What+is+the+significance+of+the+year+2029?

America 2029 was founded in 2013, inspired by leading visionaries:
 * Thomas L. Friedman's book //The World Is Flat//, and his sequel with Michael Mandelbaum, //That Used to Be Us//, rally Americans to create their future.
 * Ray Kurzweil continues to use 2029 as a critical year for human enhancement and man-machine interfaces, based on his rigorous mathematical charts. He originally predicted that 2029 would be the year of "the singularity," when improvements in man-machine interfaces would cause all the rules that we take for granted to break down. It turns out that the singularity is not as easily projected from the math as other milestones, but the potential for the massive breaking of historical rules in 2029 is still possible.
 * Neil Howe and the late William Strauss predicted that 2029 is approximately when the Millennials will have to take dramatic action to put an end to the inevitable financial crisis that is brewing.

In addition, 2013 was exactly 16 years away from when first graders would be graduating from college and needing to face this dramatically different world.

What does it mean for accepted rules to be broken? It means massive uncertainty. Consider what's happening now with near-zero and even negative interest rates. People don't know what these ridiculous rates mean for this year let alone the distant future. What will it mean when employees are regularly laid off and need to be retrained for new careers? It's a given that jobs will increasingly be eliminated due to technology. The last several centuries are proof of this accelerating trend which now has critical mass. In the past, laid-off employees just settled for what they could until retirement. Now careers will be reinvented every decade, so employees can't just drift after a layoff. What will we do about this? We need to take action now, long before the year 2029.

At this point, many people are writing their science fiction around Ray Kurzweil's date of 2029. //Transcendence// is a purely fictionalized version of many technologies that are predicted for the next century by Ray Kurzweil and his associates, including Peter Diamandis. It's pretty scary stuff, if the sci-fi writers are even partially correct. Even the 2015 //Terminator// reboot, //Terminator Genisys//, centers around the man-machine war peaking in the year 2029. At America 2029, we appreciate all the fiction about the year 2029, including the dystopian material. In order to create a 2029 that we'll all want to live in, we have to recognize possible threats, and address them before they occur.

Like the year 2001 (popularized by //2001: A Space Odyssey//), the year 2029 serves as a symbolic representation of our future. However, the year 2029 is much more. Major scientific and economic breakthroughs are guaranteed to occur around that year. We need to shape those breakthroughs in ways that will make us all better.

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