Future Day 2014, a third annual global event, combined Google hangouts and live events, bringing together people around the world to brainstorm ways to create a radically better future.

Future Day was organized by Humanity+, an international nonprofit membership organization that advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities, and The Millennium Project — an independent non-profit global participatory futures research think tank, and its 50-plus Nodes around the world, with participation by four other futurist organizations.

“Future Day aims to create the context in which our intended futures can thrive — while avoiding stumbling into default unintentional futures,” said Future Day director Adam A. Ford.

“This was a demonstration that a ’round the world’ conversation among a variety of futurists was possible,’ said Millennium Project CEO Jerome Glenn. “A beachhead has been established for global participatory conversations about how to build a better future.”

The events were well attended. The Future Day Conference in Peru of the Millennium Project Node in Peru had 250 participants. Future Day Melbourne had 60, and covered issues such as the risk of extinction and whole-brain emulation and addressed questions such as: What can we expect from stem cell technology in the near future? How accurate can futurologists be? Is reverse engineering the brain within reach?

Starting at noon March 1 in New Zealand, the Google video hangouts stepped across the planet one time zone at a time, ending up in Hawaii at midnight.

The wide-ranging conversations at Future Day hangouts and events worldwide also addressed ways to manage complexity, using collective intelligence to allow smart cities to anticipate and manage such complexity, a shift of global attitudes about what is important about the future, new concepts of employment to prevent increasing unemployment from accelerating AI technology knocking out call centers and driverless cars reducing the number of truck and taxi drivers, self-organization on the Internet to reduce dependence on ill- informed politicians, and how virtual currencies could work without supporting organized crime.

The India Future Society presented the International Future Day Conference Google hangout, with speakers including bioethicist James Hughes (Citizen Cyborg), novelist Clyde DeSouza (Memories with Maya), Singapore futurist Harish Shah, International Longevity Alliance co-founder Ilia Stambler, and India Future Society founder and president Avanash Kumar Singh.

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What’s the future of Future Day? Tune in tomorrow. ..