Getting Ready for the Future

Often crisis is argued as a harbinger of opportunities for cocreativity, innovation, and change. However, a pandemic like the COVID-19 pandemic triggered significant mortality increases in 2020 of a magnitude not witnessed since World War II in Western Europe or the breakup of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. Females from 15 countries and males from 10 ended up with lower life expectancy at birth in 2020 than in 2015. With its variations, the virus has caught the world napping while many nations were flung into confusion and crisis moderation. The chapter is based on an extensive analysis of the developmental response to the pandemic during the last 2 years while being engulfed by the inadequacy of the current systems to respond to crises. The authors undertook a futures exercise that reveals further work to be done in several areas such as information technologies, privacy and ethics, robotics, artificial intelligence, and biological technologies, among a host of others. The plausibility argument of opportunity is teased in some of these sectors. Lessons learned are many and one of them is that bugs will continue to mutate and will compel humanity to be more accepting, vigilant, and prudent in its preparedness for another attack afterward.