Monday, May 03, 2010 — Book Version 0.3 By Andres Agostini
THE UNABRIDGED ELICITATION OF KNOWLEDGE FROM THE INCESSANTLY ARRHYTHMIC, ABRUPT, ANTAGONISTIC AND ANARCHISTIC FUTURE, AS WELL AS THE CONTENTIOUS INTERRELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SUCH FUTURE AND THE PRESENT: A RADICAL YET RIGOROUS STRONG-SENSE AND CRITICO-CREATIVE APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING THE COMPLEXITIES, SUBTLETIES AND OPPORTUNITIES OF DRIVING FORCES INSTILLING PERPETUAL CHANGE INTO TWENTIETH-ONE CENTURY. By (c) Copyright 2010 by Andres Agostini — All Rights Reserved –
(This textbook may be reproduced for noncommercial purposes if it is copied in its entirety, including this notice.)
Full textbook as of:
Monday, May 03, 2010 — Book Version 0.3 By Andres Agostini
CONTENTS
1.- Objective
2.- Abstract
3.- The Challenge
4.- Introductory Quotations By Enlightened Minds.
5.- What is Happening Now? How Many “Nows” Are There?
6.- Body of the Present textbook.
7.- Wrapping Up
8.- Caveat
9.- The Hope
10.- How To Cope With Century Twentieth One!
11.- Appendix, “Reflecting on the Education We Immediately Need”
12.- Appendix of Suggested Quotations
13.- The Most Thoughtful Statement By Any American President To Date!
14.- What I’ve Given You!
15.- Annotated Bibliography
16.- Additional Bibliography (Recommended)
17.- About The Author.
OBJECTIVE
In this book I have tried to give you a very practical overview of massive change besieging our institutions, professions and civilizations globally, as well as our personas, and how it can be taken advantage of.
Metaphors are defined as: “…A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison…” I will use metaphors frequently though in the final analysis the entirety of this material
To utter end of spoken-of change, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid make the following claim:
“Technological and social systems shape each other … technologies — such as gunpowder, the printing press, the railroad, the telegraph and the Internet — can shape society in profound ways. But on the other hand, social systems — in the form of governments, the courts and informal organizations, social movements, professional networks, local communities, market institutions and so forth — shape, moderate and redirect the raw power of technologies.” [56]
ABSTRACT
Is the future a function of the present or is the present a function of the future? What do present and future mean in practicality regarding business, profession, education, politics (including most universal realpolitik geopolitics), society (understanding the granularity of details ingrained in matter-of-fact demographics), markets, as well as in regards to emerging science and technology?
Alvin Toffler offers some insight: “The FUTURE always comes too fast and in the wrong order [expected by the great majority of mindful or absent/minded ‘incumbents’].” Brackets are mine.
Why is this FUTURE different to others? Why is change so pervasive, massive, ubiquitous and frenzy? Why is this ever-changing rate of change entailing different differentness and newness and what are the respective consequences and sequels unavoidably affecting our lives?
What are the imperatives we must superlative micro- and macro-manage to cope to sustainably and sufficiently prevail?
How can we gain a vantage position and benefit from such futures and changes? How can we “upside” strategic perils along the times to come while simultaneously “downside” eventual opportunities, thus combining both “outputted” advents into a maximum optimum adaptation?
Why will this FUTURE unveil the ill and flawed considerations in greatly hidden, misunderstood and largely “socially engineered” fallacies, assumptions, conventions and beliefs? All of this — actually going staggering universal to the least extent (both geographically and demographically), while DARPA — greatly to my innermost gusto and own entertainment — is stubbornly driven to “loving” defying (defiance) and disrupting (disruption) in “empirical” yet “rampant” labs to “counter” and prove “wrong” “immutable” classic laws of physics every day, literally.
DARPA, the entity that spinned off an agency termed “NASA” and magnificent Internet, exhibits a most lucid maxim: “If you’re not failing frequently, you are not succeeding enough.”
If thirty years ago DARPA, Los Alamos National Laboratories, NASA, National Foundation of Science et al. had been commissioned with the invention of massive and abundant “green energy,” we could all now protect much better our environment (and possibly had reduced the formation of the climate global crisis), as well as enjoying plentiful sources of reliable energy.
How could this have been achieved then? By appointing an initiative within the tradition of the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Program and the Genome project.
As civilizations we have the right to make extreme blunders as well as to be held liable (knowingly or not) for the inherent consequences and sequels. Isn’t there the national security of every country threatened now?
Can we seriously and professionally (that is, without deceiving) speak of “success appropriating” WITHOUT STRONGLY REVIEWING FAILURES AND, ABOVE ALL, ADDRESSING THE NANO-GRANULARITY OF YOUR RIVALS COMPREHENSIVELY AND IN ADVANCE? Indeed?
What are the new high-tech deities in the “warped passages” block? Is this the FUTURE we have chosen not to start creatively imagining to the fullest in the PRESENT early on? The FUTURE is that unimpeachable real thing?
Many people have huge difficulty understanding time progression and the strategic surprises that said progression fosters sometimes beyond creative imagination.
It is attributed to Jeff Immelt, GE’s current CEO, the following: “…post 9/11 is a different world…” This tragic milestone alone will play through times in forceful manners up to actual time horizons. Reversing or smartly modulating the consequences will take a gargantuan effort by every constituent in Earth’s civilization, whether hungry or fulfilled, whether thirsty or satisfied, whether sophisticatedly educated or illiterate, whether old or young.
I really hope that those not believing such a claim to make a thorough understanding quickly. This material is bound to helping in that direction and thereby offering unique and unprecedented insights. [42]
Subsequently, in today’s world, timidity and fear are serious competitive liabilities. Coming times, upcoming times, forthcoming times, future times will prove themselves ruthless in the continuum known as PRESENT without a fail.
In illustrating the PRESENT and the FUTURE, What rolls are they respectively impersonating to gain us further insight? This is a strong-sense and critico-creative discernment to understanding the ever-challenging nature and anatomy of change in every facet of Human Life!
In order to appreciate time progression and its beyond geometrical non-linear quality, Can we establish accurate parallelisms with metaphoric and not so metaphoric (yet most accurate) terms to better enlighten our minds with lacking optimum rigor?
Why do we humans, marshaling through such a massive technological progression, readily wish to subject our existence to retrogression by choosing not to recognize grave and yet subtle forces that redefine it all?
In the final analysis, the FUTURE is not for the fainthearted. Stated simply, be it known that the scale, scope and magnitudes of the FUTURES are impossible to overstate.
The PRESENT is so playful and naïve just gaming in arenas whose sole proprietor is the omni-mode ruling monarchical FUTURE.
As the PRESENT carries on just acting serially (not coping with all simultaneously but just gradual and in ill randomness), the FUTURE ascertains every impending deed simultaneously.
In instituting best analyzes and countering the DOWNSIDES and leveraging the UPSIDES, the optimum analyzes are those industriously pondered: 1) pre facto (before the facts), 2) a priori (a form of before the facts), and 3) pre-mortem (much before mortem or before post-mortem).
Back in 1985, as I was starting to manage large petroleum risks — along with the risks embodied by some forty thousand employees with one hundred six thousand direct “eligible dependents” — (refinery, installations, wells, maritime fleets) — including the immense risks of oil refinery number one and oil refinery number three as per worldwide standards, I started asking myself how I could foresee some of that potential disruption (clearly, early on and for future cases).
At that moment, and for some strange reason, someone started speaking to me about Alvin Toffler’s and his game-changing book “Future Shock,” first published in the 1970s. [25]
From there on — having read the book carefully, I became engaged about the rate of change, seeing change engendering opportunities and chaos at the same time and forever.
The driving force was the understanding of how small and complex things in life can be so profoundly modified by just instituting “out-of-this-world” common sense (non “Thomas Paine” common sense).
To a great extent and since them, I literally started a “space age” race to understanding the maximum about it (sic).
Some forms of change are amazing and must be understood at any rate as per my view. For instance, when things feel less chaotic, it doesn’t mean that there is less chaos.
What it means is that many forms of chaos are greatly intertwined and, thus, generating a) mutually-reinforcing energies (productively and disruptively), b) function and purpose, and c) and self-preservation for said chaotic system, as their collective selective pressures get aligned by their own combined valuable orders (usually multiplied by many orders of magnitude).
When my father gave me his private library, I found a book that he never mentioned to me and which he read in 1957, way before my coming into existence, titled “El Desenlace Del Drama Mundial” (in Spanish, “The Final Outcome of World Drama”) authored by Argentinean Dr. Fernando Chaij in 1956.
It is a textbook with the rigor and strategic end and theme of a book in the tradition of George Orwell, though it was fully based on fact, statistics, reflection, concern and a rectification calling, never driven by the science-fiction genre.
So many years later I came to a great understanding (since I believe in the forces of genotype and phenotype). My maternal grandmother was really a busy lady, not only in making her home and being entrepreneurial, but my mother — not fully aware of the subtle scope of my profession — one day told me, “your grandmother was a futurologist. She worked on understanding how and when things were supposed to unfold.”
And my father would constantly tell me, besides amplifying my brain through education and mind shaping our personalities, “try to foresee every problem so that you can fix them in advance.”
I was raised in a home in which it was much more important to solve problems before their crystallizing. Before these findings, I wanted to know why and how each toy and even 383-inch (eight-cylinder) Chrysler Fury engine operate, as well as investigating the possibility of making those artifact “perform” better.
Fortunately, I am not a prognosticator but I am steadily practicing zillion “FUTURES” in advance effortlessly. For over some fifteen years these workings by my mind stop being “second nature” and became first nature indeed.
For a client or for a serious subject matter of mine, I will be eliciting the driving forces that will impact positively and negatively, as well the action plans to exploit every UPSIDE out of every DOWNSIDE. In the mean time, there is an Arab adage to share with you: “That who foretells the truth lies even if he is telling the truth.”
By extreme systematic and systemic cognition, I see trends, their intertwining, their superposing, their interrelationship, and their possibilities. I also see advantages and disadvantages and the fruitfulness of tackling them when it is called for.
These extreme systematically and systemically cognitions, as expressly exercising both hemispheres of your brain, might land me or you to pre-cog capabilities.
The scientific and technological progression, driven by the convergence of many visionary industries and the marketability of the stemming technologies globally, has brought an unprecedented level of scientific knowledge at a growing rate beyond geometrically exponential progression. In the mean time, and not so paradoxically, too many valuable minds are engaged in rogue retrogression as well.
Medical advancements and breakthroughs not only hold the promise of prolonging life while holding it with great health and stamina, but it is entertaining the idea of human lives prevailing for up to one thousand years while some, like Dr. Ray Kurzweil Ph.D. and Dr. Terry Grossman M.D. [26], [27], speak habitually of conquering immortality.
Many serious researchers (including Dr. Arie De Geus) speak about as living as you pay and use the one-thousand year milestone not to make people afraid about immortality becoming a major reality in the near future. The aim is immortality per se and not the thousand years in actuality. In the final decision, anyone will make its “freewill” choice.
There is a valuable thought about the future and its arrival, attributed to Gary Hamel, “The problem with the future is that is different [since is profound, its scientific properties are being dramatically changed in real time]. If you are unable to think differently, the Future will always arrive as a surprise.” Brackets are mine. [28]
In addition and as it is believed to be proclaimed by Samuel Goldwyn, “Only a fool would make predictions, especially about the future.”
Before solving any complex problems, one must comprehend the most of them. A cross-function, multidimensional, scrutinizing and applicable womb-to-tomb vista will be beyond vital. In the execution, one must operate through many contexts and aided by a cohesive compilation of a great diversity of perspectives “funneled” into a monolithic unison.
As I paraphrase Dr. Stephen Hawking and to pursue the former, my express perpetual bottom-line for Life is the ensuing: “My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the Universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”
In aligning the idea of understanding the nature of change and the impacts stemming from said change, former GE’s CEO Jack Welch indicated: “Seeing the world the way it is, not the way we hope it will be or wish it to be.” Then, Jeff Immelt succeeded Jack Welch and became new GE’s CEO in September 07, 2010. [42]
To further enlighten the present material, Tichy stated: “Jeff Immelt realizes that the world changes every day and that his job is to keep GE competitive in that changing world. But his ability to take the company where it needs to go is greatly facilitated by the fact that he has a clear understanding of where he is starting.” [42]
Agreeing greatly with Dr. Hawkins’s, Welch also mentioned, “To get to the guts of why things happen.” [42]
There is a mandate in the PRESENT over the FUTURE by the forces of the FORTHCOMING TIMES. The solid idea about it requires crafting a new vision, with its appended (loose/tight and amorphous but concrete) strategy, and aligning people to it.
Transformation involves not just tearing away from the PAST, but immediately moving into a new better future besieged by great perils that must be transformed into lucrative yet sustainable UPSIDES.
In speaking to your intellect, as your intellect and mine dialogue fluently, I will appeal to very legitimate narrative resources to offer you an accurate insight and perspective of how the scientific properties of change are changing and how changed changes are beginning to change it all beyond the wildest dreams and nightmares.
In due time, you will realize that this is a well-meant calling in which vigorous rigor is sine qua non to the undersigned.
Why will I use the above referred “legitimate narrative resources”? Because I feel there is massive universal and dysfunctional illiteracy concerning the rate of change.
Even as headlines in “hard-copy” newspapers supersede the most creative fantasies embedded in science fiction, many incumbents just don’t get it. Others are really upset because they cannot understand why the PRESENT does not resemble the nearest PAST.
Others are paralyzed in the analyzes. And others manifest an anarchistic tendency towards society.
Through centuries, the greatest luminaries have greatly reflected and recommended not to fight against extraordinary forces, but to use them smartly. This time around, with the Kingdom of the “Society of Knowledge” ruling as the prominent Tudor family, one must become a cross-pollinated savant to navigate the waters shed by said forces.
The PRESENT seems to be having a great deal of enjoyment by pontificating words and deeds solely engaged in exponential mediocrity, thus exploiting the worst of humankind as if it were the most desired quality. This featured quality by the PRESENT is pervasively horrendous and existentially damaging.
On the contrary, the FUTURE is capable, and in fact it implements so, of doing well to the point we would astound ourselves. The actual quotation by Thomas Edison indicates: “If we all did the things we are capable of doing well we would literally astound ourselves.” [44]
As this material will portray, and very much to the advantage of the subject matter here dealt with, I carry on all my professional lines of practice with absolute agreement with Otto Herman Khan. He actually stated: “I'm against fashionable thinking ... I'm against ignorance ... I am against the whole cliché of the moment ... I'm against sloppy, emotional thinking…” [43].
In my case, I am also extremely against superfluous and inexpensive thinking. It’s timely to remembering that humanity’s problems are all related to ignorance. Very soon enough you’ll find the rigor, as well as the strong sense, critico-creative approach, by this author.
Salvador Dali: “Get real; dream the impossible.” However, if you dream the impossible, you must get prepared to work rigorously and smartly for a serious term of time.
THE CHALLENGE
(by Paul Valéry, 1932)
“All the notions we thought solid, all the values of civilized life, all that made for stability in international relations, all that made for regularity in the economy … in a word, all that tended happily to limit the uncertainty of the morrow, all that gave nations and individuals some confidence in the morrow … all this seems badly compromised. I have consulted all augurs I could find, of every species, and I have heard only vague words, contradictory prophecies, curiously feeble assurances. Never has humanity combined so much power with so much disorder, so much anxiety with so many playthings, so much knowledge with so much uncertainty…” [56]
TEXTBOOK’S INTRODUCTORY QUOTATIONS BY ENLIGHTENED MINDS
There is a great deal of publishing about change and coping with it and its consequences. I have the firmest belief that there is a huge lack of understanding how change can change its own nature. Bacon, ensuing, makes a legendary quotation about it.
Sir Francis Bacon: “He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator.” [2]
In seriously rigorous thinking, there is an important maxim to bear in mind at all times. It establishes: “whatever is now working is already obsolete.” In the case of already-forewarned scientists, this implies to evolve or to radicalize the evolution of any tangibles or intangibles.
There is a very important scientific truism to bear in mind at any cost. It ensues, “everything is connected to everything else.”
When evolution gets radicalized in applied science, a so-called breakthrough takes place. Hence, Einstein makes the case now:
Albert Einstein: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity … We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.” [4]
One of America’ and the world’s greatest and most rigorous intellect with a perspective embedded in the future. He, Buckminster Fuller, successfully tackles a continuously and increasingly puzzling problem. As follows:
Richard Buckminster Fuller reminds us of the following: “Either war is obsolete, or men are.” [5]
Speaking seriously as I do in the entirety of this textbook, some scientific research preliminary yet unconfirmed outcomes and findings seem to suggest that the future rules the present. The German philosopher Nietzsche has his own lucid position.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: "It’s our future that lays down the law of our today." [6] It’s advantageous to understand what a prominent 120-year-old corporation such as GE is now considering. This quote is attributed to GE’s current CEO, Jeff Immelt: “I have to lead for tomorrow’s world.”
We cannot solve problems planted in the past. But we can solve problems to come (in the future). Ergo, former U.S. president Roosevelt makes a great appeal.
Theodore Roosevelt: "All the resources we need are in the mind." [7]
It is indispensable to create whatever future you conceive by yourself. Is there a better tool than your most cultivated and prepared mind thinking in unthinkables? Please quit now that foolish intuitivism à la Savannah thinking, since this is a different temporal locus for certain. See Emerson’s take:
Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: “Man hopes; Genius creates.” [8]
In order to work for the matters that make us hope, we must bluntly face the matters that besiege our own existence, the ones elicited by us and the ones elicited by the people that we don’t even like. Dr. Knowles, a connoted American and greatly regarded into adult education, has a lucid position that can serve us as a starting point. Following:
Dr. Malcolm Knowles Ph.D.: “The greatest danger for the survival of the present civilization is neither atomic war, nor environmental pollution, nor the exploitation of natural resources, and nor present crises. The underlying cause to all of the above is the acceleration of man’s obsolescence … The only hope seems to be an electroshock program to re-instill to the present adults the competencies required to function adequately under a mode of perpetual change. This is a profound need — the immeasurable challenge — that is presented by the modern society to adult education.”
Former Federal Supreme Court Justice Sandra O’Connor gave a brief interview in 2009. She is mobilized into telling people that children and youngster must be taught both a) Civics and b) History. Clearly, having seen so much mistaken people led to grave imprisonment sentences, O’Connor indicates that many of the people did not understand the basics about 1) living civilly in society, 2) respecting the mandates of the “Law Of The Land”, and 3) understanding where society and, in her case, the U.S. comes from (through systematic study of history) to comprehend where are we likely to go or not.
On education and to this end, Dr. Skinner made an important point.
Dr. Burrhus Frederic Skinner Ph.D., ˝Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.” [9]
We see a host of manufacturers of all types of products, including automakers and their cars. In great many cases and as people have been concerning about being so-called “global winners” in their respective industries, they were adding to their products more and more features.
That is, they were adding great complexity while defying that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Evidently, you can add every thinkable “complexity” to your products, as long as you greatly upgrade the scrutinizing vista of the entirety of the systems and the dynamic interactions among i) hardware (amplest meaning), ii) software (amplest meaning), and iii) humans themselves (both the ones represented by the manufacturers as well as those being end users).
Since you cannot use the same knowledge repository in making the features-adding-to-your-products effort, you’d better pay attention to Einstein’s wise words.
Albert Einstein: "A problem can never be resolved at the same level of knowledge that was created." [10]
In the seventeenth century Milton made a point that in my opinion is valid today. In arguing to free technology, capable of great good but also of great evil, John Milton (1644) expressed majestic confidence in our ability to prevail: “Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof we are, and whereof ye are the governors: a Nation not slow and dull, but of quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.” [52]
Was Thomas Jefferson America’s first futurist? He proclaimed:
Thomas Jefferson: ̋I prefer the stories of the future than history.˝ [11]
Speaking of not changing the current state of affairs, Dr. Kissinger, especially addressed for people how to approach this maxim: “first, foremost and never do not harm,” (mostly taken from the Latin sentence: “Primum non nocere”) by stating:
Dr. Henry Kissinger addresses: "An ignored issue is an invitation to a problem." [12]
Former U.K. Prime Minister Churchill is undisputedly considered by many one of the greatest political intellects. He had a great position on the future, stating:
Sir Winston Churchill: "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." [13]
There are many fallacies and ill-conceived assumptions and conventions that even smart people hold dearly without subjecting said fallacies and assumptions to great testing to attempt to disprove them to gain further insight and mental acuity of what holds true and what doesn’t.
Antonio Machado: “The eye is not an eye because you see it. The eye is an eye because it sees you.” [14]
After the insight by Machado, there is additional thoughtfulness along these lines:
The Panchatantra (body of Eastern philosophical knowledge): “Knowledge is the true organ of sight, not the eyes.” [15]
Seeing through the eyes of applied science (and actionable omniscience) is, in my view, the optimum mode and here lies further food for thought:
Bernard d'Espagnat: "Even if the Universe is a little myopic is true that, more than others, MEN OF SCIENCE ARE ITS EYES." [16]
Drucker was blamed often of self-praising himself about his capability of foretelling the future. This is his take on it:
Peter Drucker: “Things that have already happened but whose consequences have not been realized [because they were not imagined, considered, scrutinized or envisioned by disciplined foresight and far-sight extending and expanding both sides of the human brain] … Don’t confuse movement with progress.” [17] Brackets are mine.
In an interview with Charlie Rose in 2009, Dr. Watson explained the vast significance of science:
Nobel laureate Dr. James D. Watson, Ph.D.: "Science gives society a great sense of decisive freedom." [18]
There has never been a greater importance to the most sophisticated education, especially to science, math, and engineering (and most of the times, the three of them simultaneously). The ensuing quotation accordingly goes:
Arthur C. Clarke: “We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 — and half of the things he knows at 40 hadn’t been discovered when he was 20?” [19]
Regardless of how difficult, every responsible adult must assume the difficulties of the present realities. Then, s/he can establish a plan of action to work through those realities to overcome those realities. Khan offers important insight now.
Otto Herman Khan: “Clearly, the first task is to gain acceptance of a more reasonable view of the future, one that opens possibilities rather than forecloses them.” [20]
Time and action are invaluable resources. Verify the ensuing quotation:
General Francisco de Miranda: “Time is the context by means of which action is delivered.” [21]
Unthinkable thinking will increasingly prove itself the most sensible decision.
Oscar Wilde: "To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect."
To be capitalistic in general requires having a good “relationship” with machines and even sophisticated automation. By every account, Mrs. Katharine Hepburn is a great democratic and civilized person and never a prominent activist of anything else but the center, made a wonderful claim. As follows:
Mrs. Katharine Hepburn: “Nature … is what we are put in this world to rise above.” [52]
Daring circumstances are for the tough-minded, resilient, resolved, as well as for those who combine boldness with prudence.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox: "There is no chance, no destiny, no fate that can circumvent, hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul."
How do freedom, security, safety, reliability, reason coalesce and intertwine?
Sir Karl Popper: We must plan for freedom, and not only for security [and safety and reliability], if for no other reason than that only [extremely educated] freedom can make security secure [and safety safe and reliability reliable]. Brackets are mine. [51]
Before challenging situations, don’t rule it out or oversimplify it without first trying to research those situations and begin asking both silly and exuberant questions lavishly.
In second-guessing responsibly the future, not to foretell but to make mental options for omni-mode preparedness to avoid being strategically surprised, I recommend the following:
Alan Turing (1950): “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
AN U.S. AIR FORCE COLONEL WHO REPEATED IT FREQUENTLY: "It's better to remain silent and be thought a fool that open your mouth and remove any doubt."
Additional and important quotations, directly related to the subject matter here addressed, are located at “Appendix of Suggested Quotations.”
All quotations not otherwise cited are from the interviews conducted by the author or personal communications sent to the author.
WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW? HOW MANY “NOWS” ARE THERE? ARE THOSE “NOWS” STILL RELEVANT?
Swift and swirling change, peril, complexity, and newness do not function alone. They are deeply inter-meshed, interactive, and transforming, as well as transformational. Using the genetic and biological parlance, you’d better believe that this a multi-fold epoch, evermore unfolding, in which mutations and transmutations are taking place across the board.
You can open up new doors for yourself, see new options, minimize significant mistakes, and maximize potential understandings. In order for you to act decisively successful, you’d better have a lucid comprehension of said understanding for Life. A lucid comprehension will come to you by the greatest — tough and subtle — omni-mode and thorough application of the scientific method, especially through exact sciences aiming solely to the state-of-the-art generation.
Because of the forces exerted by the FUTURE upon the PRESENT, this Era streams rising ambiguity, ambivalence, dichotomy, uncertainty, complexity, conflict, bewilderedness and yet unprecedented possibilities.
It’s greatly convenient recalling the luminescent thought by the prominent German philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche "It’s our future that lays down the law of our today."
It’s advantageous to understand what a prominent 120-year-old corporation such as GE is considering since September 2001. This quote is attributed to GE’s current CEO, Jeff Immelt: “I have to lead for tomorrow’s world.”
It is for leaders to fall into the trap of thinking that planning ahead and building for the FUTURE is an incredible luxury. IT IS NOT. IT IS AN ABSOLUTE NECESSITY FOR LIFE.
But anyone who underestimates the revolutionary character of today’s changes is living a too-uncontrolled an illusion.
Zen Buddhists will offer you unprecedented lectures on reality being the greatest mental “fabrication” by the hominid's mind. The world, that of physical “existence” and manufactured by the mind, is being transformed dramatically and irrevocably, second by second all of the time.
Juxtapositions of many knowledge dominions will bring about the greatest scientific convergence ever in the years ahead. Some people like James Canton call suggest these forces becoming and rendering “weird science” in every sphere in our lives. [22]
With each passing day, change quickens everyday at a faster-and-faster, nonlinear, discontinuous and counter-intuitive rate. In the mean time, Evelyn Lindner reminds us of the following: “Pessimism is a luxury of good times … In difficult times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence.”
TEXTBOOK (BODY OF,)
To further set the stage for this material, the textbook “Einstein in the Boardroom” by Suzanne S. Harrison and Patrick H. Sullivan Sr. may offer some lucid ideas on the “current” state of affairs when they claim:
“Humans have been adding to their total knowledge steadily over the centuries, and the amount of knowledge we create is multiplying at an incredible rate. Beginning with the amount of knowledge in the known world at the time of Christ, studies have estimated that the first doubling of that knowledge took place about 1700 A.D. The second doubling occurred around the year 1900. It is estimated today that the world's knowledge base will double again by 2010 and again after that by 2013.” [37]
There are many serious publications, from 2003 to this date, speaking of the entirety of scientific knowledge doubling every five (5) years and sooner. How, then, can one undertake such a gargantuan challenge, through the “Society of Knowledge,” unless it is through the stewardship of the scientific method?
The American Heritage Dictionary’s Introduction (fourth edition, 2000) by Joseph P. Pickett, Executive Director, literally indicates [54]:
“This Fourth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary combines the best of traditional making with key innovations that afford new ways of looking at our language… This edition has nearly 10,000 new words and senses that reflect the rapid pace of change in the English language today. Technological innovations in computing and communications along with advances in the sciences have been especially rich sources of development in the lexicon (for example, bit map, domain name, and raster in computing; dark matter, photonics, and yoctosecond in science). Medicine and medical research continue to produce an astonishing array of new terms for chemicals and substances (endostatin, leptin, transfatty acid), for disorders and infectious agents (Asperger’s syndrome, erectile dysfunction, hantavirus), for treatment (cocktail, molecular knife, xenotransplant), and for a variety of creations and discoveries (designer gene, enteric nervous system, microsleep)…. In addition, continuing social change in postindustrial society has given rise to expressions that describe new business practices (buyback, microcredit, reverse mortgage), a changing workplace (face time, job-share, mommy track), and evolving political positions and governmental policies (family leave, term limit, workfare). New sports terms have arisen (clap skate, five hole, skyboard), as have words for new educational practices (charter school, distance learning, homeschool). The names of foods from other cultures continue to be adopted (baba gannouj, garam masala, quesadilla). A host of new cultural developments has produced a host of new compound cords (assisted living, poetry slam, shock jock). And English speakers continue to be an exuberance force in creative coinage (bloviate, newbie, wannabe)…. To ensure accuracy in the coverage of our rapidly changing vocabulary, we have worked closely with distinguished consultants in a wide variety of specialized fields, including anthropology, astronomy, genetics, immunology, philosophy, and physics, to name but a few. We have also gone to great lengths to make our biological and geographic entries as timely as possible. Many new biographical entries have been added, especially in the areas of sports, music, filmmaking, and literature. To the geographic entries we have added new country names, such as Myanmar and the Republic of Congo, and newly prominent places such as Kosovo….”
The PRESENT resolutely insists on trashing itself with an overload of “obsoledge” (obsolete knowledge) [23]. But the erudite, shrewd, pre-cog FUTURE — knowing the decisively better best — stays safe and certain that « what worked best won’t anymore » for the PRESENT besieged by mundane miseries, those miseries propelled by the unkindest humankind without a fail.
THE FUTURE IS ALSO AND ABOVE ALL BESIEGED, BUT BESIEGED OF AND BY BREAKTHROUGHS IN PERPETUITY AND PERPETUALLY IN FLUIDITY RADIANTLY AND IRRADIANTLY.
If you must insist, you can study the melancholic PAST as a distorted prologue primer to the PRESENT. Nevertheless, not even the loftiest accumulation of all the suboptimal PASTS added to the PRESENT are nothing but an infinitesimal, ineffectual, inconsequential, immaterial, and impious script to the FUTURE. PAST and PRESENT are a bunch of empty, hallow iotas.
Said script, I’m not apologetic to state, since I did not birth this Universe, won’t get you to your own FUTURE’s UPSIDES, but might make you institute an emergency landing upon your own existential disruption unless you pay great attention and act upon it urgently and smartly. Got to get beyond cross-pollinated sophistication. Cannot make it by yourself? Can you please just ask for unconventional professional assistance?
In the ultimate scrutiny, you must conceive, design, develop, implement, sustain, update, adapt, re-adapt, and re-invent you and your own FUTURES, FUTURE by FUTURE for Life, a Life that will equate to immortality. Taken from the Latin term a posteriori, I will never act aposterioristically. Taken from the Latin term a priori, I will invariably proceed aprioristically.
Unless, in exercising your most conscientious freewill, you wish to be enslaved by an arrogant robot that is: omniscient, as well as self-upgrading, self-enhancing, self-replicating, self-fixing, self-energized, self-renewing, self-reinventing, self-aware, self-ruling, self-transporting, self-commuting (by ground, air, water, outer space, tele-transportation, etc.), and in possession of many other “selfs” that grant it huge autonomy.
Those believing that tele-transportation, more popularly known as teleporting, is Sci-Fi might wish to research on the breakthroughs by Los Alamos National Laboratories. Some years ago, as per LANL itself, they made it possible at the “discrete level.”
The PRESENT does not resemble the PAST, nor will the FUTURE ever resemble the PRESENT; up until now the PRESENT has been anecdotal, folkloric, and still impregnated with greater forces and yet more subtle ones than an ever-increasing synergy (i.e., mother of all synergies) of all our known and unknown PASTS combined (over four billion years), while the FUTURE will over-geometrically trans-mutate into infinitely swifter, arrhythmic, inconceivably, amorphously perennially-accelerating (through diversely modulated or not speeds — speeds that stem from some new order of rampant speeding and acceleration of said speeding —), orderly-chaotized and yet more driven into vividly-immersed and palpable realities than our current yet obsolete PRESENT.
Why second-guess the FUTURE when you can read, in advance, said FUTURE's hints NOW and exploit them grandiosely, to your advantage?
Annihilate the DOWNSIDES to hijack the UPSIDES, metaphorically and not so metaphorically speaking about leading, managing, and undertaking organizations with a profit end or otherwise. Please remember a golden rule: Regardless of your qualitative and quantitative growth in, say, leadership and success capturing as well as management, every growth will be hallow and harmful if it is not first a growth of ethics and morality.
The FUTURE at all times wishes to readily equip the present with novel information. Why? Because the FUTURE considers the PRESENT a failed stated in the realm of time, and does not desire to get implicated with the downsides of a sub-optimal, bitter fellow who declines every helpful knowledge on “emotional intelligence” and “political intelligence”.
Anyway, and by any rational measure, we are in a multi-eon-streaming epoch in which mind-toughness and mind resilience, within kindness and civility, are going to be far more important than the smile of the bus driver spoken of by Daniel Goldman. [29]
As the FUTURE gives the PRESENT a bad score and becomes judgmental on it, the PRESENT flagrantly denies and rejects the current existence of the FUTURE. The signs echo by the FUTURE into the PRESENT are ubiquitously here in encoded ways.
As the FUTURE paraphrases Shakespeare’s sentence (fears take away the good with which we could win) and executes it in the practice, the PRESENT feels a great animosity against such a maxim and habit.
The forthcoming FUTURE — already scattered among us — has a lot to offer to the PRESENT, namely an invaluable out-of-this-world-and-time source of narrative and numerical data (unexplored repository knowledge waiting to being seized and administered by the PRESENT and its inhabitants). Can you think of anyone more visionary than the king in his class, the FUTURE itself?
The PRESENT, unfortunately, is somehow anecdotal (suboptimal) while the FUTURE ruthlessly and relentlessly abides by ever-emerging scientific truths. These truths contain vast gold mines for creation, recreation, and super-creation, as well as for devastation.
The cultivated brains must root out the endless dangers to capture the benefits, so humankind prevails on Earth and much more beyond it if the Universe (and the embedded Nature of the latter), too, — and its own hyper-dynamics — warrants such a sovereign license.
For the first time in history, we can work backward from our imagination rather than forward from our past. [28] In the midst of chaos, there is a learning lesson to assimilate. Sometimes the table is served for OVER-LEARNING if the prepared mind is paying huge attention to the nano-granularity of details.
To me uncharted territory is the most splendorous “terra incognita” territory, chiefly because of its sheer number of unknown knowns and unknown knowns. As well as immense crises, there territories and incognitos offered an unprecedented learning opportunity that I will never waste, my most thoughtful friends.
The term singularity entered the popular science culture with the 1993 presentation at NASA-sponsored conference of a seminal paper by San Diego State University statistician Vernor Vinge. The abstract of the famous essay is as dauntingly lucid today as it was more than a decade ago: Permalink: http://www.mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.htm
Professor Vinge indicated it in 1993: “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended …Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers [and some further dangers] are presented…” Brackets are mine.
I just wonder if the FUTURE is continually stalking on the PRESENT! Perhaps, it is so. One thing can be ascertained, because of the PRESENT’s non-erudite nature, the FUTURE (the over-ruling) is always filibustering the PRESENT (the enslaved).
These days meaning: these seconds — the totality of all is in the making perpetually. That to be “in the making” mode — at this time — is relentlessly thought of and thought through way in advance. This is a technique to CURRENTLY get your brains over-in-sourced by zillion practiced futuristic scenarios (happily and readily adopted quite early on).
The FUTURE WILL HIT the PRESENT AND ITS RESPECTIVE GROUND RUNNING. All of that as it has been seen up to the present time.
This is a hyper-accelerated Eons-streaming Age and ever-increasingly by an above and beyond an over-exponential “many orders of magnitude” factor.
Said “over-exponential factor,” even when multiplied by many orders of magnitudes as in effect it is, the non-linear geometrical and discontinuous growth rate of it is by most people immeasurably underestimated and misunderstood. Besides its intuition is only flagrant counter-intuition.
To me the PAST is more like Alice (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). The PRESENT seems more like Mr. Hyde while the FUTURE appears to be more like the joint conspiracy by Dr. Jekyll and Dorian Gray. Perhaps, we will need the combined effort by Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie to decipher these outright enigmas, namely those stemming from the ever-awaited-but-ever-intruding FUTURE.
We are repeatedly longing for the good sides of the futures impiously forgetting that those futures come along with great responsibilities and challenges.
Progress is the future outcome of a multitude of cascades of “current moments” flowing divergently. The divergence unites seamlessly but not under the ever-suboptimal comprehension of the “naked” human eye.
The PRESENT is introvert adhocracy as the FUTURE is technocracy in perpetuum. The PRESENT is an illiterate adhocratic one while the FUTURE is the technocratic, “omni mode” savant. The PAST is hollow and inconsequential fossils unverifiable by any “carbon testing.”
To give entrepreneurs a POV quickly, most business plans are (have been for too long) grotesquely ill-conceived indeed in the mean time, as they are written-up and reckoned with the eyes fixed in prehistory. IF IT IS NOT AN ACTUAL SUB-SET OF A MUCH GREATER AND THOROUGH ADVANCED RISK MANAGEMENT STRATEGY, THE FIRM WILL MEET GARGANTUAN CHALLENGES.
Otherwise, there will be great opportunities! One end of the greatest Risk Management Effort (extraneous to insurance, co-insurance, re-insurance, bonds, and those artifices “marketed” by beautifully institutionalized “social engineering,” termed by these God-sent incumbents: “marketing techniques”) is to entertaining the fiscally sound outcomes of a business, literally any business, challenge, or task.
This FUTURE, that throws around its weight through every facet of the PRESENT overbearingly and mercilessly, might be 99.99% INEVITABLE.
Inevitability, in this instance, equates to meaning that it will be a rogue dictator, over-ruling capriciously and solely acting upon its way and capricious taste.
The unavoidable consequences of this FUTURE can be mitigated or at least somehow modulated. Evidently, this FUTURE’s UPSIDES can be, perhaps, seized and even amplified. To meet both requisites, there is one HUGE prerequisite before proceeding any further. The popular wisdom so populated of “one thing at a time” is forbidden by the rulings of the incumbent FUTURES here referred to.
This is not a calling for the “snail-paced” multi-tasking either. You do your DOWNSIDES and UPSIDES simultaneously for Life. Otherwise, one can never proclaim knowing how systems operate (not just computational software, but SYSTEMS per se IN UPPER CASE).
That is, that the TOTALITY of HUMANKIND has to converge AT UNISON — “on the doubles” — on the most essentials Herculean tasks to do in order to attempt the sustainability of the corresponding civilization as it is now known / perceived. What a big problem to solve that one posed by so-called perception!
In all seriousness, one must decode, de-encrypt the enigmas of the informative and dis-informative yet hallucinated perception. There are way too many kinetic hallucinations and vivid fabrications and pseudo-actual artifices even in the most lucidly sighted perceptions as fluidly recorded, in real time, even in the most prepared of the minds. How can one, in an all-out practiced, de-hallucinate such atrocious perceptions?
Don’t trust perceptions since they’re all flawed and ergo they lie. Dr. Henry Mintzberg indicates that “humans are flawed,” How, could you, subsequently, obtain de-flawed perceptions from flawed hominoids? In order to de-flaw perceptions and executions, you must go great distances to begin with, thus as you are still entrenched in so-called “Success 101, the in-between lines 1, line 1, word 1,” out of a socially engineered preface.
Do you feel confused by said hallucinations? Verify this quotation by Henry Miller: “Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.”
Atrocious hallucinations embedded in perceptions can be “reality check” by, for example, following these success tenets in your professional/business theater (frame of reference) of operations: 1.- Picture mentally radiantly. 2.- Draw outside the canvas. 3.- Color outside the vectors. 4.- Sketch sinuously. 5.- Far-sight beyond the mind’s intangible exoskeleton. 6.- Abduct indiscernible falsifiable convictions. 7.- Reverse-engineering a gene and a bacterium or, better yet, the lucrative genome. 8.- Guillotine the over-weighted status quo. 9.- Learn how to add up —in your own brainy mind — colors, dimensions, aromas, encryptions, enigmas, phenomena, geometrical and amorphous in-motion shapes, enigmas, phenomena, methods, techniques, codes, written lines, symbols, contexts, locus, venues, semantic terms, magnitudes, longitudes, processes, tweets, “knowledge-laden” hunches, so forth. 10.- Project your wisdom wealth onto communities of timeless-connected wikis. 11.- Cryogenize the infamous illiterate by own choice and reincarnate ASAP (multiverse teleporting out of a warped / wormed passage) Da Vinci, Bacon, Newton, Goethe, Bonaparte, Edison, Franklyn, Einstein and Feynman. 12.- Organize relationships into voluntary associations that are mutually beneficial and accountable for contributing productively to the surrounding community. 13.- Practice the central rule of good strategy, which is to know and remain true to your core business and invest for leadership and R&D+Innovation. 14.- Kaisen, SixSigma, Lean, LeanSigma, “Reliability Engineer” (the latter as solely conceived and developed by Procter & Gamble and Los Alamos National Laboratories) it all unthinkably and thoroughly by recombinant, a là Einstein Gedaken-motorized judgment. 15.- Provide a roadmap / blueprint for drastically compressing (“crashing”) the time’s “reticules” it will take you to get on the top of your tenure, nonetheless of your organizational level. 16.- With the required knowledge and relationships imbedded in organizations, create support for, and carry out transformation initiatives. 17.- Offer a tested pathway for addressing the linked challenges of personal transition and organizational transformation that confront leaders in the first few months in a new tenure. 18.- Foster momentum by creating virtuous cycles that build credibility and by avoiding getting caught in vicious cycles that harm credibility. 19.- Institute coalitions that translate into swifter organizational adjustments to the inevitable streams of change in personnel and environment. 20.- Mobilize and align the overriding energy of many others in your organization, knowing that the “wisdom of crowds” is outright rubbish. 21.- Step outside the boundaries of the framework system when seeking a problem solution. 22.- Within zillion tiny bets, raise the ante and capture the documented learning through frenzy execution. 23.- “Moonshine” and “Skunkswork” all, holding in your mind the motion-picture image that, regardless of the relevance of “inputs” and “outputs,” entails the highest relevance is within the sophistication within the THROUGHPUT. (See definition of “throughput” at [53]).
The function of the “motion picture” image is to early on show before the mind a film of incessantly altering futures. The purpose of the vision is never to show a film of an irrevocably fixed future.
Come to think of it thoroughly, throughput is embodied by the Latin term “modus operandi.” Through ages, the concept of mission-critical “throughput” has regularly been represented by said Latin term. Clearly, as eons elapse, in the West we do need a great translation into English.
Through implementation of your organizational, corporate, institutional, entrepreneurial modus operandi, you can shape up your modus vivendi.
Possibly, this FUTURE will not have — as per the flawed hopes treasured by all-walks-of-life eyewitnesses — a “natural tendency.” Stated plainly, because it is being envisioned and worked-out preter-naturally, this FUTURE may appear — before our naked eyes — with extreme tendencies and directives that evoke the most extravagant and transhuman mandates.
Can anyone undergo an epiphany in reversal? Long time ago, speaking of my professional experience while testing and experimenting, I have reduced probabilities of having “breakthrough” epiphanies to zero, literally. I had envisioned many “Eureka times” long time ago and yet in advance. I do have an immense way to go very much to my blessed apostlehood.
Those greatly appreciated Alemanic, Germanic Bavarians speak abundantly about “susceptibility to perfectibility.” In my professional quest, which is my own intellectual challenge of mine with me and before my persona, that precept is vastly insufficient.
One must consider that I toy and play with not only Edisonian Research but also with own self-induced: a) Serendipities, b) Pseudo-serendipities, c) Randomized serendipities, d) Pseudo-randomized serendipities, and e) Pseudo-randomized serendipities.
For cases a), b), c), and d) I also play a great deal with channeling the “throughput” with 1) directness, 2) indirectness, and 3) a combination of immediately previous 1) and 2). All of the above, in further progression of my testing and experimenting, as well as my fact-finding and fact-disproving research, I subject to a gradation (“gray scale shading”) of i) loose, ii) control, and a combination of immediately previous i) and ii).
The terms “extravagant” and “transhuman,” in this case, apply for even the ultimately leading-edge practitioner of the scientific realm, either within that eminent establishment, or those with an unauthenticated citizenship from the avant-garde renegade-verse. It might be a genuine deal, it might not?
Said dictator will not impersonate anyone. He will be THE maximum MONARCH OF TECHNOCRACY by his own right, Remember? Yes, yes, yes — I know, Technocracy, the gentleman that just espoused a lady with an appalling temperament that loses composure oft, even before the state’s visits by the Holly Pope and her Royal Highness the Queen of England.
Her fist name is “Global.” Her surname is “Crises.” That’s the reason why this “power couple” has made Sir Francis Bacon a best-selling icon, “FOR TIME IS THE GREATEST INNOVATOR.” Gotten it?
This Monarch will expel every laggard and every one that, notwithstanding his / her most advanced education, worships and disseminates ignorance. This expel will include the transfer of the selected one to a recondite “curved” corner of the Universe or the Multiverse.
The PRESENT carries on superfluously. But the FUTURE is over-impregnated and super-immersed with detailed meaning and significance and with projected transgressive-ly and a là “omni mode” manners, as well as with its manifesting tangibly and yet palpably intangibly pervasive ubiquity.
Perpetual innovation is a rogue truth to this PRESENT. The breadth, depth, scope, subtlety, intricacy, and rate of acceleration of this FUTURE’s perpetual innovation will be endless, endless so that is beyond the wildest dreams or nightmares ever conceived by the ultimately noted or most criticized sci-fi writer.
To attribute to this FUTURE’s perpetual innovation a quality of far-fetched will be as well an extreme over-simplification and an existential blunder and the greatest and most public personal acknowledgment of own worshiped supine ignorance.
The PRESENT is 1% a function of the PAST and, above all, a function of the FUTURE. The PRESENT is a function of the PAST only in part.
Remember: The FUTURE is eternally pre-clashing and/or clashing the PRESENT, thus continuously shaping and re-shaping the PRESENT to a great extent. The FUTURE is, so to speak, 30% a function of the PRESENT and 70% a function of the FUTURE itself. Percentages are arbitrarily suggested in order to illustrate.
The PRESENT is bathed by the ill-presumed permanency and by the quality of being impermanent. The PRESENT is never a snapshot or fixed (static). It is the linkage, superposition, and/or contentious intertwining of many films (multi-fluid dynamics / kinetics).
Its dynamism grants itself, the PRESENT, huge ambitions to becoming the FUTURE while trying to capture the “here and now” mirage, a mirage (a misdemeanor) that does not care losing the sense of ridicule in worldwide football / soccer game through worldwide broadcasting “live.”
There are too many “heres” and a myriad of “nows” without the utter and indispensable acknowledgement that the perennial, trembling gap between the PRESENT and FUTURE generates many creative tensions, regardless if harvested or not.
The PRESENT is at least unceasingly infinite, unless its interrelationship with the FUTURE stops. The FUTURE is never endless unless a great anomaly takes place.
Concerning the PRESENT and specially the FUTURE, the great majority of people failed considering the possibility of anything going wrong, no matter how remote the location or complexity of the implementation environment.
The PRESENT and the FUTURE engender tsunamis of CHANGES, principally those changes never thought through. When you altered your work because of competition and/or difficult times, you are CHANGING your professional occupation (organizational strategy).
The PRESENT has orderly been used to being a land at the dawn of history, that history architected by a bunch of biographies and auto-biographies by the winners and the prevailing ones without considering the side of the losing ones or that of those without partisan positions.
The PRESENT’s duties are appended to the FUTURE. The PRESENT’s rights are appended to the PAST.
When you reflect and modify you innermost (and that one revolting and commuting within the innermost by using its own proprietary translational and rotational moves), you are CHANGING your essence to some extent. CHANGING your essence to being ADAPTABLE to ever-shifting realities will be your utmost sensible deed.
When CHANGE is perpetually altering all types of CHANGES, the scientific properties of known and unknown changes get modified, sometimes profoundly and sometimes to an indescribable unknown. This extreme modification is what I have been referring to ‘CHANGED CHANGES.’
CHANGED CHANGES make the overwhelming case for “beyond unprecedented” reinvention of humans, lifestyles, organizations, businesses, governments, nongovernmental organizations, societies, and worldwide society. In the process, the extreme makeover is in nothing superficial or similar.
And the call is an abrupt wake-up alarm to all sorts of leaders, managers, entrepreneurs, business owners, government administrators, consultants, advisers, strategists, professors, teachers, students, researchers, and any breathing or cryogenized human being.
Welcome to a new “normal” and a new “abnormal.” In all verisimilitude, there are many new “normals” and “abnormal” being the latter, incidentally, as well within normalness.
At the time being, it does not matter anymore where you come from and how this impact your ‘current’ PRESENT. Instead, what is presently relevant for you to envision are the floating, fluxing, cross-railed FUTURES as they climb the treacherous building-block ladder, the ladder of accumulation of opportunities, challenges, and perplexing, but exuberant trade-offs. Neither exuberance nor trade-offs are for the uncultivated.
These trades-offs poise the least thinkable of the unthinkable results, challenging our body (physiology), mind (psychology), and soul (spirit). If you think “exuberant” is a fancy or undesirable term, kindly please wait until you come to meet your FUTURE in person.
To apply, say, for practical leadership credentials will be a nearly, though not impossible, insurmountable enterprise for Life. Leadership to what a) Benchmark, b) Metric, c) Objective, d) Goal, e) Function, f) Purpose?
How insurmountable? As nearly insurmountable as attempting to hike the Everest cloth-less, equipment-less, ill-prepared, flawed-minded without a crew and the indispensable Sherpa, as you walk and climb toward the mountain’s peak with your back focused on the peak and while your eyes are grabbed by the starting-point locus. You have the right to successfully seek the anti-canonical milestone, Haven't you?
You can continually walk into the FUTURE backwards to revive the fossilized vestiges of blurred/made-up/artificial “artifices”-driven memories that eat your soul out. A healthy medical prescriptions will dictate: “The patient must always focus on the FUTURE. In the process, and in order to keep its existence, he/she must always REMEMBER THE FUTURE IN ADVANCE.”
You know what the PAST is? Reply: The eternal flow of increasing creative-tension and controversial discrepancies between the FUTURE and the PRESENT, encapsulated in a stream of segments from the “preterit tense” kingdom, a kingdom that is neither awaken nor significant anymore.
Historians and actuaries, in a hurry, will be shouting that they stop being “retrospective” to becoming “prospective” (and creatively so) given the eternally-happening inflicting points of inflections requiring exuberant solving.
Paraphrasing Ray Kurzweil [1], as order from FUTURE exponentially increases, designated time exponentially and incessantly speeds up by ever-increasing orders of magnitude.
The PRESENT is just a fluid venue progressively bumped and shocked by the interactions between the unfortunately fossilized PAST and the FUTURE through the intermediation of the so-called PRESENT.
Clearly, the genetics of the human beings will have a notable impact on the psychology and physiology of the humans until the FUTURE’s say, wanted or not, like it or not. Such a say has a designated “due time.”
By all enforced effects, the FUTURE is by any means a representative of three facets. There is the facet of opportunities that we can call UPSIDE RISKS.
Another facet is that of the likelihood of potential disruption. The former impersonates the DOWNSIDE RISK.
Thirdly, there’s the facet of blended UPSIDE RISKS with DOWNSIDE RISKS. To really get the OPPORTUNITIES the DOWNSIDE RISKS must be terminated or, at least, mitigated and modulated. Those DOWNSIDE RISKS must be brought under optimum control as per the technical parlance I employ.
Such eternal creative-tension discrepancies / disputes — as imposed by the rogue and nearly ageless interrelationship between the FUTURE and the PRESENT — as the FUTURE wages an all-out “preemptive war” to get the PAST under retirement.
These eternal creative-tension discrepancies make three major displacements. Firstly, it displaces the PAST to a corner (or quadrant) where vestiges are fossilized but not looked after.
It must be mentioned that interrelationship between the FUTURE and the PRESENT is intense and will become increasingly more intense, beyond the boldest and lucid imagination without a fail.
Mother Nature is a great and loving and noble matriarch. The Universe is the oldest and wisest Patriarch, perhaps the elder son of the greatest intelligence of all.
The Multiverse (many universes happening and reckoning at the same time, possessing many dimensions) is not only the maximum, all-enabling Patriarch, but also a pervasive Patrician holding the greatest intelligence, wealth, perhaps the elder son of applied omniscience, nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, and A.I. (artificial intelligence). [41]
Successful and tough, subtle, refined, granular reverse-engineering captures breakthrough innovations for the PRESENT’ and from the FUTURE’s dominion. Reverse-engineering all regardless of its origins, terrestrial or extraterrestrial. Come to think of it and conclude that both a) all and b) everything is primordially and ultimately extraterrestrial.
In the last analysis, everything is terrestrial and exo-terrestrial. This is important to bear in mind. Terrestrial or extraterrestrial, what a fruitless argument as that of the gender of the angels, is ultimately guided by the Multiverse (period).
The Earth (so too: Earthlings, always greatly non-terrestrials, and/or Buckminster Fuller’s Earthians) is a function of the Universe. [47].
The Universe is a function of the Multiverse. Perhaps, the Multiverse is a function of most known and chiefly unknown forms of utmost conscientious awareness and supremely lucid intelligence.
Every human is partly earthling and partly extraterrestrial. Why? Because pre bio-genesis and bio-genesis was (at least and as it seems) massively instilled from the outer space (a sub-verse of the Multiverse).
If extraterrestrial beings existed, they would be, in fact, siblings to current humans. How come? Because there are other genesis different from bio-genesis on Earth, whether within our knowledge or not. A genesis does not only take place only on Earth, but in the whole Universe if it is or not under known and unknown modes/assumptions.
To capture benefits and to extreme-make-over, say, leadership and to scientifically steward disruption potential into exploited upsides (to make success seizing crystallize), you need to understand the PRESENT, the FUTURE, and its frenzy interrelationship. In making this effort optimum — and among other prerequisites — we must find out and address two topics.
One topic has to do with how we reached this PRESENT out of a scattered PAST’s technological accomplishment as we constructed an expanded knowledge repository just by practicing future scenarios through radiant foresight, far-sight, hindsight, insight, and innermost-sight.
The most reasoned foresight and far-sight, sine qua non to recalling the FUTURE, is only a function of innermost-sight.
Another topic is that insidious habit of the FUTURE in seducing the as-of-now PRESENTS while the citizens of such PRESENTS make us agent so many looking-forward changes that set afire the interrelationship between this PRESENT and this FUTURE.
Now we know how we got to “here,” “here” is the hyper-dynamism of flows, in-flows, counter-flows, avant-garde flows, crossed-pollinated flows, point-inflecting flows. “As-of-now” exactly refers to the PRESENT-FUTURE’s own tête-à-tête. [38]
“Here,” while planted in the PAST, was a bit statistical but never really so.
The so-called “here” is undergoing a total immersion of numberless processes, throughputs, transactions, deeds, etc. “Here” has incessantly been mobilized. “Now” is motorized at a rate that is beyond awe-inspiring.
We just got the “now” about right to this point. To turn savvier on this FUTURE, one must be a genius in his executions (sic), yoctosecond by yoctosecond, which is one septillionth (10-24) of a second. [48]
Then, s/he has to make the greatest effort of all, that is, to think unthinkably in relation to present forces and pertaining to futuristic trends — both subtle and dramatic ones as well as those driving and marshaling and enforcing just brute-force dramatic ones — by means of the practical implementation of scenario planning.
All of the previous without ignoring the flagrant and less-are-sometimes-more interactions instrumented by said forces.
Thereinafter, your unthinkable thinking about FUTURES must become more refined, enhanced, exuberant, streamlined, diverse, expanded, disciplined, and extended. In doing so, it never suffices to come up with a three-scenario forecast (not even with the prehistoric “compounded forecast”).
Subsequently, forecasts must carry with you as many plausible or implausible scenarios (ad infinitum indeed) as resources required never lacking the maximum rigor. Also, no optimum forecast is great enough if it is not accompanied with an arsenal of plans of contingency. Each scenario crafted must have its respective, unambiguous plans of contingency without a fail.
All of this is true for humans from the PAST and the PRESENT. Towards a more advanced time — and by means of reverse-engineering with the omniscience perspective — the humans will increasingly be of different constituents and design, as well as different concerning purpose, function, and a combination of purpose and function simultaneously.
We will become more “intimate” with our eternally ignored relationship with atomic and sub-atomic particles (not to get me involved in “dark matter” and “divine” or “God’s matter”).
The PRESENT is changelessly unnecessarily delayed or even lost and inattentive because its limits are impermanent and available capabilities are finite.
The PRESENT never contemplates fast-forward-ly, but in reversal in so adding to its even greater inherent disadvantage. The FUTURE operates beyond the offensive acceleration of “light speed”-plus and nearly without or with zero limits or constraints or borders.
The FUTURE is the Napoleonic Emperor that does everything only under its own terms, exploiting every advantage and disadvantage to its lucrative well-being and omni-ruling.
The FUTURE is accustomed to spying on the PRESENT. How come? The FUTURE is the PRESENT’s debriefing one. The FUTURE is, in many cases a virtuoso, though it, at times, voyeurs the PRESENT. What a horrendous vice!
Such deed will NEVER be tolerated. How do you REHAB the FUTURE? Group therapy? Grouping it with whom, the “crowd of wisdom” folks? Rehabilitating it by which handy means?
The PRESENT is sleepwalking while the FUTURE is “child like” wondered by daydreaming promenades. In the mean time, the post-modern modernity is in a rush getting more and more modern by unprecedented “shock and awe” unearthed standards.
This criss-cross PRESENT will be reconstituted by the continually crinkum-crankum FUTURE inevitably. [30], [31]. There is going on a terzetto in which the happenings are more or less like this: the PAST (R.I.P), the PRESENT (thé dansant), and the FUTURE (tertium quid). [32], [33], [34]. Clearly, the PAST is getting a fully impeachable CPR by so-called “historians.”
Earned in his own intellectual right, Thomas Jefferson most cogently stated: “I prefer the dreams of the FUTURE than history.” Jefferson, on his own right, for eternity knew that the FUTURE is un-manipulated from that underperforming venue called “PRESENT.”
Who would dare not to appreciate that nanotechnology, biotechnology, bionics, and artificial intelligence making deep and steep inroads? Incidentally, the definition of the omniscience perspective can be revised at <
The PRESENT is a forgetful sardine while the FUTURE is a giant cuttlefish in conspiracy with an octopus and a twenty-four eyes jelly-fish.
Ying and Yang have combined forces of subtle and dramatic origin. These days the PRESENT is a bit like a pseudo-harmonized Ying-Yang relationship. The FUTURE is only about Yang deeds.
The PRESENT is besieged by a bunch of dilettantes and poseurs. [39]. The FUTURE is — so to speak — à la Sir Francis Drake.
The PRESENT is more like Huckleberry Finn while the FUTURE is perhaps the archetype of Genghis Khan and his efficacious Mongols.
The stream of as-of-now PRESENTS will become — to some extent — one of the forthcoming FUTURES. At some point ahead, a PRESENT will be ultimately integrated into a single FUTURE seamlessly.
Such a FUTURE, though, will reach a point in which being bio-based or bio-related or not in vivo at all will be splendidly awaken and active.
Regardless of transhumanity, overhumanity, superhumanity, nonhumanity and “above and beyond” humanity, the hard-core essential is and will be not being human but becoming and acting humanely.
The PRESENTS are from appalling and contentious interrelationship between Venus and Mars. The FUTURES are only from stringent Mars. Go and ask about it Dr. John Gray. [40]
The FUTURES are supervening upon the PRESENTS in combination with the ruthless forces possess by the own FUTURES.
The PRESENT concerns the animal and vegetable kingdoms. These kingdoms are subject not to three but four emperors, namely: liquid, solid, gas, plasma.
The FUTURE is only about beyond post-humanity and its staggering brute-force and dramatically-subtle INTELLIGENCE.
The PRESENT pertains to pretending discovering science. The FUTURE is absolute science dominance and nearly if not thoroughly infinite power until the Universe’s last say.
On their own earned rights, the PRESENT and the FUTURE are dogs and darlings, respectively.
The FUTURE has, in many incessant and efficaciously ways, reminded the present about the instrumentality of America’s primordial and indigenous civilizations.
When you take the glorious Dakota’s tribal wisdom, you’ll be advised: Whenever you discover you’re on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.
The undisputable scientific maxim goes, “everything now working is obsolete” (unfortunately, including the human being and the human mind pivoted upon the spine cord) and as a consequence is subject to actual perfectibility for Life.
As you will never reach perfection (even if over-practice makes over-perfection), one (and everything) must be increasingly be upgraded forever. Can you now relate better to Dakota wisdom above?
The PRESENT is always misled and misleading, treasuring a great promise of deceit. The FUTURE is eloquently transparent and clear, crippling — in advance — violators of ethics, morality, principles, integrity, and dignity.
The PRESENT has its eyes glued to the inside-outs. The FUTURE is immensely into staring at its outside-ins.
The PRESENT is a powerless hostage not interested in any vindication at all.
The PRESENT is sick and ailing because of: a) its once-true believes, b) its once-true assumptions, c) its once-true conventions, d) its once-true cosmosvision (weltanschauung), e) its once-true systems of belief, f) its once-true truisms g) its once-true “common sense,” h) its once-true “good luck,” so forth.
From the human point of view, these changed changes will be a throwing away of all the previous maxims in a rather violent and abrupt way.
The PRESENT is pseudo-architected and mobilized in tearing down achievement. The FUTURE is forever re-architecting itself while massively out-fostering breakthrough achievements.
Subsequently, the FUTURE will incessantly remain redefining the totality and the entirety of (i) all and (ii) everything (known, unknown, improbable, impossible, thinkable, unthinkable, concerning, and desirable within and outside the laws of physics, quantum mechanics, and other science of “exactness”). I now warmly welcome you, ladies and gentlemen, to “Futurama.” [36]
Some serious scientists are making the case of conquering humans’ immortality or, at least, some thousand years of healthy living in the upcoming years.
In making their case, they insist that we are all made of an eternal molecule known as DNA. You’d better believe on the doubles!
They insist that the DNA molecule has been with us through billions of years. Ray Kurzweil proclaims that “by the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate” [1]. Get ready then! Let this brief paragraph to be introductory to the one ensuing.
Futurama will ultimately and inexorably transform into Computronium [35], [36], a technocratic, adhocratic, stratocratic, plutocratic empire thoroughly immersed in the overbearingly qualities: techie, nerdish, brainy, geekish, whose subject matter is the designated output of: a) humans, b) enhanced humans, c) pseudo-humans, d) post-humans, e) super-humans (over-men), f) bionicals, g) superhumanly intelligent beings, h) robots, i) hybrids, j) trans-humans, k) post-biologicals, and l) a combination of all of the priors.
While the PRESENT vastly underestimates the influence of the present-day Internet, the FUTURE will capture every known and unknown force to crown itself into ruthless Computronium.
This Royal is not silly dignitary as one will see him out-compute the entirety of the Universe (and Multiverse, the Universe’s first-and-foremost father).
In the near FUTURE’s (in the zillion flows between Futurama, the adolescent, and Computronium, the adult), your dreams, fantasies, and nightmares will all be literally out-dreamed and/or out-daydreamed and/or out-smarted and/or out-shinned and/or out-foretold by a factor of zillion orders of magnitude.
The FUTURE is bathed, as the PRESENT has already been carefully hinted, with artifacts that as a whole are pervasively awakened. These FUTURES are beyond boundary-less-ness.
The FUTURE is for eternity unfolding before most people’s absent-minded eyes, independently if those eyes are appended or not to so-called “prepared minds.” The myopia is within the mind not in the corneas.
The PRESENT is mostly about hardware (palpably tangibles). The FUTURE is greatly about software (palpably and not intangibles with consequences and sequels both in the physical and vivid virtual worlds).
The hardware era, ever-changing and adapting, is giving way to the software era. Will next generation man-made software use the Universe as a maximum multi-supercomputers hardware?
This colossal eons-streaming Era, regardless of time locus, is constantly under ruthless ruling by the FUTURE.
If you're not remembering the FUTURE is only because you are ignoring every lesson by the PAST and PRESENT, both a PAST and a PRESENT, in my view, designated by the express mandates and designs of the FUTURE.
Vest your interest in the FUTURE since planting your hopes in preterit times will succeed into failure without a fail.
The PRESENT makes a great number of mistakes once, twice, thrice and beyond that without learning a single lesson from even the most recent and gravest mistakes.
The FUTURE is into extracting the critical lessons learned.
Whether or not you’re seeking a rival and if the FUTURE is not conscientiously conceived, designed, develop and created, the FUTURES will become your most formidable adversaries.
In unnoticeable yet transformational movement is what the FUTURE’s status quo has become, a status quo that is pervasively fluid and impermanent in perpetuity. On the contrary, the PRESENT’s status quo is erratic, timid, disorganized, idiotized and consequently banal.
While the FUTURE is extremely concentrated and focused on every matter in which it has a vested interest, the PRESENT is over-fragmented — greatly Balkanized –, thus lacking attention and excessive in dilution of results.
In dealing with our systems of beliefs, strongly held assumptions, conventions and cosmosvision (weltanschauung), the FUTURE, into walking habitually great lengths, ascertain that the PRESENT is a thing of the past and the past is a thing further back to the primordial big bang.
QUESTION: WHY DON’T WE MAKE OF THE FUTURE A THING OF THE PAST?
The FUTURE is not in hot pursuit of the PRESENT. The PRESENT represents one fluid expression by the ever-more autocratic unstoppable rulings by demanded the FUTURE.
Yet we have now a great likelihood to make the most intelligent decision to lowering the downsides and upping and upgrading the upsides.
The FUTURE is accustomed and indifferent to the PRESENT’s most self-valued quality, its quality of distraction.
The PRESENT is a laggard. The FUTURE is an out-doer beyond the influence spheres of execution. Here execution only equates to execution of and through relevance, not taking it said execution to the “extra mile” but to the “extra league.” A league is about three miles.
The FUTURE is a composite vector in reversal to the PRESENT.
The PRESENT is, at all times, taking a forty-wink siesta as it dreams of stealing credits and glories from his countrymen. The FUTURE — under its own ways, modes and rulings — is relentless rendering time progressively inexistent.
The FUTURE is, in every occasion, making the PRESENT déclassé and hence démodé. [45], [46].
The FUTURE spies on the PRESENT comprehensively. The PRESENT’s counter-spying attempts on and towards the FUTURE are less than primitive and more than entirely ludicrous.
When the FUTURE wishes to blend in with the PRESENT, said PRESENT shocks.
With the progression and retrogression of “time,” the postmodern modernity is becoming more and more “modern” by unprecedented “shock and awe” standards.
The PRESENT is sleepwalking while the FUTURE is daydreaming like a child wondering.
The PRESENT is the perfect personification of an accommodationist while the FUTURE is the most robust believer (thoroughly faithful and without rudimentary, slowing-down psychological complexes) on his deeds and own existential existence.
To get underneath the FUTURE's skin is the only path to understanding the ever-revolutionizing nature of changed changes.
In consequence, practice the tradition of actionable mindful mentality — in every theater of operations — without the dragging hold-backs by so-called traditions.
Learn a difficult lesson easily and immediately by Thomas Jefferson: “I prefer the stories of the future than history.˝
In matters of actual challenging one’s own intellect, any “too much” effort to this end is evermore “too little.”
We must, wherefore, strive exponentially and creatively forever to capture now the best (optimum) from the ever-forthcoming FUTURES. Striving without the maxim effort in taking possession of applied omniscience coupled with universal morality and ethics will render absolutely worthless.
The PRESENT is concave whereas the FUTURE is convex, vexingly convex as a Big Bang’s catch-as-catch-can.
The PRESENT is the frenzy of irrelevance and the FUTURE is the everlastingly-increasing climax of the critical mass that catapults civilization into unkwon unknowns.
The PRESENT seems to be into “moribund” mode as the FUTURE is redefining its always-unfolding birth.
The PRESENT tergiversates itself. The FUTURE, out of a domiciled located in the PRESENT, is hugely tergiversated by large majorities. The FUTURE is within a subterfuge and must be lucidly unveiled if you want to make your life prosper.
The PRESENT is not diametrically opposed to the FUTURE. The FUTURE is just diametrically different.
What are you going to in the PRESENT before the “fierce urgency of now” FUTURE and its ignored (whether existentially lucrative or not) waking-up calls?
I don’t know about the PRESENT and its quality being laissez-faire. The FUTURE does its intellectually hard working rendering emotions useless. This bohemian PRESENT yet an unsalvageable one self-propelled into crass stupidity till FUTURE’s last calling.
The PRESENT systematically fails to crack the FUTURE’s codes. It seems that the PRESENT is irremediably stubborn by genetic design, genetic design of 4 billion years old.
A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) is important. But now it’s more important the most pervasive amplification of the human mind via biological media only so that we can conceive and develop our own FUTURES and those incumbent to the people we care for!
In deciphering (de-encrypting) the FUTURE now and making the PRESENT a “thing of the PAST,” one must learn an easy lesson:
Post-mortem analyzes are indispensable. Yet pre-mortem analyzes (especially the qualitatively driven) are beyond grandiose. In order to institute the latter you must inquisitively learn to discern, think, heed, ponder, scale and become furiously and industriously mobilized without losing composure and harmony.
WRAPPING UP
The German philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, reiterates that if we change the present we can change the future, and if we change the future — as well as the way we proactively and qualitatively envision and practice it through futuristic scenario methods — we will be changing the present in fact and taking increasing control over the negative circumstances that impact us so dramatically.
In actuality, we must change both the PRESENT and the FUTURE simultaneously. The PRESENT’s vested interest into the FUTURE is too huge not to note it immediately. Nietzsche, thereby, stated exactly: "It’s our future that lays down the law of our today."
It now becomes opportune Freeman Dyson’ sentence: “God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.”
The FUTURE will, nonetheless, unveil the most ambitious and extravagant hopes crystallized into bewildering, new full immersion realities.
Thinking “Big Picture” will never suffice since this image is fixed. Instead: It is about carrying on perennially fluidly radiant thinking irradiantly through quite a few big/small motion pictures.
Even with the most beneficial UPSIDES from the FUTURES, not to mention their inherent yet controllable — to some extent — DOWNSIDES, it will be a huge existential error not to identify the diverse facets embedded in that timeless yet incessantly and incessantly arrhythmically, abruptly transmutating locus known as “FUTURES”.
The PRESENT is more like Antonio Machado’s sentence (“The one that has for all time returned and has never gone anywhere.”) while the FUTURE is S-H-A-Z-A-M (“The wisdom of Salomon, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury.”)
Clearly, in order for you to identify something significant and rendering a solution, you must acknowledge every complexity, every intricacy, every dynamics and every challenge without getting paralyzed through the analyzes, especially the most crucial analyzes to a great degree from the qualitative stand.
Thereinafter, keeping you reflecting via your own biological “search engine” seeking to test, validate, and falsify evidence in the ground and on the fly, there has now come unquestionably urgent time for boldest and shrewd execution.
While the PRESENT operates stubbornly and with eyes grabbed by remnants of fossilized vestiges, the FUTURE is fully within and along the lines of the claim made by James Madison, USA’s 4th President (1751 — 1836): “Knowledge must forever correct ignorance.”
The PRESENT feels flooded by some unknown yet forceful competitors. The FUTURE, have no time to futilely discuss the angels’ genders, has overcome any unthinkable breakthrough.
Paying to the FUTURE PRESENTly allows you to hijack maximum strategic value. That value comes in the form of forthcoming discovering unveiled by the Royals of reverse engineering, those Royals reverse engineer anything at from the Solar System or from any exo-planets independently where the Multiverse treasures them.
Speaking of texting the evidence, Sir Karl Popper makes extraordinary sense when he asserted: “In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.” [51]
If you don't conceive and develop — jointly with your manageable and controllable UPSIDES and DOWNSIDES — your own FUTURES, Who is it going to do it for you? Really?
I must suggest reviewing the attached Appendix on Education for further meditation.
CAVEAT
Capturing the benefits of all possibilities stemming from the future, as well as turning threats, perils and hazards — several of them existential ones –, will largely depend on THE TOTALITY OF HUMANKIND taking unprecedented and immediate countermeasures in tackling numerous and extremely dramatic global crises with sustained success.
I am referring not to “fashionable” success appropriation ever-lacking the womb-to-tomb scrutinizing vista and marshaled consideration pertaining to: a) Factors considered our sworn existential rivals, and b) Other agents competing against our efforts to “stay alive Earthly and with dignity” — that is, if the Universe and the Multiverse warrant their sovereign permission — as we effect our efforts to countering said global crises (please remember — for your pondering, reflections and meditation — the over-empowered “global crisis of corruption,” greatly downplayed even after ignoring its immemorial existence). Without an absolute observance of the indicated in this paragraph, any “preaching” of “success capturing” will secure universal failure.
We must establish universal acceptance of the greatest axiom of all times pertaining to the subject matter to be dealt with now.
Said axiom establishes: “An ounce of prevention is worth millions of dollars of cure.” In the West we are unquestionably super-succeeding at over-working at the “cure” while maximizing the ignoring of the “prevention.”
I hope that Earth and “earthians” (paraphrasing notable and most lucid Richard Buckminster Fuller) does not learn in hindsight — but in earliest and sophisticated foresight and far-sight — the savviest lesson from non-insurance and “applied omniscience” driven Risk Management that I, in my case and as per my own proprietary method, call “Transformative And Integrative Risk Management.”
Dr. Stephen Hawking has reiteratively suggested the world’s civilization to move out of Earth by spreading in outer space with little success. View Dr. Hawking interviewed by Mr. Charlie Rose at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeJv6gCroJc
In learning more about this aspect, it is recommended the visiting Queen Elizabeth’s top-notch scientist (“Astronomer Royal”), Sir Martin Rees (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Martin_Rees), published a textbook titled “Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning by Martin J. Rees” (ISBN-10: 0465068634), available at http://www.amazon.com/Our-Final-Hour-Scientists-Warning/dp/0465068634/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271973623&sr=1-1.
Additional research on the subject matter, addressing the gravest existential UPSIDES may be founded authored by George Orwell, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Bertrand Russell and even Albert Einstein, among many others.
In no way am I neither a herald of devastations nor an optimist in the tradition of Dr. Pangloss. [49].
I do research (under absolute consistency and congruency with all of my public claims), with ever-increasing rigor, depth and scope, an important number of driving forces affecting our lives.
I am not outside realism but I will never avoid but face reality in its entirety regardless of how daring it becomes.
Thus one can assert with certitude that I am cautiously hopeful, especially as I observe the challenge and conceive solutions.
I abide by the unknown adage, “the harder I work, the lucky I get” [eventually and hopefully]. Simon Bolivar proclaimed, “God grants victory to the perseverant.”
It is opportune to make a distinction. So-called trends are the manifestation of driving forces. Trends are a function of driving forces and not the other way around.
There are some “prominent” scientists that believe that the term “trend” is synonymous with “driving force.” Again, another critical existential blunder that blurs our vision.
Even by Dr. Bertrand Russell’s proclaim (“I know more people who prefer to die than to think.”) [3], we must anyway create preconditions and conditions readily and steadfastly for everyone to get more immersed into the constructive and yet breakthrough thinking side of the equation than in the self-destructing one.
The behavior and the patterns of such behavior by the reading offered by time’s pendulum and the metronome, as well as other “measurers,” are beyond worst chaos.
Facing daring FUTURES, we must become (FIRST) patternists and, as per my Oxford Dictionary’s standards and own utter mention, we must each be (and SECOND) the “monster of omniscience.” [50] All of the former ad verbum.
THE HOPE
(By William Faulkner, Nobel Prize
acceptance speech, December 10, 1950)
“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which has been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.” [52]
HOW TO COPE WITH CENTURY TWENTIETH ONE!
Learn a challenging lesson quickly:
To be a conscientiously human being into deep, subtle, and proactive awareness, you need to entertain some form of profound spirituality understanding that the greatest wealth is that of the spirit and the enlightened mind (those splendid intangibles).
Once you do your own most conscientious awareness for Life, you can increasingly do your morality and ethics for said Life.
Once you do your morality and ethics, you can do your actionable knowledge.
In order to capture ever-updatable and perpetually amplifiable as well as actionable knowledge, you and only you must challenge yourself intellectually as if you were competing with your strongest opponent.
If you really wish to immerse your mind into the perspective of the applied all-knowingness, you most make the greatest effort — in a sustained mode — towards actionable and applicable omniscience (http://www.slideshare.net/andresagostini/definition-of-transformative-and-integrative-risk-management-authored-by-copyright-2005-andres-agostini-andy-arlington-virginia-usa), chiefly with the perspective attached by the most sophisticated exact sciences.
Once you do your intellect, knowledge, and science, you can lucidly conceive your lucrative futures for the so-called and lamentable “heres and nows.”
When your futures are done, conceived, visualized, and developed way in advance, foresight, and far-sight by you, you can then do your upside and downside risks.
When risks and competing rivals are done solely by you optimally, you can do your benefits.
Your risks and competing rivals get much better done when you consider lavish provisions for contingency planning under the rigor and vigor of mentioned omniscience.
Now you know — complete the entirety of this process throughput systematically, systemically, holistically, and without ignoring a single step mentioned above — how to proceed in seizing success in personal, professional, organizational, and societal life.
Can you now commence your own development, by and for yourself, of self-improvement and/or self-betterment?
By © Copyright 2010 Andres Agostini (*)
www.AgostiniWorks.blogspot.com
www.linkedin.com/in/AndresAgostini
www.twitter.com/SciCzar
www.google.com/profiles/AgoNews
Arlington, Virginia, USA + The World + The Multiverse + Computronium
(*) Andres Agostini is the author of “¿La Medida de Nuestro Desconocimiento?” (In Spanish, “The Magnitude of Our Ignorance?”) as it is featured by Google Scholar at
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22andres+agostini%22&btnG=Search&as_sdt=2000&as_ylo=&as_vis=0
REFLECTING ON THE EDUCATION WE IMMEDIATELY NEED
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE ON EDUCATION (1769 — 1821):
“…Education, strictly speaking, has several objectives: one needs to learn how to speak and write correctly, which is generally called grammar and belles letters. Each lyceum has provided for this object, and there is no well-educated man who has not learned his rhetoric .... After the need to speak and write correctly comes the ability to count and measure. The lyceums have provided this with classes in MATHEMATICS embracing arithmetical and MECHANICAL KNOWLEDGE IN THEIR DIFFERENT BRANCHES .... The elements of several other fields come next: chronology, geography, and the rudiments of history are also a part of the education of the lyceum …. A young man who leaves the lyceum at sixteen years of age thence knows not only the mechanics of his language and the classical authors, the divisions of discourse, the different figures of eloquence, the means of employing them either to calm or arouse passions, in short, everything that one learns in a course on belles letters. He also would know the principal epochs of history, the basic geographical divisions, and how to compute and measure. He has some general idea of the most striking natural phenomena and the principles of equilibrium and movement both with regard to solids and fluids .... Whether he desires to follow the career of the barrister, that of the sword, or ENGLISH, or letters; if he is destined to enter into the body of scholars, to be a geographer, engineer, or land surveyor — in all these cases he has received a general education necessary to become equipped to receive the remainder of instruction that his circumstances require, and it is at this moment, when he must make his choice of a profession, that the special studies present themselves .... If he wishes to devote himself to the military art, engineering, or artillery, he enters a special school of MATHEMATICS, the polytechnique (institution, especially college dealing with or devoted to various TECHNICAL subjects). What he learns there is only the corollary of what he has learned in elementary mathematics, but the knowledge acquired in these studies must be developed and applied before he enters the different branches of ABSTRACT MATHEMATICS. NO LONGER IS IT A QUESTION SIMPLY OF EDUCATION, AS IN THE LYCEUM: NOW IT BECOMES A MATTER OF ACQUIRING A SCIENCE …. The total length of the course of the Artillery and ENGINEER school being fixed at two years, we must divide the course into four parts, each comprising six months of study. Students in the first class would learn: 1.- The infantry maneuvers of the platoon and battalion. 2.- The maneuvers of field and siege artillery as well as those of mortars and howitzers. 3.- Mechanical maneuvers, the composition of explosives… 4.- The principles of the attack of fortifications. 5.- The entire position of the aide-mémoire pertaining to firing, and finally. 6.- Everything necessary to the gunner and the engineer in the field .... Students will be led to the target range; they will lob bombs into the target barrel, fire blank cartridges, etc., and construct every kind of battery. They will continue their [initial] course of construction. In the third class students would pursue their STUDIES IN HYDRAULIC ARCHITECTURE, CIVIL and military. They would busy themselves with the most complicated part of construction and LEARN EVERYTHING NECESSARY to direct and superintend the construction of a fort. They would take cognizance of the details of foundries, mines, etc .... The fourth class would be dedicated to perfecting the students in the different subjects that they have been studying. They would go over all of the details of arsenals, mines, galleries, etc. — in brief, everything that would complete their instruction as engineers and gunners would belong to the curriculum of this class …. In general, in the establishment of a school for engineers and artillery one should consider the knowledge of the maneuvers of all the guns and the tactics of infantry as the principal object. When a student is admitted to the School of the Battalion, he would be forced to perform the manual of arms and the maneuvers of the battalion at least three times every ten days … It is important for the maneuvers of artillery to keep in mind that nothing is more uncertain than the art of firing. This portion of the military art is classified among the PHYSIO-MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES, yet its results are dubious; those of practice are certain. Students having completed one course in mechanics know nearly everything that they must understand and apply… It is appropriate thereof to strive above everything else, and not as one of the foremost foundations of the instruction, to see that each student executes the manual of arms and all of the maneuvers of artillery better than a veteran soldier, that he is skilled in large practice and HAS PERFECT KNOWLEDGE of the employment of artillery. No one can be considered a good student if, upon graduation, he cannot go immediately to a battery or a siege. It is proper that upon joining his unit he should instruct a class of recruits in the maneuvers of artillery and infantry and in the mechanical maneuvers. How often do you not see officers unable to place a gun carriage, direct a mechanical maneuver, fashion explosives, and forced to take lesson from old sergeants? … When a student can aim a gun better than the soldier, no one will question either his right to advancement or the other advantages of his education. Old sergeants will not be jealous of these young officers when they never have to teach them anything.”
SIR IAN HAMILTON IN 1921 ON NAPOLEON:
“It is only progressively that one can form a great army. Certainly no other commander (leader) in his day devoted as much thought and attention to organization as Napoleon, who went into painstaking detail to assure that his forces (team and resources) were disciplined, prepared, and ready to take the field (the marketplace and its competitors). The army marches, works, and has its being by organization and discipline.”
WERNHER VON BRAUN ON EDUCATION, 1912 –1977, (Father of the American Space Program):
“…The average citizen today, of course, has far more scientific information at his disposal than did those greatest of intellects of earlier times. Yet paradoxically, I think that THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A GREATER NEED FOR INCREASED UNDERSTANDING AND APPRECIATION OF SCIENCE. It has been said that, although the choice of direction for our civilization will be determined through democratic process, it is there that the problem begins. TO MAKE RATIONAL CHOICES, THE AVERAGE CITIZEN MUST UNDERSTAND THE NATURE AND ROLE OF SCIENCE AT A TIME WHEN ITS BREADTH AND COMPLEXITY ARE INCREASING ALMOST EXPONENTIALLY .... Conversely, the scientist, at a time when he can barely keep up to date in his specialty, must not isolate himself in his parochial interest. Instead, he should see his profession as a part of the larger world, to evaluate himself and his work in relation to all forces, especially the humanities, which shape and advance society. THE NEED, THEN, IS FOR AN EDUCATIONAL PROCESS RESULTING IN MORE SCIENTIFIC LITERACY FOR THE LAYMAN, AND MORE LITERACY IN THE HUMANITIES FOR THE SCIENTISTS .... Man in this scientific age is free only to the extent that he has a grasp on himself and his surroundings. FREEDOM — THE ABILITY TO SPEAK, THINK, ACT, AND VOTE INTELLIGENTLY — is based largely on our ability TO MAKE CHOICES growing out of our understanding of the issues involved. With each advance of science, there is an invitation to more understanding. This is the essence of the burden borne by all peoples since the dawn of humanity. There must be widespread understanding of the role of science in modern society, both as to its limits and our dependence on its basic function as a tool for our survival. This is the imperative for scientific literacy .... How do we encourage scientific literacy? I THINK THE PROBLEM IS HOW TO INSTILL IN STUDENTS A PERMANENT DESIRE TO LEARN. All youth is endowed with curiosity from the very beginning. What can education process do, not only to keep this natural curiosity alive, but to make it a permanent part of the individual drive? … Students should be encouraged, beyond learning facts, to be intrigued by objects and events in their environment, as well as to become aware of and responsive in a positive manner to beauty and orderliness in their environment. THEY SHOULD BE TAUGHT TO WILLINGLY SUBJECT THEIR DATA AND IDEAS TO CRITICISM OF THEIR PEERS WHILE ACQUIRING A CRITICAL, QUESTIONING ATTITUDE TOWARD INFERENCES, HYPOTHESES AND THEORIES. Early in education, they should be led to recognize the limitations of scientific modes of inquiry and the need for additional, quite different approaches to the quest for reality … ULTIMATELY, THEY SHOULD BE INSTILLED WITH AN APPRECIATION FOR THE INTERRELATEDNESS OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY .... This is essentially the scientific method. By learning the scientific method, students will understand its role in society and at the same time to think for themselves. LEARNING TO THINK FOR ONESELF, IN TURN, IMPARTS A DEEP SENSE OF FREEDOM. ONCE TESTED, AN APPETITE FOR IT IS FORMED WHICH MAY WELL ENDURE THROUGHOUT LIFE .... But if our young people are going to gain the appetite, our schools, our colleges, our universities, must bear an ever greater responsibility. ALL TOO MANY TIMES IN THE PAST, EDUCATION — PARTICULARLY IN THE SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINES — HAS PLACED EXTREMELY HEAVY EMPHASIS ON TRANSMITTING THE ESTABLISHED KNOWLEDGE OF THE PAST. THERE HAS BEEN A TENDENCY FOR TEACHERS TO ASSIGN, AND TO ENCOURAGE ROTE LEARNING, INSTEAD OF TAKING THE ADMITTEDLY MORE DIFFICULT PATH OF ENCOURAGING STUDENTS TO THINK FOR THEMSELVES .... THE MAINSPRING OF SCIENCE IS CURIOSITY. SINCE TIME IMMEMORIAL, THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN MEN AND WOMEN WHO FELT A BURNING DESIRE TO KNOW WHAT WAS UNDER THE ROCK, BEYOND THE HILLS, ACROSS THE OCEANS. THIS RESTLESS BREED NOW WANT TO KNOW WHAT MAKES AN ATOM WORK, THROUGH WHAT PROCESS LIFE REPRODUCES ITSELF, OR WHAT IS THE GEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE MOON.”
QUESTION: ARE THE ROMANIC CULTURES IN SOUR OPPOSITION WITH NAPOLEON BONAPARTE’ AND WERNHER VON BRAUN’S SUCCESS PRESCRIPTIONS?
Yes, the Romanic cultures — to an appalling and unfortunate degree (and with the notorious exception of Leonardo Da Vinci) — have this overwhelming counter feeling against Napoleon Bonaparte’ and Wernher von Braun’s Success Prescriptions. When the subject matter is addressed, the respective incumbents take it as a violation to their traditions and not as an opportunity to grow beyond any past historic consideration.
DR. MALCOLM S. KNOWLES, PH.D. AND AMERICAN AUTHOR OF “THE ADULT LEARNER: THE DEFINITIVE CLASSIC IN ADULT EDUCATION AND HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT” WROTE ON EDUCATION:
“The greatest danger for the survival of the present civilization is neither atomic war, nor environmental pollution, nor the exploitation of natural resources, and nor present crises. The underlying cause to all of the above is the acceleration of man’s obsolescence … The only hope seems to be an electroshock program to re-instill to the current adults the competencies required to function adequately under a mode of perpetual change. This is a profound need — the immeasurable challenge — that is presented by the modern society to adult education.”
APPENDIX OF SUGGESTED QUOTATIONS
Attributed to Winston Churchill: “Courage is the capacity to go from failure to failure with increased enthusiasm!”
Attributed to Andre Gide (1869 — 1951): “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
Upton Sinclair (attributed to): “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Brian Tracy (attributed to): “No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.”
Sir Winston Churchill (attributed to): “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.”
Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”
Albert Einstein: “I hold that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest motive in fostering scientific research.”
Mother Teresa (attributed to): “Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.”
Attributed to Henry Ford (1863 — 1947): “Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly. It comes as a by-product of providing a useful service.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes (attributed to): “A mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”
Louis V Gerstner, Jr., Former CEO, IBM (attributed to): “No credit can be given for predicting rain — only for building arks.”
Donald Rumsfeld: “As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Author Unknown(attributed to): “If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.”
Albert Einstein: “The significant challenges we face cannot be resolved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
William Gibson: “The FUTURE is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Henry Miller: “Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.”
Albert Einstein: “Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”
All quotations not otherwise cited are from the interviews conducted by the author or personal communications sent to the author.
THE MOST THOUGHTFUL STATEMENT BY ANY AMERICAN PRESIDENT TO DATE!
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.” By John F. Kennedy, Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort Delivered in Houston, Texas, September 12, 1962. [55]
WHAT I’VE GIVEN YOU!
I’ve given you some ways of thinking and perceiving this ever-impermanent world of ours.
Yet the most important task now, depending on your objectives, goals and desires, is for you to make or to fail making your own research and to make your own conclusions as you come up with said conclusions for and by yourself alone.
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
[1] Ray Kurzweil’s quotations at ‹brainyquotes.com›
[2] Sir Francis Bacon (Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ISBN: 0-19-866185-1
[3] Dr. Bertrand Russell (Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ISBN: 0-19-866185-1)
[4] Dr. Albert Einstein (Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ISBN: 0-19-866185-1)
[5] Dr. Buckminster Fuller (Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ISBN: 0-19-866185-1) and at ‹brainyquotes.com›
[6] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ISBN: 0-19-866185-1) and at ‹brainyquotes.com›
[7] Theodore Roosevelt at ‹brainyquotes.com›
[8] Ralph Waldo Emerson at ‹brainyquotes.com›
[9] Dr. Malcolm Knowles at ‹brainyquotes.com›
[10] Dr. Albert Einstein at ‹brainyquotes.com›
[11] Thomas Jefferson at ‹brainyquotes.com›
[12] Dr. Henry Kissinger at ‹brainyquotes.com›
[13] Sir Winston Churchill at ‹brainyquotes.com›
[14] Antonio Machado from Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ISBN: 0-19-866185-1.
[15] The Panchatantra (body of Eastern philosophical knowledge) from Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ISBN: 0-19-866185-1.
[16] Bernard d'Espagnat from Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ISBN: 0-19-866185-1.
[17] Peter Drucker from Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ISBN: 0-19-866185-1.
[18] Dr. James D. Watson, Ph.D., as he was interviewed by Charlie Rose most recently in year 2009.
[19] Arthur C. Clarke at ‹brainyquotes.com›
[20] Otto Herman Khan at ‹brainyquotes.com›
[21] General Francisco de Miranda from Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ISBN: 0-19-866185-1.
[22] James Canton, Technofutures: How Leading-Edge Innovations Will Transform Business in the 21st Century by James Canton (http://www.amazon.com/Technofutures-Leading-Edge-Innovations-Transform-Business/dp/0976108100/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268366802&sr=1-3 )
[23] Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler (ISBN-10: 038552207X)
[24] Ella Wheeler Wilcox at ‹brainyquotes.com›
[25] Future Shock by Alvin Toffler (ISBN-10: 0553277375)
[26] Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman ( ISBN-10: 0140282025 )
[27] Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever by Ray Kurzweil Ph.D. and Terry Grossman M.D. (ISBN-10: 1605299561)
[28] “Leading the Revolution” by Gary Hamel (ISBN-10: 1591391466)
[29] Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman ( ISBN-10: 055309503X )
[30] Criss-cross at Oxford Dictionary ISBN 0-19-861122-6
[31] Crinkum-crankum at Oxford Dictionary ISBN 0-19-861122-6
[32] Terzetto at Oxford Dictionary ISBN 0-19-861122-6
[33] Thé dansant at Oxford Dictionary ISBN 0-19-861122-6
[34] Tertium quid at Oxford Dictionary ISBN 0-19-861122-6
[35] Computronium at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computronium
[36] Futurama at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama
[37] “Einstein in the Boardroom” by Suzanne S. Harrison and Patrick H. Sullivan Sr. (ISBN-10: 0-471-70332-X
[38] Tête-à-tête at Oxford Dictionary ISBN 0-19-861122-6
[39] Dilettantes and poseurs at Oxford Dictionary ISBN 0-19-861122-6
[40] Why Mars and Venus Collide: Improving Relationships by Understanding How Men and Women Cope Differently with Stress by John Gray.
[41] Multiverse at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse
[42] “The Cycle of Leadership” by Noel M. Tichy (ISBN: 0-06-662056-2)
[43] Herman Kahn’s quotations at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/herman_kahn.html
[44] Innovate Like Edison: The Five-Step System for Breakthrough Business Success By Michael J. Gelb (ISBN-10: 0452289823)
[45] Déclassé at Oxford Dictionary (ISBN 0-19-861122-6)
[46] Démodé at Oxford Dictionary (ISBN 0-19-861122-6)
[47] Richard Buckminster Fuller at http://www.brainyquotes.com/quotes/authors/r/r_buckminster_fuller.html
[48] Yoctosecond, definition of, at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/yoctosecond
[49] Dr. Pangloss at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide
[50] “Monster of omniscience” at page V, first paragraph, Concise Oxford Dictionary (ISBN 0-19-861122-6)
[51] Quotations by Karl Popper at http://www.thefreedictionary.com
[52] Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau (ISBN0-385-50965-0).
[53] Definition of “throughput.” Throughput: Output or production, as of a computer program, over a period of time. The quantity or amount of raw material processed within a given time, esp. the work done by an electronic computer in a given period of time. An amount of work, etc. done in a particular period of time. Volume of data or material handled: the amount of something such as data or raw material that is processed over a given period.
[54] The American Heritage Dictionary’s (fourth edition, 2000)– ISBN 0-395-82517-2
[55] By John F. Kennedy, Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort Delivered in Houston, Texas, September 12, 1962. SOURCE: http://www.dudeface.com/kennedyrice.html (seen on June 12, 2007).
[56] The Art of The Long View — ISBN 0-385-26731-2
ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY RECOMMENDED
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil (http://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Near-Humans-Transcend-Biology/dp/0143037889/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268365913&sr=1-1
)
Lessons from the Future: Making Sense of a Blurred World from the World's Leading Futurist by Stanley M. Davis (http://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Future-Blurred-Leading-Futurist/dp/1841120707/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268366065&sr=1-12 )
It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business by Christopher Meyer and Stan Davis (http://www.amazon.com/Its-Alive-Convergence-Information-Business/dp/1400046416/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268366347&sr=1-1)
Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy by Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer (http://www.amazon.com/Blur-Speed-Change-Connected-Economy/dp/0446675334/ref=sr_1_22?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268366208&sr=1-22 )
Future Wealth by Stanley M. Davis and Christopher Meyer (http://www.amazon.com/Future-Wealth-Stanley-M-Davis/dp/1578511941/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268366424&sr=1-1 )
The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos by James N. Gardner and Ray Kurzweil (http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Universe-Emerging-Mind-Cosmos/dp/1564149196/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268366513&sr=1-6 )
Seeing What's Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change by Clayton M. Christensen, Erik A. Roth, and Scott D. Anthony (http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Whats-Next-Theories-Innovation/dp/1591391857/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268366646&sr=1-1 )
Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning by Martin J. Rees (http://www.amazon.com/Our-Final-Hour-Scientists-Warning/dp/0465068634/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268366726&sr=1-1 )
Technofutures: How Leading-Edge Innovations Will Transform Business in the 21st Century by James Canton (http://www.amazon.com/Technofutures-Leading-Edge-Innovations-Transform-Business/dp/0976108100/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268366802&sr=1-3 )
The Extreme Future: The Top Trends That Will Reshape the World in the Next 20 Years by James Canton (http://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Future-Trends-Reshape-World/dp/B001OMHSWQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268366802&sr=1-1 )
Futuring: The Exploration of the Future by Edward Cornish (http://www.amazon.com/Futuring-Exploration-Future-Edward-Cornish/dp/0930242610/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268366927&sr=1-1 )
PS: All quotations not otherwise cited are from the interviews conducted by the author or personal communications sent to the author.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mr. Andres Agostini is - first and foremost - a Global Independent Professional Contractor and a Member of the Advisory Board of ACC Group Worldwide (New York, Miami, London). He is also Executive Associate for Global Markets at Omega Systems Group Incorporated (Arlington, Virginia, USA). He has 30 years of applied, professional/empirical experience. He has two majors on insurance management in the U.S., took "Mechanical Engineering Technology" in Dawson College (Montreal, Canada), as well as Linguistics courses in Queen's University and Saint Lawrence College (both at Kingston, Ontario, Canada). He took “Mechanical Engineering” in Universidad Metropolitana, Caracas, Venezuela.
Through his professional life and beyond upper education, he became engaged in being trained and indoctrinated by the most prominent minds and global organizations, out of the U.S. and the U.K., into: a) Management, b) Risk Management, c) Group Employee Benefits, d) Insurance, e) Reinsurance and many other subject matter dealing with transformation of: 1) Organizations, 2) Management, 3) Leadership, 4) Business, 5) Scenario Method (beyond the three-scenario mode), 6) Systems Methodologies, 7) Systems Safety, 8) Systems Security, 9) Systems Reliability and 10) Professional Futurology.
Beyond implementation of methodologies such as Total Quality Assurance, Kaisen (including the Toyota Production System «TPS»), Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, LeanSigma, Reliability Engineering and other Multidimensional approaches, he is the founder and sole proprietor of the methodology “TRANSFORMATIVE AND INTEGRATIVE RISK MANAGEMENT,” based on Systems Methodology and with the applied omniscience perspective, designed by Andres Agostini in 2005.
Mr. Agostini is passionate about (a) the FUTURE, (b) Applied Omniscience Activist,(c) Not “insurance-based” Transformative and Integrative Risk Management,(d)Mind Expansionist Practitioner. I enjoy teaching a great deal!
AN IDEA WORTH SPREADING AS PER MR. AGOSTINI! We can all attempt the best to tackle so many global crises. Those concern me. However, there is one global crisis that TAKES PRECEDENT AND TUTELAGE FROM ANY OTHER CRISIS.
I’M REFERRING TO THE EXTREMELY GRAVE AND UNIVERSAL, EXISTENTIAL RISK CONCERNING SYSTEMATIC VIOLATIONS AGAINST MORALITY, PRINCIPLES, VALUES, AND ETHICS. I’ve given this life-to-death humankind challenge profound womb-to-tomb reflections for a number of years.
In the mean time, disruption potential and its corresponding vulnerabilities are staggeringly compounding into an immeasurable defiance to Earth in its totality. Ethics AND serious rule of law AND true justice AND zero calamities equal some viable chances as we grasp the convergence of technologies with the applied omniscience perspective.
In fact, with a “tsunami” of new knowledge (and subsequently an epic flood of obsoledge) and novel skills we might have a change of prosperity. We must all remember that all “PROBLEMS” are because of ignorance, especially that ignorance deployed by those supposed to have empowered minds that in actuality worship their preferred path: own supine ignorance in extremis!
TALK TO ME ABOUT! We must embrace (i) science and technology, (ii) unconventional thinking in excelsis, (iii) morality and ethics, (iv) civics, justice, and rigorous law ruling, as well as compassion, humanity and really enforced harmony and peace.
“PEOPLE DON'T KNOW THAT I'M GOOD AT” AS THIS QUESTION WAS ORIGINALLY REFERRED TO ME AT TED.COM! People don’t know that I’m extremely good at -with the Omniscience perspective - seeing existential problems/fixes way in advance and decisively, and solving extremely complex difficulties that require maximum precision.
MY TED STORY! I’ve had and still have the pleasure to be hired by customers and operate with partners before the most daring and pressing situations. Fortunately, educated in the USA, Canada, and Great Britain in academia and chiefly in profession.
I have a unique way of seeing problems and their solving. Luckily and very much to my advantage, I have worked in many tenures and for a whole array of disparate industries.
Subsequently, I feel quite comfortable in dealing with a gamut of business issues, including some undertaken by some supranational organizations as the World Bank and special agencies like or related to or aspiring to instituting best practices by NASA.
I am always ready to take on an even more stringent challenge every time. I never advise to make crises wait when there is so much learning to capture in solving said crises.
I don’t only do a great deal of researching, experimenting/testing. But I, too, do huge studying and studying present “evidence falsifying” (a là Sir Karl Popper) to walk several steps forward towards the optimum omniscience repository applicable by me and via others.
I can go from huge structuralism to highly amorphous and a combination of those two without losing consistency, congruency, sense of direction, ambient/environment awareness and efficacy.
He has addressed major advisory services to top executives from Fortune-1000 corporations. Some of its clients include, World Bank, GE, GMAC, Toyota, Mitsubishi, and Abbot Laboratories.
MY MOST SUCCINCT BIO at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4tNFnLjDyQ
INTELLECTUAL MANIFESTO OF ANDRES AGOSTINI 3.0 at
http://www.slideshare.net/andresagostini/1-3235200
1.-MY EXTENDED PROFESSIONAL PROFILE at http://www.cybercv.blogspot.com/www.linkedin.com/in/andresagostini
2.- MY PERSONALITY TYPE at http://www.slideshare.net/andresagostini/1-1601247
3.- WORKS, RESOURCES, TESTIMONIALS, AND REFERENCES at http://www.ECADEMY.com/account.php?id=408933
4.- IMPORTANT CONTACTS AND WORK PERFORMED at http://www.PLAXO.com/directory/profile/201864946128/463c7d64/High-Tech/High-Tech+Visionary
5.-IMPORTANT RESOURCES at
http://www.slideshare.net/andresagostini
http://bigthink.com/wwwagostiniworksblogspotcom/
http://www.docstoc.com/profile/omnisciczar
http://www.ted.com/profiles/view/id/231424
http://Future-Elicitation-Book.blogspot.com
6.- LEADERSHIP FORUM WITH U.S. MILITARY AND LAW ENFORCEMENT PRACTITIONERS at http://www.leadership-online.blogspot.com/
7.- ORGANIZATIONS I HAVE EXTENSIVELY WORKED WITH at http://www.slideshare.net/guest45906/andys-andres-agostinis-clients-arlington-virginia-usa-presentation
8.-A NASA SCIENTIST ASSESSES AND HIRES ANDRES
http://www.slideshare.net/andresagostini/omega-evaluates-andres-agostinis-traits
9.- SOME CONTACTS AND MY REPUTATION OVER THE WEB AT http://www.yasni.com/index.php?action=webprofileand update
10.- "TRANSFORMATIVE AND INTEGRATIVE RISK MANAGEMENT" (MY OWN METHOD) AT
http://www.slideshare.net/andresagostini/1-2489096
11.- APPLIED OMNISCIENCE DEFINED BY ANDRES AGOSTINI AT www.slideshare.net/andresagostini/1-2094865
12.- MY LINES OF PRACTICES www.slideshare.net/andresagostini/1-2524521
13.- ORGANIZATIONS I HAVE WORKED EXTENSIVELY WITHwww.slideshare.net/andresagostini/1-1898282
14. - IS ANDRES AN ACADEMICIAN GIVEN THE GOGGLE SCHOLAR PUBLICATION AT?
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22andres+agostini%22&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=2001&as_sdtp=on
15.- AT XING at
https://www.xing.com/profile/Andres_Agostini
16.- DOWNLOAD MY “…FUTURE…ELICITING…BOOK…” at
https://Future-Elicitation-Book.blogspot.com
Andres can operate as a coach, consultant, indoctrinator, trainer, and adviser, as well as a transformational manager!
Arlington, Virginia 22202, USA + The World + The Multiverse + Computronium (sic)