(Not all the 12 questions are related to technology- in fact most are not- but for the purposes of this blog, I have reproduced the ICT questions first, as follows:)
1. "People power in development will move into a new age. 2010 will mark the fifth birthday of YouTube. In 2004 YouTube did not exist, now it gets 1 billion views a day. In 2003 China and India had 100 million internet users. Today that number is 350 million. In most African countries the number of Internet users has tripled or quadrupled in the past five years. In 2004, two in ten households in the developing world had a mobile phone subscription while today it is five in ten. These trends will accelerate and we will find ever more uses for them in development... Will this new technology foster a profound new wave of participation in development and change? I think so".
2. "Searching the Internet just by thinking. Internet search as we know it is just one decade old; by 2020 it will have evolved far beyond its current bounds. Content will be a mix of text, speech, still and video images, histories of interactions with colleagues, friends, information sources and their automated proxies, and tracks of sensor readings from Global Positioning System devices, medical devices and other embedded sensors in our environment. The majority of search queries will be spoken, not typed, and an experimental minority will be through direct monitoring of brain signals. Users will decide how much of their lives they want to share with search engines, and in what ways".
3. ‘China's view will become the bellwether of all development agreements. As Copenhagen signaled, it will be impossible to have any agreement on any development issue without China's blessing. In an increasingly G2 world, only one of the G's has developing country bona fides, even if no-one really considers it to be one, and its voice will count the most in any development agreement.’
4. "An equal right to pollute (and the Polluter-Pays Principle). One smart suggestion I’ve heard…is that each person has a right to pollute and that there might somehow be a way to monetize this. By this accounting, your average Ethiopian can sell her underpolluting ways to the average American and use the proceeds to deal with the effects of climate change, educate her kids and send them to university".
5. "Interests and alliances vs. laws and institutions.’ The forces for global integration (trade, travel, communications, finance) are greater than the forces of fragmentation (ethnic/religious conflict, protectionism, unmanageable crises)".
6. "Viva la (Nonviolent) Revolucion. I’ll place my hopes on the possibility – however remote – that the regimes in North Korea and Myanmar and elsewhere are taking note of the trouble an aroused citizenry can give to tyrants, and that people in places filled with rage and despair…will in the days ahead among them find their [Mahatma] Gandhi, their [Martin Luther] King, their Aung San Suu Kyi".
7. "Food and nutrition will slowly slip from the top table of the development agenda. Much as I hate to say it, I cannot see food and nutrition being the subject of a high level meeting in Number Ten [Downing Street] any time soon. Of course, something could be prompted by another food price spike, but I have been disappointed by the international community's response to the 2007-08 food price increase and I would not expect anything different next time around".
8. The World Cup kicks off the African Decade... for the 2010 World Cup, naysayers thought South Africa could not build the stadiums on time. Those critics should be red-faced now. South Africa’s impressive preparations underline the changes on the continent, where over the last few years, 5 percent economic growth was the average. Signs point to a further decade of growth to come. Canny investors will put more capital there. This in turn has the potential to shore up fragile young democracies across the continent.
9. "Copenhagen will energise, not demoralise, those fighting for climate issues to be higher up the agenda. Climate change is a window into the future for so many issues - the relations between market and state, between private and public behaviours, and between the rich countries and the emerging ones - but what does it say about climate change as an issue? Whoever was to blame for the Copenhagen agreement, the outcome told us that negotiations as usual will not work... It's time to reboot the negotiations using a different operating system, and I think the Copenhagen outcome will crystallize this for many people".
10. Synthetic biology and bionic food. "Biologists will have access to tools that will allow them to arrange atoms to optimize catalysis, for example, or arrange populations of organisms to cooperate in making a chemical... The obvious application will be in manufacturing and delivering drugs more efficiently. However, these treatments might be superseded by smarter ones, such as oral vaccines and ‘programmable’ personal stem cells or bacteria... that could, for example, sense a nearby tumor, coordinate an attack and drill into the cancer cells to release toxins. Another application is in the production of chemicals, biofuels and foods — for example, the development of parasite-resistant crops or photosynthetic organisms that can double their biomass in just three hours. As costs drop, such technology will allow developing nations to leapfrog fertilizer-wasting, fossil-fuel-intensive and disease-rife farming for cleaner, more efficient systems, just as they are leapfrogging costly landlines in favour of mobile-phone networks".
11. A graying rich world and its emerging challenges. "As population growth marked the twentieth century, population ageing will mark the twenty-first. By 2020, the average European will have fewer years of life expectancy remaining than years he or she has already lived. East Asians will soon follow. Humankind will spend much of the coming decade grappling with questions about how to organize and pay for the care of an increasing elderly population and about who will produce what the elderly consume".
12. Lasers and limitless, carbon free energy. "Next-generation lasers will allow the creation of new states of matter, compressing and heating materials to temperatures found only in the centres of massive stars, and at pressures that can squeeze hydrogen atoms together to a density 50 times greater than that of lead. The resulting fusion reactions may one day be harnessed to provide almost limitless carbon-free energy. Enough fusion fuel is present in the oceans to supply the current energy needs of the entire world for longer than the age of the universe".
Once again, SID has also requested a broader sample of responses, so let them know what you think! Access their survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/
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