Thrust Group Leader:  Joel Garreau (ASU)
Thrust Group Participant:  Patrick Lin, Samara Firebaugh, Karl Hasslinger, Brad Allenby, Ron Arkin, Shannon French

The “Seven Horizons” project is designed to become the trusted source, worldwide, for factual information about the expected arrivals of hundreds of emerging technologies. For each technology, it is designed to answer two questions:

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• How seriously should we take this?
• How much time do we have?

It is also designed to place each technology in the broader context of all related technologies, such that, when surprises occur, it can be clear how this disruption relates to other parts of the web of change.

This “Seven Horizons” project comes out of the scenario-planning tradition.

Scenarios are rigorous, logical, but imaginative stories about what the future might be like, designed to help people plan. Scenarios specifically are not predictions. They are tools for preparation. Recall how pilots just returning from combat—no matter how complex the conditions they encountered—frequently say, “It wasn’t as bad as the simulator.” Simulators do not predict the future; they allow those who use them to carefully and calmly anticipate and rehearse their response to almost any sudden eventuality. Think of them as idea maps.

When organizations as diverse as Apple, Intel, Coca-Cola, the California Energy Commission, Texaco, the CIA, Cementos Mexicanos, Clorox, Deutsche Bank, DARPA, Glaxo-SmithKline, Kellogg, Mattel, the National Education Association, Nissan, the Republic of Singapore, UPS and the World Council on Sustainable Development use the process, they create multiple scenarios out of the same set of existing facts. This enables them to describe as wide a variety of possible futures as imagination allows.  

Scenarios have rules:

• They must conform to all known facts.
• They must identify “predetermineds.”   These are future events so locked in by those of the past that they can usefully be viewed as inevitable.   For example, a predetermined element of a U.S. presidential election is that it will occur every four years.
• Scenarios then identify “critical uncertainties.”   These are possibilities that logically might occur in the future but which are both highly uncertain and highly important. For example, a critical uncertainty about any U.S. presidential election is who might win.
• Sometimes scenarios identify “wild cards.”   These are highly improbable eventualities that would have great impact should they occur—for example, the leading presidential candidate being assassinated just before the vote.
• Scenarios reveal “embedded assumptions.”   These are often unexamined foundations on which our thinking about the future rests.   For example, no one expects the U.S. military to so dislike the outcome of a vote as to overthrow the government.
• It is useful to identify in advance certain “early warnings” that serve as an alert that a particular scenario is coming to pass.   For example, professional political operatives have known for decades that in a close presidential race, the mathematics of the Electoral College is such that if one party has California and the other has Texas, the outcome likely will be decided in Florida.

None of these seven horizons (which are explained on the site) are predictions.   They are simply factual, truth-squaded reports on where these things are thought to stand right now, created in a bottom-up, wiki fashion, by legions of critical and knowledgeable people.   The first two horizons can be usefully seen as “predetermineds.”   The middle three include many “critical uncertainties.” The last two are “wild cards.” They all can be useful as “early warnings” and challenges to “embedded assumptions.”

What you see is only a beginning. The “Seven Horizons” wiki currently sports about 100 items, but most of these are stubs.   Those are minimal entries, designed to entice participants who are knowledgeable about them to go in, add to them and flesh them out.

The ten or so that are most developed, to give you some ideas of where this might go, include:

• Revolutionary Prosthetics
• Robotics:   Mobility
• Robotics:   Social Smarts
• Longevity Drugs
• Touch Feedback
• Language Translation
• Brain-Computer Interface
• Gecko Adhesion Project
• Robotics:   Medical Machines

Wiki Instruction Document

Instructions as to how to make this all work are on the website at:   www.sevenhorizons.org.

Go in, have fun, add things, change things, tell us what works, and tell us what doesn’t.   Help us figure out how to make this go viral.   Help us figure out how to get the funding to make it really take off.