Tuesday 28 April 2015

Thinking About the Near Future - A Five Year Challenge!

Our next meeting will be on the 14th May 7.30pm at the White Rock Hotel

Thinking about the near future – a 5 year challenge!

One of the things that is supposed to differentiate us from other animals, is our ability to think about, and plan for the future! But how good are we at it?
It is also said that ‘crowd sourcing’ is better at generating good results than relying on experts (the jelly bean test).  And it might also be why democracy works…

This meeting will be an opportunity to put that to the test….

With the election over and (perhaps) another 5 years till the next election, I am hoping that we can make 10 predictions that we can agree on, that we can put into a sealed envelope and examine in a few years’ time, and see if we got any of them right.  Here are a couple of examples that I think will happen to get things going:-

My Forecasts are that by 2020:-
·         The UK property bubble will have burst and property prices will have fallen by 30% leaving everybody feeling a lot poorer than they were.
·         ‘Artificial Intelligence’ will be the first line of information in diagnosing health issues, undertaking tax returns, translating into foreign languages and a great variety of seriously complex interactions that currently depend on experts.
·         We will either have found ‘dark matter’ and therefore have a deeper understanding of the ‘super symmetry’ that underpins the structure of the universe, OR we will not have found ‘dark matter’ and will be trying to re-write all that we know in a universe in which either the force of gravity is not a constant or in which the speed of light varies over time.
·         The UK will still be in the EU and after a serious run on the £ in 2018, we will also have joined the € zone.  
·         A global sales tax of 1% will be in place to finance the building of replacements for carbon fuel and stop global warming in its tracks – (OK that seems a bit far fetched!)

I look forward to hearing your predictions – small or large.

 Stephen Milton