Most people alive today will be alive in 2050 and most babies born today will see the year 2100. Global existential risks are increasingly being acknowledged, but zero-sum geopolitical power competitions prevent the synergetic relations among nations, businesses, NGOs, universities, and UN systems needed to adequately address these risks and achieve what could be a magnificent future for all. Without U.S.-China collaboration on issues like global warming, future forms of AI, synthetic biology, and strategic weapons, it is difficult to be optimistic about the future.
…Humanity faces a stark and urgent choice: a breakdown or a breakthrough.
— UN Secretary-General António Guterres
Despite the media’s focus on the most terrible events, day after day, the majority of the world is living in peace and cares about the whole of humanity as never before. Much of the world’s knowledge is freely available to over 60% of humanity. Updating the data for each of 15 Global Challenges shared in Chapter 1, year after year, since 1996, shows that the state of the future, in general, is improving. The State of the Future Index (SOFI) in Chapter 2, based on 29 variables, shows that humanity is winning more than it is losing, but where it is losing or where there is little progress the outcomes could be very serious. We are healthier, wealthier, better educated, living longer, and better connected, but at the expense of the environment, increasing global warming, and obscene concentrations of wealth. We have no right to be pessimistic, but we also cannot rest on past successes.
The SOFI shows that if the trends among the 29 variables continue, then the human condition will be better in 2035 than it is today. If we do it right, civilization’s future could be quite wonderful far beyond 2035. Chapter 4 describes some of the potential beautiful futures for 2045.
Figure 1. State of the Future Index 2035
Artificial intelligence (AI) will be much different in 2050 than it is today and far more different in 2100. Since most people alive today will live with very advanced AI in 2050 and most babies born today will live in a world dominated by far more advanced AI, we should care about shaping such a future today.
Governing Artificial General Intelligence could be the most complex, difficult management problem humanity has ever faced. To which Stuart Russell adds in Chapter 3: “Furthermore, failure to solve it before proceeding to create AGI systems would be a fatal mistake for human civilization. No entity has the right to make that mistake.” So far, there is nothing stopping humanity from making that mistake. Since AGI could arrive within this decade, we should begin creating national and supranational governance systems now to manage that transition from current forms of AI to future forms of AGI, so that how it evolves is to humanity’s benefit. If we do it right, the future of civilization could be quite wonderful for all.
There are, roughly speaking, three kinds of AI: narrow, general, and super. Artificial Narrow Intelligence ranges from tools with limited purposes like diagnosing cancer or driving a car to the rapidly advancing generative AI that answers many questions, generates code, and summarizes reports. Artificial General Intelligence does not exist yet, but many AGI experts believe it could within a few years. It would be a general-purpose AI that can learn, edit its code, and act autonomously to address many novel problems with novel solutions like or beyond human abilities. For example, given an objective, it could query data sources, call humans on the phone, and re-write its own code to create capabilities to achieve the objective that it did not have before. Artificial Superintelligence would set its own goals and act independently from human control, and in ways that are beyond human understanding. Thousands of un-regulated AGIs interacting and giving birth to artificial superintelligence poses an existential threat to humanity. Details on how to manage the transition from ANI to AGI are in Chapter 3. The first section of that chapter organized the views of 55 leading AGI experts from North America, China, UK, Russia, and the EU by 22 key questions about this transition. The second section is an international assessment by 299 futurists and related experts on 40 potential regulations and related issues and 5 global governance models.
The nuclear arms race is being aided by and in important ways being replaced by the race for AGI and advanced quantum computing among the U.S., China, European Union, Japan, Russia, and several corporations. This rush could mean that we cut corners on safety and don’t develop the initial conditions and governance systems properly for AGI; and hence, artificial super intelligence could emerge from thousands of unregulated AGIs beyond our understanding, control, and not to our advantage. Many AGIs could communicate, compete, and form alliances more sophisticated than we can understand, making a new kind of geopolitical landscape. The energy requirements to power this transition are enormous, unless better strategies than large language models (LLMs) and large multi-model models (LMMs) are found. Nevertheless, the proliferation of AI seems inevitable since civilization may be getting too complex to manage without AI’s assistance.
Elementary quantum computing is already here and will accelerate faster than people think, but the applications will take longer to implement than people will expect. It will improve computer security, AI and computational sciences, which in turn will accelerate scientific breakthroughs and technology applications, which in turn increase both positive and negative impacts for humanity. These potentials are too great for humanity to remain so ignorant about them. We need political leaders to understand these issues. The gap between S & T progress and leaders’ awareness is dangerously broad.
Meanwhile, global temperatures continue setting records, increasing sea-levels and ocean acidification, slowing ocean currents, melting glaciers and ice caps, decaying coral reefs, and increasing droughts and other severe weather (hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods). The cost of natural disasters, in part caused by global warming, grew to $280 billion in 2023 and is likely to double over the next ten years. If not another molecule of CO2 or other greenhouse gases goes into the atmosphere from now on, these conditions will continue to get worse for several decades before a new environmental equilibrium is achieved. The public is not prepared for the severity of future climate changes. The world population of 2.5 billion in 1950 grew to 6.1 billion in 2000 and is now over 8 billion and could grow another 2 billion in just 25 years. Either global warming is turned around, or massive migrations from the poorer regions to the richer regions are inevitable.
The COVID pandemic has caused the first global “time-out” for humanity to re-think everything. It has increased our collective awareness of planetary interdependencies and speeded up implementation of many applications of AI and teleeverything from education and work to conferences and health care. Mixed reality for many has become the new reality. It also decreased CO2 emissions and reduced fossil fuel dependency. But it also, cut supply chains of everything from computer chips to oil, shrank the global middle class by 54 million, and increased extreme poverty by approximately 100 million, and likely killed over 15 million people. Its impacts may also reinforce the importance of global early warning systems, collective responsibility, and the value of foresight.
Biologically, new growth occurs after natural and human-made disasters. Historically, innovations can follow disasters as well: from the ashes of World War II, the United Nations and other multi-lateral organizations grew to support human progress as-a-whole. We have yet to see what will emerge from the complex global heath, economic, and psychological disasters from the global COVID pandemic. Although the COVID Recession was the greatest since the Great Depression, rapid financial infusions of over $11.5 trillion around the world, prevented the world recession from falling into a global depression — but did contribute to global inflation.
The war in Ukraine also added to global inflation by reducing grain and fertilizer supplies, but it did increase renewable energy investments and speeded up efforts to reduce European dependency on coal and oil. Unfortunately, it also is bringing the world to nuclear brinkmanship for the first time in 35 years!
Although nuclear brinkmanship has returned to geopolitics, the vast majority of the world is living in peace. Other than the invasion of Ukraine, no major power transborder wars have occurred for over 70 years. However, the nature of warfare has morphed today into: 1) transnational and local terrorism (deaths from terrorism increased 22% during 2023 the highest since 2017, but 23% lower than the peak in 2015; but caution, definitions and data collection vary widely in terrorism reporting); 2) international intervention, including private armies into internal wars (e.g., Ethiopia, Gaza-Israel, Haiti, Mali, Syria, and Yemen); and 3) publicly denied cyber and information warfare.
Information warfare (as different from cyber warfare that attacks computers, software, and command-control systems) manipulates information trusted by targets without their awareness, so that the targets will make decisions against their interest but in the interest of the one conducting information warfare. Fake news via thousands if not millions of bots enabled by AI, deepfake videos, and other forms of deception are increasingly manipulating perceptions of truth, intensifying social polarization, defaming institutions, refuting trust in news, while the public does not know how to defend itself. Oxford University identified 28 countries that experienced coordinated social-media manipulation campaigns in 2017; that number increased to 70 just two years later and today proliferates in social media worldwide.
Predictive analytics and databases of disinformation attacks could be used to anticipate disinformation actions, and then others could identify and coordinate preventive interventions, learning from feedback to make countering information warfare more intelligent with each iteration. Policies that just focus on identification and deleting disinformation, may have to be replaced by policies that anticipate and intervene before attacks, otherwise acceleration of such information pollution with increasingly sophisticated AI could destroy social cohesion.
Given trends in synthetic biology, material sciences, and AI, eventually, an individual acting alone will be able to make and deploy a weapon of mass destruction. To prevent this possibility, three means could be developed: 1) national technical means; 2) better integration of applications of cognitive science into education and public health to reduce mental illness; and 3) programs for the family, community, and the public for nurturing healthy behavior and in preventing actions of such deranged individuals.
The COVID pandemic increased awareness of the need to use global foresight as input to national and transnational strategy, and global decision-making. The 15 Global Challenges are global in nature, and transnational in solution, yet decision-making and implementation at the global level is nearly nonexistent. Much of the human experience is globalizing, but governance is not. Governance systems are not keeping up with growing global interdependence and socio-technological change. To change this, the UN Secretary-General proposed five foresight strategies to improve global decision-making in Our Common Agenda published in 2021. Chapter 5 assesses these strategies. An international panel of futurists and related experts around the world overwhelmingly endorsed these proposed strategies and UN reforms as an interrelated system to improve global decision-making. The high-profile strategy was the UN Summit of the Future in 2024 at the United Nations. Millions of people and thousands of organizations around the world provided input to the pre-Summit planning, increasing world attention to the need for improved global collaboration for the future.
In the 1970s and 1980s there were very few discussions about the ethical issues in the early spread of the internet. Now there are far, far more discussions about the ethical and safety issues of AI around the world. This is an indication that humanity is becoming more responsible about assessing, forecasting, and shaping the future. Of course, it remains to be seen how successful we will be. But overall, we are moving in the right direction, even though there are serious threats to democracies, the environment, and social cohesion.
The majority of the world was living in extreme poverty in 1980; today, it is less than 10% and a third of the world is middle class. Granted, this is mostly due to progress in China and India, but the rest of the lower income countries are expected to benefit from the rapid technological changes. Life expectancy worldwide in 1980 was a little over 60 years; today it is a little over 73 years. Income per capita grew from $2,588 in 1980 to $13,840 by 2024. World literacy has improved from 67.6% in 1980 to 88% today. Over 90% of the world has access to electricity. Almost no one had Internet access in 1980; by April 2024, nearly 5.5 billion people had access. The global economy is growing around 3.2% and is expected to reach $115 trillion by 2025, and has nearly tripled over the past 20 years.
Yet, too much is invested into geopolitical zero-sum power, instead of investing in synergies among nations to turn around global warming, govern future forms of AI and synthetic biology, counter information warfare, and more seriously address other global challenges. As long as we continue to focus on geopolitical zero-sum power, rather than on creating synergies among governments and people, then conflict in one form or another will continue.
This report serves as a crucial roadmap for navigating the complex global landscape and working towards a more sustainable, equitable and loving future for all.
See State of the Future 20.0 at https://www.millennium-project.org/state-of-the-future-version-20.0/