Applied Foresight Network - Call To Action

Call To Action

"The power of one becomes the force of many."

The Challenge: In a British Broadcasting Corporation radio program on November 19, 1933, noted futurist, Herbert George Wells challenged members of the academic community to use their knowledge for the betterment of humanity.

Wells talked about how unprepared the world was for the motorcar. He said that, “the motorcar ought to have been anticipated at the beginning of this century. It was bound to come. It was bound to be cheapened and made abundant. It was bound to change our roads, take passenger and goods traffic from railways, alter the distribution of our population, and congest our towns with traffic. It was bound to make it possible for a man to commit a robbery or murder in Devonshire overnight and breakfast in London or Birmingham.” He further said that while we could have, we did nothing to work out the potential impacts of the motorcar before our roads were choked, the railways were bankrupt, and the police were dealing with the likes of Bonnie and Clyde (World Future Society: Futures Research Quarterly, 1987).

Since that BBC broadcast close to eighty years ago, specters of global warming and uncontrolled population growth have filled our newspapers; scientists have put a man on the moon, mapped the human genome, cloned Dolly the sheep, crossed a strawberry with an Arctic char, created weapons of mass destruction, and advanced artificial intelligence, robotics, and nano-technologies; and the world is dealing with numerous threats to peace, the global commons, and to humanity itself. never experienced the convergence and, in some cases, the collision of global forces of such magnitude and diversity (John L. Petersen, The Arlington Institute).

But at a time when Yale University Professor Emeritus Wendell Bell asserts that “the rampant hyper-specialization and decomposition of developed disciplines into specialties and sub-specialties leaves little room for much needed holistic approaches”, the need has never been greater for cross-disciplinary academic discourse on issues of critical importance to the future of humanity.