Member-only story
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a leading international proponent and user of Strategic Foresight, has published a thought-provoking report featuring global scenarios for the year 2035. The report identifies half a dozen emerging changes and trends that the OECD’s Strategic Foresight Unit believes will transform the world in the coming years.
These changes and trends include the effectiveness and alliances of states (the role of states versus markets at a time of geopolitical power shifts), common risks to humanity (including environmental degradation), shifts in value and values (digitalization and changing views on well-being), influence of non-state actors (power concentration among tech firms and networked social movements), digital interconnectedness across borders, and resource management for the digital and green economy. The report draws on these powerful forces to elaborate three very different alternative plausible futures.
One of these futures, named “Virtual Worlds,” envisions humankind interacting mostly in the metaverse — in just 14 years. It is striking that this imaginative picture has been drawn by what some consider a staid and cautious international bureaucracy staffed with stat-obsessed economists and policy wonks. Credit to the OECD for pushing the boundaries of our thinking with…
