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The great questions of tomorrow
\"We are on the cusp of a sweeping revolution--one that will change every facet of our lives. The changes ahead will challenge and alter fundamental concepts such as national identity, human rights, money, and markets. In this pivotal, complicated moment, what are the great questions we need to ask to navigate our way forward?\" -- From book jacket.
Book
Future files : a brief history of the next 50 years
Filled with provocative forecasts, Future Files examines emerging patterns and developments in society, technology, economy and business and makes educated speculations and entertaining extrapolations about where these trends may take us. In addition to being a fun ride through the possible future, Future Files will be indispensable to business analysts, strategic planners and other thinkers who need to stay ahead of the curve.
eBook
Surviving the 21st century : humanity's ten great challenges and how we can overcome them
\"The book explores the central question facing humanity today: how can we best survive the ten great existential challenges that are now coming together to confront us? ... The author examines ten intersecting areas of activity (mass extinction, resource depletion, WMD, climate change, universal toxicity, food crises, population and urban expansion, pandemic disease, dangerous new technologies and self-delusion) which pose manifest risks to civilization and, potentially, to our species' long-term future. This isn't a book just about problems. It is also about solutions. Every chapter concludes with clear conclusions and consensus advice on what needs to be done at global level--but it also empowers individuals with what they can do for themselves to make a difference. Unlike other books, it offers integrated solutions across the areas of greatest risk. It explains why Homo sapiens is no longer an appropriate name for our species, and what should be done about it\"--Back cover.
Book
Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology
One of the most universal trends in science and technology today is the growth of large teams in all areas, as solitary researchers and small teams diminish in prevalence
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–
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. Increases in team size have been attributed to the specialization of scientific activities
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, improvements in communication technology
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,
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, or the complexity of modern problems that require interdisciplinary solutions
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–
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. This shift in team size raises the question of whether and how the character of the science and technology produced by large teams differs from that of small teams. Here we analyse more than 65 million papers, patents and software products that span the period 1954–2014, and demonstrate that across this period smaller teams have tended to disrupt science and technology with new ideas and opportunities, whereas larger teams have tended to develop existing ones. Work from larger teams builds on more-recent and popular developments, and attention to their work comes immediately. By contrast, contributions by smaller teams search more deeply into the past, are viewed as disruptive to science and technology and succeed further into the future—if at all. Observed differences between small and large teams are magnified for higher-impact work, with small teams known for disruptive work and large teams for developing work. Differences in topic and research design account for a small part of the relationship between team size and disruption; most of the effect occurs at the level of the individual, as people move between smaller and larger teams. These results demonstrate that both small and large teams are essential to a flourishing ecology of science and technology, and suggest that, to achieve this, science policies should aim to support a diversity of team sizes.
Analyses of the output produced by large versus small teams of researchers and innovators demonstrate that their work differs systematically in the extent to which it disrupts or develops existing science and technology.
Journal Article
Estimating a social cost of carbon for global energy consumption
Estimates of global economic damage caused by carbon dioxide (CO
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) emissions can inform climate policy
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. The social cost of carbon (SCC) quantifies these damages by characterizing how additional CO
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emissions today impact future economic outcomes through altering the climate
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. Previous estimates have suggested that large, warming-driven increases in energy expenditures could dominate the SCC
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,
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, but they rely on models
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that are spatially coarse and not tightly linked to data
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,
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,
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,
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,
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,
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. Here we show that the release of one ton of CO
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today is projected to reduce total future energy expenditures, with most estimates valued between −US$3 and −US$1, depending on discount rates. Our results are based on an architecture that integrates global data, econometrics and climate science to estimate local damages worldwide. Notably, we project that emerging economies in the tropics will dramatically increase electricity consumption owing to warming, which requires critical infrastructure planning. However, heating reductions in colder countries offset this increase globally. We estimate that 2099 annual global electricity consumption increases by about 4.5 exajoules (7 per cent of current global consumption) per one-degree-Celsius increase in global mean surface temperature (GMST), whereas direct consumption of other fuels declines by about 11.3 exajoules (7 per cent of current global consumption) per one-degree-Celsius increase in GMST. Our finding of net savings contradicts previous research
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,
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, because global data indicate that many populations will remain too poor for most of the twenty-first century to substantially increase energy consumption in response to warming. Importantly, damage estimates would differ if poorer populations were given greater weight
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.
Using global data, econometrics and climate science to estimate the damages induced by the emission of one ton of carbon dioxide, climate change is projected to increase electricity spending but reduce overall end-use energy expenditure.
Journal Article
The Metaverse as a Virtual Form of Smart Cities: Opportunities and Challenges for Environmental, Economic, and Social Sustainability in Urban Futures
Data infrastructures, economic processes, and governance models of digital platforms are increasingly pervading urban sectors and spheres of urban life. This phenomenon is known as platformization, which has in turn given rise to the phenomena of platform society, where platforms have permeated the core of urban societies. A recent manifestation of platformization is the Metaverse, a global platform project launched by Meta (formerly Facebook) as a globally operating platform company. The Metaverse represents an idea of a hypothetical “parallel virtual world” that incarnate ways of living and working in virtual cities as an alternative to smart cities of the future. Indeed, with emerging innovative technologies—such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, the IoT, and Digital Twins—providing rich datasets and advanced computational understandings of human behavior, the Metaverse has the potential to redefine city designing activities and service provisioning towards increasing urban efficiencies, accountabilities, and quality performance. However, there still remain ethical, human, social, and cultural concerns as to the Metaverse’s influence upon the quality of human social interactions and its prospective scope in reconstructing the quality of urban life. This paper undertakes an upper-level literature review of the area of the Metaverse from a broader perspective. Further, it maps the emerging products and services of the Metaverse, and explores their potential contributions to smart cities with respect to their virtual incarnation, with a particular focus on the environmental, economic, and social goals of sustainability. This study may help urban policy makers to better understand the opportunities and implications of the Metaverse upon tech-mediated practices and applied urban agendas, as well as assess the positives and negatives of this techno-urban vision. This paper also offers thoughts regarding the argument that the Metaverse has disruptive and substantive effects on forms of reconstructing reality in an increasingly platformized urban society. This will hopefully stimulate prospective research and further critical perspectives on the topic.
Journal Article
Changing climate both increases and decreases European river floods
Climate change has led to concerns about increasing river floods resulting from the greater water-holding capacity of a warmer atmosphere. These concerns are reinforced by evidence of increasing economic losses associated with flooding in many parts of the world, including Europe. Any changes in river floods would have lasting implications for the design of flood protection measures and flood risk zoning. However, existing studies have been unable to identify a consistent continental-scale climatic-change signal in flood discharge observations in Europe, because of the limited spatial coverage and number of hydrometric stations. Here we demonstrate clear regional patterns of both increases and decreases in observed river flood discharges in the past five decades in Europe, which are manifestations of a changing climate. Our results-arising from the most complete database of European flooding so far-suggest that: increasing autumn and winter rainfall has resulted in increasing floods in northwestern Europe; decreasing precipitation and increasing evaporation have led to decreasing floods in medium and large catchments in southern Europe; and decreasing snow cover and snowmelt, resulting from warmer temperatures, have led to decreasing floods in eastern Europe. Regional flood discharge trends in Europe range from an increase of about 11 per cent per decade to a decrease of 23 per cent. Notwithstanding the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of the observational record, the flood changes identified here are broadly consistent with climate model projections for the next century, suggesting that climate-driven changes are already happening and supporting calls for the consideration of climate change in flood risk management.
Journal Article
The future of buyer–seller interactions: a conceptual framework and research agenda
The revolution in information availability and the advances in novel interaction technologies have ushered in two major shifts that call into question the traditional assumptions of buyer–seller interactions. First, buyer–seller information asymmetry has greatly decreased in many interactions. Second, face-to-face communication is no longer the main format of buyer–seller interactions. In this article, the authors review empirical research on how these shifts have changed buyer–seller negotiations, an important type of buyer–seller interactions. Several insights arise from this review. First, the shifts have caused fundamental changes in buyers’ and sellers’ roles, power, and aspirations and information processing. Second, the shifts and these fundamental changes together cause major changes in buyer–seller interactional processes and outcomes, including (1) change in buyers’ attitude and behavior, (2) change in sellers’ effectiveness in interacting with buyers, and (3) change in buyer–seller interactional processes. Based on these insights, the authors develop a research agenda to guide the reexamination of existing theories and the development of new theories of buyer–seller interactions.
Journal Article
Parental Social Isolation and Child Maltreatment Risk during the COVID-19 Pandemic
On March 11, 2020, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. The social isolation and economic stress resulting from pandemic have the potential to exacerbate child abuse and neglect. This study examines the association of parents’ perceived social isolation and recent employment loss to risk for child maltreatment (neglect, verbal aggression, and physical punishment) in the early weeks of the pandemic. Participants (N = 283) were adults living in the U.S. who were parents of at least one child 0–12 years of age. Participants completed an online survey approximately 2 weeks after the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 was a pandemic. The survey asked about recent changes (i.e., in the past 2 weeks) to employment status, parenting behaviors, use of discipline, use of spanking, and depressive symptoms. Nearly 20% of parents had hit or spanked their child in the past two weeks alone. Parents’ perceived social isolation and recent employment loss were associated with self-report of physical and emotional neglect and verbal aggression against the child, even after controlling for parental depressive symptoms, income, and sociodemographic factors. Parents’ perceived social isolation was associated with parental report of changes in discipline, specifically, using discipline and spanking more often in the past 2 weeks. Associations were robust to analyses that included two variables that assessed days spent social distancing and days spent in “lockdown.” Study results point to the need for mental health supports to parents and children to ameliorate the strain created by COVID-19.
Journal Article
The projected timing of abrupt ecological disruption from climate change
As anthropogenic climate change continues the risks to biodiversity will increase over time, with future projections indicating that a potentially catastrophic loss of global biodiversity is on the horizon
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. However, our understanding of when and how abruptly this climate-driven disruption of biodiversity will occur is limited because biodiversity forecasts typically focus on individual snapshots of the future. Here we use annual projections (from 1850 to 2100) of temperature and precipitation across the ranges of more than 30,000 marine and terrestrial species to estimate the timing of their exposure to potentially dangerous climate conditions. We project that future disruption of ecological assemblages as a result of climate change will be abrupt, because within any given ecological assemblage the exposure of most species to climate conditions beyond their realized niche limits occurs almost simultaneously. Under a high-emissions scenario (representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5), such abrupt exposure events begin before 2030 in tropical oceans and spread to tropical forests and higher latitudes by 2050. If global warming is kept below 2 °C, less than 2% of assemblages globally are projected to undergo abrupt exposure events of more than 20% of their constituent species; however, the risk accelerates with the magnitude of warming, threatening 15% of assemblages at 4 °C, with similar levels of risk in protected and unprotected areas. These results highlight the impending risk of sudden and severe biodiversity losses from climate change and provide a framework for predicting both when and where these events may occur.
Using annual projections of temperature and precipitation to estimate when species will be exposed to potentially harmful climate conditions reveals that disruption of ecological assemblages as a result of climate change will be abrupt and could start as early as the current decade.
Journal Article