The Millennium Project is a global participatory think tank established in 1996 under the American Council for the United Nations University. We became an independent non-profit in 2009 and we now have 72 Nodes (a group of institutions and individuals that connect local and global perspectives) around the world.

Purpose: Improve humanity’s prospects for building a better future.

Mission: Improve thinking about the future and make that thinking available
through a variety of media for feedback to accumulate wisdom about the future for better decisions today.

Vision: A global foresight network of Nodes, information, and software, building a global collective intelligence system recognized for its ability to improve prospects for humanity. A think tank on behalf of humanity, not on behalf of a government, or an issue, or an ideology, but on behalf of building a better future for all of us.

The 15 Global Challenges organized by the Millennium Project are updated on line and are included in the newest edition of the State of the Future 20.0.

They incorporate extensive research and insights from various Millennium Project research and publications, including Work/Tech 2050, Robots 2050, the Future of Life Institute competition, COVID-19 scenarios, and AGI Phases 1 & 2. Drafts were reviewed by more than 30 experts, share d with Node chairs for regional updates and feedback, also enhanced with data from over 50 interns, and refined using AI tools as needed.

Source: Millenium Project website

The State of the Future 20.0 is a 500-page broad overview of the issues and opportunities on the future of humanity. It is a detailed and readable look at what we should know today to avoid the worst and achieve the best for humanity.

The Millennium Project, a global participatory think-tank, distilled countless research reports, insights from hundreds of futurists and related experts around the world, and 70 of its own futures research reports, to make this report of immense value.

It offers an Executive Summary and concluding section on the prospects for civilization, plus seven parts. State of the Future’s authors are Jerome Clayton Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, Elizabeth Florescu.

Source: Amazon

The 15 Global Challenges provide a framework to assess the global and local prospects for humanity. Their description, with a range of views and actions to addressed each, enriched with regional views and progress assessments are updated each year, since 1996, by the Millennium Project. These versions come from The State of the Future by The Millennium Project (2024).

These videos were published on the Millennium Project YouTube channel on March 17 2025.

For more information on the Global Challenges, go to this onAir post.

Source: Millennium Project

This post has a compilation of videos from The Millennium Project YouTube Channel. For videos on the 15 Millennium Project Challenges, go to this post.

The Millennium Project is a global participatory think tank with 66 Nodes (groups of individuals and institutions) around the world. It was founded in 1996 after a three-year feasibility study with the United Nations University, Smithsonian Institution, Futures Group International, and the American Council for the UNU.

It is now an independent non-profit futures research think tank of futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities. The Millennium Project manages a coherent and cumulative process that collects and assesses judgments from over 3,500 people since the beginning of the project selected by its Nodes around the world.

The work is distilled in its annual “State of the Future”, “Futures Research Methodology” series, special studies, all available in the online Global Futures Intelligence System at them.org.

Source: The Millennium Project

Global Governance of the Transition to Artificial General Intelligence: Issues and Requirements
Authored and Edited by Jerome Clayton Glenn

While today’s Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) tools have limited purposes like diagnosing illness or driving a car, if managed well, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), could usher in great advances in human condition encompassing the fields of medicine, education, longevity, turning around global warming, scientific advancements, and creating a more peaceful world. However, if left unbridled, AGI also has the potential to end human civilization. This book discusses the current status, and provides recommendations for the future, regarding regulations concerning the creation, licensing, use, implementation and governance of AGI.

Based on an international assessment of the issues and potential governance approaches for the transition from ANI of today to future forms of AGI by The Millennium Project, a global participatory think tank, the book explores how to manage this global transition. Section 1 shares the views of 55 AGI experts and thought leaders from the US, China, UK, Canada, EU, and Russia, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Bill Gates, on 22 critical questions. In Section 2, The Millennium Project futurist team analyzes these views to create a list of potential regulations and global governance systems or models for the safe emergence of AGI, rated and commented on by an international panel of futurists, diplomats, international lawyers, philosophers, scientists and other experts from 47 countries.

This book broadens and deepens the current conversations about future AI, educating the public as well as those who make decisions and advise others about potential artificial intelligence regulations.

Source: Barnes & Noble

The High-Level Expert Panel on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), convened by the UN Council of Presidents of the General Assembly (UNCPGA), has released its final report titled “Governance of the Transition to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Urgent Considerations for the UN General Assembly” outlining recommendations for global governance of AGI.

The panel, chaired by Jerome Glenn, CEO of The Millennium Project, includes leading international experts, such as Renan Araujo (Brazil), Yoshua Bengio (Canada), Joon Ho Kwak (Republic of Korea), Lan Xue (China), Stuart Russell (UK and USA), Jaan Tallinn (Estonia), Mariana Todorova (Bulgaria Node Chair), and José Jaime Villalobos (Costa Rica), and offers a framework for UN action on this emerging field.

The report has been formally submitted to the President of the General Assembly, and discussions are underway regarding its implementation. While official UN briefings are expected in the coming months, the report is being shared now to encourage early engagement.

Source: Millennium Project

The Millennium Project invited all those studying or working on the future issues of global governance of Artificial General Intelligence – AGI to share their judgements on the elements necessary for safe and productive global governance of AGI in our new online Real-Time Delphi

Phase 1 of the AGI study collected the views of 55 AGI leaders in the US, China, UK, the European Union, Canada, and Russia to the 22 questions below (the list of leaders follows the questions). Phase 1 research was financially supported by the Dubai Future Foundation and the Future of Life Institute:

Phase 2 is a Real-time Delphi Study that assessed 40 potential regulations for developers, governments, UN Multi-Stakeholder hybrid (Human-AI) organization, and users for trusted global and national governance of AGI. The RTDelphi is now closed and report is being prepared.

Source: Millennium Project

World Futures Day 2025: Join the Global Conversation on Building a Better Tomorrow on March 1

March 1^st The Millennium Project and five other international futurist organizations will host the 12th annual World Futures Day — a unique 24-hour online conversation around the world exploring possibilities for our shared future.

World Futures Day begins at 12 noon in New Zealand. This round-the-world event will move westward hour-by-hour, ending 24 hours later in Hawaii. The public is invited to drop in anytime to listen, share ideas, and discuss how to create a better tomorrow with futurists, thought leaders, and engaged citizens worldwide.

Source: The Millennium Project

Report on a three-year international study that produced three detailed scenarios, conducted 30 national workshops in 29 countries, identified hundreds of action distilled to 93 that were assessed by hundreds of futurists and related experts in over 50 countries.

Source: The Millennium Project

Looks at how technology will shape the next century, and discusses cyborgs, genetic engineering, national defense, economic development, and education.

From Google Books: Glen examines the potential for future integration between man and machine drawing on examples in medicine (the Jarvik heart, Utah arm, Triad hip, etc) and advances in human-like processing via machine in terms of speech recognition and other information technologies. While the author touches on topics ranging from philosophy and religion to science and politics, the unifying theme is what he sees as the inescapable blending of machine-enhanced humans and ‘conscious’ artificial intelligence.

Source: Amazon

Futures Wheel: A Tool for Examining Implications of Change

Whether it involves thinking through the implications of a decision, considering possible outcomes of an event such as COVID-19 or ideating on the impacts of a trend, facing change means grappling with a certain level of uncertainty. No one can know the future, and it is impossible to think through the full range of implications of a change.

However, using Futures Wheels can help surface implications beyond the immediate, first-order consequences of change and can help develop an understanding of causality by mapping how a change can create a ripple effect of other changes. Examining those implications can help clarify how to navigate the murky waters of change and can bring to light other potential changes that might have gone unexamined.

Futures Wheels were created by futurist Jerome C. Glenn in the early 1970’s to help visualize the direct and indirect implications of a decision, trend or event. I find them to be a fantastic visual idea generation tool. While Futures Wheels can be completed solo, they are best done in groups. If you are grappling with change, you can use Futures Wheels to help push your thinking beyond the immediate, sometimes obvious implications of change by creating your own Futures Wheel using the steps outlined below.

Source: Knowledge Works

Jerome C. Glenn co-founded and directs The Millennium Project, a leading global participatory think tank supported by international organizations, governments, corporations, and NGOs, which produces the internationally recognized State of the Future annual reports for the past 16 years.

Jerome Glenn invented the “Futures Wheel”, a futures assessment technique; Futuristic Curriculum Development, and concepts such as conscious-technology, transinstitutions, tele-nations, management by understanding, feminine brain drain, just-in-time knowledge, feelysis, nodes as a management concept for interconnecting global and local views and actions, and definitions of environmental security, Collective Intelligence, and scenarios.

Dr. Mara Di Berardo is a seasoned expert in futures studies, communication, and participatory methodologies. She serves as the Communication Director and Italy Node Co-Chair of The Millennium Project, a global think tank with over 70 Nodes dedicated to improving global foresight and collaborative intelligence. Mara has been a vital contributor to the organization since 2007, leading research, events, and communication initiatives.

A prominent voice in the field, Mara is also the Communication Officer for the Foresight Europe Network, where she connects foresight professionals across Europe through participatory vision-building and strategic action planning. Her research includes an analysis of global futures topics, notably as the Principal Investigator for the 2022 Third Futures Research Grant, resulting in the widely cited study on World Futures Day 2022.

Source: Millennium Project

Elizabeth Florescu is Director of Research of The Millennium Project. She has been with the Project since 1997.

Elizabeth is an economist and analyst-programmer with over 20 years of experience in futures research. She was also policy analyst at the European Commission (2016-2019) and has done extensive work in operational research (using fuzzy logic), foreign trade, diplomacy, and security-related domains.

Source: Millennium Project page

Paul Werbos is best known (and most cited) for the original discovery of backpropagation, and for the theorem establishing its validity, as part of his PhD thesis in Applied Mathematics for Harvard in 1974. Even before 1974, he had developed backpropagation as one element of a more general approach to reinforcement learning, which combined a new way to learn to approximate dynamic programming with key insights from Freud’s theory of how learning works in neurons of the brain.

He inaugurated the field which we now know of as RLADP, Reinforcement Learning and Approximate Dynamic Programming, building on this earlier work, his later papers, and on the research area of Adaptive and Intelligent Systems at NSF which he led from 1988 to 2015. This included neural networks, adaptive fuzzy logic, and a major paradigm shift in how to understand intelligence in the brain, which has passed tests on the best real-time brain data (Werbos and Davis 2016).

Source: Regulating AI

In this episode of In Focus, we speak with Jerome Glenn from The Millennium Project about the newly released report Work/Technology 2050: Scenarios and Actions. ‪@futee.freetv‬ ‪@millproject‬ ‪@jeromeglenn5706‬