Early warning system

An early warning system collects information, analyses its threat potential and opportunities to reduce negative impacts. Today, civilization is said to be moving into uncharted waters ranging from global financial crises and climate change to artificial biology and nanotechnology; hence, more information is needed than ever to identify change and assess implications. Since plans are based on forecasts and forecasts are based on assumptions about the future, scanning the horizon is always prudent to identify new developments that can challenge past assumptions or provide new perspectives on future threats or opportunities. Environmental scanning systems provide early warning about important changes and detect "weak signals" that indicate plans should be amended. “Environmental scanning” is the term most futurists used in the 1960-1970s, but as the environmental movement grew, some thought the term might only refer to systems to monitor changes in the natural environment due to human actions. To avoid this confusion, some have called them “Futures Scanning Systems”, “Early Warning Systems” and “Futures Intelligence Systems.” Increasingly the output of such systems is being called “Collective Intelligence.” MIT created a Center for Collective Intelligence in 2007. Jerome C. Glenn defines collective intelligence as “an emergent property from synergies among data/info/knowledge, software/hardware, and human minds (experts) that continually learns from feedback to produce ‘just in time knowledge’ for better decisions than these elements acting alone.” Facilitating this emergent property should be the purpose of environmental scanning for early warning systems.