has been provided -translated and edited- by me in cooperation with some of my best colleagues under the supervision of Prof. Izadi by permission of dear Jerome. C. Glenn and dear Ted Gordon includes 5 volumes including 39 chapters that has been published in Iran. In the coming weeks it'll be freely released...

Trends over the past decades show that Lone Wolf (LW) terrorism is on the rise around the world. To reach a deeper understanding of this phenomenon and its possible future trajectory, the authors of this book, under the auspices of the Millennium Project's Israeli Node, conducted a Real-Time Delphi (RTD) study involving experts in security and rela...

The recent terror events committed by individuals in the streets of Jerusalem, the Canadian Parliament and in New York have raised attention to the phenomena of Lone Wolf terrorism. While there is no internationally-agreed upon definition, generally a lone wolf (LW) is described as a single individual acting essentially alone who kills or injures p...

The raw material from which the Global Trends 2030 report was derived came from commissioned papers, workshops, interviews, and feedback?all largely qualitative. In addition, a number of quantitative models were used to put numbers behind the ideas that came from the consultants. The synthesis of this information was performed by an individual (or...

Persian translation of The Millennium Project's "State of The Future 2011". Teamwork by: Futures Studies Research Institute. http://fsri.aut.ac.ir/

Persian translation of the book.

In training to be a pilot one of the earliest lessons taught and repeated is that no matter what happens, the pilot must first and foremost fly the airplane. It can be bouncing in turbulence, slammed up or down in a thunderstorm, caught up in the vortex of a jumbo jet that has just taken off, radios gone, night dark and foreboding, but fly the airp...

This paper reports on the introduction of the State of the Future Index (SOFI) into the University of Denver's International Futures (IFs) modeling system, a synthesis that will permit the calculation and comparison of the SOFI for all nations covered in the model. The SOFI is an index designed to show whether the future outlook is improving or not...

Brief history of the approaches to the method, what it is, how to do it, building an environmental scanning data base and collective intelligence, and appendix with examples.

The status of sub-Saharan African nations and their people can be affected now and even more so in the future by technology. Both the frequency and profundity of inventions that change lives have been accelerating because of the disappearance of artificial walls that separated scientific disciplines, improved and rapid communications, and the inven...

Purpose Conventional Delphi studies use sequential questionnaires and produce rich information synthesized from the judgments of the experts who participate. However such studies are usually time‐consuming. The purpose of this paper is to describe one of the first applications of a new method of applying the Delphi principles of feedback and anonym...

The authors have recently developed a new approach to performing a Delphi study that does not involve the use of sequential “rounds” and as a result, greatly improves the efficiency of the process and shortens the time to perform such studies. This paper describes this process, RT Delphi, and illustrates its use in a decision-making application dra...

Abstract: Fifteen global challenges have been identified, described, and strategies proposed for their solution by over a thousand futurists, business planners, policy makers and advisors, scholars and scientists via a series of questionnaires, interviews, environmental scanning, and computer models. The 15 Global Challenges are a system – improvin...

This paper describes some important frontiers of futures research with the aim of identifying new opportunities for improving the value and utility of the field. These frontiers include the exploration and/or the reexamination of(a)Potential for integrating new technology with futures research methods,(b)Ways to reduce the domain of the unknowable,...

Purpose The article seeks to address the lack of serious, normative scenarios exploring peace in the Middle East. Design/methodology/approach Three normative, backcasted scenarios were written. These were derived from literature searches, interviews with experts in the field, and input from a three‐round Delphi. Actions were identified and rated b...

This article presents four scenarios depicting science and technology (S&T) management dilemmas of the next two decades. The scenarios concern the balance between risk and promise, between the need to steer the directions of S&T, to minimize risk, and the need to maintain a free and unconstrained S&T agenda. These scenarios were constructed in the...

The Millennium Project involved 237 scientists, futurists, and policymakers around the world in a two-round Delphi on the future issues of science and technology (S&T) over the next 25 years. This is the first of a 3-year study. The study began by asking science attaches to Washington, DC, what questions were worth asking to their leading scientist...

Many forms of analyzing future technology and its consequences coexist, for example, technology intelligence, forecasting, roadmapping, assessment, and foresight. All of these techniques fit into a field we call technology futures analysis (TFA). These methods have matured rather separately, with little interchange and sharing of information on met...

In the aftermath of the Iraq war, global attention to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has increased, but the way ahead still seems as difficult as before. The lack of trust on both sides has led to the development of the internationally backed “Road map for peace” that avoids direct negotiation between the parties. This inability...

This paper presents an agent model that simulates the spread of an infection in a population. The epidemic depicted could be any attribute that is passed from a one person to others in society, for example, a disease, an idea or belief, a fad, a market or a behavioral pattern. The model was constructed to study the sensitivity of factors such as vi...

The world is increasingly complex and the most serious challenges are global in nature. Questions to do with sustainable and equitable development, democratic change, terrorism and transnational crime, for instance, require collaborative action among governments, international organizations, corporations, universities, and nongovernmental organizat...

This article reports on an international assessment to identify and discuss environmental issues that may affect the US Army’s transformation efforts. Many factors, such as new kinds of weapons, increasing demands on natural resources, urbanization and globalization, are making the planning of environmental viability for life support more important...

At its best, futures research can change priorities and attitudes within organizations, and bring fresh meaning to the present. But its recommendations are not always politically convenient, and a much-heralded report can be just as discreetly shelved. A key role for futurists is therefore to inspire decision-makers with alternative futures and cho...

This issue presents the accumulative research of the past 3 years of the Millennium Project and its approximately 550 participants from 50 countries that have contributed their judgments about the future of humanity, providing an independent, interinstitutional, multinational, and interdisciplinary context for global thinking. Fifteen Global Challe...

This article presents a scenario based on the inputs of 550 futurists, scholars, business planners and policy advisers from around the world. Their views on global developments were distilled into a range of issues, opportunities and actions to address. These have been woven together into a scenario based on achieving norms by 2050 that were identi...

This issue presents the distillation of views of approximately 250 participants from around the world who have contributed their judgments about the state of the future. A total of 180 developments were identified and rated that could evolve over the foreseeable future to significantly improve the human condition. These were clustered into 15 globa...

The first year's operations of The Millennium Project of the American Council for the United Nations University is described. The four-round 1996 Global Look-Out Study is one of the three primary activities explained. Results of Round 1 and 2 in the domain of governance and conflict are listed.

The Millennium Project of the American Council for the United Nations University is described as a global capacity for early warning and analysis of long-range issues and strategies originating from a recently completed three-year feasibility study funded by the US EPA, UNDP, and UNESCO. The Project's first years are explained, planning committee m...

Underpinning contemporary political debates and organizational restructuring is a serious rethinking of rights and responsibilities in the roles of governments, communities, companies, and individuals in a civil society.International Rights and Responsibilities for the Futureprovides a foundation for these debates by focusing on the need to reinteg...

The pace, complexity, and globalization of change requires attention to the future. The change of millennia — the coming of the year 2001 — provides an opportunity, a psychological focus, for a global review of past achievements and problems and a unique chance to assess and reflect on future issues and opportunities.Unfortunately, there is as yet...

Previous papers have described the chaotic nature of nonlinear systems under some conditions: widely fluctuating and randomly appearing behavior, high sensitivity to initial conditions, and “attraction” to a regular trajectory in transformed space. This work has served to demonstrate for planners and policy analysts as well as physical scientists t...

Dynamic systems that have nonlinear elements can exhibit stable, oscillatory, divergent, or chaotic behavior. In many instances the behavior of such systems is surprising and counterintuitive. Most work in the field of chaos has focused on physical, mechanical, or electronic systems; here we examine three examples of nonlinear social systems. One e...

In this article, the principal methods used in exploratory forecasting are described. These descriptions should serve two purposes. First, for someone who intends to make an exploratory forecast, they will provide information about the strengths and useful range of each technique. Second, they will also illustrate, directly and by implication, the...

It is well known that a nonlinear recursive equation can produce a chaotic sequence at certain values of the parameter. Furthermore, in the chaotic regime, extremely small changes in the initial value or in the value of the parameter produce very large changes in the sequence. It is surprising therefore that a short segment of a chaotic sequence ca...

I have outlined an ambitious project for forecasting and planning on a world scale in an effort not only to inform, but to help ameliorate the most significant emerging world issues. I offer a tentative description of the project in this article in the hope of stimulating discussion and comments, the first step toward the project's implementation.

Nonlinear systems can be stable—that is, converge to an equilibrium, oscillate stably, diverge unstably, or exhibit persistent chaotic behavior within predictable boundaries. Using a simple, one-dimensional, nonlinear equation as an example, the authors show how these regimes of behavior can be determined a priori, but not the specific values of th...

During 1980, The Futures Group performed a study under contract to the National Science Foundation to devise a convention for describing—in quantitative terms—technological state of the art of essential any technology. In designing this convention we hope that different analysts, working independently, would be able to arrive at a similar conclusio...

325 pages, figures, tableaux, 33 pages de bibliographie This volume is concerned with forecasting. In particular, it is concerned with the various beliefs, methods, practices, and results associated with a kind of forecasting that has come to be referred to in the last JO to 15 years as "futures research." Most earlier works on these subjects-and t...

State profiles of geothermal area crop acreage, production, dollar value, and drying energy were begun. Technical feasibility analyses were done for four geothermally augmented, natural gas alfalfa dryers, a steam-tube predryer design, and an all-geothermal conveyor dryer; costing is underway. Details of a geothermal conveyor-type alfalfa dryer in...

Many of the techniques used to forecast the future are basically extrapolative, that is, they assume that the future will be an extension of the past. This assumption will eventually be incorrect as new forces cause future changes. This paper describes methods for incorporating data and perceptions about unprecedented forces and events in otherwise...

Geothermal energy, energy derived from the intrinsic heat of the earth may become an important element of the energy inventory of the United States and the world in the next few decades. This report deals with some potential uses of geothermal energy in the United States, evaluates systems and makes recommendations for future applications. Specific...

The major characteristics of the development of geothermal energy are examined. The location of geothermal resources and their geology, a description of a typical geothermal power plant, relevant environmental considerations, technologically feasible levels of geothermal energy resources development in the United States, and the combination of geot...

A number of regulatory and institutional impediments to the development of geothermal energy exist. None of these seem likely to prevent the development of this energy source, but in the aggregate they will pace its growth as certainly as the technological issues. The issues are associated with the encouragement of exploration and development, assu...

A set of scenarios is presented depicting the possible range of energy supply, demand, and policy in the United States for the periods between the present and 1985, and 1985 and 2000.

El CD que acompaña esta edición presenta detalles completos de las investigaciones de 2004 del proyecto Millennium, así como de varios años previos. La edición impresa puede considerarse como el resumen ejecutivo de cada capítulo en el CD, el cual contiene tres mil páginas de dicho informe. Así, los temas tratados son: desafíos globales, evolución...