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From the former vice president and 1 New York Times bestselling author comes An Inconvenient Truth for everything—a frank and cleareyed assessment of six critical drivers of global change in the decades to come. Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in history. With the same passion he brought to the challenge of climate change, and with his decades of experience on the front lines of global policy, Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast in the visionary tradition of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends. In The Future, Gore identifies the emerging forces that are reshaping our world:
[...]... fundamental change in the balance of global economic power Already, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, it is the emerging economies that have become the principal engines of global growth As a group they are growing much faster than the developed countries Some analysts doubt the sustainability of these growth rates But whatever their rate of growth, it is only a matter of time before these economies... relative value of technological capital have increased income THE GLOBAL WEALTH GAP As this shift in the relative value of technology to labor continues to accelerate, so too will the levels of inequality This phenomenon is not in the realm of theory It is happening right now on a large scale As technological capital becomes more and more important compared to the value of labor, more and more of the income... are almost completely and totally unregulated That adds to the risk of increased volatility in markets, especially when the daily volume of electronic transfers of capital now exceeds the combined total of all of the reserves in the central banks of all advanced countries In practice, the progressive displacement of human decision making from the process and the explosion in the trading of artificial... brought some of the visions conjured by Verne and his successors into reality, optimism about the future gained further momentum But the balance of the twentieth century brought two world wars and the murder of millions by totalitarian dictators of the left and right to serve their own twisted conceptions of progress—and our view of the future began to change The malignant nightmare of the Thousand... now The narrow slice of time to the left of the midpoint in this spectrum the one that represents the history of the human species—is an even narrower slice of the spectrum of time than is visible light of the electromagnetic spectrum The thoughts we devote to these vast stretches of time in the past and future are often fleeting at best There are ample reasons for optimism about the future For the. .. enhancement of computer processing, the storage of memory, the identification of toxics in the environment, the filtration and desalination of water, and other uses are still in development The reactivity of nanomaterials and their thermal, electrical, and optical properties are among the changes that could have significant commercial impact For example, the development of graphene—a form of graphite... in the hands of fewer and fewer elites, while a much larger number of people suffer the harm of lost income There is a growing concentration of wealth at the top of the income ladder in almost every industrial country and emerging nations like China and India Latin America is the rare exception Globally, technological offshoring has at least temporarily improved the equality of income, because of the. .. order to shape the future One of the six drivers of change described in this book the emergence of a digital network connecting the thoughts and feelings of most people in every country of the world—offers the greatest source of hope that the healthy functioning of democratic deliberation and collective decision making can be restored in time to reclaim humanity’s capacity to reason together and chart... once again, the robosourcing of these exotic financial instruments aided and abetted the marketing of those same products to buyers throughout the global economy When the actual quality and real value of the mortgages in question were belatedly examined, they were suddenly repriced on a mass basis—triggering the credit crisis and bursting the housing bubble in the United States The fact that they had... web of other computer-driven financial transactions (collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs) led to the credit crisis, a massive disruption in the availability of capital as a basic factor of production in the global economy— essentially, a global run on banks This led, in turn, to the Great Recession, the effects of which we are still struggling to escape Incidentally, after the manufacturing of these . projections of the future are so often wrong. A NEW VISION OF THE PAST AND THE FUTURE The invention of powerful new tools and the development of potent new insights—and the discovery of rich new. conceptions of progress—and our view of the future began to change. The malignant nightmare of the Thousand Year Reich, the Holocaust, and the cruelties of Stalin and Mao came to be emblematic of the. excited about the possibilities of the future are now focused solely on the implications of the future s potential for the business, political, and security strategies of the present. As the Scientific