ABSTRACT
In any discussion of the future, it is a mistake to think of the world as a predictable place, as many major trends and events lie outside the realm of normal expectations and are hard to foresee (Taleb 2007). Research on inter-species embryos (or human admixed embryos, or in the tabloid version, human-animal hybrids) is pushing the boundaries of what we might mean by ‘a person’ in the future. New biofuels and exhaust-free engines make the prospect of environmentally clean cars a realistic prospect. New technology is being developed all the time. For example, hafnium, which is replacing silicon and revolutionising computer chip technology, will double the speed of computing over the next ten years. The ‘semantic web’, based on much greater data linking and integration, will replace the ‘world wide web (www), providing the intelligence to display and analyse trends, compared to the feast of raw data on the current web.
