Mini Trip report: Brussels

The EC brought me back to Brussels for the third meeting of the 2050 Scenarios group for the future of innovation, research, and higher education. I came a few days prior to this meeting to speak to Prof. Francis Heylighen’s PhD candidates in the Global Brain Institute of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel about collective intelligence systems, GFIS, and Conscious-Technology. At the same time the EC held its conference of Future Technology Assessment, so I had the opportunity to briefly attend a session and meet with MP Node Chairs and Members of Nodes from The Millennium Project at this conference (Geci from South Africa; Cornelia from Germany; Fernando from Peru; Norbert from Poland, Markku and Jaana from Finland; Roey from Israel; Ozcan from UK, Turkey, and Russia; Riel from UNESCO, and other friends of MP). I was very impressed with the conference; about 450 attended, showing great progress and interest in the EC and others in Foresight. For more info see https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/event/site/fta2014?ref=twitter

The EC’s 2050 Scenario group meeting discussed a rich array of issues; a short sample: increasing power of regions and cities, technologically driven long-term structural unemployment mostly from AI, self-employment important in both positive and negative scenarios, crowd sourcing, conscious-technology, aging and immigration demographics, but has not come to grips with how much change is really likely/possible by 2050, such as the possibility of a world full of technologically-augmented geniuses. One participant said, believe it or not that “3-D printing is so last year.” The final meeting of this group will be February 2015 with a report in March or April giving recommendations for EC research, innovation, and higher education, hopefully, including a collective intelligence system for Europe.

The visit ended with a delightful lunch with MP Board Member Philippe Destatte who is also the chair of the Brussels Area Node of MP to review our work and explore next steps. Am now en route back to Washington for a few days, than on to Seoul, Korea.

Futuristically yours,

Jerome C. Glenn, CEO