Will coronavirus reverse the Megatrend of Urbanization?

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I often say that a trend-watcher and a futurist are very different things.

Trend-watchers see what has happened and implicitly assume that it will continue into the future.

Futurists uncover trends and consider the impacts of and responses to those trends, that could sustain, accelerarate, slow, or potentially reverse them.

In fact one of the most pertinent questions when observing a powerful trend is what could stop or reverse it.
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The self-perpetuating social feedback loops in AI-based predictive policing could stop social evolution

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A group of well over 1000 academics and researchers calling themselves Coalition for Critical Technology has just published a public letter to academic publisher Springer urging them not to publish a forthcoming article.

The article claims to be able to predict if someone is a criminal based on a picture of their face, with “80 percent accuracy and with no racial bias.”

The extensive, well-referenced response letter titled Abolish the #TechToPrisonPipeline states, in part:
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The pandemic is offering us many more choices in our behaviours, to help us carve a better future

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Humans, individually and collectively, often tend to get stuck in ruts and routines. That’s our nature, we try things until we find a point of comfort and then stay there.

One of the biggest potential positives of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it has broken established routines and structures, thereby giving us additional options and choices to those we perceived before.

Speaking to this point, I was recently interviewed for an interesting podcast from Defiance News, The Future of Technology: The Good, The Bad & The Orwellian. The full podcast is embedded below.
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The future of dating, relationships, and sex beyond the pandemic

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Social isolation has impacted just about every aspect of our lives, not least our love lives.

A recent article in Mashable titled Futurists predict what your sex life may look like after the pandemic wove together interviews with legendary trend seer Faith Popcorn, renowned sex futurist Byrony Cole, and myself.

The full article is well worth a read, it does a great job at teasing out the themes that emerged from the interviews. However here are some excerpts from the ideas I shared in the article:
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The opportunity for social capital and mutual aid to define how we emerge from this crisis

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Today was the first episode of my new live-streaming show, The Virtual Excellence Show (which I haven’t even had time to announce on this blog yet, but if you’d like to follow it please subscribe here!).

My guest on the first show was the amazing and colorful Howard Rheingold. When I considered who should be my first guest on the show, Howard was the obvious choice, having been a pioneer in all things virtual for decades, in among other landmarks publishing the book Virtual Communities: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier in 1994.

You can see the relevant part of conversation in the show below.
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Quality news will be central to creating a better future in this pivotal phase in humanity

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Last week I gave the opening keynote at the International News Media Association Virtual World Congress, on the topic of Reinvention for a Post-Pandemic Future.

My keynote was focused on the manifold opportunities for the news industry at this time of exceptional change.

However the subtext was the critical role of news in supporting a better future for everyone.
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Could the pandemic lead to global cohesion and a maturing of humanity?

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When I searched my blog for mentions of pandemic, one mention came up in a post I wrote in 2014 on Four scenarios for 2030.

One of the scenarios from that exercise may be enormously relevant today.
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5 powerful ideas that will shape the 2020s

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A little while ago I gave a keynote titled Powerful Ideas Shaping Our Future at the highly inspiring Supply Nation Conference, which had the theme The Power of an Idea.

The five powerful ideas I shared in my keynote covered some of the most important themes that will shape this decade. Ideas ripple out to create action and in turn change. Here are brief snapshots of these five deeply interrelated ideas.
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The 2020s will be a pivotal decade: we all have a responsibility to believe it can be positive for humanity

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We have now entered the very-long-awaited year of 2020, and an entirely new decade.

I truly think that everything we have experienced so far has just been prelude to the craziness of the 2020s. This will be an absolutely pivotal decade in human history, as we almost literally choose who we become and what direction we go as the human race.
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The next stage of human evolution is to transform our intrinsic desire for progress

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I was pleased to discover I am on the cover of the new issue of Venture magazine!

The cover feature, titled Transformation Without End, is based on an extended interview with me. It covers many facets of how we should be thinking about the future, but begins on a very important point:

“It is intrinsically human to want to create, to invent, to make things beyond what we’ve had before, and there will be no end to this.” So says futurist, author, and strategist Ross Dawson, who advises global companies on make-or-break issues that ultimately shape the course of human progress.

This human desire for progress, wanting more, of course can and does often go too far. At this point, having manifested extraordinary technological advances, we need to temper that desire. The article goes on to quote me:
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