MountainScenarios

Category: Scenario Planning & Delphi Research Page 1 of 3

These are the prompts used to gather information about homelessness and to develop a Delphi Method study to research causes and possible interventions (locally).  This is part of our Regenerative AI project; recreate as needed, when needed, with the GenAI engines available to you at that time. (Reprinted with permission from authors at NonprofitPlan.org and some adaptation here.)

Select GenAI results as of April 2024 of Delphi Research on Homelessness (from ChatGPT 4.0, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot) are available in this pdf document.

Earth Day, Drawdown, and GIA

Graphic of Categories to Help Reduce Human Impact on Planet. (ChatGPT 4.0 (DALL-E). Prompt by E Hall, 2024, April 22)

What does GenAI have to say about the scientific-based solutions promoted by Project Drawdown? ProjectDrawdown.org

<This Article is modified and reproduced from SustainZine.com, with permission. The discussion related to scenario planning is added here.>

Disruptive Innovation: AI Will Spark Exponential Economic Growth

(First published on IntellZine on April 4, 2024, https://www.intellzine.com/2024/04/disruptive-innovation-why-ai-will-spark.html … Repeat here with permission.)

The innovation and investment guru Cathy Wood gave a TED talk in December 2023 about 5 pivotal innovation platforms that will (continue) to change the world as we know it. Her group expects to see exponential sustained growth that is fueled by the productivity gains in these areas, especially where they converge. The 5 platforms (AI, Robotics, Energy Storage, DNA sequencing, and blockchain) are described below, with AI in the center. One example she uses is the rapid move to self-driving taxis. TED talk with Cathy Wood, Why AI Will Spark Exponential Economic Growth. (2023, Dec. 18).  

H+AI: The Genius of Crowds and AI

This site has now taken a dive into AI, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in this case. AI Assistants are everywhere now, and proliferating. In search(ish) there is Google’s Gemini (formerly Bard); in Microsoft there’s Copilot which utilizes OpenAI’s technology. And, of course there OpenAI’s ChatGPT itself, with the open source version available to anyone who has the time and money to obtain data, pre-train, and implement their own GAI system — typically for a more specific application like internal customer service.

There is a new heading on DelphiPlan.com (ScenarioPlan.com) that addresses Delphi + AI, or Scenario + AI… https://delphiplan.com/delphi-ai-primer/

The EV Hurricane Disaster: a 1-sided scenario, Part 1

An unsigned, undated, email came circulating the web presenting a horror story about EVs: Everyone has electric cars, and they are all trying to flee the peninsula (let’s say South Florida) as a hurricane approaches. Cars are stuck in traffic with no place to go, and no place the recharge. Can’t run radios and air conditioning because that uses precious batteries. Kids and elderly suffering in sweltering heat.

The obvious conclusion: we all need to stick with huge gas-guzzling SUVs and avoid moving into the future.

WEF Global Risks Report for Scenario Plans

The Global Risks Report 2021, 16th Ed., Insight Report, was just released by the World Economic Forum (WEF). This is one of the best places in the world to gather ideas for scenario planning, especially Chapter 1 on Fractured Futures. Essentially, this report is scenario planning, but for the whole of the world, and then on a region-by-region basis. So, a government, a business, or a non-profit organization can simply review these risks, adapt the concepts to your locale and situation, and wa-la, you have scenarios to plug into your scenario planning workshop. Of course, multiple risks might have similar results for your organization; for example, disaster recovery planning might be similar for man-made disasters as well as natural disasters.

Beyond Moore’s law, Beyond Silicone Chips

Beyond Moore’s law (by Dr Ed Jordan)

After almost 60 years, Moore’s law, related to the doubling of computing power every year-and-a-half-ish, still holds. At the current exponential speed, there is a brick wall looming in the foreground: the physical limitations of silicon chips. The most straightforward example of how that might impact a company is to look at Intel Corp. But first more on Moore’s law and the more general idea of learning curves.

PREDICT a Pandemic: First Kill those Pesty Scientists

Rough Road Ahead

Oh My God!

Trumps administration completely stopped the PREDICT program that did USAID training and response world-wide for pandemics.  Since the Bird Flu of 2005 (H5N1), the US presidents (Bush II and Obama) have moved toward building a program to identify potential pandemics and to help countries (including the USA) deal with such an eventuality. Of course, the PREDICT program got to deal with several pandemic-type events including SARS, MERS, Ebola and even Zika (mosquito). The idea, which apparently worked very well, is to fight a pandemic where it originates in other countries, so that you don’t have to fight it here in the USA. Of course, the train-the-trainer program would be developed and applied here in the USA.

Pandemic Scenario in Trump Transition Team, Days before Office

Okay!. So the Obama administration left the incoming Trump administration several scenarios for them to think about. No evidence as to what happened to the final report. But apparently, it showed everything that we have seen since November in China, and the first outbreaks outside of China. The result was a world-wide pandemic. Overwhelming the US with supply shortages and patent overflows. What happened to the final report? The early warning signposts? The disaster (recovery) plans?

We did a blog post about the military planning scenarios that would have realized a pandemic as an act of war… Or, even if it wasn’t caused by an act of war, the resulting story line would be similar. And, of course, if the pandemic started elsewhere, there would signals and signposts, in the jargon of Shell related to early warning signs in scenario planning.

A major country should be doing military scenario planning for several topics. None is quite as huge and integrated as climate change. Look at this report produced by The National Security, Military, And Intelligence Panel on Climate Change (NSMIP, February 2020), A Security Threat Assessment of Global Climate Change: How Likely Warming Scenarios Indicate a Catastrophic Security Future. It doesn’t seem possible that the US would not have a plan like this for a pandemic? It also doesn’t seem possible that the US would not have multiple plans for economic recession, no matter the cause. Since we missed the boat on the pandemic, hopefully we didn’t miss planning for a recession… However, this recession is like none we have ever had before. Kind of like turning the switch off on most of the economy for a while. (How long is a “while” is a $4T question?)

Kiaser Health News did a composite of highlights from several articles about the Trump transition team and how badly they apparently failed in the Pandemic exercise: How A Crisis Simulation Run Before Trump’s Inauguration By Obama’s Team Eerily Mirrors Current Outbreak!

November in China. By December, the military and health official had to know that expansion into a global pandemic was was not only possible, but likely. In Florida, when we see a Hurricane coming, we dust off all of our contingency plans for the businesses and start buying toilet paper and canned goods. We make sure that we have lots of jugs to fill with water if needed (no need to buy water, by the way).

Did the military and health officials simply forget to mention these things up the chain of command, or — apparently more likely — did the higher-up-the-chain-of-command not listen? What the hell happened to the results of the simulation? Did it take the path of anything and everything that Obama did/mentioned/signed/said, flushed down the toilet?

Military Scenario Planning

It is hard to imagine a world where the (US) military did not make plans for a pandemic like the coronavirus (COVID-19). Each and every military must have a plan for weaponized bio-warfare. In fact, every military will have their own plans for ways they can weaponize biowarfare. Think about the types of bioweapons the terrorist groups might want to employ?

The military has been planning for the big issues of global warming and has been shouting out that climate change is one of the biggest risks to the world in the future. Droughts and rising sea levels will produce mass instability in regions, much along the line of the human tragedies in Chad, Sudan, Syria, etc. For decades now, the military has warned of the risks of climate change on US national security. Pentagon, for example, here.

With the pandemics that have passed through (Ebola, SARS, mosquito-borne) over the last 10-20 years, this too is a national security threat.

In the spirit of Scenario planning, setting up sign-posts and early warning signs, you have to wonder when the military started to escalate the coronavirus outbreak in China to the highest risk levels of world, and therefore US pandemic. November? December? The military would already have contingency plans to help other countries. By early December 2019, the signposts were visible for a spread from China to the rest of the world. By mid December, the US mainland would have been clearly at risk.

The power of having scenario plans, early warning signs, and contingency plans, can break down anywhere along the line. All of the planning in the world is useless, if you don’t react and implement.

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