These issues, which included both trends and wild cards became the core subjects that the organization continues to focus upon today. TAI began to monitor these subjects and enlisted input from an international network of friends who regularly submitted harbinger articles and stories from a wide variety of publications and sources.
These pieces were edited by Petersen and published fortnightly in the free email-based newsletter, FUTUREdition, which has grown to a readership of many thousands of individuals. TAI regularly receives comments from readers who consider it one of the most informative publications in existence for staying abreast of early indicators and weak signals of potential global change. When the dot-com bubble burst, the scenario project ended. The loss of funding necessitated that TAI cut back its staff and activities to a minimum and begin a process of redirection.
Tools for anticipating change: Global change will only come with shifts in human values and attendant consciousness and in the development of new tools that will allow us to operate on this planet in fundamentally different ways. TAI has developed a number of potential projects for encouraging new ideas that will lead to rapid social evolution. One two-year project, the Arlington Forum, is designed to develop a strategy for the future of humanity – looking out twenty years for a new framework for human behavior that deals systemically with some of the largest problems that our species faces.
Global change will require breakthroughs in the tools available to humanity for providing the basic needs that advanced and developing societies need, like energy, education, drinking water, food, health care, et al. In 2001, John L. Petersen conceived of what has become the Technology Horizon Foundation, a partnership with two venture capital executives to raise significant amounts of philanthropic funding ($30 – 100 million) for seed capital investments in fledgling companies that have a product idea that could “fundamentally change the world”. THF is presently reviewing the business plans for companies in the healthcare, waste conversion, education, and energy areas, among others. Financial projections suggest that over a decade as much as a billion dollars could be made available for funding breakthrough technologies through this vehicle.
In the early part of this decade, influenced by technologies TAI had become exposed to in the Y2K era, John L. Petersen came to believe that humanity was on the verge of being able to develop, for the first time in history, tools that could begin to relate current events to specific alternative futures, thereby providing early warning of major, disruptive events. Individual applications were being developed that could perform extraordinary single functions (like searching for information from multiple sources, monitoring specific sources twenty-four hours a day, translating between and among languages, performing a variety of processes based upon natural language processing, visualization of complex information in increasingly powerful ways, and recognizing patterns over time and allowing systems to learn) which, if integrated together into a seamless tool suite could open a new era in “sense-making.”
TAI began what turned into an eighteen month process of evaluating alternative technologies that might be included in such a tool suite. Its efforts came to the attention of the government of Singapore in 2001 which ultimately joined TAI in a two-year partnership to develop the capability that is now called DIANE (DIgital ANalysis Environment). DIANE represents the beginning of a revolution in what TAI calls “anticipatory analysis” – the process of analysis with the goal of anticipating the emergence of specific futures. Many government agencies and other organizations are seriously considering adopting the DIANE tool suite into their analytical processes as it represents a capability that is otherwise unequalled.
Over the next two years TAI built upon the capabilities and success of DIANE to make it the core engine in a National Surprise Anticipation center that was named the Risk Assessment – Horizon Scanning (RAHS) project, which continues after multiple incarnations to this day.
Facilitating a global transition: TAI continued to work to learn more about the major forces that are driving global change. A particular area of interest for many years has been energy. In 2003, TAI completed a project for the Office of the Secretary of Defense to develop an energy strategy for the country that accelerates the movement away from a dependency on oil for transportation. A Strategy: Moving America Away From Oil has been embraced by the United Nations Foundation as the best strategy that they have found to move the U.S. toward renewable biofuels.
TAI’s newest initiative is the development of a major web portal called the “World’s Biggest Problems,” which will be a single source of descriptions, scenarios, resources, news, and unsolicited advice on dealing with those problematic trends that will inevitably force major global change. Subjects that will be addressed will include increasing shortages of drinking water, the fragility of the global financial system, the end of oil as an economical source of fuel, rapid climate change, et.al.
TAI works with big ideas that can make a big difference. We are sincerely interested in helping humanity prepare for and transition to the new era that is clearly on our horizon.
For 30 years, TAI has published a free bi-monthly newsletter FUTUREdition; it has sponsored a speaker series – now called TransitionTalks – for 25 years, and is now hosting a video blog with John Petersen, PostScript, which is aired regularly.