#rethink : PIP 2016 : The future already happened - just not the way the map expected
Revisiting PIP 2016: A Collective Retrofuture Audit of a July 2016 Foresight Artifact. Call for Chapters.
Preamble
The above document was produced during the PIP 2016 (International Panel of Futurists) from July 11-13, 2016. It was organised by IRES, the Royal Institute for Strategic Studies, in Rabat, Morocco, a think tank led by Mr Mohammed Tawfik MOULINE together with his team1.
The document represents the crowdsourcing work of an international group of futurists (see below the full list)2 - selected by Fabienne GOUX_BAUDIMENT - who all contributed and sought to map major global trends and emerging phenomena as they appeared in mid-2016. The chart should therefore be read not as an individual forecast, but as a collaborative foresight artifact shaped by multiple perspectives and a shared effort to structure uncertainty.
My handwritten notes discussed below belong to the sensemaking exercise that followed the trends mapping. Their importance lies in the way they transform a broad trend, signals, and emergences inventory into a more focused reflection on democracy, sovereignty, technological power, and the future of the human being.
This post aims to revisit this 2016 artifact as a retrofuture document. Rather than judging it simply by predictive accuracy, it examines what it reveals about how futures were imagined at the time, which tensions were already becoming visible, and what methodological lessons such an artifact can still offer contemporary foresight practice.
Finally, for the one interested, there is a call for chapters3 for a eventual collective publication related to PIP 2016 - Flash (Back, Now, Forward) - See footnotes.
1. Introduction - A July 2016 document from a future that no longer exists
Dated 12 July 2016, the document examined here is more than a trend map. It is a layered foresight artifact composed of a printed futures chart, handwritten markings across that chart, and two additional handwritten synthesis pages that condense the map into a short list of civilizational concerns. Read together, these layers capture a moment when scanning the future gave way to something more interpretive: an effort to understand how emerging technologies, governance mutations, demographic shifts, and bio-political transformations might converge into a new social order.
The usual way to revisit an old foresight document is to ask whether it was right. That is too narrow. The more interesting question is what kind of future it thought it was entering. The July 2016 notes do not merely identify themes such as blockchain, basic income, AI, longevity, or world governance. They reorganize those themes around deeper anxieties and possibilities: democracy under monitoring, sovereignty under pressure, humanity under redesign, rights under expansion, and work under erosion. The artifact therefore deserves to be read not as a scorecard of prediction, but as a historical grammar of anticipation.
From today’s vantage point, the value of the document lies precisely in this double movement. It first inventories signals. It then extracts a hypothesis from them. That hypothesis is strikingly audacious: the coming transition will not be defined only by new technologies, but by a redefinition of governance, legitimacy, and the human being itself. This article revisits that hypothesis as a retrofuture audit, asking not only what the document saw clearly, but what it struggled to name, what it missed, and what its categories reveal about the anticipatory imagination of 2016.
2. The artifact in layers - From printed trend map to handwritten civilizational hypothesis
The printed chart offers the familiar architecture of institutional foresight. It arranges themes across a field of “settled trends” and “emerging phenomena,” associating them with issues such as world governance, synthetic biology, smart medicine, universal currency, basic income, cyber eugenics, automation, climate change, and global identity. At this level, the artifact behaves as many futures maps do: it turns complexity into an overview and presents a wide field of possible relevance.
A second layer appears directly on top of the chart. Here the handwriting begins to disrupt the neutrality of the printed frame. Certain areas are circled, linked, or renamed through marginal concepts such as values, identity, women, food, poverty, reverse surveillance, corruption, and new trust economy. The annotations suggest dissatisfaction with treating signals as isolated topics. They begin to reorganize the map around social and moral stakes rather than sectoral categories alone.
The third layer, composed of the handwritten synthesis pages dated July 12, 2016, is the most consequential. These pages no longer scan broadly; they select and condense. Global citizenship, blockchain and DAO, cyber eugenics, basic income, parity between Muslim and Christian populations, a new role for human beings, longevity, sovereign-less society, circular economy, AI and AGI, and a shift of power toward cyber are not listed as equal trends. They are staged as components of one larger transition. The artifact therefore evolves across its own layers: from map, to interpretation, to manifesto. That trajectory is itself a foresight lesson. The meaningful work does not end with mapping; it begins there.
3. Reading 2016 historically - What kind of future was being imagined?
The July 2016 document reflects a threshold moment in the politics of anticipation. The future it imagines is no longer simply one of innovation, connectivity, and growth. Nor is it yet fully a world of polycrisis, platform dependency, and AI saturation in the sense that later years would make familiar. Instead, it occupies an in-between zone: the period when digital infrastructures, distributed systems, life sciences, and automation were increasingly understood not just as technical developments, but as forces capable of reorganizing the political and anthropological foundations of social life.
That shift is visible in the language of the notes. “Global citizenship,” “one currency,” and “world governance” suggest a world moving beyond inherited national containers. “Blockchain → DAO / P2P” suggests that infrastructure itself might become political form. “Cyber eugenics,” “longevity,” and “what it will be to be a human being” point toward the body and personhood as sites of transformation. “Monitoring democracy” shows that even democracy is no longer assumed as a fixed institutional backdrop; it is itself becoming unstable, measurable, vulnerable, and redesignable.
This is what makes the artifact historically revealing. It shows 2016 as a year in which emerging forces had become visible, but their later institutional forms had not yet fully crystallized. The notes therefore oscillate between acuity and conceptual strain. They sense that a new order is forming, but can only name it through provisional labels: neo, cyber eugenics, sovereign-less society, AGI? That instability is not a weakness of the document alone. It is evidence of the difficulty of thinking at the edge of historical transition.
4. The real foresight move - Why the handwritten synthesis matters more than the printed map
The printed chart remains useful, but the real foresight move occurs in the handwritten synthesis- part of the sensemaking exercise. That is where the document ceases to behave like a broad scan and begins to function like an argument. The 2016 notes do not ask what is merely new. They ask what is being fundamentally restructured. Democracy is boxed. “Monitoring democracy” is circled. DAO is linked to world governance. “What it will be to be a human being?” is elevated from implicit background concern to explicit central question.
This movement matters because it separates two different kinds of foresight. The first kind classifies signals. The second identifies the deeper tensions through which those signals may become historically significant. The synthesis pages belong to the second type. They compress the map into a short agenda centered on governance mutation, post-nationality, human transformation, rights, and purpose. In doing so, they reveal a practical truth about anticipatory work: the most important outcome of scanning is often not the inventory itself, but the interpretive condensation that follows.
Seen this way, the July 2016 pages are not supplementary notes. They are the intellectual center of the artifact. They show a practitioner moving beyond descriptive foresight toward something closer to political anthropology. This is the point at which the document stops being about technologies and starts being about forms of life.
5. Democracy under transformation - From governance to monitored legitimacy
One of the most striking features of the handwritten notes is the treatment of democracy as an unstable object. The word itself is boxed, and the phrase “monitoring democracy” is singled out as a major concern. This is not the language of a period that assumes democratic form to be secure. It is the language of a period beginning to recognize that digital infrastructures, data systems, algorithmic visibility, and network coordination may alter the conditions under which democratic legitimacy is produced and maintained.
The term “monitoring democracy” is suggestive precisely because it is ambiguous. It may imply surveillance of democratic citizens, quantification of participation, platform intermediation of public discourse, real-time legitimacy metrics, or the replacement of slower institutional mediation with continuous data-based exposure. In each case, democracy becomes less a constitutional arrangement and more an object subjected to technical scrutiny and infrastructural redesign. The notes do not fully articulate the later forms this pressure would take, but they clearly sense that democracy is entering a different regime of vulnerability.
From the present, this intuition appears remarkably sharp. The following years would intensify concern about disinformation, platform governance, data extraction, computational propaganda, trust collapse, and the thinning of public mediation. The lesson is not that the notes foresaw every mechanism. It is that they grasped something deeper: democracy itself had become a frontier of transformation. Foresight must therefore stop treating democratic order as a stable container for change and start treating it as a changing variable in its own right.
6. From sovereignty to protocol - Global citizenship, DAOs, and post-national order
The notes repeatedly return to a post-national horizon. “Global citizenship” is coupled with “new rights,” “one currency,” and “right to live + die.” Elsewhere, blockchain is linked to DAO and P2P, while a separate note connects DAO to world governance. Even the difficult phrase “sovereign-less society” points in the same direction: the possibility that authority, coordination, and belonging may no longer be organized primarily through territorial state sovereignty.
This is one of the document’s boldest hypotheses. Blockchain is not treated here as a technical curiosity or a financial instrument. It is treated as a governance substrate. The move from blockchain to DAO suggests that distributed ledgers were already being interpreted as a possible basis for collective organization, protocol-mediated trust, and non-state institutional experimentation. Likewise, global citizenship and one currency condense the idea that legal identity and exchange might migrate beyond national containers.
What unfolded later was more uneven than the notes imply. States did not disappear, and genuinely decentralized governance remained partial, contested, or absorbed into more concentrated infrastructures. Yet the notes were not wrong about the pressure. Trust, identity, exchange, and coordination have all become more infrastructural, more transnational, and more mediated by technical systems than earlier political frameworks assumed. The language of the 2016 artifact may be unstable, but its intuition remains powerful: sovereignty would not vanish, but it would have to coexist with new protocol-like forms of organization and legitimacy.
7. The anthropological break - What will it mean to be a human being?
No phrase in the handwritten pages is more consequential than the question: “What it will be to be a human being?” That line changes the entire register of the artifact. It shows that the author was not merely interested in new systems or institutions, but in the transformation of the subject around which political and moral order has traditionally been organized. This concern is reinforced by adjacent phrases: dehumanity or dehumanization, new role for human beings, cyber eugenics, longevity, human enhancement, transformation, and right to live and die.
Taken together, these notes point toward an anthropological break. The human being is no longer assumed to be the stable measure of institutions, rights, work, and political order. Instead, it becomes a site of intervention, redesign, extension, and uncertainty. Enhancement, longevity, and cyber eugenics all imply that technical systems may not only assist human life, but sort, optimize, and redefine it. The reference to the right to live and die further expands the question into one of bodily autonomy, dignity, and the governance of life itself.
Much of this language still sounds provocative, and some of it sounds historically marked. Yet its provocation is revealing. What seemed extreme in phrasing has become normalized in substance. Debates about assisted dying, algorithmic selection, cognitive enhancement, biomedical intervention, reproductive choice, personalized health, and the governance of human capacities now occupy mainstream institutional discourse. The 2016 notes therefore deserve to be read less as rhetorical excess than as an early attempt to name a shift for which the period lacked settled vocabulary: the destabilization of the human as a fixed political and moral category.
8. The crisis of purpose - Work, income, and the new role of human beings
The notes treat basic income as a central item, but its significance is broader than policy design. It appears alongside AI, robotics, machine learning, AGI, longevity, and the question of a “new role / function / reason of being for human beings.” This conjunction is essential. The document is not merely worried about labor displacement. It is worried about the erosion of the moral and social architecture built around work.
In industrial and post-industrial societies alike, work has long functioned as more than an economic mechanism. It has anchored contribution, recognition, identity, and distribution. The July 2016 notes imply that this settlement is under stress. Basic income appears as one possible response, but the deeper issue is anthropological: what becomes of human purpose in a system where automation, augmentation, and machine intelligence challenge inherited assumptions about necessity, value, and role? Even the tentative note about a “new role for parents” suggests that the author was thinking about social reproduction and family structure, not merely employment metrics.
The years since 2016 have only intensified this question. Automation has expanded into cognitive domains, generative systems have blurred boundaries between authorship and assistance, and anxieties about redundancy, meaning, and legitimacy have widened. The most prescient aspect of the notes is that they frame these changes not simply as labor-market disruption, but as a crisis of function. That remains a crucial foresight lesson: societies do not destabilize only when jobs disappear, but when the norms that tie value, identity, and social worth to work begin to fail.
9. Demographic and civilizational balance - Religion, population, and global recomposition
One handwritten item refers to 2050 parity between Muslim and Christian populations, echoing a topic already present on the original printed chart. This may appear narrower than the document’s more sweeping reflections on governance and humanity, but it deserves attention because it shows that the author understood long-term demographic and civilizational shifts as part of the same anticipatory landscape.
This signal matters for two reasons. First, it reminds us that foresight is not only about technology or institutions. Population composition, age structures, mobility, and religious demography can reshape geopolitics, public discourse, national identities, and civilizational narratives over long horizons. Second, its presence within the same synthesis list as blockchain, AI, and basic income shows that the author did not treat demographic change as a separate “social” topic. It belonged to the same reordering of world scale.
Retrospectively, this note also demonstrates something about 2016 itself. The future being imagined was one in which cultural and demographic recomposition would interact with governance, legitimacy, and identity. That interaction remains central to contemporary political life. Even where the document does not develop the theme extensively, it correctly senses that population change is not background noise. It is one of the underlying conditions through which global transformation becomes politically charged.
10. Ecology and circularity — The quieter but necessary transition
Compared with democracy, sovereignty, and the human question, ecology is quieter in the handwritten synthesis. The relevant line is concise: circular economy → environment / climate change. Yet that brevity should not lead to dismissal. Its presence indicates that the author recognized environmental transition as structurally significant, even if it did not occupy the emotional center of the document.
This asymmetry is itself instructive. Some forces are visible in foresight, but insufficiently weighted. Climate change and ecological stress were present in 2016, but in many strategic conversations they still functioned as bounded domains rather than total conditions. The note on circular economy captures an attempt to think system redesign—production, waste, resources, adaptation—rather than isolated environmental management. Even in compressed form, it points toward a future in which ecological constraint would shape economic and institutional reorganization.
Looking back, the relative understatement of this theme reveals one of the artifact’s limits. Climate volatility, infrastructural fragility, and everyday ecological instability would become more decisive than many mid-2010s frameworks fully acknowledged. The foresight lesson is not that ecology was absent, but that recognizing a driver is not the same as grasping its regime-wide force.
11. Right pressures, unstable language - Why the labels aged faster than the drivers
One of the document’s most revealing features is the instability of its vocabulary. Phrases such as cyber eugenics, sovereign-less society, one currency, monitoring democracy, and AGI? are all striking, but they do not function equally well as durable categories. Some sound premature, some overly compressed, some melodramatic, and some simply too bound to the conceptual atmosphere of 2016. Yet this should not be mistaken for failure.
What the notes show is that foresight often senses pressure before it can name form. “Blockchain → DAO / P2P” was not wrong, but it was a provisional container for wider concerns about distributed coordination and trust. “Cyber eugenics” was a blunt term, yet it pointed toward optimization, sorting, enhancement, and selective access. “AGI?” was speculative, but it indicated awareness that machine intelligence might move beyond narrow automation toward more generalized cognitive significance. The labels wobble because the underlying transformations had not yet fully settled into recognizable institutions or public vocabularies.
This is a methodological point of real importance. Categories age faster than vectors. Foresight therefore requires a distinction between names and pressures. A weak or unstable label may still capture a durable line of transformation. Conversely, a polished buzzword may age quickly while obscuring the deeper conflict it briefly organized. The July 2016 notes are valuable precisely because they let us watch anticipation struggling for language.
12. What the 2016 artifact missed - Blind spots, absences, and historical surprise
The document is unusually rich, but it is not omniscient. Some of the most consequential features of the subsequent decade do not appear clearly enough in its frames. Pandemic-scale disruption is absent as a systemic possibility. Industrialized disinformation and platform dependency are only indirectly latent. Generative AI as a mass interface layer is not visible in its eventual social form. Supply-chain fragility, mental health as a macro-social variable, and polycrisis as a governing condition are likewise missing or underdeveloped.
These absences matter because they show where even an ambitious foresight artifact remained bounded by the concepts available to it. The notes sensed governance mutation, human redesign, and post-national pressure. They did not fully anticipate the speed with which infrastructure would become inseparable from everyday dependence, nor how overlapping crises would transform public experience of instability. In that sense, the artifact saw vectors but not always regimes.
That does not diminish its value. On the contrary, the blind spots are part of what make it useful. They demonstrate that strong foresight is not simply the accumulation of good guesses. It is also the disciplined study of conceptual limits. Revisiting what was missing helps refine present anticipation by revealing where historical imagination was still constrained by the framing habits of its moment.
13. From trend maps to tension maps - The methodological lesson
The deepest lesson of the July 2016 artifact is methodological. The movement from printed chart to handwritten synthesis shows that signal collection alone is insufficient. The real work begins when signals are translated into tensions. The notes do this repeatedly, even when they do not name the tensions explicitly. Democracy versus monitoring. Sovereignty versus distributed coordination. Enhancement versus dignity. Rights expansion versus new exclusions. Work-based value versus a new human role. National belonging versus global citizenship.
This suggests a more mature foresight method. Trend maps remain useful as starting points. They gather material, create overview, and support conversation. But they should not be treated as endpoints. A second layer is necessary, one that asks what kinds of conflicts, thresholds, and legitimacy crises the mapped signals intensify. In other words, after identifying what is emerging, practitioners should ask what governing tensions are becoming harder to stabilize.
The 2016 notes are valuable not only because of their content, but because of this movement in method. They show a practitioner instinctively shifting from topic inventory to civilizational diagnosis. That shift deserves to be formalized. The future is not remembered through trend labels alone. It is remembered through the tensions that those labels were trying, often inadequately, to name.
14. Conclusion - July 2016 as an x-ray of historical anticipation
The July 2016 artifact is not important because it predicted the present with exactness. It did not. Some of its terms were unstable, some of its priorities were uneven, and several major regime-level transformations were only partially visible or absent. Yet none of this makes the document trivial. Its value lies elsewhere. It captures a moment when the future was beginning to be understood not only as innovation, but as a reordering of democracy, sovereignty, rights, and the human condition.
That is what makes the handwritten synthesis pages so decisive. They show the anticipatory imagination moving beyond broad trend language toward something sharper and more ambitious. The author no longer seems satisfied with listing topics. The real question becomes what kind of civilizational transition these topics imply. Post-national governance, protocol-mediated coordination, anthropological uncertainty, work without inherited guarantees, and democracy under technical pressure all appear as interconnected elements of one historical shift.
Read today, the artifact functions like an x-ray of anticipation itself. It shows where 2016 sensed pressure, where it reached for unstable language, where it already understood more than its vocabulary allowed, and where it could not yet see the full shape of what was coming. That is why revisiting old foresight documents matters. Their afterlife is not retrospective embarrassment or triumph. It is methodological refinement. They teach us how futures were once imagined, and by doing so, they help improve the grammar with which we imagine them now.
Access IRES information about PIP 2016
Organiser and staff IRES (2016)
Mohammed Tawfik Mouline — Morocco; Director General of the Royal Institute for Strategic Studies
Tayeb Amegroud — Morocco; consultant in energy planning, and projects development, valuation, financing and structuring
Elmehdi Boudra — Morocco; Analyst at the Royal Institute for Strategic Studies
Issam Lotfi — Morocco; Statistical and Financial Engineer graduated from the National Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics, Statistician Analyst at the IRES
Said Moufti — Morocco; Doctor of international economic relations, Director of Research at the IRES and coordinates the Institute’s work on global competitiveness and external relations of Morocco
PIP 2016 - Participants
Rosa Alegria — Brazil; Sustainability & Foresight
Antonio Alonso-Concheiro — México; Prospective
Christopher H. Cordey — Switzerland; Anticipation, Disruption, Relevance
Jim Dator — Hawaii; Futures Studies
Fabienne Goux-Baudiment — France; Foresight, Anticipation & Innovation
Aditi Kapoor — India; Director Policy and Partnerships, Alternative Futures New Delhi
Geci Karuri-Sebina — South Africa; Urban Development, Innovation, and Foresight
Nisreen Lahham — Egypt; Foresight, Development
Victor Vahidi Motti — Iran; Foresight and Anticipation
Wendy Schultz — USA/UK; Futures Methods
Alexander Sokolov — Russia; Higher School of Economics
Dr. Liu Youfa — China; guest research fellow at Shanghai Institutes of International Studies
Amy Zalman — U.S.A.; National and Global Security, Strategy, Foresight
Call for chapters !!!!
PIP 2016 : Flash(Back, Now, Forward)
I would like to invite all colleagues who participated in PIP 2016 at IRES in Rabat to contribute their own analyses, recollections, reflections, comments, or any other form of contribution related to the outcomes of that gathering - looking back at PIP 2016 (Flashback), reflecting from the standpoint of today, 2026 (Now), and projecting forward toward 2036 (Flashforward).
A natural starting point could be the trends map developed during PIP 2016, but contributions are not limited to that. They may delve into any aspect of the process or outcomes: the discussions, methods, expectations, disagreements, insights, blind spots, later reinterpretations, or the relevance of the work today.
The goal is to bring these contributions together into a collective book, to be independently published, potentially through Lulu.
Any type of contribution is welcome. There are no restrictions.
Analytical texts, essays, memories, notes, fragments, critiques, visual material, speculative reflections, or hybrid formats are all fully acceptable.
All contributors from PIP 2016 (staff and participants) but also non participants are warmly invited to participate.