Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Prediction and Reactions Prediction: By 2020, intelligent agents and distributed control will cut direct human input so completely out of some key activities such as surveillance, security and tracking systems that technology beyond our control will generate dangers and dependencies that will not be recognized until it is impossible to reverse them. We will be […]
Prediction and Reactions Prediction: As sensing, storage and communication technologies get cheaper and better, individuals’ public and private lives will become increasingly ‘transparent’ globally. Everything will be more visible to everyone, with good and bad results. Looking at the big picture – at all of the lives affected on the planet in every way possible […]
Setting Priorities: Question and Responses Respondents were asked the following: If you were in charge of setting priorities about where to spend the available funds for developing information and communications technologies (predominantly the internet) to improve the world, how would you rank order the following international concerns? Please number these from 1 to 4, with […]
Predictions inspire lively discussion about the future, and help stakeholders prepare for adjustments associated with technological change. Those who think about the future are best poised to influence it. The visionary 20th century engineer, mathematician and architect R. Buckminster Fuller argued that, “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” One […]
Predictions and Reactions Prediction: By 2020, the people left behind (many by their own choice) by accelerating information and communications technologies will form a new cultural group of technology refuseniks who self-segregate from ‘modern’ society. Some will live mostly ‘off the grid’ simply to seek peace and a cure for information overload, while others will […]
Prediction and Reactions Prediction: In 2020, networked communications have leveled the world into one big political, social, and economic space in which people everywhere can meet and have verbal and visual exchanges regularly, face-to-face, over the internet. English will be so indispensable in communicating that it displaces some languages. An extended collection hundreds of written […]
Pentecostalism and related charismatic movements represent one of the fastest-growing segments of global Christianity. At least a quarter of the world’s 2 billion Christians are thought to be members of these lively, highly personal faiths, which emphasize such spiritually renewing “gifts of the Holy Spirit” as speaking in tongues, divine healing and prophesying. Even more […]
Library of Congress Washington, D.C. With the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998, the United States became one of the few countries in the world to make promotion of religious freedom an explicit foreign policy goal. The act, signed into law by President Clinton, established an Office of International Religious Freedom at […]
Los Angeles, California The Pew Forum held a telephone news conference with reporters across the country to discuss key findings from a new international poll, Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals. Speakers: Luis Lugo, Director, The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life John Green, Senior Fellow in Religion and American Politics, The […]