We have entered a two-decade period which will be looked back upon as a historical transit as significant as the beginning of the Industrial Age or the Renaissance. Reality and Meaning as we know it, individually and collectively will undergo profound change. As much change in the next 20 years as in the last 100.

The period 2017-2037 could well have the same amount of change as 1917-2017 in the areas of:

• Technology
• Transportation
• Energy
• Economics
• Business
• Employment
• Communications
• Education
• Medicine
• Consciousness

In addition, there will be the physical global change in weather, land, water, and sea level rise due to Climate Change that has not happened since before the beginning of the Agricultural Age more than 10,000 years ago. This alone will result in both trillions of dollars of property loss and tens if not hundreds of millions of Climate Change refugees in the next 20 years.

Note:
None of this is "good" or "bad", it just will be. I am clear that all these changes and dynamics will occur, I just can't specifically say exactly how much and when. The forecasts I have gotten wrong have not been in direction, only in degree or timing.

Unless one is a total Luddite/Off the Grid person, technology is not good or bad, it just is. Airplanes can be used for good or bad, same with computers. It is how humanity uses invented technologies that is the variable. That is exactly why I speak to how much creative destruction, disruption and transformation will occur in the next two decades. We have to start to think and prepare for what is coming.

We have to face forward, we have to accept that our individual and collective definition of reality will change. We have to prepare for the reality that our individual and collective meaning and meanings will be challenged.

We will experience the redefinition of Intelligence. The use of the phrase Artificial Intelligence is anthropomorphic. Nowhere in the definition of Intelligence is there the word 'human'. There is just intelligence. What we call Artificial Intelligence is really Machine Learning. Machine Learning is morphing so rapidly that it will of great aid to humanity if we anticipate how to integrate it into our future.

Machine Learning can truly aid humanity as it goes through this transition or threshold period. It can and will take on ever more of our economic work, in partnership with us. This will allow us to face and collaborate on the new thinking and acting necessary for the 21st century.

In this 20-year period we will experience a massive transformation in energy. The beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era began in the past two years. The historically rapid transition from fossil fuels to wind, solar, next gen nuclear and even new forms of energy will be extremely disruptive economically. Yet we will possibly emerge from this time living in a world of largely free energy. Think about how that will change the global economy. Free energy. There will never be "peak solar" or "peak wind".

For years I have said that 2010-2020, the Transformation Decade, is the first decade of 21st century thought. It is now that we are moving from the legacy thinking of the past to the clearly in ascendant thinking of the future.

When you hear the words "20th Century" what usually comes to mind is "the century of world war, the century of science or the American century. The 20th century truly began 1914-1918 with the first industrialized war, the Russian Revolution, the General Theory of Relativity, the map of Europe as it largely is today and, very unfortunately the map of the Middle East that the English and French arbitrarily created with straight lines and right angles in the desert.

So many of the dominant historical themes of the last century began in the second decade of the last century. Future historians will look back to our current decade and say that this was the time humanity started to think 21st century thought.

In his magnificent book "Post-Capitalist Society", Peter Drucker pointed out that there were "divides" in Western History. As he wrote in the introduction:

"Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself - its worldview; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born"

The difference now is that with the acceleration of the speed of change to the point that it is now environmental, Drucker's 50 year "divides" are now 20 years in length.

Welcome to the second half of the Shift Age when Drucker's quote will be true but in the 20 years 2017-2037.

Many of you are subscribers to both this Shift Age Newsletter and to the Evolutionshift blog. You might therefore have read the last few months of posts since #41 of the Newsletter. Those who only are subscribers to the Newsletter, if you like to get the weekly blog posts, please go here to input your email: davidhoule.com/shift-age-newsletter

Since it has been too long since the last Newsletter, to the right I have placed links to the blog that relate to the next 20 years theme above. Please check them out.

Please visit davidhoule.com It has been completely redesigned. The goal is to update design, navigation and the ability to more easily interact with me. Thanks to what2design, the best, and therefore the only interactive design firm I have used for the past 11 years.

Check it out! Thank you!