1994 Annual Conference

Toward the New Millennium: Living, Learning, and Working
Held July 24-26, 1994
Hyatt Regency Cambridge
Cambridge, Massachusetts

More than 800 participants from across the United States and dozens of other countries—including nations such as Bangladesh, Ivory Coast, and Egypt—came to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend the World Future Society's annual conference, Toward the New Millennium: Living, Learning, and Working, held from July 24-26, 1994. The conference explored a vast range of aspects of living, learning, and working in the twenty-first century.

The nearly 200 speakers at the conference had some interesting opinions on the future:

• "Creativity is the ability to look at the same information as everyone else and see something different," said Michael Michalko, author of Thinkertoys. "The mind sets we're born with are difficult to change, but when we can do this, the impossible becomes possible. Ideas come once we stop limiting ourselves."
• "The next two U.S. presidential elections will be dominated by the problems of the work force," predicted Joseph F. Coates, author of Future Work. "Downsizing was the first and only alternative that corporations looked at—not, for example, job sharing—when the corporate objective was to cut costs."
• Business is shifting to a new "microparadigm," said David Bostian, chief economist for Herzog, Heine, Geduld, Inc. "Productivity economics means using all resources—human and natural—in the most efficient way. But human capital—knowledge and motivation—is too intangible to quantify, so it is often overlooked."
• "We live in an ignorant society," said Michael Marien, editor of Future Survey. "This doesn't mean we're dummies. There are a variety of culprits, but the net result is 'nonlearning.' . . . There has been a growth of useful and not-so-useful information. Universities have become trivia factories. Will the Internet accelerate our learning of what we ought to learn or contribute to infoglut?"
• "In the past, workers climbed an internal labor market—one company in one place," said Stephen Herzenberg of the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment. Now, there is a "horizontal division of labor, where workers move in multiple markets." This is partly due to a rise in professional jobs and in technical crafts in such areas as medical labs and computer services, he explained.
• "The future may save us yet," said Benton Musslewhite, president of One World Now, an organization working to help democratize and restructure the United Nations. "I don't want to play Russian roulette with the future of my grandchildren. A solution—not the solution, but a solution—is to create a global structure to coordinate efforts and focus on global problems."
• "Zero growth is nearly impossible," said Philippe Bernard, a consultant on environmental affairs. "It's like being on a bicycle—it can only be stable if it's going forward. So we must protect the environment while going forward."
• "Economic systems around the world are being restructured. We're creating the decentralized world that futurists were talking about 20 years ago," said William E. Halal, professor of management at George Washington University.
• "All the space in geosynchronous orbit is taken up by U.S. and European satellites for 17 TV channels in Frankfurt, 74 channels in New York—but there is no room for education satellites for Ghana to stop illiteracy," said Rashmi Mayur, president of the Global Futures Network in Bombay, India.
• "Futures studies has made a big difference in my life. My thought patterns are not the same as before I engaged in this," said Joakim Andersson, one of the 32 Swedish young adults involved in Framtidsbygget, or "Building the Future," a program to create an information database on work and the future.
• Future energy decisions will be shaped by the fear that use of fossil fuels will continue and global warming will happen, said Andy Hines of Coates & Jarratt, Inc. "This means switching to nuclear power. It's not going to be fun to be an environmentalist."
• Today's educational system is "shortchanging employers," said Joyce Malyn-Smith of the Institute for Education and Employment in Newton, Massachusetts. "We're not providing workers with the skills that employers need. And we're shortchanging students by not preparing them adequately to compete for work in a global marketplace."

A complete article covering this conference is available in the November-December 1994 issue of The Futurist. To order.

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Revised: 30 July 1996