After four interesting years in Berkeley during the early 1960s Michael returned "back East" to earn Ph.D. in interdisciplinary social science from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University (1970). He has monitored the writing of futurists, system theorists. and various other reformers and visionaries for the past 14 years. His self-published guidebook to this literature. Societal Directions and Alternatives (1976; out of print) led to the founding of FUTURE SURVEY. a monthly abstract journal of books and articles on trends, forecasts, and proposals-transformational and otherwise. FUTURE SURVEY and Future Survey Annual, which integrates abstracts from the monthly, have been published by the World Future Society since early 1979. In late 1979, the New World Alliance was initiated. and Michael has served as a member of the Governing Council since then, with special effort devoted to helping prepare the NWA Transformation Platform (1981), which he considers unique and promising, but very preliminary and incomplete. This essay adapted from a presentation at the Association for Humanistic Psychology Twentieth Annual Meeting in Washington (1982), is seen as an initial probe into the vast and vexing problem of why so little humane, transformational change actually takes place.

What is the most interesting research project publication you are currently working on?
 
My website, Global Foresight Books.org which is mapping current affairs books. That is a very broad definition in the publishing world. It incorporates a lot of social scientists who don’t call themselves futurists, but are nevertheless talking about forecasts and policy proposals. Futures studies or futures research – what you call foresight research – is a very small entity and there are hardly any books that are explicitly in that realm.
 
What would you like to do after completing this project?
 
This project is a demonstration and the next step is to secure testimonials and obtain funding to make it sustainable. Rather than propose doing this and then get funding, I decided to do it and demonstrate it, as people would not believe it until they saw it. Beyond that, all sorts of things can be done if and when I am reasonably on top of the current affairs literature, which incidentally is not reported in the futures journals. Publishers don’t care about books –they only want articles on foresight. They just have an occasional book review. There are about 1,000 futures-relevant books published every year and an awful lot are being ignored.
 
What was the last foresight project website you visited and what for?
 
In the world of foresight and futures studies?  I don’t look at them. I look at what publishers are putting out, so both universities and thinktanks. I try to hit the websites of all the publishers and leading thinktanks, like the RAND Corporation1, the Centre for Speech in International Affairs, the Brookings Institution,2 which puts out a huge catalogue that had 77 items that I checked off. The great majority of the items they were distributing were publications of other thinktanks, like the United Nations University Press. 1 http://www.rand.org/ 2 http://www.brookings.edu/about.aspx
 
 So you don’t look at research project websites or at reports?
 
Only if it was something of extraordinary interest. I am mostly looking for finished publications, either in book form or something on the web.
 
If you were able to anticipate the future of one research area or sector, which one would you choose and why?
 
I am interested in all. I am one of the few general futurists, or as I call myself, a ‘futures watcher’. I have been a generalist for 40 years, I can tell you which ones are important. On my website I have the literature classified in 25 major categories, and 20 of those have to do with standard government departments, such as health, communication, transportation and urban affairs, etc. But five of the categories are on particular issues which are huge and multidimensional and they overlap with the others. Climate change is the most important long-term futures-oriented concern which needs to be monitored. Number 2 is the economic crisis. There is a flood of literature on this – there must be about 80 books on what happened, how to avoid this happening again. I think there is too much on this. I have an explanation of those categories, which will be posted soon. Water is an up and coming issue, rising very fast, and I have a separate category for that, although otherwise it would come under environment and resources. Development is a huge area and again there are a huge number of books and hundreds of people who are going to save the world by doing this or that. There are overlaps and these are all important in varying degrees. But climate change is the most important in the long term and the economic situation is the most important in the short term.
 
Can you envision major wild cards (positive or negative) that may occur in the next 20 years?
 
It is a question of how far we go on the list. This is where some further refinement is needed, as I think the term ‘wildcard’ is used poorly. Literally, a wild card is a joker in a deck of 52 playing cards, with a two percent probability of occurrence. That is fine. There are certain events or developments that have a one chance in 50 or one chance in 100; but then there are other events that are more like one chance in 1,000 and there ought to be a category for those, e.g. very wild cards. In the US there is a popular book about black swan events (Taleb, 2007), highly improbable occurrences. On the other hand, there are a lot of ‘not so wild’ occurrences, with a 10% to 30% chance of happening. To call them wild cards is to deflect attention away from their probability. My favourite wild card, that I am most concerned about, is acid release of methane from plants on the ocean floor. Even rapid release of methane from melting tundra is likely to be of great concern (see alarm posted by Hans Schellnberger of the Potsdam Institute in my review of Clive Hamilton, Requium for a Species, chosen as a recent Book of the Month on my new website, www. globalforesightbooks.org) If you were to assess climatologists on the very uncertain probability of this, I think it would fall into the ‘not so wild’ category. For some of these events, there will be a lot of controversy. It depends on what sort of timeframe you have on all these developments. It is useful to specify the timeframe. I find some of them to be very vague as far as what is happening, and sometimes it is an obvious event which is already under way. This project is about developing a methodology, so any suggestions are very welcome. It is the underlying methodology. For example, you have something on off-the-shelf disease testing. This is already under way, for example blood sugar testing for diabetes. You just expect more and more of the same for that. It is unsurprising, a general trend, and I don’t think it belongs in your collection of wild cards or weak signals. Similarly, ’Growing dependence of society on technology‘ is hardly a weak signal; it is conventional wisdom, at least in US. (Another one of my top ten wild cards is an extensive and prolonged crash of the Internet, due to malfunction, a superhacker, or outright cyberwar.) Hopefully, at some point, you should do some retrospective WI-WE assessments, notably for tThe Great Recession, where there were dozens of outlier warnings that were not heard. Merely posting the warnings is not enough.


What are the weak signals that (if detected) could hint at a growing likelihood (or imminent realization) of the wild cards that you mentioned?
 
That is a very broad and vague question. Everybody is looking at signals – there are thousands of signals for thousands of events. For example, the rapid disintegration of the Eurozone; this could happen any time. There is lots of talk about Greece and a lot of worry. That is certainly not a wild card and could happen in the very near future. I think this term ‘wild card’ needs to be better defined. I suggested the three different categories would help to improve thinking about these events – wild cards, not so wild cards and very wild cards. There are many agencies looking for wild cards and weak events. The security establishment and intelligence establishment specialize in all sorts of weak signals of incipient problems worldwide. The health establishment look for early warnings of disease outbreaks and have a very refined method for spotting this on a global basis. So I don’t think you would be offering any help to them, but I don’t know because you are running a general service. The problem with running a general service is that everybody is very specialized in their own silos. There is a lot of complaint about people blocking their silos, not looking across the categories, but that is the situation. I am trying to break it with my website. I am not confident it will work, but hope it might put a dent in it. If you have information on a thousand possible wildcards, which you could easily do, who is going to plough through all this? When they want specific information, they will probably go to the people in their domain who are familiar with this. It is the problem of packaging this, getting credible foresight and assessment, and getting it out. That is why you need a Top Ten or Top Twenty list to attract attention to what you are doing, rather than a long, unuseable list. The wheat crisis is a legitimate wild card. I think there is a wheat virus on the way in Africa. There is the question of whether it spreads, but that is certainly legitimate and is near term. I prefer stuff in the next decade or so. My reaction to “floods in Europe lead to a mass migration”, is that it is far, far out. I don’t know what countries you are thinking about. Clearly, floods in Bangladesh will lead to mass migration. That is more likely than not – beyond ‘not so wild card’, it is conventional wisdom. But in Europe I would have to be convinced that is even a very wild card.
 
Do you have some important criticisms of the study?

Invisibility spray sounds very fanciful to me. If you are trying to establish credibility it seems well into the realm of science fiction and fantasy.
 
And of the methodology?
 
Suggestions for improvement – wild cards and weak signals could be better defined. When you state certain things, it is important how you define them. For example, “black economy”: your definition is an electronic black economy or a more informal economy everywhere, especially in lesser developed countries. This has been and always will be and it is a huge topic. I am a bit unhappy about that. China is setting up a new Great Wall. Clearly China is spreading out in the world and making a lot of investment because they have the money to do it, and what you want to call it is quite important. Let’s go back to the first three in the policy brief. A neo-fascist leader gets elected… it depends how you define fascist leader – most look at Hitler, but there is a new, friendlier version. For example, Bertram Gross published Friendly Fascism in 1980, which pretty well described the Bush Administration some 20 years later. No one ever made the connection.