Here are Futurist magazine's top ten predictions for 2008:
1. The world will have a billion millionaires by 2025.
[None will be librarians]
2. Fashion will go wired as technologies and tastes converge to revolutionize the textile industry.
[Hmm. Build a keyboard into my pants and a monitor into my shirt - I could do some serious navel gazing.]
3. The threat of another cold war with China, Russia, or both could replace terrorism as the chief foreign-policy concern of the United States.
[I'm more concerned about China *owning* us.]
4. Counterfeiting of currency will proliferate, driving the move toward a cashless society.
[Higher interest rates are leading to a cashless society as well - though not in the way they mean.]
5. The earth is on the verge of a significant extinction event.
[Hope it's not us.]
6. Water will be in the twenty-first century what oil was in the twentieth century.
[I'm surprised it isn't already - they've been predicting this for quite a while.]
7. World population by 2050 may grow larger than previously expected, due in part to healthier, longer-living people.
[Doing my best to buck this trend...]
8. The number of Africans imperiled by floods will grow 70-fold by 2080.
[Nothing in Africa is a joke. I just watched HBO's latest documentary on Darfur. Hard to imagine flooding on top of this.]
9. Rising prices for natural resources could lead to a full-scale rush to develop the Arctic.
[We used to joke about needing to arm the deer against hunters to be fair. Now we'll have to arm the moose and caribou too.]
10. More decisions will be made by nonhuman entities.
[No jokes about adminstrators, please.]
If you want to read more about why they made these predictions, you can go to the original announcement.
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