Between 14 and 20 March 2019, a historically powerful “bomb cyclone”, combined with snowmelt devastated Colorado and the Central United States, especially the Midwest “farmbelt” of Iowa and Nebraska, South Dakota and Kansas. Consequently, it triggered immense floods, which wrecked more than a million of acres (405000 hectares). These floods have immediate direct consequences, because …
Category Archives: Strategic Foresight and Early Warning Issues
Smart Agriculture, International Power and National Interest
Smart farming, the combination of agriculture, artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT), will help tackle the various challenges of food security, and usher the happenstance of a new world. It will also change what international food security means. We present here some of the features of the new “international smart food security”. …
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★ Sensor and Actuator for AI (3) – Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things and the Future of Agriculture: Smart Agriculture Security? (2)
One of the current focuses regarding Artificial Intelligence is on ethics. For example, on 8 April 2019 the European Commission published its Communication Building Trust in Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence. Google, despite set backs, also tries to implement an AI ethics board (Kelsey Piper, “Exclusive: Google cancels AI ethics board in response to outcry“, Vox, 4 …
Creating Evertime
Time in strategic foresight and warning is a crucial problem, as underlined in “Time in Strategic Foresight and Risk Management” and pointed out in “Everstate’s characteristics“. We shall still need much effort and research before to obtain detailed, proper and actionable timelines – and this without even considering timeliness. For the Chronicles of Everstate, we …
Everstate’s characteristics
The initial variables chosen to start building our scenario are the five most important variables of our model, according to Eigenvector centrality, as explained in the article “Revisiting influence analysis”. We shall now choose values for each criterion. Consistency is then checked, but only for the variables that are linked. As we aim at finding …
Everstate: Setting the stage (I)
Everstate is an ideal-type for our very real countries created to foresee the future of the modern nation-state. In the case of this specific scenario-building, we are setting the stage for Everstate, by attributing values to key influencing variable to be able to develop the scenarios. The explanations regarding the methodology used to develop the narrative is explained in …
★ Sensor and Actuator for AI (2) – Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things and the Future of Agriculture: Smart Agriculture Security? (1)
This article explores the way artificial intelligence (AI) is inserted within its environment through the Internet of Things in a particular domain, agriculture. As a result, “smart agriculture”, a whole new way to produce food, is born. We look at the way various actors include AI in farming and thus envision and develop the future …
The Chronicles of Everstate: the Actors
The Everstatans: the citizens (including companies), the people, the Nation Everstate’s central governing bodies or political authorities: the government, Parliament, the national representatives, the civil servants constituting the formal and rational modern bureaucracy. Everstate’s regional and local governing bodies: elected representatives at town, department (or county) and region level. Everstate’s political parties: Two major parties (loosely …
Saudi Arabia and the Chinese Belt and Road: the Great Convergence
In February 2019, during the Saudi Arabia-China economic forum, the two countries signed for more than 28 billion dollars deals (“Saudi-Chinese Investment Forum Signs 35 Deals During Crown Prince’s Beijing Visit”, Ashark Al Awsat, 22 February, 2019). These gigantic deals are part of the growing Saudi-China relationship. They are the economic and political continuation of …
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Climate change: Shall we live or die on our changing planet ?
A cavity 1000 feet tall (1600 metres), and as large as two thirds of Manhattan has been found inside the Antarctic Thwaites glacier (Sarah Sloat, “An Enormous Cavity Inside an Antarctic Glacier Harbors a Dangerous Threat », Inverse Daily, February 1, 2019). It has been created in three year by inside warming and melting. This shows …
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