maart 2020

I grew up in the time of the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. Watching the first step on the moon with my father at our small black and white TV. Gazing upon in The Netherlands was the same moon on which  American astronauts had just landed. The path I’ve traveled side by side with so many other people inspired by science and technology has been enormously enlightening and rewarding. But there’s still far to go. The future looms. We will face daunting challenges in coming decades, and to overcome them we will need to summon up a…

INTRODUCTION In policy-and decision-making multifaceted phenomena have to be tackled; conflicts of interests, migration, climate change, the automation of professions, economic and financial aspects (crises), healthcare, education, international trade, social integration, disruptive technologies, etc. The degree of uncertainty present is enormous and increases with rising interconnectedness. Denser interaction which complexifies causality chains. Efforts in research and practice have led to approaches and processes to analyze these phenomena and make decisions under uncertainty. International commitment to the appropriately ambitious Paris climate agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 has pulled into the limelight the urgent need for major…

We are facing an existential crisis. The anticipated global population of more than 9.7 billion by 2050 poses daunting challenges from providing sufficient energy, food, and water, as well as health care more accurately and at lower cost, to trespassing biogeophysical boundaries. These challenges are enormous in scale and complexity, and we will need to take equally enormous leaps in our imagination to meet them successfully. In the first convergence revolution the atomic parts list discovered by physicists sparked a first bringing us radar, television, computers, and the internet, just to start. Radically changing our conception of what is possible…