A New Generation of Business Leaders

Students are increasingly blending social awareness and social entrepreneurship.

Business schools may attract more students if they offer more courses on corporate responsibility and environmentally friendly business practices.

More than 80% of undergraduate students surveyed jointly by nonprofits Net Impact and the Aspen Institute said that they want more sustainability and corporate responsibility material in their curricula. Only 23% said they were satisfied with the quantity of material that their schools currently offer.

“Students in college today are pretty aware of environmental issues in a way that my generation was not,” says Amanda Nicholson, an assistant professor of retail management at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management. “They grew up with recycling bins outside their dorm rooms. They’re already believers.”

Nicholson led a group of students in a Converting Organic Waste project. The students built a septic system that breaks down food waste from the dining hall into biogas and fertilizer; the biogas powers the tank system, and the fertilizer can be bagged and sold commercially.

Not only does the project benefit the environment, according to Nicholson, but it also makes great business sense in that it cuts costs while also making marketable products.

The Whitman School offers a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Sustainable Enterprise, which students earn by completing five courses in the challenges facing businesses that strive to practice social and environmental responsibility.

The school also partners with the State University of New York to teach a course called “Managing Sustainability,” which explores sustainable enterprise. Syracuse and SUNY faculty jointly teach it, and students from schools in both universities enroll in it.

“Ethics and environmental sustainability — those two things seem to come up in every class now across the board,” Nicholson says.

Whitman law and public policy professor Eletta Callahan sees the trend echoing in college campus administrations. Colleges are measuring their own carbon footprints, for example, and reducing their buildings’ emissions.

“Attention to sustainability has become an expectation in colleges,” says Callahan.

However, college curricula have been slower to adopt the sustainability ethos, as course material is much harder to change than campus administrative policies. But if student populations have their way, course content, too, may change over time, Callahan concludes. — Rick Docksai

Sources: Amanda Nicholson and Eletta Callahan, Syracuse University, www.syr.edu.

Net Impact, www.netimpact.org.

Latinos Online

In an increasingly wired United States, only slightly more than half of Latinos were using online media until the last few years. Many of those offline were recent arrivals in the country, lacking the resources — including education, language skills, and income — needed to join the digital community.

However, in a very short amount of time, Internet use among Latinos in the United States has rapidly grown. The Pew Hispanic Center reports that, between 2006 and 2008, the number of Latino adults going online increased from 54% to 64%. Latinos are now slightly more wired than African Americans, according to the Pew Center study.

What’s more, the study shows evidence that the increase in overall Internet usage among Latinos is largely due to those with less education, less income, and less English language proficiency. These groups grew a great deal percentage-wise, due in no small part to the fact that they had the most room for improvement. College-educated Latinos, for example, are already going online in droves, so there’s not as much margin for growth.

U.S. born, English-speaking Latinos are accessing the Internet much more than foreign-born Latinos in the United States, indicating that language continues to be a barrier preventing individuals from taking advantage of new technology. And those with higher incomes and higher levels of education were the most likely to have broadband connections at home. Notably, the digital divide continues to separate young and old: More than three quarters of adults under 35 are wired, as opposed to about one quarter of the over-65 set.

The surveys were conducted via telephone by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Pew Internet & American Life Project in 2006 and 2008. Only those with landlines were contacted — no cell phone numbers were dialed — which, the study’s authors point out, allows for a certain margin for error.

More and more individuals in the United States are relying exclusively on cell phone use, and the study’s authors note those who only use cell phones are likely to be a little more tech-savvy than those who can still be contacted over landlines. Their research shows that the percentage of cell phone-only Latino households was 25% in 2008, up from 15% in 2006. Therefore, it’s likely that the study’s results may slightly underestimate the total percentage of online Latinos. — Aaron M. Cohen

Source: Pew Hispanic Center, www.pewhispanic.org.

A Software Business Model That Turns Users into Partners

A new start-up has built “economic self-empowerment” for its users into the core of its mission.
By Jason P. Clark

I believe it’s safe to say that the next 10 years will give rise to some of the greatest advances in technology we have ever seen. We have witnessed a steady climb to a new level of collective consciousness and distributive intelligence through increasing Internet use. Today, social media sites such as Facebook, Reddit, and many others each possesses its own unique hive mind, wherein knowledge and life experiences are shared across the planet at the speed of light.

Yet, there is a major drawback to this fantastic future. As we progress, we simultaneously create a great divide that leaves behind those who do not have the means to participate in the global hive. These individuals are separated by economic challenges and thus are limited to this collective information. There is a chasm between those who have access to the Internet and those who do not.

Most of us take for granted our privileged exposure to technology and do not think about how this exposure creates opportunities for us later in life. Over the next 10 years, some aspects of this problem will be resolved by cheaper access to computing and the Internet. Case in point: The Federal Communications Commission has submitted its National Broadband Plan for the next decade and proposes that every American should have affordable access to “robust broadband services.” That means at least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to speeds of at least 100 megabits per second (Mbps) for downloading and 50 Mbps for uploading.

By 2020, access to the Internet will no longer be an issue for most who desire it. Computers will be handed out as readily as textbooks in schools and communities. Yet, simply having access to these tools does not instantly solve the problem of a knowledge divide. So long as a paradigm exists by which corporations profit by directly charging the end user for their services, there will be so-called “haves” and “have-nots” of the Internet.

Turning Have-Nots into Partners

One way in which we at Syntiant, the company at which I serve as chief technical officer, are working to actively shift this paradigm is by incorporating philanthropy — or, more specifically, “economic self-empowerment” — into the core of our business model. Empowering people to help themselves through knowledge and a marketplace for knowledge fosters loyalty, spurs creativity, and creates a potential revenue stream in the process. This approach weds individuals’ ideals with their financial interests and shatters the attitude that an organization can’t be philanthropic and make money at the same time.

One of Syntiant’s goals is to facilitate education and social interaction, while providing the requisite equipment and connectivity to those who need it most. Syntiant’s goal is to introduce a new profit paradigm for a global social media company. Here’s how it works: Instead of charging users for the use of our basic services, we will offer free access in exchange for a small computational contribution. In essence, Syntiant will request four to five hours per day of an end-user’s unused computing time, a tit-for-tat trade in which everyone benefits.

Syntiant will use the millions of combined hours of excess computing power to create a Global Exaflop Supercomputing Cloud (GESC), the fastest and most distributed system of its kind. Instead of feeding from our users’ pockets, we receive their donations of unused clock cycles, thus turning users into contributors. By utilizing a distributed computing network already in existence, we eliminate the need for the costly overhead associated with deploying and managing our own computing infrastructure. Syntiant will also offer an app-store model for user-based transactions within our operating environments.

We are working on a wholly new way of delivering social networks — evaluating them as a microcosm of the Internet itself and using already proven models of browsing and searching to improve content and advertising delivery in a way that is tailored to each and every individual user.

The year 2020 should see many variations of this distributed, consumer powered — but not consumer-based — revenue model. The companies of tomorrow that embrace this philosophy will stand a much better chance at prosperity long after organizations adhering to the traditional model have run aground.

It is difficult to visualize and prepare for a coming phase change before the event, when it seems as if chaos and entropy are increasing boundlessly. Consequently, when we originally shared our comprehensive vision with potential investors and other stakeholders, we were told that our ideas are scattered, unfocused, and without direction. Yet it is precisely this model of scattered, distributed components working together as a global information system that creates value in the Syntiant network.

We are committed to overcoming the challenge of limited information access and striving to bridge the gap by creating a global, user-built community. We believe the tipping point is soon upon us for a more consumer-driven, user-focused world in social networks.

About the Author

Jason P. Clark is a serial entrepreneur in the field of network infrastructures, multimedia, and virtual-reality content. He’s the creator of three international patents for uni-directional audio navigation, which were later purchased by Hewlett-Packard. At age 32, he’s developed and acquired funding for more than five start-up companies. He’s currently chief technical officer for Syntiant, www.syntiant.com/.

The author acknowledges Brad Thompson, CEO of Altruent, and Elliot Kulakow, partner/VP Technology R&D at Syntiant, as contributors to this article. Without their distributive intelligence and vision, this article would not have been possible.

Books in Brief: July-August 2010

Edited by Rick Docksai
The Economics of Integrity: From Dairy Farmers to Toyota, How Wealth Is Built on Trust and What That Means for Our Future by Anna Bernasek. Harper. 2010. 193 pages. $19.99.

The businessman who says he created his wealth all by himself is mistaken, states financial reporter Anna Bernasek in The Economics of Integrity. She points out that any successful enterprise is the result of a number of people lending their cooperation and their time. For all these people to cooperate effectively, they must first be able to trust each other.

Bernasek affirms the fundamental role that relationships of trust play in national and global commerce. There is actually far more integrity in the world of finance than some people might assume, she says. Integrity is what makes the economy go. Without it, a future of economic prosperity will not be possible.

Bernasek cites the successes that some major businesses attained by being trustworthy, and the comparatively greater wealth that some nations attain by enforcing transparency and integrity among their national businesses. Then she describes the benefits a new business can enjoy if it counts integrity and trustworthiness among its paramount values.

The Economics of Integrity makes a sound case for moral behavior and a clear link between doing the right thing today and achieving a better future tomorrow. Entrepreneurs and students who might one day be entrepreneurs will both find it to be inspirational reading.

Global Sources of Local Pollution: An Assessment of Long-Range Transport of Key Air Pollutants to and from the United States by the National Research Council. National Academies Press. 2010. 234 pages. Paperback. $35.

The pollution that a factory emits on one continent today will impact the health of a neighborhood on another continent next week, warns the National Research Council in Global Sources of Local Pollution.

Global wind and water currents have the potential to carry smog, soot, pesticide residues, and other toxins from region to region. Within one week, they can cross an ocean. A year is all the time needed for them to completely circumnavigate the globe. Consequently, any one locale’s ecological problems are likely to become the world’s ecological problems.

The authors identify four main types of pollutants — ozone, particulate matter, mercury, and organic pollutants — the long-term health risks each one presents, and specific actions that the global community can take now to mitigate them.

With thorough research and analysis, Global Sources of Local Pollution affirms the interconnectedness of our world and the ties that bind every community within it, and points out scientifically sound ways forward toward a healthy future for all.

Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making by Gary Klein. MIT Press. 2009. 337 pages. $27.95.

Decision makers sometimes put their faith in logic and data when intuitive thinking would really be the better guide, says scientist Gary Klein in Streetlights and Shadows.

He notes that most adults assume that the way to plan for the future is to gather copious information about the matter at hand and carefully consider the available options. This may be true only in situations that are well-ordered and predictable. But real life is often complex, random, and prone to dramatic changes in short spans of time.

We often are pressed to make decisions without having all the information at hand, or where change is taking place rapidly and unpredictably. Trying to analyze the environment and predict what will happen next could be futile, and maybe even counterproductive.

Klein urges decision makers to alter their planning methods when they are faced with unexpected events. This means revising a lot of deeply ingrained beliefs: accepting that biases aren’t always bad, logic does not always help, gathering more information can confuse instead of clarify, and generating multiple options might do more harm than good. There are times to conduct analysis, Klein says, and there are times to let experience and intuition pinpoint the answers.

Streetlights and Shadows is a sharp assessment of planning methods and their relative strengths and weaknesses. Consultants and organization leaders may find it an insightful read.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Broadway. 2010. 305 pages. $26.

How, exactly, do you motivate people to change their behaviors? According to Chip Heath and Dan Heath in Switch, it boils down to a three-part process: reaching people’s rational minds, appealing to their emotions, and then shaping the environment to make it more conducive to change.

The authors lay out their own insights about the change process and how successful change comes about. They demonstrate their findings by presenting case-by-case examples from real life. Among the many anecdotes that they share:

• Steve Booth-Butterfield and Bill Reger, two West Virginia University health researchers, persuaded the residents of two West Virginia towns to drink more low-fat milk and less whole milk via promotional ads that contrasted unsightly images of blobs of saturated fat (which an individual ingests when he or she drinks whole milk) with appealing images of glasses of low-fat milk. After six months, sales of low-fat milk nearly doubled.

• Donald Berwick, a doctor and president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, spearheaded life-saving procedural changes within Institute-affiliated hospitals. The hospital administrators were reluctant to adopt many of them, but he won them over by setting forth specific goals and the interventions that could help achieve them. He then launched a campaign of procedural change that hospitals would join if they wanted to participate. For added effect, he brought the mother of a girl who had been killed by medical error on stage to deliver a keynote speech. Joining the campaign was easy, and every hospital that did would receive a team of researchers that would help guide it through the changes. Within the first two months, more than a thousand hospitals joined.

• Jerry Sternin, a Save the Children administrator, received an invitation from the Vietnamese government to come to the country and reduce rural malnutrition. He traveled to a rural village and sought out “bright spot” households in which children were healthier and better-nourished than their peers. Then he interviewed the bright-spot parents to find out what they were doing differently. He brought them together with other parents in cooking groups that would meet regularly to prepare well-balanced meals. Six months later, 65% of the children in the village were eating better.

Switch offers many insights about human behavior and psychology that marketing professionals, communications experts, and public-policy makers might all appreciate.

Toward Human Emergence: A Human Resource Philosophy for the Future by Philip Harris. HRD Press. 2010. 452 pages. $59.95.

The human species is transitioning toward a new, higher state of being, asserts management and space psychologist Philip Harris. The exponential acceleration of knowledge is transforming civilization itself. As the twenty-first century progresses, humans will have a series of opportunities to develop their potential.

The challenge will be for all people to widen their perspectives and be mindful of humanity’s long-term evolution. People can move beyond self-destructive and exploitative behaviors, and embrace cooperation and compassion for those less fortunate. But it will take a concerted effort. We must all personally strive to be “world shapers” rather than “earth squatters.” Harris lays out specific courses of action for both policy makers and private citizens to take.

Harris’s Toward Human Emergence is an introspective and inspirational discussion of human life. Philosophers, public officials, and the general public will all find it to be a worthy read.

2048: Humanity’s Agreement to Live Together by J. Kirk Boyd. Berrett-Koehler. 2010. 221 pages. Paperback. $15.95.

Since World War II, world leaders have initiated serious discussions about how to turn from a past of worldwide warfare and poverty to a future of global peace and prosperity for all, notes Kirk Boyd, executive director of the nonprofit 2048 Project. He argues that the goal is achievable, though it will require a written agreement for peaceable coexistence that is ratified by all countries and enforceable in all of the world’s courts.

He explains how the agreement might come to fruition by 2048: It will build off the successes of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it will follow two prior steps: education of all the world’s citizens on human rights, and then bringing the world’s leaders together to draft an international accord.

Many skeptics believe that war and poverty are inevitable and will always be realities of human life, Boyd notes. But he challenges that supposition throughout 2048 with hope for a better future and an action plan to bring it about. His book offers a lofty, but inspiring, set of goals.

The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World by William Sims Bainbridge. MIT Press. 2009. 248 pages. $27.95.

Imagine a video game bursting out of the screen and merging with the real world around you. You may experience precisely that if a prototype augmented-reality game system called LARP (live-action role-playing games) becomes fully developed, according to William Sims Bainbridge in The Warcraft Civilization.

A LARP’s playing field, Bainbridge says, would be an open-air city or park. Your view would be altered by game-generated holographs of heroes, villains, and action sequences. Gamers who now play World of Warcraft on computer screens might gather in a theme park and face off against each other in real time, disguised as warlocks, elves, orcs, and other characters.

Education might get enhancements, too. Tourists who visit Washington, D.C., and listen to a guide discuss the capital’s role in World War II might relive the era by pretending to be OSS agents or Nazi spies.

Even without LARP, however, World of Warcraft is very much present in the real world and may become more so, Bainbridge adds. In May 2008, scientists held an academic convention as avatars in the World of Warcraft domain. Also, many sociologists are experimenting with the game because of its parallels with real life. Tribes of beings interact with each other and sometimes clash. And there are functioning economic systems, complete with “black-market” transactions.

In The Warcraft Civilization, Bainbridge explores the social trend of role-playing games and their significance for contemporary culture in the years ahead. Gamers and sociologists will both find his observations informative.

Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century by Paul Milo. Harper. 2010. 288 pages. Paperback. $14.99.

Renowned twentieth-century experts made many educated guesses about what life in the early twenty-first century would be like, and many of those guesses turned out to be spectacularly wrong, notes freelance journalist Paul Milo in Your Flying Car Awaits. We’re now 10 years into the new century and have as of yet no bases on the moon, computers that think, flying cars, or any of the other marvels that scholars only three decades ago expected that we would have.

Milo reviews the leading forecasts across the twentieth century and infers what they say about their respective times — optimistic eras bred optimistic forecasts, while recession eras bore gloomy forecasts, for example. He also identifies lessons that forecasters today stand to learn from these erroneous forecasts. Forecasting is always a risky endeavor, he says. But if we determine how scholars in the past erred, we can alter our approaches to forecasting accordingly and guess the future with greater accuracy.

Your Flying Car Awaits is a light and conversational overview of forecasting through the decades, as well as a sharp evaluation of the limits to our abilities as humans to guess the future. Students of cultural history will appreciate it, as will any readers who want an approachable yet informative discussion about the discipline of making forecasts.

Future Scope: July-August 2010

MEDICINE

Rx: New Medical Specialties

Tomorrow’s doctors will practice more-personalized medicine, not because they’ll be friendlier, but because they’ll have access to more-detailed genetic information about their patients. Such changes will affect how medicine is taught.

“A curriculum in genetics is so important to the future of medicine,” says Aaron Michelfelder, associate professor of family medicine at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. Loyola’s genetics course used to be completed in the first year of medical school, but now it has been expanded and incorporated into the entire four-year curriculum.

Another major change Michelfelder foresees is more specialties and sub-specialties to handle new and emerging medical technologies and innovations.

Source: Loyola Medicine, www.loyolamedicine.org.

HABITATS

Design Out Unwanted Noise

Architects may soon be able to design more conversation-friendly rooms by mapping “hot spots” for potential noise.

Sound-mapping software developed by engineers at Cardiff University in Wales shows where conversations would be unintelligible if a room were busy. The architect could then alter room shapes and materials to cancel out noise that would make conversation difficult.

Acoustic engineering is already well developed for theaters and concert halls, but more attention is needed for acoustic design of indoor meeting spaces, notes research project leader John Culling, a professor at Cardiff’s School of Psychology. The new software could be used where large numbers of people gather to interact, such as open-plan offices, cafés, and reception halls.

Source: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, www.epsrc.ac.uk.

HEALTH

Gluten Intolerance on the Rise

Population aging may be behind a recent upsurge in gluten intolerance in Finland, report nutrition researchers at the Academy of Finland. Sufferers of the digestive disorder have increased from 1% of adult Finns in the early 1980s to 2% by the 2000s. Among the elderly, the rate is 2.7%.

Intolerance to gluten — a blend of proteins found mainly in wheat — is difficult to catch early, as patients may be symptom-free until later stages, when the condition can be identified from tissue samples. The principal symptom may be anemia due to iron deficiency or folic acid deficiency.

Researchers are seeking new and better markers for gluten intolerance that will allow easier diagnosis without need for endoscopy. Patients also hope for an “anti-gluten” pill with enzymes that break down gluten — a treatment that may prove feasible in the future, the researchers believe.

Source: Academy of Finland, www.aka.fi.

LIFESTYLES

Cheaper Fashions Change Faster

Fashions are changing faster than ever because clothing is becoming relatively cheaper. In fact, twenty-first-century clothes are 70% cheaper than the mod outfits of the Sixties, reports University of Kent sociologist Julia Twigg.

One outcome of this trend is that fashion is, well, fashionable for a wider age group, as new markets extend to the very old and very young. Women over age 75 are shopping for clothes more frequently now than they did as youths in the Sixties — and far more than their elders did at the time..

Despite a reputation for nonconformity, aging baby boomers are adopting the latest mainstream fashion trends, Twigg notes. Boomer women are neither accepting the “frumpy” look of previous generations of middle-agers nor making their own fashion statements, as they have throughout their lives.

“Although the baby boomers are indeed increasingly engaged with fashion in the twenty-first century, it’s a myth that they are different,” says Twigg. “It is just that they are responding to the mood of the times — like everyone else.”;

Source: University of Kent, www.kent.ac.uk.

WORDBUZZ

Unconsumption

More people are becoming conscious consumers or even unconsumers, reports social entrepreneur Halle Tecco in the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog (April 7). She credits the convergence of recession-driven frugality and the green movement for the rise of this trend.

“Unconsumption describes the now savvy and respectable trend of reducing, reusing, and recycling,” writes Tecco.

Source: Stanford Social Innovation Review, www.ssireview.org.

Life Among the Clones

How to Defeat Your Own Clone: And Other Tips for Surviving the Biotech Revolution by Kyle Kurpinski and Terry Johnson. Bantam. 2010. 180 pages. Paperback. $14.

Genetic manipulation and human cloning are possible, write bioengineers Kyle Kurpinski and Terry Johnson in How to Defeat Your Own Clone. They point out that medicine is gaining the abilities to alter genes, delete them, or copy them in their entirety, and speculate on where the innovations might lead.

Mass production of clones might lead to a nightmare world of viral warfare, clone rebellions, and super-intelligent clones that take over the workforce and drive non-clones into unemployment. Scenario: A government-funded battalion of Chuck Norris clones imposes a rough Norris Law everywhere and forces all television stations to play reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger around the clock. An army of Bruce Lee clones rises up to resist them, and the biggest kung fu battle in world history ensues, at the end of which society lies in ruins.

Alternatively, genetic manipulations might lead to a better world in which doctors undo any physical injury or ailment via on-demand generation of any human body part. Children everywhere are born immune to HIV and diabetes, and they are smarter and stronger than ever before. Medicine treats every major disease and anticipates every newly emerging one.

The authors detail what clones are, what they are not, and how we might expect clones to behave. They also delve into the potential family and social dynamics you would likely encounter after cloning yourself. Your clone could be your best friend — or a dangerous enemy. The authors argue that you should think now about what you might do if you do get cloned.

Kurpinski and Johnson lay out in precise detail what it would take to clone a human being and why present technology cannot yet achieve it. They also explore the role that stem cells might play in finally making cloning a reality. Since stem cells can transform into any cell in the body, researchers might use one to generate a complete human being. All they’d be doing is replicating the process of human reproduction.

“Complex organisms don’t exist as a single cell, but they all start as one — a very special one — and this phenomenon is what will allow us to replicate the development of a specific individual,” write Kurpinski and Johnson.

Real clones will be very different from the clones in science-fiction movies and television shows. Your clone will not necessarily have your personality, likes, and dislikes, for example. An individual’s thoughts and memories come from life experience and do not get carried over in genetic codes.

“Popular culture has been misrepresenting clones since the term was applied to Homo sapiens,” write Kurpinski and Johnson. “If you want to make the most of the biotech revolution, you’re going to have to unlearn the most egregious of culture’s misapprehensions.”

Among the things that biotechnology can do is genetically engineer lab mice to run faster and farther than average mice, and to not accrue body fat at the same rates.

These same enhancements might enable humans to change their genomes to be stronger and less prone to obesity. Extended life spans, faster recovery times from injuries, and immunity to diseases and addictions will all be feasible. Individuals might change their appearance, raise their intelligence to unnaturally high levels, or program themselves to thrive on three or four hours of sleep a night.

“Whether you want to be smarter, prettier, or genetically battle-ready, your body will be yours to enhance — and so will your clone’s,” write Kurpinski and Johnson.

But are all of these enhancements things that we would want to see? The authors stay relatively mum on this question.

Having new powers to change the human body carries deep ethical dilemmas. Individuals who use medical treatments to boost their strength and intelligence might become a new ruling elite, for example. And a society of people who only sleep four hours a night sounds like a society of workaholics. Kurpinski and Johnson thoroughly relate the mechanics of what we could develop, but they say little on whether we should develop it.

Nevertheless, How to Defeat Your Own Clone is a lighthearted, erudite look at the many directions that biomedicine could lead society.

About the Reviewer

Rick Docksai is a staff editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review.

Sustainable Urban Mobility in 2020

To make the car of the future, we need to make the city of the future, says MIT designer Ryan Chin.

How can you design a city by designing a car? Today’s automobiles are driven by an increasing number of users who live in cities. The United Nations reported in 2007 that migration patterns and population growth have created an equal split between inhabitants of cities and rural areas for the first time in human history. This general trend will continue for the next several decades and will produce a very urbanized world.

In 1950, New York City was the only megacity on the planet, with 10 million occupants. Today, there are 25 megacities that are mostly in developing countries. To verify this trend, we need only to look at the rapid urbanization in China to see the mass migration of the rural poor to urban areas for economic opportunity. Population experts project that most of the urban growth will occur in Asia and Africa for the next several decades. Simultaneously, humanity’s thirst for personal mobility will continue to grow. History shows that, as countries develop economically, so does their use of four-wheeled motorized transportation.

The world’s automobile fleet is currently estimated at 800 million cars that serve the 7.8 billion people living on Planet Earth. In the developed world, roughly seven out of 10 people own a car, whereas in the developing world, it’s two out of 10. The continued economic development of Brazil, Russia, India, and China will fuel the growth of this fleet to more than 1 billion cars by 2020. The continued use of this personal transportation model is simply unsustainable given the combination of energy inefficiency, environmental consequences of fossil-fuel usage, potential disruptions to fuel supplies, urban sprawl created by automobile reliance, and congestion caused by inadequate alternative modes of transport. What we need is to radically rethink the problem by examining not only the automobile itself, but also how it is used in cities (where most of us are currently living).

Size and Weight

2010: Today’s automobiles weigh an average of nearly 4,000 lb, approximately 20 times the weight of the driver. Today’s automobiles also have a footprint of approximately 100 square feet, which is nearly 15 times the amount of space required for a comfortable office chair. But the size requirements don’t stop at the footprint of the vehicle, if we consider the space that cars occupy on the road, in parking at home, work, and other destinations; add to that the space for maintenance and repair and it quickly grows to approximately 1,200 sq. ft. per vehicle. In midtown Manhattan, a 1,200 sq. ft. condominium would cost you upwards of $2 million to own.

2020: Tomorrow’s automobiles will be more lightweight and smaller. Size, weight, and energy efficiency are three factors that intimately interconnect in the design and engineering of automobiles. The lighter the vehicle, the more energy efficient it will be to move the mass of the car. The smaller the vehicle, the less mass you have. This set of relations forms a set of positive and negative feedback loops that ultimately affect the design of the vehicle. It will be imperative to incorporate technological improvements in lightweight materials, and composites will certainly help to make vehicles leaner, but this is not enough. Vehicles must also become more compact. These changes will not only improve energy efficiency, but also the vehicles’ overall footprint.

Range and Speed

2010: Today’s automobiles have a fuel range of about 300 miles (meaning they can travel 300 miles or so on one tank) can go from 0 to 60 mph in less than 10 seconds, and top out at more than 110 mph. This is great for intercity travel, but most Americans don’t travel that far. More than 80% of daily commutes in America are less than 40 miles (round trip). With more than 81% of Americans living in metropolitan areas, you simply don’t need to go 100 miles an hour down a city street. If you travel to Shanghai today, the average speed in the city is 9 mph. Bangalore, India, has achieved 24-hour congestion. Today’s vehicle is simply over-engineered for most practical purposes in cities.

2020: Tomorrow’s automobiles will not need that much refueling autonomy. BMW recently finished a series of user experiments to examine “range anxiety” — the fear of running out of electricity in electric cars — and discovered that their new electric mini (with 100 miles of range) has two to three times the range required for practically all trips. Users don’t need to have five to six times the range, and they quickly learned to adapt to the constraints (and benefits) of this new vehicle type. The introduction of electric charging infrastructure in the upcoming decade will virtually eliminate range issues in urban areas. Cities like San Francisco, Portland, Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona all have initiatives to bring a network of charging stations in their respective metropolitan areas. Car makers are introducing plug-in options for many models that enable the electrical charging from a common 110V household outlet.

Gasoline versus Electric

2010: Today’s vehicles are predominantly powered by petroleum-based fuels. An internal combustion engine is terribly inefficient (approximately 15%) in converting chemical energy into mechanical work to drive the wheels of your car. Hybrid vehicles are better at conserving energy at the cost of a more complex powertrain, but projections for the next five years call for less than 12% of the total new car market. The remaining alternative fuels, like compressed natural gas, hydrogen, compressed air, and biofuels, have varying levels of efficiency, but are utilized in even fewer numbers than hybrids. Battery electric vehicles utilize electric motors that are more than 90% energy efficient, but these have not taken over mainstream markets because of limitations of battery technology.

2020: Tomorrow’s automobiles will be increasingly electrified. The emergence of new battery chemistries such as lithium ion nanophosphate have allowed battery manufacturers to produce cells that have higher energy density and lower internal resistance, thus allowing rapid charging in less than 30 minutes. In fact, my colleagues at the MIT Electric Vehicle Team have been able to rapid-charge these new cells in less than 7 minutes with just a 10% degradation in capacity after 1,500 cycles. For comparison, lithium ion cells in your laptop today have roughly 1,000 cycles of usable life. The ability to rapid-charge will enable users to top-off their batteries in about the time it will take to order and drink an espresso, thus opening up new opportunities to create a ubiquitous charging network distributed throughout cities. No longer do we need to charge only at home or the workplace where our cars sit waiting for six to 10 hours.

Driver-Controlled versus Autonomous Driving

2010: Today’s cars are driven by human operators. Drivers have a number of telematic devices that aid in driving, such as antilock brakes for safe stopping, adaptive cruise control for the highway, parking sensors to help avoid scratches to the bumpers, and GPS for navigating unfamiliar places. However, we still have more than 50,000 deaths a year in the United States under the current driving paradigm. Today’s drivers sit in traffic for more than 50 hours a year and endure the stop-and-go driving experience.

2020: Tomorrow’s cars will be increasingly autonomous. The annual DARPA Urban Challenge has consistently proven to be a tremendously useful catalyst for innovations in autonomous driving. The most recent challenge shows that autonomously driven vehicles can navigate in busy city streets without incident. The potential of autonomous vehicles to self-drive and coordinate with other autonomous vehicles is to smooth traffic flows. In urban environments, top speed is not necessary; it is the orchestrated movement of vehicles within a speed regime that will improve congestion. The introduction of semi-autonomous systems such as self-parking and automated highway systems has provided useful lessons in the benefits and challenges of autonomous driving. Continued federally funded research in this area, combined with improvements in computational power, will enable the miniaturization of autonomous technologies, thus making autonomous driving commercially viable for mass markets in the coming decade.

Private versus Shared Ownership

2010: Today’s automobiles are designed for private ownership. The burden of ownership includes the cost of the vehicle, depreciation, tires, licensure, taxes, registration, insurance, maintenance, fuel, and parking. These individual direct costs are compounded by what economists call “negative externalities,” which include congestion and pollution leading to global warming — that is, costs to society not immediately felt by the individual user. Privately owned commuter vehicles that may drive two hours a day (round trip) will sit doing nothing useful for 92% of the day. During this state, the car takes up valuable real estate and doesn’t move people around. Single passenger occupancy also doesn’t help in this situation; if I stand on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I could wait up to 20 minutes before seeing a vehicle with two occupants. In that same city, approximately one-third of the land area is devoted to the servicing of automobiles (this includes roads and parking for cars) that are principally used by private individuals. This is not an atypical land-use percentage devoted to the automobile throughout the United States.

2020: Tomorrow’s automobiles will be increasingly utilized in cooperative or shared-use models. The emergence of car-sharing and bike-sharing schemes in urban areas in both the United States and Europe have established alternative models and markets for fractional or on-demand mobility. Zipcar, the world’s largest car-share program, has grown from just a handful of cars to a fleet of 6,000 cars and 275,000 drivers in 49 cities in just under 10 years. It’s very difficult to own one-quarter or one-tenth of a car with traditional ownership, and let’s not even talk about fractional insurance. Shared ownership provides users fractional ownership that allows them access to any vehicle in the fleet whenever they please and for as long as they need, just like video on demand or print on demand.

Radical Rethinking Required

Since 2003, the Smart Cities group at the MIT Media Lab has developed solutions to directly tackle these problems. We have designed an electric two-passenger vehicle called the CityCar, which utilizes in-wheel electric motors called Wheel Robots that have incorporated drive, suspension, and braking directly inside the wheel. Each wheel is independently controlled with by-wire controls (no mechanical linkages) and is capable of 120 degrees of steering, which provides very high maneuverability. The CityCar can turn on its own axis (zero turn radius) and can make sideways turns by turning the wheels perpendicular to the primary driving axis.

The Wheel Robots eliminate the need for traditional components like drivelines, transmissions, and gearboxes. We have taken advantage of this freedom by rethinking the architecture of the vehicle. Since there is no driveline, we can make the vehicle very compact by folding the chassis. The CityCar can fold up to half its length to just under the width of a traditional parking space. The CityCar, when folded, is less than 60 inches in length and 100 inches when unfolded (comparable to the Smart Car). Three CityCars when parked can fit into one traditional parking space. It weighs just 1,000 lb, thus making it very lightweight and energy efficient, and the new architecture allows us to rethink entry and exit. We have designed a front ingress solution that easily allows the driver and passenger to safely exit the vehicle onto the curb rather than the street. The folding mechanism complements this feature by articulating the seats so that the user can ergonomically and elegantly exit at an elevated position. CityCars are designed to park nose-in to the curb, which allows the users to use the sidewalk rather than the street. Finally, the in-wheel motors will provide plenty of low-end torque, thus making the CityCar fun to drive in urban areas.

Simply redesigning the vehicle is only one part of the solution. We have also created a new use model, called “Mobility on Demand”(MoD), which utilizes a fleet of lightweight electric vehicles (LEVs) that are distributed at electric charging stations throughout a metropolitan area. The LEVs are designed for shared use, which enable high utilization rates for the vehicles and the parking spaces they occupy. The use model mimics the bike sharing systems made popular in Europe, whereby users simply walk up to the closest charging station, swipe a credit card, pick up a vehicle, drive to the station closest to their destination, and drop off the vehicle.

Our group has designed our CityCar to fit into these MoD systems, thus creating a complementary network that can solve what transportation planners call the “First Mile Last Mile” problem of public transit — that is, how to bridge the distance between your real origin (i.e., your home) to the transit station and from the transit station to your real final destination (i.e., your workplace). Often these distances are too long to walk, thus encouraging private automobile use.

The expansion of MoD into a sustainable urban ecosystem can be achieved by introducing additional shared-use vehicle types like electric bicycles and scooters. (Smart Cities has also designed an electric folding scooter called the “RoboScooter” and an electric bike called the “GreenWheel.”) This will offer flexibility and convenience while allowing for asymmetric trips. For example, a user can drive a GreenWheel to the supermarket, then go home with a CityCar that can carry groceries.

We believe that MoD systems will work better than private automobiles in cities because you never have to worry about storing the vehicle. In many cases, a MoD charging station will be closer to your final destination than if you had to park in a private lot. A typical urban trip is short, however; much of the time spent is not actually driving, but rather walking to the vehicle and finding parking once you get there. A recent study by the Imperial College in London showed that, during congested hours, more than 40% of total gasoline use is by cars looking for a parking space!

In 2020, I expect the shift from private gasoline powered use to shared electric vehicles will be on its way. There are three primary factors that will accelerate this trend:

1. Economic and environmental pressure to transition away from petroleum fuels.

2. Technological innovations.

3. Political leadership to promote new regulations and policies for this type of innovation.

In 2010, China has become the world’s number-one automobile market, surpassing the United States. in the total number of cars purchased. The increased consumption of fossil fuels and the emissions of CO2 will be part and parcel of this economic development. This will all but guarantee increased demand for petroleum and set the stage for political responsiveness.

Luckily, most of the technologies required to make the CityCar real already exist today, such as highly efficient electric motors, computational horsepower, new battery technologies, wireless network communications, lightweight composite materials, advanced sensing, and GPS. The only thing that limits us is the inherent difficulty of breaking away from our preconceived notions and embracing this radical rethinking.

About the Author

Ryan Chin is PhD student at the MIT Media Lab in the Smart Cities research group. He has led and managed the design development of lightweight electric vehicles (LEVs), including the CityCar, RoboScooter, and GreenWheel electric bicycle. In 2007, Chin co-founded the MIT Smart Customization group, which is focused on improving the ability of companies to efficiently customize products and services across a diverse set of industries and customer groups. Web site: http://cities.media.mit.edu.

The author would like to acknowledge the collective effort of the Smart Cities team that developed the CityCar, RoboScooter, GreenWheel, and the Mobility-on-Demand System. He is particularly grateful for the guidance of Professor William J. Mitchell and team leaders William Lark Jr., Raul-David “Retro” Poblano, Michael Chia-Liang Lin, Andres Sevtsuk, Dimitris Papanikolaou, and Chih-Chao Chuang.

The Future Then and Now: Electronic Newspapers

When futurists were first outlining scenarios for electronic news delivery, they didn’t foresee the overwhelming demand for interactivity, nor the consequences of multitudes of competing information sources.

The Internet has so transformed our lives that we may forget how recently it came about. Interestingly, one of the industries it’s transformed most radically—journalism—was in the process of changing anyway.

“Futurists have long speculated that newspapers would someday be delivered electronically to people’s homes. In Britain, electronic newspapers are already a reality,” THE FUTURIST reported in “The Electronic Newspaper,” April 1978.

In that article, Kenneth Edwards, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Alabama, took FUTURIST readers on a tour of Britain’s Viewdata system, a scheme whereby information could be transmitted by teletext from a BBC editor’s office directly to viewers’ televisions at home.

While the technologies were being developed to provide online access to news, information, and other communication, another unexpected phenomenon was beginning to occur: a call from media consumers to participate in the process.

Nearly a decade after Edwards’s article, Mike Greenly wrote about his experience as one of the world’s first interactive electronic journalists (“Interactive Journalism and Computer Networking: Exploring a New Medium,” March-April 1987). In addition to covering the World Future Society’s 1986 conference electronically, Greenly also used computer conferencing to cover the Comdex computer trade show in Las Vegas and the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in 1984 (for which Greenly struggled to obtain press credentials).

As he hauled his portable computer to interview such luminaries as New York City Mayor Ed Koch for research on his book Chronicle: The Human Side of AIDS, Greenly sent reports back to a computer bulletin board on The Source (a predecessor of AOL). When he checked back in after a day’s reporting, he would find responses and queries from readers.

“I had a following to whom I offered my reports,” Greenly wrote. “Not just my own attempts at journalism, but interactive journalism, since people could write back to me and electronically converse with each other.”

We caught up with Greenly recently to get his thoughts on today’s—and tomorrow’s—media environment.

“Back when we—myself and scattered online buddies around the world—were exploring or inventing what ‘electronic journalism’ could be, the corporations who were hosting us didn’t seem to have a clue,” he recalls. “They kept pushing stock quotes, news feeds, and weather, but the pull we users felt to spend more time online came primarily from each other and from what we each had to share.”

Welcome to the first glimpse of Web 2.0!

“Today’s online world has surpassed, already, our expectations for it,” Greenly continues. “We knew that people-to-people sharing would only grow and flourish, and we demonstrated for ourselves the power of an on-the-spot ‘reporter’ being able to respond, live, to the queries of distant readers. But we didn’t envision, for example, the impact of broadband to enable the global sharing of YouTube videos of dancing cats or government oppression.

“As for tomorrow,” he adds, “I would personally strongly favor stricter regulation of publicly crediting content. If blog X lifts content from blog Y, for example, I think it must always be clear who generated the original content. That kind of accountability is clearly in the public interest, so that we always know the source of reports or ‘news’ we can trust versus lies disguised as fact.

“As usual, technology is outpacing regulation,” Greenly observes. “But the fast-growing critical mass of online readers and reporters (and the blur between them, since people can play both roles) will—I believe and I hope—lead to clearer legal guidelines that protect content providers, encourage them to keep providing, and enable all of us to use or avoid them, depending on what matters to us.”

Coincidentally, Greenly’s 1987 article appeared in the same issue in which THE FUTURIST described a technology enabling researchers to better communicate with each other—“ScholarNet: The Beginning of a World Academic Community” by Richard W. Slatta of North Carolina State University. We would later know this technology better as the Internet.

About the Author

Cynthia G. Wagner is managing editor of THE FUTURIST and editor of the World Future Society’s e-newsletter, Futurist Update. E-mail cwagner@wfs.org.

For more information, visit Mike Greenly at www.mikegreenly.com.

Tomorrow in Brief: July-August 2010

Solar Power at the Micro Scale

Tiny, sunlight-capturing cells could one day provide a nearly ubiquitous source of mobile power. Glitter-sized photovoltaic cells, developed at Sandia National Laboratories, would also lower the costs of solar arrays, as they could be mass-produced using common microelectronic and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) techniques.

Glitter power could be applied on items with unusual shape, such as clothing or other textiles used for hiking, hunting, and military operations.

Source: Sandia National Laboratories, www.sandia.gov.

“Skinput”: Human Skin as Touchpad

Instead of scribbling someone’s phone number in your palm, you may soon be able to tap the number on your arm or some other part of your body.

A technology called “Skinput,” developed by Carnegie Mellon PhD candidate Chris Harrison and team, uses bio-acoustic sensors that can pick up the signature sounds of a finger tapping on specific locations on the skin. An armband device projects the keypad image on the user’s palm or forearm and picks up the acoustic signature of the finger taps.

Simple devices such as MP3 players could be used without the projected keypads, as users learn where to tap without looking — a true touch system.

Sources: Carnegie Mellon University, www.cmu.edu. Skinput, www.chrisharrison.net/projects/skinput.

Biodegradable Packaging

An eco-friendly alternative to petroleum-based food packaging could come from dairy farms.

Most foods are wrapped in multilayer films made of synthetic polymers, which has some consumers worried about the use of petroleum in manufacturing the film and disposing of the waste after it’s used.

Agricultural researchers believe dairy proteins such as casein and whey offer a viable alternative to petroleum.

Future research will address the ability of dairy-based packaging to provide adequate barriers to moisture.

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, www.ars.usda.gov.

Tattletale Pills

Doctors, caregivers, and clinical researchers may soon have an easy way to make sure patients are taking their medicines: The pills will tell on them.

Engineers at University of Florida have developed a digestible microchip and antenna that can be integrated into a standard medicine capsule; when it’s swallowed, it automatically sends an alert to the doctor or caregiver.

Improving compliance is important not just for patients using prescription drugs, but also for clinical drug research, since a participant’s failure to take the experimental drug will skew the test results.

Source: University of Florida, www.ufl.edu.

Conquering Phobias Pharmaceutically

It may one day be possible to vaccinate yourself against irrational fears.

Researchers at the University of Hiroshima used classical conditioning to “teach” goldfish to become frightened by a flash of light; however, fish that first received injections of the anesthetic lidocaine into their cerebellums maintained steady heart rates, suggesting that they did not learn to fear the flash.

The effects of the lidocaine were temporary, but the researchers hope their work could one day help people overcome phobias. (And perhaps an alternative to injections could help those with a fear of needles.)

Source: “Effects of Local Anesthesia of the Cerebellum on Classical Fear Conditioning in Goldfish,” Masayuki Yoshida and Ruriko Hirano, Behavioral and Brain Functions, BioMed Central, www.behavioralandbrainfunctions.com.

What Quantum Computing Means for National Security

If cyberwarfare is the Cold War of the new millennium, quantum computation may be the hydrogen bomb.

Researchers with Google, D-Wave (a Canadian computer hardware company), and the U.S. government are looking to quantum physics to make vastly more-capable computers. They may also find the key to making certain networks, pages, or computers nearly invincible to cyberattacks, or render certain Internet security systems completely defenseless.

Quantum computation harnesses the unique behavior of subatomic particles — behaviors that don’t occur anywhere else in nature above this incredibly small scale. Scientists view quantum physics as distinct from regular physics for this reason. It’s also why subatomic particles can be made to compute information differently than their bulkier macro-scale counterparts.

Regular computers function through the use of transistors. An electric current running through the transistor activates a switch, turning the switch either on or off, thus giving it a value of either one or zero. Lots of activated switches create the binary computer codes of ones and zeros that compose all computer functioning. But quantum bits of information (qubits) can convey a value of one, zero, or both at once because certain subatomic particles can exist in more than one state (known as a superposition). If scientists can direct the powers of these in-between numbers, they can use them to solve mathematical problems, called quantum algorithms, which have long eluded solutions.

A quantum computing breakthrough could, in turn, enable governments to break otherwise impervious encryption codes such as the “public key” cryptographic systems that protect your e-mail and bank account. Cracking the public key could render such security measures worthless. The same trick could be reversed to create essentially unbreakable encryption codes.

One potentially vulnerable code is the public key system based on a supremely difficult math problem called Shor’s algorithm. Cryptography may sound like some obscure security concept of little relevance to civilians, but millions of people interact with public key codes every day.

For instance, thousands of U.S. banks rely on a type of public key system called RSA (named for Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, its inventors) to provide users with private online account access. Web sites around the world use a public key system called the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) when they integrate Google code into their sites’ functioning, in order to keep areas of their site visible only to secure, approved users. Home WiFi networks employ various “public keys” to keep their networks closed to hackers (or neighbors who refuse to buy their own routers). As more sensitive data — possibly involving medical records or the electric grid — is brought online, the use of simple encryptions like RSA and DSA will likely increase, potentially spreading vulnerabilities across the system

“There is a national security interest in not being the second country to build a large quantum computer,” says Dave Bacon, a computer scientist at Washington University.

Recently, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) unveiled what they called “the world’s most efficient single photon detector,” which is purportedly able to count individual particles of light traveling through fiberoptic cables with roughly 99% efficiency. The announcement could have ramifications for quantum computing efforts and for secure networking. A detector that could recognize if a photon forming part of a transmission were missing would be a substantial defense against information theft, say researchers.

According to the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), several research groups have built functioning multiple qubit processing systems in which two qubits were able to interact in a stable way.

Canadian company D-Wave is the industry pioneer in the building of these processors, having invested $44 million over the last five years. The biggest chips the company has feature 128 total qubits, according to D-Wave chief technical officer Geordie Rose. (Not all of qubits interact — or form an “entanglement gate” — on the chip, however.) Last December, the Google image recognition team led by Hartmut Neven demonstrated a search algorithm that could differentiate objects in thousands of still photographs. The demonstration was run on the D-Wave chip developed by Rose.

A number of technological hurdles remain before these chips can show their superiority to regular processors. Researchers will have to maintain and improve control over the chips’ quantum operations in more complex environments. Additional challenges will arise from trying to increase the density of the qubits used in the devices.

Rose says the net knowledge gain from quantum computing R&D is probably wider than we can imagine. “A universal quantum computer is the most powerful computer possible in our universe,” he told THE FUTURIST. “Anything better would quite literally violate the laws of physics.” — Patrick Tucker

Sources: Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. www.iarpa.gov.

D-Wave, personal interviews with Dave Bacon, Geordie Rose. A detailed paper on the D-Wave processor may be obtained at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.1628.

Further reading: “Recent Progress in Quantum Algorithms” by Dave Bacom and Wim van Dam, Communications of the ACM.

What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

By Patrick Tucker

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Norton 2010. 264 pages. $26.95.

Nicholas Carr achieved notoriety after a July 2008 article in The Atlantic, in which he asked, “Is Google Making us Stoopid?” For all its wonders, all the convenience it creates for consumers and the money it makes for companies across the world, the Internet may actually be a diseducating force, gradually and invisibly rendering the surfing public incapable of reflective thought or sustained attention, argued Carr.

In posing this polemic, he set fire to a debate that still smolders. Web proponent Clay Shirky called Carr’s essay a “caricature of Luddism.” Best-selling author Steven Johnson, writing in the Chicago Tribune, derided it as “perfect fodder for a ‘don’t-be-ridiculous’ blog post.”

In his newest book, The Shallows, Carr responds to these criticisms and shows that neurological and cultural effects of heavy Internet use are becoming more observable and measurable. As our reliance on ever brighter and faster Internet content increases, a new force is taking hold across the culture of the Web-connected world, leading to changes in reading habits and even in human brains. The Internet trends of today foreshadow the surfing, the teaching, learning, and thinking of tomorrow. The picture of our intellectual future, rendered thoroughly, convincingly, and often beautifully in Carr’s text, is bleak enough to give any serious mind some serious pause. Studies show that constant exposure to high-speed Internet is making us quicker in our ability to make connections and more adept at finding what we’re looking for online using search engines. But we’re losing something of great value in the trade: the literary mind-set.

The Internet has many virtues and is perhaps as great an aid to research and conversation as Gutenberg’s printing press or the library of Alexandria; however, the effect that the Web has on the brain is rather distinct from that of books and more traditional literary activity. If sitting and reading a piece of static text for long periods of time feels “less natural” or “less intuitive” than zipping through the various pages, applications, and comments of a Web page, that’s because it is. The patience and focus required for sustained engagement with static text must be cultivated, a primary benefit of reading. Our most significant achievements as a species — the discovery of the scientific method, the recognition of universal human rights, and the exploration of space — would have been impossible without the rigorous, stubborn, disciplined, and unnatural literary mind-set; brains, in other words, capable of understanding and analyzing extremely complex narrative and dialogic arguments.

The traits of the informed intellect are essential to the furtherance of scholarship, particularly in difficult and abstract domains like science or philosophy, but the educated mind-set isn’t characteristic of the brain’s natural state. Like those of most of our cousins in the animal kingdom, the human neural and sensory network is biologically predisposed to quick attention shifts and unstructured rapid-fire responses to stimuli. In our wildest state, we’re wide-eyed, constantly searching our environment for threats to be avoided or opportunities to be exploited. We emerged upon the world naked, dirty, and easily distracted.

Book culture offered humanity some reprieve from this condition. But the Internet, in the speed and randomness with which it presents new information to the user, encourages a return to the feral mode of information gathering. Although the Web overflows with text, the bounty of links available in any article or post, the advertisements, the widgets, the blog displays increasingly crowding out the pages of even ostensible information sources, have the effect of pushing the brain away from the words on the screen as forcefully as they pull the user toward the most up-to-the-moment celebrity tweet.

“The need to evaluate links and make related navigational choices, while also processing a multiplicity of rapid sensory stimuli, requires mental coordination and decision making, distracting the brain from the work of interpreting text or other information,” says Carr. “The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. The more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted, to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention.”

Herein lies an explanation for why so many of us feel challenged to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory. The type of reading that the Internet engenders does not inspire or support the cultivation of the literary mind-set. Indeed the effect of the Internet, Carr argues, is to unravel that mind-set where it exists, and prevent its formation where it is absent. It was, after all, unnatural to begin with. The effect of this trend can be clearly perceived: Every day, every hour that we submit to the furtherance of Internet culture, we are creating a new type of civilization. Its schools and offices shall be populated with individuals who lack the mental circuitry required to read beyond a few sentences. These are the students, teachers, entrepreneurs, and leaders of the future.

The postliterate being whom Carr conjures up is a subtle sort of monster. He grows more menacing the longer you stare at him. This creature processes visual signals and forms memories differently from his more book-reliant ancestors. He is incapable of reflection or contemplation and doesn’t care to remember much. He is limited in terms of his capacity for original thought, having spent his entire life tailoring his communications to meet the expectations of an ever-vigilant network of so-called peers. He communicates constantly but only in sparse bursts. He can think with great speed but cannot know anything with certainty. He cannot conceive of hard-won knowledge yet is isolated in his hastily reached convictions. He is quick in every decision. What is perhaps most frightening about the phantom of The Shallows, this ghost of our collective future self, is how much, and how quickly, we have come to resemble him already.

About the Reviewer

Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine.