Emerging Technologies: Limits to Growth vs. Moore’s Law

This about Futurism, tagged , , was written by for on May 31, 2010

Like my post on Resource Depletion and Peak Oil, this is intended as a reference article for another key future trend. One important observation I will make at the beginning is that the approach of Limits To Growth (already imminent in the developed world) will not lead to a cessation in technological growth. In fact, they might even act as a spur to innovation, because 1) the end of growth prospects in material product will encourage a reallocation of resources to doing things better or more efficiently, and 2) the Boserupian Effect (in the Malthusian context – “relative overpopulation creates additional stimuli to generate and apply carrying-capacity-of-land-raising innovations”). So to my fellow peakists, please bear these qualifiers in mind before condemning me for “cornucopian” or “techno-progressive” heresies.

One of the best summaries is the Wikipedia page with the List of emerging technologies and I’ll be drawing heavily on it. I’ve marked out the technologies I consider to be more important and MOST IMPORTANT. Please feel free to chime in with your own suggestions.

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Towards a New Russian Century?

This about Futurism, tagged , , , , was written by for on January 11, 2008

EDIT 11/27/08: Since writing this, I have come to realize that peak oil is real and will play a major role in any future scenario, and far sooner than the other three themes I highlight here.

The twentieth century was, above all, a Russian century. Granted, Germany was the most important challenger Great Power in the first half of the century, while in the second the United States begun to assert itself on the world stage. Nonetheless, Russia, under its Soviet incarnation, was the key focal point of world history. It is hard to imagine a movement like Nazism arising in Germany, or indeed fascism in general, without the spectre of communism hanging over a country. Similarly, the US was only brought permanently out of its traditional isolationism by the Truman Doctrine – their pledge to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”, or, in other words, to contain communism.

This article will be about Russia’s place in the world in around 30 years time. In particular, will it be able to reclaim its former mantle as a superpower? Does it have the potential to usher in a new Russian century?

Firstly, we must define what a superpower is. Let us assume that it is a state with a leading position in the international system and the ability to influence events and project power on a worldwide scale. Furthermore, it must be strong on multiple planes of power – not only in the military sphere, but also in ‘softer’ areas like the economic base and cultural influence.

(Chinese political scientists have developed a metric for state power called Comprehensive National Power. There is no generally agreed-upon method by which different components of power are weighted and totalled. Nonetheless, virtually all of them have the US leading the pack, with Russia, Japan, China, France, the UK and Germany following behind in a cluster.)

Today, the world’s only country with the whole plethora of attributes – economic, technological, political, military and strategic – that make a state a superpower is the United States. Nonetheless, there are important trends at work that threaten to undermine this full-spectrum dominance. We have identified the three most important of these as economic (re)convergence, exponential growth in IT and global climate change.

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