Europe: Beyond the Crisis

In The Hague, World Future Society board member Mylena Pierremont and social entrepreneur Carine de Meyere announce the formation a new European chapter of WFS, with the goal of offering serious conversations about the future of Europe.

Here, they interview two leading authorities on Europe’s present crisis … SER-president Alexander Rinnooy Kan and ex-Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer … who outline ways out of that crisis. They cover the virtues, defects, and prospects of market capitalism, the Occupy movement, and Europe’s young people.

Filmed by Roelf van Til, New Energy TV, for the World Future Society.

Dangerous Times: The Futurist Interviews Christopher Fettweis

The twenty-first century will probably be the most peaceful hundred years in human history, according to Christopher Fettweis, Tulane University political scientist and author of Dangerous Times?: The International Politics of Great Power Peace. He considers ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other global hotspots exceptions to—rather than rules of—modern geopolitics. Rick Docksai, a staff editor for THE FUTURIST, recently spoke with Dr. Fettweis on why he is hopeful that war is becoming a thing of the past.

CHRISTOPHER FETTWEIS: Sometimes hope and good news doesn’t sell. It’s easier to say everything is going to hell. The fact is that we’re better off than we’ve ever been. The last decade of the twentieth century was the most peaceful decade we’ve ever had.

THE FUTURIST: And this past year ended with Russia and the United States ratifying a new START treaty to mandate reductions in their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. It’s safe to say that a more peaceful world would be a world that has no use for nuclear weapons. What hope can we take that the 2010 START agreement signals a new trend of global disarmament?

CHRISTOPHER FETTWEIS: I’m not sure that START really hails the beginning of a new era. The disarmament that the new START treaty calls for is going to be happening in Russia already. And in the United States, it doesn’t have much meat. Realistically, nuclear weapons are much more likely to be gathering dust no matter where they are. Whether it’s going to be decisive in ushering in a new more peaceful world, I'm skeptical.

Nuclear weapons are just not as relevant to state behavior as people think. They don’t affect how countries behave too much. Once you have the nuclear weapons, what do you do with them?

We hear a lot about Iran one day using nukes. Iran wouldn’t give them to Hezbollah. With nuclear forensics people could tell right away where they came from. People say they could use them to bully their neighbors like the United Arab Emirates, but the United Arab Emirates could easily call their bluff: They know that Iran is not actually going to use the nuclear weapons on them. But overall it’s nice to see the number of nuclear weapons coming down.

THE FUTURIST: Some skeptics of disarmament would argue that nuclear weapons make the world more peaceful, since nations are much more leery of going to war on account of them. But you’re overall not too concerned about them, or worried that if they disappeared, nations would fight each other more often?

CHRISTOPHER FETTWEIS: I don’t think they cause problems. I think they're more a symptom of problems.

Some people give nuclear weapons entire credit for the recent great power peace. In my mind, nuclear weapons are just a part of it. It’s the ideas that have evolved. Nuclear weapons had a role in changing the ideas. But to the extent that they play a pacifying role, we may cut back and have other countries cut back and not fear major repercussions.

There is not a big momentum for proliferation, Iran and North Korea notwithstanding. There are a lot of countries that could develop nuclear weapons but don’t seem to want them. In my mind, it's one piece of an overall puzzle.

THE FUTURIST: So if we gave up nukes we wouldn’t suddenly have more wars?

CHRISTOPHER FETTWEIS: I don’t think so at all. Generally arms are a symptom of insecurity. Nations cut their arms based on assessments of their security. Europe has had multilateral disarmament for decades. They don’t even plan to go to war anymore, and they have virtually no offensive capability. That's a symptom of increased security and better relations. One way to know that relations were deteriorating would be that they started arming again. I think in the course of the next few decades, we'll see more countries disarming more often.

THE FUTURIST: Especially in hard economic times like these, when governments want to cut back on expenditures, it seems to me that nuclear stockpiles would be a pretty sensible thing to cut. If you’re not going to use them any time soon, and they’re just going to sit in missile silos, then why keep spending billions of dollars a year on them?

CHRISTOPHER FETTWEIS: It’s cheaper to keep them in mothballs, and if something happens you can roll them back out. It’s an insurance.

The United States is one of the few countries that acts like a new war is on the horizon. Hardly anybody else acts that way. Even China, whom a lot of people think is the United States’ next big rival, we don’t see them rushing to build up their military capability. They don’t seem to feel the need for it. They don’t feel like the United States is going to push them around or invade them.

And that’s new. We don’t seem to take any solace from the fact that we don’t see big wars anymore. Earlier in history, people were fighting wars all the time.

THE FUTURIST: Not too long ago, people in the United States feared that China would invade Taiwan, and that maybe the United States would get dragged into a war over the island’s future.

CHRISTOPHER FETTWEIS: As times have gone by, relations between China and Taiwan have strengthened. Investments across the strait have increased. Tensions flare up every once in a while. If Taiwan pushed for independence, people in China might want to react. But it’s hard for me to imagine a big war over it.

I think we can be looking at a much more peaceful century—definitely a more peaceful than the twentieth century, which was a disaster. That includes Africa. People’s perception is it’s spiraling into chaos But Africa is more peaceful than we’ve known it to be in all African history.

THE FUTURIST: Corporations have become much more international in scope. Most of the large ones have their offices and factories distributed throughout many corners of the globe. This means that a new war somewhere could be more likely to put their assets or properties in the line of fire. Hence major corporations might be expected to press public officials to not resort to armed combat unless absolutely necessary. This is good for peace, but it makes me wonder about the influence of business on the political process. How have businesses’ political influence evolved in the last few decades? And what is it evolving toward?

CHRISTOPHER FETTWEIS: Investment flees from any sign of instability. It’s sort of a popular perception that big business wants to fuel wars. Some businesses benefit, but the vast majority don’t. Investors flee from the slightest hint of instability. As soon as something starts happening, people pull their investments out. That’s another major reason why governments will want to settle their differences peacefully. In an era of fast-moving money, they’ve stacked the deck for peace.

I don’t know where the relationship of businesses to the political process is heading. There are places where business interests and government interests are synonymous, but I don’t know about the future relationship. But I do think that it’s hard to imagine too many times that business interests will push states to fight. It’s not a situation of the arms manufacturers today pushing for war. You don’t have Lockheed Martin or Boeing making belligerent pressures. Or Halliburton. The United States didn’t go to Iraq to make Halliburton rich. Overall business people want to make money. They’re not out to conquer land. They want to get rich. It's harder to do that if people are fighting.

THE FUTURIST: As your data shows, China and Russia are not potential rivals to the United States now. Neither Eurasian giant has the military capacity for it. But a lot of observers expect the Chinese and Russian economies to gain a lot more clout this century; they are among the “BRIC” countries, after all. China may even eclipse the United States in GDP. If China or Russia amassed that much economic or political capital, presumably they would be less intimidated by the United States and feel less dependent on U.S. goodwill. In such a case, perhaps they might see less to lose from going to war with their neighbors. What do you think? If you judge it unlikely, why so?

CHRISTOPHER FETTWEIS: A lot of people think that that is the future. Wars are caused when you have uneven growth rates. If Athens is growing and gaining, and Sparta isn't, it makes the Spartans nervous. The Chinese are growing, and people worry about it. Just like people worried when the Russians invaded Georgia, but nothing much came of it since then.

For the United States to go to war with Russia or China, you would need for there to be conflicting national interests. And there isn’t a lot you can point to where the United States and Russia or China have clashing interests. It’s difficult to imagine a lot of fighting over offshore oil, for instance, because there’s too much to sabotage. It's hard to figure what the interests would be. We don’t want to conquer China, and they don’t want to conquer us. We don’t have too many flashpoints.

And it’s hard to see the Chinese expecting to gain economically from a war. They rely on exports, and that would come to a screeching halt if there were any serious problems with the United States. If there is a war, they can't export. It would be the end of their economic miracle.

THE FUTURIST: Maybe they wouldn’t want to invade the United States. But would South Korea or another one of their neighbors be fair game?

If they saw it in their interests to invade South Korea. But it's hard to see now how their ruling South Korea would be better for them than carrying on economic activity with South Korea like they do now. It's hard to see how destroying Seoul would put them ahead.

How would they possibly benefit from doing that? Unless the South Koreans were provoking them, and how would they? We could come up with scenarios, but how likely would they be? For the first time in human history, it seems unlikely that there will be major war.

THE FUTURIST: In the next few years, the United States will end its military oversight of Afghanistan and Iraq. We can hope that the two fledgling democracies’ civil governments will prove strong enough to withstand their armed insurgent enemies, but it’s obvious that they might possibly not. In that case, Afghanistan and/or Iraq could fall back into chaos. What can we do in that situation to make sure that a new regional war does not come to pass as a result?

CHRISTOPHER FETTWEIS: We can’t determine for sure if Iraq will implode. But the odds of it drawing everybody else in seem low to me. People worry about the Iranians coming into Iraq. But the Iranians are more hated in Iraq than the Americans are.

In the nineteenth century, power vacuums used to draw powers in. Nowadays they don't. Countries tend to stay away from them. They don’t want to even send troops into peacekeeping missions. I don’t think invading Iraq has made us safer or less safe. It's just been a mess.

Afghanistan is the same thing. I don’t think it matters much to U.S. security either way. They may well end up having their own civil war. But will it spill over into other countries? Probably not.

We hear that Iran is a threat to the region. But the Iranians have never shown any sign of wanting to attack any of their neighbors. They don’t want to rule Iraq. They don’t want to extend into Pakistan. They're not going to “wipe Israel off the map,” because they know it would be the last thing their government ever does. It's not a good outcome if the Iranians get nuclear weapons, but it won't be the worst thing in the world.

THE FUTURIST: Somalia bears some similarities to Afghanistan—an organized Islamist militia threatens to seize control of the government. How concerned should we be that a Taliban-like coup might take place in Somalia, as in 1990s Afghanistan, and bring on a new regional war or series of wars?

CHRISTOPHER FETTWEIS: I think the concern of an Islamist takeover is less of a concern in Somalia than in Yemen. Somalia is more or less ungovernable right now. It would be hard for Islamists to take over and launch any kind of effective attack on their neighbors. There is no functional central government or armed forces right now.

In Somalia, it's been anarchy and then tribalized governments. Over time, regions of Somalia put together governments. Somalia was largely put together as a post colonial state made of several states hobbled together. The northern part would like to break off and have its own country. The rest is either under the thumb of warlords or it’s under tribal governments. That's a problem for its people because government does supply a lot of goods and services. But Somalia's weakness has not exported a large amount of international terrorism just yet. If I were their neighbors, I wouldn’t be worrying too much about it.

Yemen may implode faster than we think, and it could become a problem. They’re running out of water, for example. But the latest numbers I've heard on Al Qaida in the country is about 100 fighters, and maybe another thousand that are sympathetic. A hundred fighters, no matter how hard-core they are, are not going to be able to take over a country of 20 million. They’re not going to engender any major force that’s going to worry their neighbors, though they may continue to export lone nuts.

The worst thing we could do would be to send troops into Yemen. Sending in any military force would exacerbate the problems it already has. We have to let the local people work it out, and if they want help it will be available.

THE FUTURIST: So we’ll keep seeing civil conflicts in parts of the globe, but wars crossing national borders will largely be a thing of the past?

CHRISTOPHER FETTWEIS: It’s becoming very rare. And even those ethnic conflicts and civil wars are becoming rarer. Incidents of human rights violations are on the decline, and this is at a time when we're adding more people than ever before. We have three times the people on the planet that we had before World War I, and there are fewer people dying, and human rights violations are down.

Life is better politically for the majority of people on the planet. A higher percentage live in peace than ever before, and that’s likely to continue.

The Futurist Interviews Matthew Kahn, author of Climatopolis

It’s a given that more global warming will occur later this century, says UCLA ecologist Matthew Kahn. But he’s hopeful that the consequences—fiercer storms, prolonged droughts, rising sea tides, etc.—might be manageable. This will depend on what cities and towns across the globe do now to adapt to the changing climate conditions.

In his book Climatopolis, he spells out how demographics and urban construction might shift as a result of climate change. Kahn spoke with FUTURIST magazine staff editor Rick Docksai about Climatopolis and his findings.

THE FUTURIST: In Climatopolis, you point out ways that people might adapt to climate change. So to what extent are you optimistic that climate change will not be as destructive as a lot of experts warn?

Matthew Kahn: Some critics point out that I’m an economist, not a climate scientist. They say I’m overly optimistic, that there are much worse scenarios that could happen. But I would say that’s always true of anything—the earth could be hit by an asteroid.

The difference between us and monkeys is our ability to take action to protect ourselves in the present against potential ugly scenarios. I don’t want the argument to be that since we can adapt we don’t need to mitigate. I think they go hand in hand. Since I’m a realist, I argue that we need to go about meeting the adaptation challenge.

THE FUTURIST: You noted in Climatopolis that some cities in the United States are better prepared for climate change than are others. Salt Lake City, Utah, is an example of the climate-safe metropolises. If climate change becomes more severe, and the less-prepared cities want to adapt before it’s too late, what types of help would they need to hire between then and now?

Matthew Kahn: There are two types of cities. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg is being proactive with his 2030 Plan, which anticipates how climate change will affect the city. In Salt Lake City, it’s more a matter of geographical determinism. There is nothing explicit they have done. I put them on the list because of their physical location, due to my concern about sea level rise.

A city can adapt due to natural advantages. But the first step to not having a problem is to acknowledge that you could have a problem under the status quo. Bloomberg is stepping up to the plate. I would be worried about a Homer Simpson city living on the coast and everyone under the false belief that they are in no danger. They will be up for a big comeuppance.

The insurance industry loses profitability if they under-predict risks. I talk about how even in a Republican city that opposes taking action on climate change, the insurance industry could send a message by raising prices for risky areas.

THE FUTURIST: Are we seeing insurers preparing for climate change now?

Matthew Kahn: I’ve been in discussions with the insurance industry, and some are working with climate scientists. They think they could make more money if climate change happens because of the increased risks. I’ve found documents on plans they're making to protect themselves against climate risks. Insurance companies in hurricane areas of Florida, for example, are seeking scientists’ advice on how they should price their premiums.

Suppose I want flood insurance and the premium is $40, and it’s based on the flood risk being 4%. If because of climate change the risk goes up to 10%, basic algebra tells me my insurance policy should go up to $100, because the risk increased from 4% to 10%.

Will the law allow insurance prices to rise to reflect that climate change has increased the risk of flooding? If the answer is no, then these insurance companies will go broke and government will end up being the last-resort insurer.

I could imagine some liberal politicians accusing the insurers of price gouging, in this case, and passing laws to keep insurance premiums low. But as I talk about in the book, we need politicians to pre-commit and to allow capitalist markets to work. Government has to let free markets work by sending signals to people about what’s at risk and what’s scarcer due to climate change.

THE FUTURIST: If some cities in the world suffer more than others, we will probably see a phenomenally larger scale of migration and population displacements. This could lead to cultural clashes as new waves of immigrants converge on the few safe cities. How ready are U.S. cities to accommodate all these new groups? What would the cities need to come up with in the way of support services, education outreach, culturally appropriate media, etc.?

Matthew Kahn: I talk about Detroit as an example. The New York Times recently bemoaned the slow death of Detroit, with all its abandoned homes. A point I make in Climatopolis is cities like Detroit could make a comeback. If Los Angeles goes to hell because of climate change it could be the case that many of its residents would move to Detroit or another northern latitude city, like Fargo.

We'll have to build all this new infrastructure. When you have growth you need new infrastructure. It's harder to take an old building and retrofit it than it is to build a new building in accordance with energy efficiency and green design.

A big point in Climatopolis is the competition among cities. Just as Coke competes with Pepsi, cities compete with other cities. Those cities that suffer because of climate change will lose their more skilled residents and grow more slowly.

Even a Republican mayor that doesn't believe in climate change will see incentives to act to keep the skilled professionals in the city.

Right now home prices are really high in LA, San Diego and New York City. If these cities suffer losses to quality in life, the homeowners will suffer value loss. But renters can get up and go to cities that are better to live in, like Fargo or Salt Lake City. There will certainly be distribution effects. By being a homeowner in Los Angeles, I've made a bet that this city will continue to be a great place to live. If I bet wrong, I'll lose money.

THE FUTURIST: As you also described in Climatopolis, some major cities are upping their investments in mass transit. Should this trend continue and get repeated in more cities, what sorts of new jobs would it create?

Matthew Kahn: As a city becomes a better place to live, more people live downtown. Crime in big cities has fallen sharply in recent years. And an unintended consequence of less crime is more people living in city centers.

When you get the middle class willing to use mass transit, like in New York City and London, that creates incentives for politicians to provide good mass transit. Because crime is falling, when people live and work downtown, they are more likely to use public transit and people are more likely to live downtown

Right now, Los Angeles has all these single family homes and most people don’t use mass transit. A point I make in Climatopolis is that because of the expected heat wave, more people are going to want to live close to the ocean. If there is that kind of population density, a subway could be effective.

A major trend has been the suburbanization of employment. Many major companies are not downtown. They’ve been building corporate campuses far from center cities. I could image some of these businesses returning to the city centers. Downtowns could re-acquire employment.

Sprawl has been a major twentieth century trend, but under some of the dynamics we've talked about, some of this could be reversed. It won't be for everybody, but it would shrink our carbon footprint if 40% of people were willing to live like that.

If I was the only bald guy on the planet nobody would dream up Rogaine. There are always going to be guys, like the guys who created Google, who are looking for the next big product. If seven billion people are looking for ways to help them adapt to climate change, this is going to create a huge new market for entrepreneurs to come up with new products to help them adapt. Climate change is going to make the Homer Simpsons desperate to adapt. I don't need seven billion entrepreneurs. I just need a couple of hundred entrepreneurs thinking ahead. I need them thinking through what might be the opportunities.

THE FUTURIST: In Climatopolis, you describe many feats of engineering that cities and rural districts could undertake to better manage the water that we have. Among these are water-recycling systems and irrigation networks. Many analysts have expressed concern that there is a dearth of young people with thorough training in engineering and applicable sciences. If this is so, how might we find the requisite cadres of designers and builders to construct all these new infrastructures?

Matthew Kahn: I agree with you. The short answer is were going to take in more highly-skilled immigrants from China and India, but I don’t find that answer satisfactory. There is a scarcity of talented people who are majoring in these fields. As a free-market economist, I would hope the wage demand would rise in these fields. This should trigger more interest.

But you put your finger on a major issue, and it’s that we’re going to need ingenuity. We need these people majoring in these fields.

THE FUTURIST: You describe the potential implications of climate change in U.S. cities very extensively in Climatopolis. But I’m curious what you think the consequences might be for Canada. Its biggest urban centers, Toronto and Montreal among them, are relatively distant from both flood-prone Manhattan and from the melting Arctic Circle. Would they, therefore, be mostly climate-safe? If so, then what might Canada get in terms of new influxes of climate-change refugees?

Kahn: I have a colleague Laurence Smith, who wrote on this topic in 2050. I’ve ceded that territory to him. I’m very sympathetic to his arguments. I think Canada will be helped by climate change.

It would interest me what Vancouver is doing, but I thought Laurence Smith made a number of great general points. I’m not a fan of climate change, but every shock creates new opportunities and I certainly agree with him that there will be unintended consequences.

It raises interesting issues of distribution. Coming back to Detroit today, you could sell one home in Los Angeles and buy a hundred homes in Detroit. A wise economist might want to do that now, given what we know about climate change and Detroit’s future. You want to buy low and sell high.

If we introduce carbon pricing, and it’s more costly to ship by truck or plane, could trains make a comeback? I throw that out as another example of how the capitalist market could adapt.

The starting point of Climatopolis is we’ve been slow to implement climate pricing. I believe in the guinea pig model: Through experimentation we’re going to learn that some of these things are going to work. As years go on, as the reality of climate change dawns on more people, I think even a Rush Limbaugh type could acknowledge that we need carbon pricing. So I see adaptation and mitigation efforts going hand in hand.

This is all assuming that climate change will be gradual. If climate change is abrupt, if we wake up one morning and New York City is underwater, then it will be hard for just about any economist to predict how we might adapt.

But I leave it up to scientists to keep us in the loop about what is likely to occur. Climate scientists play a key role in not being Chicken Little, but educating us about what they know about the risks.

The Futurist Interviews Open-Source Expert Josh Lerner

Open-source software—software that no one owns exclusively, so individual users can modify its coding as they see fit—is rapidly gaining fans in industries across the globe, but it’s also drawn some controversy. Authors Josh Lerner and Mark Schankerman teamed up to write The Comingled Code, a book that describes the open-source phenomenon and the ways in which it will, or will not, benefit the different types of businesses, organizations, and government agencies that use it. Rick Docksai, a staff editor for THE FUTURIST, conducted the following interview with Lerner.

THE FUTURIST: I'm interested to hear how would-be contributors to open-source projects typically find the open-source projects. The Web site Ohloh is one vast directory of projects that users can peruse, read about, and even contribute to if they choose. What other means exist?

Josh Lerner: I think there are a couple of ways that this happens, both formal and informal. Within the formal realm, there are Web sites. The most famous of them is Sourceforge, which has a few hundred thousand projects, everything from games to printer drivers to whatever. It's an amazing catalogue.

But I think the vast majority of people come to open-source software in a more informal kind of way. People start off trying to solve a particular problem they have. It could be you’re trying to figure out how to get your printer driver to print out from an open-source word processing program, or you're trying to figure out a solution to some other problem. Whatever the case may be, you're probably going to get a referral.

And in some cases, there is outside tinkering involved. Let's say you’re an economist and you want to write a non-linear regression and you’re giving them p- values rather than standard errors. Or let's say you’re running an analysis and you want to output it into a spreadsheet.

A lot of times people start with an open-source program and they say 'Hey, there is this addition that we could input that would it more effective. Let's go into the source code to tweak it and make it more effectively do what we want it to.’ It could involve adding a little feature or fixing a little bug, something like that. And they get drawn into it and become more substantial contributors. They want to make additions to existing open source software to meet their own needs.

Once they do this, then they get engaged and want to become more involved in looking for how they can be helpful in advancing the open source project. It's sort of like you have a kid in school and the kid is doing the science fair and the kid wants you to come in and volunteer with the science fair. And you get caught up and start to volunteer with the school more generally.

THE FUTURIST: Intellectual property theft is a danger to many industries, computer software among them. As more software companies make code available to volunteer contributors on open-source platforms, what level of heightened risk will they assume from unethical types who might steal the code and profit off it? What will they need to do to stay safe?

Josh Lerner: This is a complicated and interesting set of issues. One thing we’ve seen is many companies have opened up their source code and taken code they weren’t using and made it more available. They typically don’t just make code available to everybody on an unconditional basis. They do it under some kind of license.

There are two kinds of licenses. The more restrictive is the public license. This says that if I make source code available and you take it and modify it, you have to make it available to other people. Essentially it becomes viral. It’s not just the code that has to be public but any modifications to the code as well.

The other is called Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, license. And that essentially is much less restrictive. It says that if I make part of my code available I have to keep that code available in the public domain, but if you go and use it you don’t have to make your modifications available. All you have to do is acknowledge the fact that you’re using it. You don’t have to say how you’re modifying it or how you make those modifications available. Essentially, that’s a much less restrictive license. It’s not surprising that most of the corporate code that gets opened up is much more likely to be done under the more restrictive public license, which protects them from having somebody come and make a competing product without having it be publicly available.

THE FUTURIST: You also note that large firms and firms that are heavy exporters are statistically more likely than small firms that do little exporting to invest in open-source software development. Given that open-sourcing a software application can both expose it to more users and solicit those users' help in developing it into a better product, how might smaller firms with more local consumer-bases use it?

Josh Lerner: It’s easy to see why this would be something that big companies would have some sort of competitive advantage in. Bigger gives you more flexibility to take advantage of these things. But I think you do see examples of smaller firms getting involved in open source.

The smaller companies that are able to take advantage of open source have been the ones more willing to think strategically along these lines and say 'How can we look into open source as an investment? How can we make sure that we're going to get a return on it?

Say they’re doing a program that helps people keep track of their diet. They’ll say that if they’re going to do an open source project, best to make sure that it’s very closely related to the commercial product. It’s best to make sure lines of communications between those managing the open source project and those doing proprietary work. If we are operating under a restrictive license, they’ll take some of the ideas and use it in a commercial product so there is an emphasis on learning and knowledge growth between the open source side and the profit-making side. When you’re a smaller business you have to be much more targeted and much more focused, and make sure there’s going to be more of a return in much less time.

THE FUTURIST: You note that middle- and low-income countries are especially active in procuring open-source software programs. Given that businesses in many affluent countries have been off-shoring many of their operations to middle- and low-income countries for some years now, I'm wondering if open-source software will render computer programming jobs increasingly likely candidates for off-shoring (it would cost much less for tech-savvy contributors in India to develop an app than for a highly-paid tech professional in the home country to do it). What are your thoughts on this?

Josh Lerner: I think it’s something you’re certainly seeing in many developing countries, using open source as an explicit strategy. They’re targeting open source for precisely the reasons you’re identifying. If you talk to the Brazilian government, they'll say that this is the future and is really going to help them become a software hub. They’ve got modern young programmers who really know this stuff. They even have centers in the slums of Brazil where they say to kids 'learn how to operate this and make income from it.' They're seeking to position themselves competitively for the future.

We’ve seen in the recession in the last eighteen months in the United States more interest in open source, as well—not as a substitute for proprietary software, but as a complement to it. It's not like we're going to throw away all our commercial software. But some of the stuff, could we move it to open source in an era of shrinking budgets make our dollars go further.

THE FUTURIST: What potential does open-source software have for leveling the international playing field of IT capacity? Right now, the United States, Canada, and the countries of Western Europe are ahead of China, India, and southeast Asia in terms of IT infrastructure and access. But to what extent might a continuing expansion of open-source programming help the latter "developing" countries and regions catch up?

Josh Lerner: If you went to India you'd find policy makers having a lot of interest, as well people looking at this seeing people go from no phones to wireless and skipping landlines entirely. I think many policy makers in developing countries are seeing open source software have that kind of leapfrog capability, as well.

THE FUTURIST: A recent article in Tech News World (
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/71302.html?wlc=1290527413) said that since the government is straining to rein in budget deficits, government agencies are very receptive to open-source software and its minimal up-front costs. Consultant firm INPUT projects that government expenditures on open-source software will increase 8% a year and reach $430 million in 2014. But your book indicates that open-source software can cost more in maintenance and operation. Also, you urge governments to deal with open-source and proprietary software in a neutral fashion. What will governments actually save-or not save-if they up their investments in open-source as predicted?

Josh Lerner: I think there isn't a one-size-fits-all answer to that. But I think it's wise to point out that there is a danger of being penny-wise and pound foolish. If you’re saving the up-front costs but taking out a huge bill in later costs necessary to upgrade the product in some cases it might be counterproductive. What’s needed is looking at it in a careful and dispassionate way to try and figure it out what works best in the individual case. In some cases, open source will win. In other cases, proprietary will.

THE FUTURIST: To what extent might their quest to cut costs compromise their ability to judge open-source and proprietary programs neutrally?

Josh Lerner: I have two observations on that, one of which is in a lot of cases whether you're open source or not, a lot of discussions have been terribly ideological in flavor—there are claims either that open source is really wonderful and a solution to all the world’s problems, and on the other side claims that open source is terrible and problematic. Neither is very productive there are certain circumstances where it will be more or less appropriate for different agencies or organizations. One of the concerns I have is I want more economics entered into the discussions.

Secondly, I would say the general tone of what open source is that its that the total costs of open source and proprietary you can easily see the temptation to say lets go with proprietary because we’ve always done it or open source because its cheaper. Objective costs analyses are important to help lead people to making the right decisions.

The Futurist Interviews Space Expert Edgar Choueri

Traveling through the Solar System on a Budget
Rick Docksai interviews Edgar Choueri

Launching spacecraft is extremely expensive now, but Princeton University physicist Edgar Choueri believes that some up-and-coming propulsion technologies could make it much more affordable. On Feb. 4, he visited the Philosophical Society in Washington and discussed several concept launch systems that space agencies are now exploring:

A space elevator. A cable would run from a base on earth to a tether somewhere up in low-earth orbit. An elevator pod would ferry people and payloads from the base to the tether and back. Carbon nanotubes, which are more than 100 times as strong as steel, would be an optimal building material. Once the elevator is up and running, the cost savings would be massive: It costs $10,000 to $20,000 per kilogram to lift a payload into space using conventional rocket thrusters, but it might cost no more than $5,000 per kilogram via a space elevator. The idea has been gaining traction in recent years.

“It’s moved from science fiction to there being conferences every year where scientists talk about how to build space elevators,” Choueri said. “It would make sending a payload to space as inexpensive as sending a package via Federal Express.”

Plasma rockets. The earth’s surface is a horribly inefficient place for launching spacecraft. Instead, we could build our spacecraft in low-earth orbit— with the materials and the human crews transiting up on the space elevator. Upon completion, the craft would propel through the vacuum of space by plasma rocket engines, which use electromagnetic currents to ionize plasma gas and create powerful propellant forces.

Choueri said that there are there are 139 spacecraft in space that now use electromagnetic propulsion. It is used on many spacecraft from the United States, Europe, and Japan. A Japanese spacecraft used one last year to land on an asteroid. Since plasma rockets don’t involve any combustion, they consume just a fraction of the fuel of conventional chemical rockets, while producing much more thrust: The best chemical rockets will reach velocities of 4 kilometers per second, but some propulsion rockets reach 50 or 60 kilometers per second.

Plasma rockets would be our best bet for flying to the moon, according to Choueri.

Magnetoplasma dynamic thruster (MPD). An exceptionally powerful plasma rocket system, it uses lithium as a propellant. Princeton University has built several lithium MPD thrusters. Lithium is very reactive; an MPD that runs on it can reach velocities of 60 kilometers per second and 100 kilometers per second.

An MPD would be our transit of choice to get to Mars, Choueri said. A spacecraft with MPD thrusters could get a human crew to the red planet in a few months while using 20 to 30 times less propellant than one with comparably sized chemical rocket thrusters.

Solar sails. To send a spacecraft to the solar system’s outer edges, we might outfit it with solar sails that would capture radiation energy from the sun. These “sails” would span one to 10 kilometers in length but would be just millimeters thick. The spacecraft would fly toward the sun and, once it is in the sun’s vicinity, receive a massive burst of radiation through its sails.

This burst of solar energy would might hurtle the spacecraft as far as the Oort Cloud, the outer realm of comets that encircles our solar system. Theoretically, the spacecraft could even keep going and reach another start system in 50 years’ time. Whether it’s headed for comets or for the stars, though, it had best be an unmanned probe: Flying toward the sun and receiving large doses of solar radiation would probably fry any human beings on board.

If these four concepts attain fruition, according to Choueri, humanity could be sending humans to the farthest ends of the solar system in a mere 30 years. At that point, we could then begin seriously exploring our options for taking the next step: traveling to other star systems and beyond.

Choueri is director of Princeton’s Program in Engineering Physics, as well as the chief scientist and director of the university’s Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory, a physics professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department’s Applied Physics Group, and an associated professor in the Astrophysical Sciences Department/Program in Plasma Physics. He graduated from Princeton in 1991 with a PhD in Aerospace Engineering/Plasma Science.

Off campus, he has worked as a Principle Investigator (PI) in charge of directing and managing more than 25 competitively selected research projects funded by NASA, AFOSR, the National Science Foundation, and other governmental and private institutions. From 2004 until 2007, he led a team of researchers from NASA and several academic institutions to develop a high-power plasma rocket system intended for the robotic and human exploration of the Moon and Mars.

He is the author of more than 140 journal articles, conference papers and encyclopedia articles on plasma propulsion for spacecraft, plasma physics, instabilities and turbulence in collisional plasmas, plasma accelerator modeling, space physics and applied mathematics. He has been an invited speaker at symposia and leading institutions in more than 20 countries and has advised more than a hundred graduate and undergraduate students at Princeton University. He also serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Propulsion and Power.

He is the recipient of a number of awards and honors, including the Howard B. Wentz Award for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship and the Medal of the Order of the Cedars (rank of Knight), and was recently elected President of the Electric Rocket Propulsion Society, whose members include hundreds of scientists working on plasma propulsion for spacecraft in more than 15 countries. He served as the elected Chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Electric Propulsion Technical Committee (EPTC) from 2002 to 2004, the leading professional society in his field, was awarded the AIAA's distinguished service award in 2004 elected Fellow of the AIAA in 2009.

Following his Feb. 4 presentation, he spoke a bit about his research on advanced propulsion. In the interview, Choueri laid out how NASA and other space agencies could use the technologies he was describing to make human exploration of the solar system feasible.

Edgar Choueri: What would happen in 30 years? What would space travel ideally be like? Today we do it with very inefficient technology: the chemical rocket. This structure is basically an entire structure holding fuel the payload is a very small percentage of it. I propose to you a vision for 30 years from now.

Let’s go back to the moon. I think China would be going back to the moon over the next decade. I have a strong feeling that they’re working on colonizing the moon over the next decade.

It’s ridiculous to conquer the moon over the next 40 years with the same technology we used 40 years ago, however. Going to the moon with a plasma rocket you can cut down the propellant mass by a factor of 20 or 30.

Rick Docksai: The U.S. government cancelled the Constellation Project and directed NASA to focus more on satellites and earth sciences, less on humans in space. How come things like the space elevator or solar sail didn’t enter into the equation? Where are the discussions about possible future technologies like these taking place, if not in government space agencies?

Choueri: If you go deep down you will find people. A lot of the projects are being researched at NASA centers. The big question is why NASA cancelled the constellation program. The answer has to do with appropriation and funding. The priorities today are not there.

There was a commission the Augustine Commission that studied for a few months the viability of what NASA should be doing in space. Headed by Norm Augustine, the chair of Lockheed Martin. His committee realized it was impossible to increase the funding to a level that space programs need to be effective.

I believe the solution is to trim down NASA, though I admit that it would be very hard to trim down NASA. The $18 billion that it now receives yearly, that is not much money by some standards: We spend that much in Afghanistan in a few weeks. Augustine and his group conclude that with that money, there is not much we can do in terms of human exploration in space. I would agree but I would say we could do a lot more with it if NASA were not so loaded with fat.

But I know that that isn’t politically viable. So unfortunately, $18 billion dollars can go a long way, but only if you are willing to reshape the agency.

Rick Docksai: What level of R&D into lithium and plasma rockets would we need to be investing year to year in order to meet your goal of travel to Mars in 30 years? By what magnitude would it have to increase from what we’re investing today?

Choueri: It’s cyclical. From 2002 to 2005, there was a peak in these propulsion ideas. By 2005, they had pulled the plug on it. Now we’re hearing that, depending on how appropriations happen, there is a significant interest in increasing the budget on these technologies again.

But there have been many such cycles like these over the last 30 years. So it looks like these levels of funding could happen in NASA. My ideal would be to fund it by NASA for a few years at universities and NASA centers, with the intent of making it as soon as possible mature enough to be picked up by industry.

Rick Docksai: You say you see a role for industry. So commercial space enterprise would work on the projects alongside NASA and other government space agencies?

Choueri: I think that one of the good things the government can do is take research that doesn’t offer give a clear enough incentive for industry to be involved. It has been proven that if a project stays under NASA’s wing for a while, it becomes habitually expensive and needlessly expensive because there is no competition.

Lithium and ion thrusters do have potential for development in private industry because they would be used in low earth orbit. Some of them are being used now on commercial spacecraft. NASA can help on the research part.

Propulsion shows a clear example of how government research can fund a new idea. It was sponsored by the government and the research was done at NASA centers and universities. The research matured the concept to where it was taken up by private companies and used. Once the technology becomes very mature, the government should not be involved in it.

Rick Docksai:Your forecast on China colonizing the moon makes me wonder – to what extent is the momentum on space exploration moving away from the United States? To what extent are other countries taking up the initiative while the United States slacks off?

Choueri: Since the 1960s, there has been a very clear shift in the center of gravity outside the United States. Now there are many players. The European Union is a very important player in terms of launching abilities. You have Europe, the United States, Russia, China, India, and Israel. All are countries that can put spacecraft in space.

The big question is how serious the investments in America in space are. NASA is in my opinion a behemoth with a lot of layers of fat. It still has some wonderful centers, but other aspects of NASA are layered in fat. I believe NASA should be reshaped from the ground up. NASA still does research on gas turbines: That’s a subsidy for research that industry can make.

The government really should only be funding things that industry does not have the time or the will to fund. The government doing everything is not the most efficient way. Having industry involved in space is an important thing involved in my opinion.

Rick Docksai: What country do you imagine would host the base of the space elevator? What geopolitical considerations would enter into it?

Choueri: I’m not in the field of geopolitics, and so I can’t predict how it would happen. But from a technical standpoint, it would be best if it was in some place on the equator, like equatorial Africa. To be geo-stationery, it has to be on the equator. If you are off the equator, you will start dipping. You won’t be at a fixed point in the sky.

Rick Docksai: A solar sail – how durable is it? What is the risk of debris in its path hitting it and causing damage?

Choueri: A solar sail being punctured by a pebble or meteoroid is not necessarily a huge thing, as long as it’s a small area and it doesn’t cause mechanical failure it’s a small area. If you have a one-kilometer sail, depending on how many punctures you get, it might be an insignificant defect. Small holes in a big structure don’t amount to much. It might not be a show stopper.

There is a project that uses a solar wind by creating a magnetic field on the spacecraft using special magnets. This would theoretically cause the solar wind to push against it. So imagine a spacecraft unfurling this big magnetic field. It's like a sail. The wind pushes against it. It’s called M2P2 and its being studied at the University of Seattle. But there are some yet-to-be-resolved problematic issues with how to couple the plasma with the magnetic field and how to produce thrust.

If you travel at the speeds necessary for interstellar travel, however, then collision with objects as small as a pebble becomes very problematic. The nearest star system known to have planets is 10 light years away. We can possibly do this trip in 50 years, but we’d have to travel at 20% of the speed of light. If you travel at one tenth of the speed of light and you collide with a pebble at that speed, it would be like colliding with an atom bomb.

Rick Docksai: A magnetic field exerting force… Maybe a spacecraft could create a magnetic field that would act as a shield and block debris in its path. Are there any experiments in “force fields” of that kind right now?

Choueri: No, there are no such projects right now. At those speeds, there is very little you can do. It's something we cannot think of right now. These things are practically impossible to deal with.

Rick Docksai: I’ve been told that as an object’s velocity increases, its mass increases. So if a spacecraft accelerates to a fifth of the speed of light, it would surely take on a very, very large mass. What effect would this have on fuel requirements? What options do we have for a fuel that would be adequate to keep it running even as the mass goes up?

Choueri: Close to speed-of-light travel is very problematic. Right now we see of no way to reach stars that is feasible in a period of 50 years. It is conceivable we could do it using antimatter as a reactor. It is somewhat conceivable that we could use a solar sail as I mentioned. But going to further stars light years away, we have no idea to do it now.

There is a proposal that we could do an interstellar precursor mission. Instead of the nearest start we go 10,000 astronomical units. We will go past the solar system into the Oort cloud and even past that. It’s a good practice. Conceivably we could do that with solar cells. It won’t be a round trip. But it could be a one-way trip.

I would go to maybe Titan. I would think about exploring the moons of Jupiter. I think the next big adventure in space will be exploring the outer planets using nuclear power and plasma propulsion. And also possibly nuclear thermal propulsion.

The Futurist Interviews Nazrul Islam on Preparing Bangladesh for Climate Change

An upcoming article in the January-February 2011 issue of THE FUTURIST looks at Bangladesh’s efforts to better prepare its communities to weather the effects of climate change.

Bangladesh has a number of early-warning systems in place to alert villages of advancing cyclones and floods. Such storm patterns have gotten more severe due to climate change, so Bangladesh has been investing time and money into further boosting these systems’ capacities. It’s also more than doubling the number of Bangladesh Red Cross volunteers who serve as rapid-response units for villages hit by storms. Cyclone shelters exist around the country, but the demand for them is spiking of late, so construction is peaking. Also, there are ways by which the shelters’ design and usefulness could be improved.

What follows is an interview between FUTURIST magazine staff editor Rick Docksai and Nazrul Islam, global coordinator for the Bangladesh Environment Network (a nonprofit network of environmentalists).

THE FUTURIST: I’ve heard about new early-warning systems that Bangladesh has put in place to warn communities about advancing cyclones and floods. When did these first go into operation? How effective have they been since?

Nazrul Islam: These are early-warning systems that we have built up over time. That started in the wake of a cyclone in 1970. More than a million people were swept away. The number of people who died in the cyclone in 1970 was very large.

Since that time, the country has been gradually trying to better prepare itself for cyclones. In the 1980s and 1990s, Bangladesh built up an early warning system and there have been some considerable achievements, as is well evidenced by a more recent cyclone in 1991: a very severe cyclone, but the number of people who died was much less.

But it’s not at all complete. A lot of issues remain, like the challenge of getting more people to use shelters. Many people stay on in their houses and protect their cattle in the event of a flood or cyclone. In order for the shelters to be effective they need to have stations for bringing the cattle into them. The cattle are the only capital many poor people have. They are their only means of livelihood.

Bangladesh has made progress on the early warning system and the construction of shelters, which has proven to be effective reducing the number of people who would be killed.

THE FUTURIST: So the early-warning systems predate global discussions about climate change. But how might recent observations about the changing climate affect the systems’ future development and future course?

Nazrul Islam: Climate change was not a big issue then. But over time, one of the effects of climate change is the extent of extreme weather events. Storms and other weather patterns tend to be much larger and exhibit greater intensity. It makes these preparations all the more necessary and forces us to raise them to a much higher level, given what is likely to come.

That will require a lot more resources. And much more importantly, those resources have to be utilized much more efficiently. A lot of people have to be mobilized.

THE FUTURIST: What role might the construction of dikes and river embankments play in keeping people safer from floods and storms?

Nazrul Islam: For dikes, it’s a more complicated issue. Dikes started in the 1960s. We had a lot of money invested in a project to build embankments along the coastal areas. And the idea was to protect the coastal land from the saline water of the sea that would come during the high tides.

Once we can separate the land from the water, it would be possible to grow more crops. But a lot of projects have unintended consequences. It proved to be controversial because it destroyed the ecological balance. The ecosystem got severely disrupted.

Bangladesh is the largest active river delta in the world. There is nothing comparable to Bangladesh. The Ganges and the Brahmaputra are the two rivers that feed Bangladesh. And two billion tons of sediments are being dropped into Bangladesh a year by these rivers.

This sediment is a vital importance for Bangladesh because Bangladesh was created by the sediment. Geologists have shown that in previous ages the shoreline was built up out of the water. And by the way of Bangladesh's shifting shoreline—it’s shifting because of the sedimentation—the land elevation rises by couple of centimeters a year.

THE FUTURIST: Interesting. So it’s like a natural levee-building process that buffers Bangladesh against rising tides.

Nazrul Islam: Yes. In general, that sedimentation leads to a rise in elevation of the land. That’s how Bangladesh was created over millions and millions of years. That silt was deposited into the Bay of Bengal, and that's how Bangladesh was created.

Because of the process of sedimentation, in the last couple of decades we have gained several hundred square miles along the coast. And it’s all because of this natural process.

Unfortunately, it's now getting obstructed by other developments. All the major rivers originate in India, Nepal, and China, and they pass through India. India has been diverting a lot of water from the rivers. It’s been diverting water from the Ganges by constructing plants to divert the water for use in its own areas, for irrigation and other purposes. India is a large country and thinks it can divert the water to its thirsting areas.

THE FUTURIST: That water diversion must spell trouble for the natural sedimentation process, does it not?

Nazrul Islam: The rivers used to bring in about 2 billion tons of sediment a year. And those sediments are the survival of Bangladesh against sea level rise. Because Bangladesh is a low-lying country.

But India has diverted a lot of river flow of the Ganges. And now we depend 70% on the delta water flow of the other major river, called the Brahmaputra River. This river originates in China, then it travels across Tibet and takes a sharp turn south of Sichuan province, and then it takes a sharp southwest turn to the Indian state of Assam and it enters Bangladesh. What is alarming is India has plans to divert water from this river, also, and now China has plans to divert water from this river to divert growing amounts of water to feed construction.

THE FUTURIST: It sounds like between China and India, the Brahmaputra and Bangladesh along with it are in a tight spot.

Nazrul Islam: If these plans come through, and they can because both China and India have large industrial and technological capability, the survival of Bangladesh will be really at stake. No large-scale diversion of the Brahmaputra has yet taken place, so we still have sedimentation in that part. This shows what effect will take place if the Brahmaputra is diverted.

Bangladesh is a poor country and it doesn’t have much international standing. It can’t stand up to India and China, because they're so much more powerful. No one pays much attention to Bangladesh.

When India diverted the Ganges, it was a violation of ecological and human rights. By this diversion of water in the Ganges they have deeply harmed the ecology and economy of Bangladesh. But Bangladesh has few opportunities to address it. India does not allow Bangladesh to raise the issue in international forums. It does not even allow Bangladesh to bring in other countries to intermediate as third parties; it says it will negotiate with Bangladesh directly.

THE FUTURIST: With the river flow interrupted, I’d guess this means that as sea levels rise due to climate change, Bangladesh will be more vulnerable.

Nazrul Islam: The dikes will not be of much use. There is controversy among experts who say that when you construct the dikes you obstruct the process of spreading out the silt. It is very questionable whether these dikes have helped, and that’s apart from the issue that they obstruct the natural ecology of the areas. It affects the ecology and deprives the natural sustenance of river flow. Everything is affected.

With its early warning systems, at least Bangladesh has made progress now that climate change has become important and its impact has become very palpable. But much more needs to be done. Bangladesh will need much more support internationally and domestically.

Bangladesh also needs uninterrupted flow of the rivers to bring in the silt that helps Bangladesh confront the flow of the rising water. It has done so going back millions of year and it will do so in the future.

We cannot predict the amount of sea level rise. Some say it will be seven meters. We don’t know how much of that will come out. But the evidence is very alarming. Some of what people said would be happening twenty or thirty years down the line are happening now. We are witnessing an acceleration of the effects of climate change and we are witnessing a lot of the effects in our country in Bangladesh now: erosion, disruption of the weather patterns. It’s important that the rivers that flow into Bangladesh be allowed to flow uninterrupted.

And consider that Bangladesh has 125 million people, and that the population could soon reach 200 million people. If sea levels rise, you could be submerging 60 million people. Where will all these people go? They will go to all sides of India. To America? It is not possible. India will have to face the pressure. It is in India’s interests to let this river flow. Bangladesh is only asking for what has been true for ages, for what is natural.

I think you as the international press can do a lot highlighting the issue. Our government is afraid, since India is very powerful. Bangladesh is in a fix. So we as a civic organization have been trying to raise our voice. We want to tell the truth and we want the international community to be aware of this situation here. This is a very dangerous situation, a matter of 60 or 70 million people getting submerged.

THE FUTURIST: When did India start diverting the river waters?

Nazrul Islam: India started commissioned the diversion of the Ganges in 1974. Since then, our southern part has been going through a process of desertification. We have hundreds of rivers that are drying up.

Now with climate change, there are more droughts. And rivers that were once full of water will become drier.

Once a river’s water flow gets below an extreme point, all the aquatic life dies. You cannot revive them again. It no longer can sustain the ecology of the flora and fauna that was in the system. So the next time you have more water, you no longer have more water life. For all the fishermen and all the people on the river who are an important part of Bangladesh's economy, it's a serious matter.

THE FUTURIST: India’s diversion of the Brahmaputra is upcoming. When will it most likely take place?

Nazrul Islam: We don’t know. India has not released the plans. But now India is in trouble, too, because China announced plans to divert water from the Brahmaputra. India has been asking China not to divert the water.

THE FUTURIST: What can India do now to help?

Nazrul Islam: India should decommission the dams that it has already constructed and should not pursue new dams. It should restore the natural previous flow of the rivers.

If Bangladesh does well amid climate change, it's better for India. Our position is let it be free, let it flow as it used to flow for ages. Bangladesh has the same message for India and China, and we think it's the message that is beneficial for all.

The Futurist Interviews Daniel J. Barnett M.D., M.P.H., Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

During the first week of May (2009) The World Health Organization called an H1N1 influenza pandemic "imminent." The largest pandemic on record, the 1918 Spanish flu, spread to nearly every corner of the world and killed as many as 100 million people. Today, we are more capable of dealing with flu, but because of global interconnectedness, we're more capable of spreading communicable diseases as well.

Are governments treating the current flu with enough urgency? Too little? Too much? More importantly, if we have indeed entered a new "Age of Pandemics" (as the Wall Street Journal announced on May 2nd) what can we do to better prepare for the epidemics of the future?

We turned to Daniel J. Barnett , M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor in the department of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Tyler Kokjohn, professor of microbiology at Midwestern University and author of the "In The Shadow of Pandemic" to parse the future of flu. (May 4, 2009)

Interview by Rick Docksai

THE FUTURIST: According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, a fully evolved pandemic of a highly lethal flu strain (not H1N1 necessarily) could result in 134 to 233 million outpatient hospital visits and 1.5 to 5.2 million hospital admissions, as well as billions of dollars of revenue and GDP loss. Two years ago, the United Nations estimated that a human influenza pandemic of the H5N1, or bird flu strain, might result in a catastrophic 150 million deaths. Swine flu appears to be spreading faster, but it also appears less lethal. Do you have any sense of how many deaths might result from a swine flu pandemic? What's the worst case scenario for the U.S.? For developing nations? What’s the most likely scenario?

Daniel Barnett: It’s really difficult to say. We don’t know yet if the current strain may mutate into something more severe or something less severe. Based on recent genetic analysis of the strain, there are some potentially reassuring signs it may be relatively mild in comparison to past pandemic strains. But we don’t know how or if it will mutate in the coming weeks or months. That’s why it’s so critical for surveillance activities to be going on around the world and for agencies at the federal, provincial, and local levels to be in close communication.

THE FUTURIST: So cooperation among government agencies at all levels is a key component of the solution.

Barnett: Correct. More cooperation, and especially more local cooperation, is essential. Local-level responders know their jurisdictions best and are best-equipped to make tailored decisions to meet their local needs with guidance from the federal and state levels. For example, some districts in the U.S. have opted to close their schools for the time being; some have not. Jurisdictions are looking at their local situations and making tailored decisions accordingly.

I can’t overemphasize the importance of local response to this international crisis.

THE FUTURIST: In a 2006 article in THE FUTURIST, you judged vaccination to be “the ideal response” to an influenza pandemic. How ready are most countries to vaccinate their populations against swine flu? What could they be doing now to increase their readiness?

Barnett: The challenges with vaccine production relate to the technology that’s available, the resources that are available, and the time it takes to ramp up production of a vaccine tailored to a given influenza strain. Vaccination is the ideal approach, but it’s not realistically feasible in the short term.

The standard means of producing flu vaccines today is egg-based production using hens’ eggs. It’s an inefficient process given the amount of time required to obtain the eggs and harvest the virus within them.

THE FUTURIST: Why eggs? How does this process work?

Barnett: Basically, in the egg-based method, the virus used to make the vaccine is harvested from a fertilized hen’s egg. After the virus has accumulated in the fluid surrounding the embryo within the egg for several days, it is machine-removed, and inactivated using formalin as a detergent. Only one to two doses of vaccine can be obtained from a single egg.

THE FUTURIST: What are the prospects for expediting the production of vaccines?

Barnett: Cell-based vaccine production, a recent innovation, is more efficient. This method could take significantly less time than egg-based production. But cell-based vaccine production is not widely used throughout the pharmaceutical industry. So we are really reliant on an antiquated production method. The cell-cultured approach is considered the ideal, and it’s one that we would like to see promulgated. In the cell-based approach, the virus is injected into cells– typically mammalian kidney cells–which multiply along with the virus. Then the cells’ outer walls are removed, harvested, purified, and inactivated, using a fermentation-like process to develop a vaccine.

But the technology and scale are not there yet. Although there have been pockets of advances, it’s not a realistic option at this time.

What adds to the challenge globally is that there are relatively few companies that produce vaccines. Developing nations, which lack pharmaceutical industrial infrastructure, may not be able to access vaccines well beyond this six-month window.

THE FUTURIST: What makes this flu strain different from past strains?

Barnett: This strain has pieces of human, swine, and avian influenza. One important point to mention about this strain is that pigs serve as mixing vessels. A pig can be jointly infected by multiple species’ strains of influenza; a pig can be infected by a human strain and a bird strain, those two strains can then recombine in a pig to generate a novel strain for which there is no preexisting immunity in human populations.

We don’t know whether the H1N1 will mutate into something more severe. One concern we do have is that the 1918 pandemic was preceded by a milder influenza epidemic. It’s uncertain whether what we’re seeing today is a preliminary stage of something more severe, or whether its severity will become lesser over time. This is why local surveillance is critical, as well as state- and federal-level surveillance.

THE FUTURIST: A pandemic has been declared "imminent." What does that mean?

Barnett: There are three criteria needed for a pandemic strain to emerge: First, it has to be a novel strain against which there is no immunity among humans. The H1N1 strain meets that criterion. Second, it has to be easily transmitted. The currently circulating H1N1 strain fulfills that criterion as well. Third, it has to cause significant disease in humans. This virus has shown that it can cause significant disease among humans and death in some cases.

That is why the World Health Organization has raised its pandemic influenza threat level to five on a scale of six. We don’t know for sure whether this will become a pandemic. But that is looking increasingly likely, given that the WHO’s phase 5 refers to a situation in which a pandemic is considered “imminent.”

THE FUTURIST: You also praised Tamiflu and other antiviral drugs as good options. But you noted that they have some issues of supply and drug resistance. Some researchers have already identified a few strains of common flu that are resistant to the antiviral drug Tamiflu. How quickly could the swine flu virus mutate and become resistant to our available antiviral remedies?

Barnett: That’s the $64,000 question. We don’t know. The virus could mutate very rapidly or it might not mutate at all and not go on to become more pathogenic in more regions of the globe. We just don’t know at this point.

THE FUTURIST: In your 2006 article, you attributed a primary role to the local responders, “the workers who are going to be on the front lines of any nation’s response to pandemic.” What should local responders around the world be doing now in light of the swine flu pandemic?

Barnett: One of the most important things that need to be done at the local level is effective risk communication to citizens. Any of the basic measures we’d use for seasonal flu are also relevant to H1N1 prevention: washing your hands, and covering your mouth when you cough (and preferably coughing into your elbow rather than your hands). It is currently thought that transmission is by coughing and sneezing. Hygienic measures are the best ways local communities can reduce the spread of the virus.

Another measure that local communities can implement is social distancing. For example, a number of local jurisdictions have made the decision to cancel school for a period of time.

Every community’s responders need to undertake their own assessments of trends in terms of the spread the illness and the measures that can counter it. And some measures may be more effective in a given community than others might be. The reality is that no one locality is the same as any other. Local jurisdictions know their populations best.

Local responders need to be prepared to distribute medical supplies. In the United States, for example, the Strategic National Stockpile’s “12-hour push pack” contains antivirals and other supplies. Upon receipt of these federally stockpiled materials, local-level health departments are in a lead role for distributing these supplies to the populations in their respective jurisdictions.

The concept that all disasters begin locally has a corollary, and it’s that all diseases need to fundamentally be addressed at the local level. Local-level responders need to be making decisions tailored to the needs of their communities.

Antivirals are, at least in the immediate term, the most effective and reliable means to address the situation. Tamiflu and Relenza are effective in dealing with the current H1N1 strain.

Antivirals can be used in one of two ways; they can be used in the short term after someone has started showing symptoms, but they can be also be used prophylactically to prevent illness in the first place. Different countries, in their pandemic flu plans, have taken different prioritized approaches for use of antivirals. Some countries have taken an approach favoring use of antivirals for prophylaxis. Other countries take an approach favoring treatment. It is not a matter of a “right” or “wrong” approach for prioritizing scarce resources. The approach must be tailored for jurisdictional needs.

The very good news so far is that this influenza strain is responsive to Tamiflu and Relenza. Having said that, there is always the potential for antiviral resistance to emerge.

We really do need to see how things unfold. We have every indication that antivirals will be an efficacious measure. But we really need to see how this virus evolves or mutates into either a more or a less pathogenic strain over time.

THE FUTURIST: According to a Washington Post story, Mexican authorities first saw unusual cases of pneumonia within Mexico on April 6th but only notified the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization by April 16. Do you think this 10-day waiting period was appropriate, or do you think they should have acted sooner?

Barnett: I think it is easy to look back in hindsight and criticize how one jurisdiction or region approached a situation but that’s not the most productive way to focus energy at this time. In general, my view on this is to err on the side of caution. If there is any inkling that there is an out-of-season presence of an illness, reporting is the best approach. Even if the result is a false positive, a false concern is a smaller problem. It’s of course better to report earlier rather than later.

Beyond that, we currently don’t know exactly how this strain developed. It is important that individuals let their doctors know if they are experiencing fever and upper respiratory symptoms, and have a recent history of travel to an H1N1-affected region or other exposure. It is likewise prudent that people stay away from work, for example, if they are sick and have traveled to such a place. The basic sort of public-health, altruistic principles have to come into play here--avoid exposing others to the illness if you’re sick.

We don’t know yet if such a step would be needed, but mandatory quarantining of populations is a possibility should the pathogenicity and reach of the influenza increase. I should specify that isolation and quarantining are not the same thing. Isolation is sequestration of someone who is symptomatic. Quarantining is for someone who may have been exposed to an identified case and is not yet showing symptoms, but who is nonetheless being sequestered for the safety of the community.

THE FUTURIST: What role do commercial farming methods play in preventing future outbreaks? What risks do farming practices pose insofar as exposing livestock to diseases and enabling diseases to spread?

Barnett: Large-scale commercial farming is fraught with potential public-health concerns. One of the concerns relates to zoonotic strains emanating from the large-scale livestock operations. I think the current developments should raise some discussion about the role of farming and farming practices with regard to health.

May 4, 2009

The Futurist Interviews Matthias Mordi, Empowering Africans Through the Internet

Internet connectivity is spreading across Africa, and it is giving rise to new waves of civic activism, according to the nonprofit Accender Africa. Nigeria alone saw the numbers of Internet connections triple between 2000 and 2008—to 24 million, up from 8 million—according to the organization.

Accender Africa welcomes this expanded Internet access and makes it its stated mission to support it. Average citizens who have Internet connections can monitor their governments’ activities and uses of taxes and aid funds. They will know when government leaders fail them—and will make sure that other citizens know, too. With this knowledge, they will be able to rally and hold their leaders accountable, demand reforms, and ensure that under-served communities at last get the support that they need.

Rick Docksai, a staff editor for THE FUTURIST, spoke with Matthias Mordi, Accender Africa’s executive director, about the organization and the overall trajectory of digital media in Africa. (Graphic courtesy of Accender Africa.)

THE FUTURIST: Let's start with a few words about Accender Africa itself. Basically, you use new-media technologies to help reduce poverty in Africa. How do you go about that?

Matthias Mordi: In a very broad sense, that’s an ultimate goal. The route to achieve that is by improving governance. The technologies are resources for building better government policies. The idea is using new media to promote transparency, which we hope would encourage good governance.

THE FUTURIST: Why is mobile Internet access taking off among African countries’ citizens but not the citizens of an industrialized country like the United States?

Matthias Mordi: I’m not an expert on the United States, but from my honest opinion, I think the United States faces challenges that are not quite present in the economies in Africa, where we are seeing exponential growth first challenge is that of being the first mover. The U.S. already had the existing technology and infrastructure. It’s like the man who already has train tracks versus the man trying to build a new train. The first man is constrained by the tracks he already has.

In America, many communities have the old infrastructure, like copper cables as opposed to optic fiber, for example. They would need optic fiber or an equivalent infrastructure, but there is a high cost of switching them over.

Having first-mover status is different from being someone who is starting fresh. In Nigeria, Ghana, and other parts of Africa, you’re starting from scratch. In Africa, most people never had a landline phone in their lives.

The second challenge for the United States is how the government works. Europe was able to move faster than the U.S. because they had a uniform standard. Countries in Africa, also, some have rules. Regulation gets them to expand to areas lacking service.

The U.S. lacks one common standard. Everyone is running in different directions. And in the U.S., the U.S. the private sector doesn’t invest in areas that are not profitable, and the government is not involved in encouraging them to make investments. Because in America, it’s a different philosophy. People don’t want the government to get involved the private sector. People are going to cry foul about government interference, which is why it isn’t going to happen.

THE FUTURIST: What services could a person in an African country obtain via a Web-accessible mobile phone that he or she might not be able to obtain via a Web-accessible mobile phone here in the United States?

Matthias Mordi: Very limited. I think the U.S. actually provides more services. The difference is accessibility. In Nigeria and many other African countries, the Blackberry has a feature called the BBM messaging service. You can add pictures and beta, and it’s free in Nigeria. So obviously think about it, free, you can send text messages for free. A service like that exists here in the U.S., but it costs more money.
Text messaging is one of the most common uses of cell phones in Nigeria. In the U.S. the cost of text messaging based on the existing revenue models of the cell phone makes access difficult for low-income people. In Nigeria and across Africa, access by low-income people is easier because the financing models and the form of use are different.

THE FUTURIST: Does that hold true for Web services, too?

Matthias Mordi: Not so much for Web access, but for other services. In terms of Web access, you’re seeing usage in cyber cafes. You see cyber cafes everywhere. It’s one of the most common ways for people, low-income people above all, to access e-mail and text messaging. But as for the middle class and the more affluent populations, most of the access is wireless.

THE FUTURIST: Do you think there might be lessons that the United States could learn from African communities on how to maximize mobile-phone Web access for disadvantaged groups?

Matthias Mordi: Yeah, absolutely, they could learn from Africa. But I think they could learn also from the Asian countries. Look at what’s happening in South Korea. The public sector co-invests with the private sector in a way that the resources of society are going heavily into building infrastructure, and that that has encouraged them to provide access to users across every sector. It’s worked nicely. There is something to learn from that.

A Natural Cure for Cancer?: THE FUTURIST Interviews Dr. Dipnarine Maharaj, South Florida Bone Marrow/Stem Cell Transplant Institute

When people come down with cancer, they submit to regimens of drugs and, if need be, harsh radiation treatments. But what if those patients could forego all of this and ward off their cancers with their own white blood cells? An experimental white-blood-cell-transfusion approach that Dr. Dipnarine Maharaj is developing might make that feasible.

Dr. Maharaj is a hematologist and oncologist at the South Florida Bone Marrow/Stem Cell Transplant Institute, a cancer treatment center that applies stem-cell therapies to cancers that have not responded well to other treatments. He is working on taking white blood cells from healthy donors and fusing them into patients with cancer, so that the transfused cells can stimulate the patients’ immune systems and enable them to ward off the cancers on their own.

His concept has precedents—doctors successfully treat some other types of infections by transfusing white blood cells—and the initial experimental results are promising. He will need more time, however, and much more funding before his treatment approach is ready. Dr. Maharaj described his research to Rick Docksai, associate editor for THE FUTURIST, in the following interview.

Dr. Dipnarine Maharaj (photo credit: BMSCTI.org)

THE FUTURIST: Strengthening the body to wage its own fight against cancer, instead of relying on drugs or radiation, is certainly an appealing idea. What first drew you to it?

Dipnarine Maharaj: We asked the question, why is that some people get cancer and others don’t? The answer is that someone who’s got cancer, their immune system is broken down. So if the people who didn’t get cancer, their immune systems are not broken down, how can we fix the cancer patients’ immune systems? I’m a stem-cell physician, and we’ve had this procedure for many years where we use a patient’s own stem cells or the stem cells of a donor to reform the patient’s own immune system. That’s what actually helps to cure the cancer.

THE FUTURIST: How does your new approach go about boosting the body’s immune cells? What mechanisms are involved?

Maharaj: To cure cancer, we really have to repair the immune system. What we’re trying to do is apply that same knowledge to treat patients with solid tumors. The method I’m using, we’re taking cells of the immune system from the donors, and we’re transfusing those cells into patients who have cancers. It is essentially a white-blood-cell transplant.

THE FUTURIST: How early in the progression of cancer would a patient need to be for the treatment to work effectively?

Maharaj: We’re still under the clinical trials. But the best way I could answer that question is that the smaller the amount of disease at the time that it is done, the better the chance of a positive outcome.

If we go based upon the animal studies, which were done over a 12-year period by Dr. Cui, he showed that it works. What I’m doing is translating it into humans. The question is, will it be an effective treatment in humans? That’s the debate in the clinical trials.

THE FUTURIST: If we can strengthen the body’s immune system to the point where it can ward off cancerous tumors, then perhaps we could strengthen the body’s immunity against many other diseases, as well. What prospects do you see for cross-applying this to AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases that still claim huge numbers of lives around the world every year?

Maharaj: I believe the answer is yes. There is evidence from the use of white-blood-cell transfusions before from patients that have had severe infections, and the patients were able to survive. It was used before for treating infections that could not be treated by anything else.

Using white-blood-cell transfusions for treating infections is not new. What is new is that we’re using it to treat patients with cancer. And we’re using young, healthy donors. Oftentimes, when they make transfusions, they transfuse blood cells from patients of all ages. We’re being selective because as we age, our immune systems become weaker. We really don’t want to take immune cells from an older person, because their immune system is weaker and less able to help the receiving patient’s body fight cancer.

THE FUTURIST: A lot of experts have expressed alarm over worldwide overuse of antibiotics, which they say accelerates the evolution of newer, deadlier pathogens that are antibiotic-resistant. If your procedure succeeds and attains widespread use, what hope might there be of reducing the world’s reliance on antibiotics to fight disease?

Maharaj: I agree. Certain things occur, over time, which weaken the immune system. Infections per se weaken the immune system. What’s happening now on the background of that, is that we have antibiotics developing resistant bacteria, so the immune system is not able to react. If we strengthen the immune system, we will be able to get rid of these bacteria, which means that we will solve this problem of bacterial resistance.

THE FUTURIST: How supportive have the NIH and other public institutions that typically sponsor medical R&D been so far of your efforts? If they have not been very supportive, then why?

Maharaj: With the economic situation as it is, funding has been very tight. One of the other aspects of this is that it’s a novel mechanism. And from a commercial point of view, a drug company is less interested in a study that involves a natural product versus a synthetic product. But the overriding problem has been the economic situation, which makes it difficult to obtain funding for a study.

However, we continue to reach out to private donors. If a million people were to read this interview and each one gave $10, we would reach our target funding goal and be able to complete this study.

THE FUTURIST: What are the next steps, research-wise?

Maharaj: We are in phase 1 and 2, and then we move to a phase three. It’s in the phase three that we get larger numbers of patients and are able to prove that the treatment is an effective treatment.

How to Read Minds: THE FUTURIST Interviews Neuroscientist Jody Culham

Your secret plans aren't so secret after all. Last year, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which reveals blood flow within the brain, Jody Culham and her fellow researchers at the University of Western Ontario discovered that areas of the brain associated with motion exhibit increased blood flow not only when acting but also when considering whether or not to act. In the January-February issue of THE FUTURIST magazine, we look into the study. Below Culham explains her work and its applications.

THE FUTURIST: You state:

“Given that conventional fMRI analyses in humans have shown widespread, highly overlapping, and essentially undifferentiated activations for different movements (Culham et al., 2006), combined with mounting evidence that standard fMRI methods may ignore the neural information contained in distributed activity patterns (Harrison and Tong, 2009), we expected that our pattern classification approach might offer a new understanding of how various parieto-frontal brain regions contribute to the planning of goal-directed hand actions.”

What do you mean by: “standard fMRI methods may ignore the neural information contained in distributed activity?” Did this experiment use non-standard fMRI methods?

Jody Culham: In functional MRI, we measure activation levels within "voxels" (= "volumetric pixels"), which are little cubes, typically about 3 mm x 3 mm x 3 mm. Until recently, the standard approach was to average activation across a whole bunch of adjacent voxels in a brain area to look at how the overall activation level changed. For example, if we measured the activation levels across an area involved in grasping, we might find similar level for grasping a teacup by the handle vs. by the bowl. In the past few years, decoding approaches ("multivoxel pattern analysis") have been developed to look at the pattern of activation across voxels within an area. For example, it may be that when handle-grasping, one particular voxel in the "grasping area" is strongly activated while another is strongly deactivated; whereas, when bowl-grasping, the pattern is reversed. In this case, even though the total activation across the whole area is the same, by using the patterns, we can guess better than chance which action a subject in the brain scanner performed.

THE FUTURIST: At the end of the paper, you hint at one possible application in prosthesis development, what other applications can you think of? Feel free to speculate wildly.

Jody Culham: Well, to speculate wildly, I suppose that all of this work on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) in general could lead to cyborg kinds of things even in normal people (whereas prosthetics would be aimed at people with handicaps, like spinal cord injuries). There are developments using things like brain waves (electroencephalography, EEG) to move a cursor on a screen, but EEG is quite coarse (and can't target a specific brain area with any precision). Potentially BCIs, such as multi-electrode implants, could perhaps be employed in normal brains to control things (cursors, avatars). We see our work as a proof of concept that a large number of specific areas within the human brain contain information about intended actions that could be used to control devices. Obviously it's not feasible to use a $4M brain scanner to do this in a large number of people, but there are other technical developments that may be able to tap into brain activation non-invasively (e.g, fNIR) or invasively (electrode implants). All of this is highly speculative as there are a huge number of technical and ethical issues to address.

THE FUTURIST: Are you familiar at all with the work of Nicole Speer? In a study conducted at Washington University's Dynamic Cognition laboratory (published in the journal Psychological Science in 2009,) Speer and her colleagues used fMRI to examine hemoglobin flow when people read fiction and discovered that the "readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge about past experiences." The brain regions that are activated "closely mirror those involved when people perform or imagine or observe similar real-world activities." It may be a irrelevant but it seems (to an admitted novice in these things) that the neurological “priming” effect of reading fiction is a bit like the priming effect you observed in your study.

Jody Culham: I'm not familiar with her work. However, it is consistent with a growing scientific literature suggesting that much of our understanding of things is based on simulation. For example, I might learn to ski by watching you ski and using the same motor control networks in my brain. I may even understand the word "ski" by invoking related concepts, including motor programs.

This interview was conducted by FUTURIST magazine deputy editor Patrick Tucker. Read the article on Culham's work here. Purchase the study here.

Rethinking Food-Delivery Systems

The nations of sub-Saharan Africa rarely receive credit today for structural innovation or entrepreneurial spirit. But thousands of African farming communities are earnestly pursuing better ways to grow produce and deliver it to hungry buyers in both their home regions and the big cities beyond. Even if their countries’ national economic numbers don’t show it, these forward-thinking farmers are boosting health and well-being at the local and community levels.

David Spielman, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) resident fellow, spoke to me and THE FUTURIST following a six-year stay in Ethiopia, where he researched agricultural development and farming-related science and technology topics. Spielman is the co-author, with IFPRI colleague Rajul Pandya-Lorch, of the 2008 book Millions Fed, which shares dozens of case studies of individual African rural communities that improved their crop yields and market shares by successfully implementing new farming practices, seed-distribution methods, or food-delivery systems.

This November, Spielman and Padya-Lorch will release an expanded version of the book. It will present all of the background studies that guided each of the 2008 edition’s stories. “It will provide the evidence that proves why each of the methods were successes,” says Spielman. “Think of it as a more technical volume for the more wonkish among us.”

FUTURIST: What are the best mediums for educating farmers in regions of Africa about better farming practices? What types of professionals are needed to operate those mediums?

David Spielman: I think that’s a very astute question; farmer education and farmer extension advisory services are very critical to improving poverty and the supply of food for rural consumers. That said, very few countries have invested enough in farmer education or farmer extensions.

Farmer extension can be a very broadly defined category. Many think it’s only about teaching farmers better practices, but I would argue that it really goes all the way back to basic education. Agriculture is becoming an increasingly scientific and technical practice, even in developing countries given increasing resource scarcities, given the increasing technical complexity, and given the variability that farmers face because of weather changes, or policy changes, or changes in price incentives.

All of these challenges require extensive amounts of education for farmers to be able to cope. And too many countries have not invested enough in education. It puts a real damper on how farmers will be able to manage risk.

FUTURIST: So a large component of improving farmers’ capacity is actually the school system?

David Spielman: Absolutely. And, of course, it’s many components, not just education. Getting the right sequence of events is obviously important.
I was in Ethiopia when the road network expanded very measurably. You’d see the roads being built and you get on the roads, and the first couple of years driving down these roads you’d see that there weren’t any big trucks coming down the roads bringing produce to the markets. The roads were only one piece.

I think there is a combination of many things that are needed. Improving access to education and the quality of education at the primary and secondary level is very important in Africa. That means improving the training among teachers, improving the quality of leadership in the education system, and it has much to do with improving the methodologies used for teaching and for evaluating students and teachers.

Certainly there needs to be some improvement in how farmers are trained to manage more complex production systems or to handle more advanced technologies. And some of that has to do with the way adults learn. People talk about the pedagogy of farmer education, but that’s a poor use of the word pedagogy, because pedagogy refers to children’s education. Adults learn differently than children do.

Earlier approaches to teaching adult farmers were very simplistic. Now instead of commanding farmers, extension teachers are seen as facilitators who are expanding farmers’ learning. As adults, we learn by observing things ourselves, by experience. Experiential learning has a participatory element, and that is allowing farmers to participate in asking questions, finding solutions, and engaging with researchers and extension educators together.

And the other thing is a lot of extension approaches have been based on very generalized recommendations. With climate change, you find that a lot of solutions to farmer problems might have very specialized answers. Farmer A might have different soil or water availability or weather than Farmer Y, so he requires customized solutions.

Also, access to markets may differ from farmer to farmer, so their approaches may have to be customized. This requires new types of extension educators. The extension agent is there to match the farmer with an input supplier or a trader who buys a certain type of output so if a farmer has a certain type of land that’s not very accessible to water, there are some tomatoes that can grow despite the lack of water. And the extension agent might reach out to sellers who have those types of tomatoes, or to a cell phone service that would help the farmer locate sellers who have those types of tomatoes.

FUTURIST: If a farm region increases its food capacity, consumers in Africa’s city areas will only see it if there is solid infrastructure in place to bring the food to them. As agricultural sectors devise new ways to increase their produce output, what kinds of innovations might food distributors, delivery services, and grocers make to keep pace?

David Spielman: One of the first things we need to remember is that farmers themselves are often net consumers. They may produce food for markets, but they themselves have to go out to markets to buy food, as well. Consumers in the city and in the countryside you have areas of surplus and areas of deficit. Getting the infrastructure right so that food can move from surplus area to deficit area is pretty fundamental.

In some areas this function is carried out by the World Food Programme or by NGOs. But many of my colleagues would argue that there are more efficient ways, like developing more sophisticated markets, such as a warehouse receipt system where buyers and sellers would exchange in slips of paper like on a stock exchange. The actual food might not be physically there, but you can enter into an agreement to say ‘you’ve got 50 tons of grain in location X. I want to buy it and have it delivered to location Y. This is what I will pay for it.’

Rather than relying on the World Food Programme or an NGO to move food around the country, market traders can do a good job of it, too, if not better. Less government control and not approaching food as a government control or relief operation, and focusing on the market dynamics, can work in a lot of cases. That’s one way of moving food more effectively from one end of the country to another.

And market strategies can create value in food that people want. There are a lot of employment opportunities that flow from the agro-processing industry. Take cassava as an example. When you process cassava by drying it, by making it into starch, by making it into a cookable substance that the household can make into a meal very quickly, that adds value and increases value, as well—you’re adding more value in the process.

Can you imagine if we had to wake up in the morning and create all our corn-based food from scratch? Having people somewhere in the country do that for us creates value and creates jobs.

FUTURIST: If many experts are correct, climate change could jeopardize the world’s agricultural sectors with increased droughts, erratic weather, and submergence of coastal plains under rising sea levels. If climate phenomena like these take place, what kinds of personnel and infrastructure would countries in Africa need to have put in place in order to contain the damage?

David Spielman: There are a lot of different approaches to mitigating climate change or adapting to climate change. Three that come to mind, the first is investing more in science and technology. This includes creating management practices and new seeds and other inputs that are more resistant to heat, salinity, or excessive cold or moisture. There is a lot of work going on around this, but certainly accelerating the level of research in this area is necessary.

Another way is financial risk management. I have a colleague who worked on index-based insurance, such weather insurance. Farmers could recoup if they lost some of their output. That’s another thing to put in place with respect to climate change.

And a third area would be to diversify sources of income for people so they don’t have concentrated risks in farming, which is particularly susceptible to climate change. That means expanding the rural non-farm employment sector.

In China, jobs were increased in rural areas not by more farming but by associated industries, such as repairing tractors and TV sets. Chinese officials committed to diversifying the employment opportunities in the rural areas so that people have multiple sources of income, so people have more assets to fall back on.

Climate change covers very large swaths of population. If there is a flood, it’s not just the farmers who suffer. There are extreme difficulties in managing climate change when the effects are so wide and felt by so many people at once. But that being said, putting all your eggs in one basket is usually not the best strategy. You want to find a way out of that.

FUTURIST: A “re-greening” of parts of the Sahel has been underway for some time. How far along are these efforts? How much more progress will they probably make? And how big a dividend will they yield for food supplies throughout Africa?

David Spielman: I’m not too sure. Millions Fed has a summary written by Chris Reij (chapter 6) and the Sahel. The changes in Burkina Faso and Niger in terms of soil fertility, increases of tree cover, and diversification of crop production has been tremendous. I think five million acres in Niger and another half million actors in the central plain of Burkina Faso.

The process has been quite tremendous, and it’s been largely driven by community activism and community organizations with support from NGOs and governments. It’s been a very organic, grassroots effort, one based on innovative processes that involve multiple stakeholders and people dedicated to making things happen. It takes a combination of events and individuals to deal with climate change.

I think these types of re-greening initiatives have strong local effects. They improve the local availability of food, the ability of local households to generate income from alternative sources such as livestock, agro-forestry, and other crops. And I think that’s really where the effects are being felt. Whether they are creating massive surpluses that can be exported across the borders, though, that’s probably not an immediate outcome.

FUTURIST: Much has been written about deforestation and the loss of vast tracts of rain forests in areas of Africa. To what extent do agriculture enhancements and “re-greening” initiatives slow – or better still, stop and reverse – this destruction of Africa’s forests?

David Spielman: The re-greening initiatives in Burkina Faso and Niger are in arid areas, not in rain forest areas. Nevertheless, re-greening initiatives are important in rain forest areas. But that’s beyond my area of expertise.

THE FUTURIST Interviews Brian Merritt, Founder of Compose the Future

On Saturday, July 28, WorldFuture 2012 conference attendees and innovation-loving Torontonians will have the opportunity to see how open-source innovation will shape our world through the social network platform ComposeTheFuture. The start-up’s founder, Brian Merritt, answered a few questions for us about ComposeTheFuture, which will be officially launched during Futurists: BetaLaunch at WorldFuture 2012.

Who is involved in ComposeTheFuture?

Merritt: ComposeTheFuture is a self-funded social network startup. I am the CEO/Founder and am currently building the core team and exploring funding options.

In true lean start-up style, finance and business planning have been outsourced to Associated Solutions in the UK, software development to Flexsin Technologies in India, and marketing and PR have been outsourced to teams on three continents.

The technical and product vision is still very much with me however, because I love my baby soooo much.

The Futurist: What background do you bring to ComposeTheFuture?

Merritt: I kicked off this career in technology and communications in the US Air Force. University was dropped in favour of the fast-growing PC industry of the late ’70s and early ’80s. I see-sawed between tech start-ups and large computing and telecom companies, with a two-year break to travel across the US and write a series of guidebooks for foreign tourists.

I recently spent nine years helping turn Interoute from a post-2001 dot com casualty into Europe’s largest and fastest growing supplier of information and communications technology services. Along the way, I gained an MBA encompassing product and software development, operational and customer support, solution selling, and business planning and forecasting in the famous “School of Life.” At Interoute, I was a recognized agent for change, always on the customers’ side, and saw not only the forest and the trees, but the ecosystem that powered them.

Having achieved profitability and stability for Interoute, I followed my dream to help individuals and organisations to face up to and plan for the future.

The Futurist: What inspired you to develop ComposeTheFuture?

Merritt: A lifetime of change, and of great experiences and almost unbearable tragedies, empowered and enabled me to take the longer term view. Being an agent of change in one of the most disruptive telecom start-ups helped me realize that anything was possible, if you could invent it and then implement it.

The Futurist: When did you first dream about and design your innovation? How far along are you in developing it? When do you think it will be delivered?

Merritt: ComposeTheFuture was the germ of an idea for many years, a dream of how to help people, and how to anticipate and grasp the future. As a design, it was prototyped on open-source software platforms and gradually grew into a full-fledged “idea for the time.” After several false starts whilst seeking a suitable software platform, ComposeTheFuture was put out to tender, with responses from 40 different software development companies across five continents. In May the software went into alpha test, and the beta will run through June and July ahead of the World Future Society conference, where it will be launched at Futurists: BetaLaunch.

The Futurist: What challenges have you faced already in developing ComposeTheFuture, and how did you address them? What challenges do you anticipate facing in the future?

Merritt: ComposeTheFuture as a platform has such amazing and diverse scope and capability, the biggest difficulty is to remain focused on the social network platform and not rush ahead creating dozens of other start-ups and delaying the launch.

The benefit of bringing a true innovation platform to market is an almost limitless potential for further and future innovation.

The greatest future challenges will be convincing other innovation management and social networking platforms that ComposeTheFuture is a positive force in the market, and showing how it adds value to what they are already doing. I believe ComposeTheFuture is a “delightful disruption,” a platform and open architecture that will integrate well with, rather than replace, other systems and methodologies.

The Futurist: What's innovative about ComposeTheFuture? What are you doing that others haven't?

Merritt: Social networks are typically about “who you know,” but ComposeTheFuture is all about “what you are interested in” and “what do you want to achieve.” Innovation management systems may combine social networking, but they are not truly open, not in the sense that everyone in the world can participate. Also, many individuals and even organisations confuse innovation with ideas. By combining collaboration and project management, in an open social network, change can be implemented globally.

The Futurist: What impact will ComposeTheFuture have on society and technological developments in the future?

Merritt: This is in the hands of the individuals and organisations that will use ComposeTheFuture. Whether they are setting personal goals, addressing global issues, or feeling empowered to create their own destinies is totally up to them. We do believe that they have the best available tool to achieve their goals, and also we will fully use our own platform to plan the next phases of ComposeTheFuture, for release in late 2012, and in 2013, and 2113, and in 211,213.

What conference sessions are you looking forward to attending during WorldFuture 2012?

Merritt: The Master Courses look very interesting, but sadly they run in parallel, so choosing is my next major task. Naveen Jain’s “Innovative Entrepreneurs Execute Big Ideas” is right up our street, so to say, and the Asian economies will have major impact on all our futures, so that is a must. ComposeTheFuture has much to offer the education market, so “When Ivory Towers Fall” is another crucial session. The truth is, we may have to do some quick cloning to ensure we get the most from the event as possible.

This interview was conducted by Kenneth James Moore. You can meet Brian Merritt and see the live launch of Composethefuture on Saturday, July 28th at Futurists: BetaLaunch 2012.

THE FUTURIST Interviews Ozzie Zehner, Energy Policy Scholar, on the Future of Global Energy Supply

Solar panels, wind turbines, and other renewable-energy options aren’t as sustainable as you may think, according to Ozzie Zehner, University of California-Berkeley visiting scholar. In his new book Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), he cautions against placing too much faith in “clean energy.”

A realistic global energy solution, he argues, will make reducing society’s energy consumption the top priority. He shared his thoughts in this interview with Rick Docksai, assistant editor for THE FUTURIST.

Ozzie Zehner

THE FUTURIST: Germany is pursuing a plan to derive 66W of its electricity from solar energy by 2030. How do you think this will pan out?

Ozzie Zehner: Germany became a leader in solar cell research and manufacturing over the last decade. German policymakers pushed through a host of subsidies for solar cells. The Euro crisis is now undermining that framework of subsidies.

Costs are amplified with inclement weather: Clouds, haze, hail, rain, freezing temperatures, and other factors create hazards for delicate solar panels. And German power companies must back up solar output with fossil-fuel plants or store daytime solar energy for later use.

It is highly unlikely that Germany will reach 30% solar by 2030. Even if it does, it will still have to deal with the negative side effects of solar photovoltaic production and energy storage. Furthermore, alternative energy mandates could simply squeeze energy-intensive German industries overseas. There, manufacturers will use dirty coal to craft goods that they will then ship back to German consumers.

THE FUTURIST: The Earth continually produces fossil fuels, albeit many times more slowly than the rate at which the human race burns them. So, theoretically, we could go on using fossil fuels indefinitely if we cut our consumption of them to a tiny faction of what it is now. What ideal fossil-fuel consumption rate should we pursue? And how capable are we of making the needed energy-consumption cut?

Zehner: Fossil-fuel renewal rates are so low as to be meaningless for practical decision-making today. Renewable forms of energy fueled humanity before the age of fossil fuels, and so they will after fossil fuels become scarce. However, there likely won't be enough of these renewable resources to go around. Humans will have less overall energy to work with.

We must achieve structural reductions in global energy consumption. Energy efficiency won’t be enough. In fact, energy efficiency can actually lead to negative environmental impacts unless regions institute taxes, caps, or regulations to prevent rebounding consumption patterns from exceeding efficiency gains.

The best way to get renewable energies to meet our needs is to simply need less. That is plausible. The largest environmental opportunities are in issues like human rights, healthcare, effective governance, and convenient neighborhood designs that are walkable and bikeable.

THE FUTURIST: Zero-energy buildings have attracted media attention in recent years. How feasible might it be to convert most, or even all, building construction into construction of zero-energy buildings?

Zehner: Insulation and good thermal performance strategies make sense. So do passive solar techniques, which employ overhangs, blinds, and smart window placement to take the most advantage of the sun’s energy.

On the other hand, there’s little reason to believe that household photovoltaic arrays and wind turbines do much to help the environment. Because of their energy footprint of production, toxins, and numerous limitations, they often merely swap one set of side effects for another. In fact, subsidized household solar cells and wind turbines may spur greater fossil fuel consumption: Alternative energy production expands energy supplies, which places downward pressure on prices, and leads to greater total demand.

Truly green homes aren't extraordinary at all. The most efficient homes and apartments sit in downtown neighborhoods that are close to shops, restaurants, neighbors, and public transit. They aren't too large, which minimizes construction materials, decreases heating and cooling requirements, and prevents them from doubling as storage units for runaway material accumulation. They have windows with adjustable shades, plenty of roof and wall insulation, adequate weather stripping, energy-efficient appliances, and kitchens with linoleum floors.

THE FUTURIST: Demand for air-conditioning systems is rising in some markets due to the warming climate. If the trends keep up, we could see huge spikes in household energy consumption worldwide. Where does air-conditioning fit in your scenario of a more energy-efficient society?

Zehner: A durable and powerful solution is to design buildings with awnings, overhangs, and blinds to deflect the sun’s rays. This can reduce—or in some cases, eliminate—air conditioning loads. But as long as it’s cheap and easy to turn down the thermostat, we probably won’t see much of a change from current trends. If energy costs were higher or buildings were required to carry an Energy Star rating when constructed or sold, then we’d likely see a shift.

THE FUTURIST: The BRIC countries, China especially, come up frequently in conversations about environmental challenges, and for obvious reasons: their rapidly growing economies, rising resource use, increases in automobile ownership, and massive emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. At the same time, most BRIC citizens still use far fewer resources than Westerners. How much progress are China, India, and Brazil making on conservation?

Zehner: Due to its rapid economic growth, China may appear to be following an unsustainable path compared to the United States. But when comparing China, a modestly consuming populace whose numbers will someday be smaller, with the United States, a more substantially consuming populace that’s set to expand, it is not difficult to determine which is sustainable within the limits of a finite planet and which is not.

Energy and economic activity are linked. That's one of the big reasons that humans find it so difficult to share energy resources and the obligations that come with them. It's unlikely that citizens of the rich world will willingly part with their high standards of living. It's even less likely that the world's poor will cease the push to increase their own.

(Note: For more information, also be sure to visit www.greenillusions.org.)

THE FUTURIST Interviews Quentin Wheeler, Biologist, on the Future of Biodiversity

Scientists have identified about 2 million animal species on this planet, but there could be another 10 million yet to be discovered, according to a report by Arizona State University biologist Quentin Wheeler and 39 fellow researchers in the March edition of Systematics and Biodiversity. The good news, according to Wheeler et al.: Thanks to digital technology and increasing collaboration between scientists and the public, the world could find all 10 million in the next 50 years. That is, if human population growth and destruction of wildlife habitats don’t wipe out many of these species first.

Wheeler discussed his outlook for species exploration and conservation in this interview with Rick Docksai, a staff editor for THE FUTURIST. Note: THE FUTURIST will publish a feature about Wheeler and the future of biodiversity in the months ahead.

Quentin Wheeler

THE FUTURIST: It sounds like the game is really changing for researching the world’s wildlife. What changes are you seeing?

Quentin Wheeler: The loss of species taking place now is frightening. If we don’t adequately discover and characterize the species, most of the data will be unavailable to future generations.

But the technological developments on the ground are two-edged swords. One example is molecular data. It allows us to do things we couldn’t do before. On the other hand, it can be misused. DNA bar coding, in particular: Researchers create species databases that take one short fragment of one gene—about 650 base pairs per specimen—and they say that’s enough information to identify every species. We know that it’s not that simple.

THE FUTURIST: Why are species extinctions so frequent now?

Wheeler: It’s the impact of human population growth and human activities—the reduction and loss of habitats. Most species have rather narrow geographic distributions. So if you destroy or seriously damage the places where they live, they disappear.

I also point out that we don’t know what species exist. And that’s the other urgency: so that we have a baseline for knowing who’s going extinct, how fast, and where. And society will then have the option of accelerating efforts to protect them.

And I am a strong believer that we have to put a face on biodiversity. Until we learn what we’re actually losing, it’s going to be hard to get people concerned enough.

THE FUTURIST: We’ve been classifying species for centuries. What do you see us doing differently?

Wheeler: It’s really how we do what we do. We’re still dependent on print media. It’s imperative that we speed things up. By using off-the-shelf technology, we could increase the speed of species classification. As we learn more about the biosphere and target our efforts more scientifically, I believe we can increase our results.

THE FUTURIST: You and your colleagues wrote that you see a growing role for “amateur” taxonomists. Can you tell me more about that?

Wheeler: Amateurs’ contributions could only go so far in the past. And as we digitize more information, people will be able to go much farther. We’ll be able to not only share our results with citizen scientists, but actually help them do the work.

One project we are developing now is “remote” microscopes that could photograph the specimen from multiple angles. We could create 3-D images of unknown specimens that we’re collecting and post the images onto Web pages. With auto-tutorials, citizen scientists could learn to distinguish the characters that we’re discerning and then go online and help us look for them in specimens. People can sit in their living rooms and be part of our team.

THE FUTURIST: That sounds like a great way for scientists to engage with the public like never before.

Wheeler: I couldn’t agree more. I see these great opportunities to excite young people. As long as we wall it off in ivory towers, then we shouldn’t be surprised that more kids don’t have an interest in becoming scientists. This accessibility is key.

The other dimension of this is natural-history collections. With emerging cyber infrastructure, we can think about linking natural history museums around the world into one research platform, so that any time I collect a specimen, the expert in that area from anywhere on the planet can examine it. That keeps all the databases more up to date and makes sure that we make policy decisions based on up-to-date data.

THE FUTURIST: Many of these hitherto-undiscovered species’ habitats lie within developing countries—the Amazon, Africa’s Sahel, et cetera. Many developing countries’ socioeconomic problems—i.e., poverty, urban sprawl, and rapid construction—lead to poaching, deforestation, and pollution, and may continue to do so. What prospects do you see for improving these ground-level conditions?

Wheeler: I take heart that over the last 20 years, we’ve seen rates of deforestation going down, and that there is recognition growing in developing countries that conservation can have value. And as we learn more about the Earth’s animal species, I think whole new economy will open up that will offer many new incentives to keep species around.

Janine Benyus wrote a wonderful book called Biomimicry that gives a lot of examples about how engineers have looked at models of nature to create solutions to problems in design. Engineers were looking at plant leaves, and they created a paint that cleans itself, just like the leaves’ surfaces. You paint it onto a house’s walls. And dust and particulate matter may accumulate, but when it rains, the water just washes the impurities away.

Another example was an architect in Zimbabwe working on an office building. He had read about termites in Australia where even though there’s a huge range of temperature in the termites’ desert habitat, the temperature in their nests stays within a couple degrees centigrade year-round. The architect studied the nests and then designed a building that uses 90% less energy to cool itself than a normal office building. We have to connect the dots between people searching for these types of solutions, and taxonomists who are discovering these solutions in the natural world.

THE FUTURIST Interviews Tomas Brückmann On Creating a Chemical Free Future For Farming

As the world’s farmers strive to produce more food, they rely on ever-increasing quantities of pesticides—which includes products to kill weeds, insects, and any other organisms that might threaten crops. Environmental groups warn that the extra food comes at a heavy cost, however, of severe harms to the health of farmers, consumers, and ecosystems everywhere. Tomas Brückmann, a project manager on pesticides and biodiversity for Friends of the Earth Germany—the German chapter of Friends of the Earth International, a worldwide federation of environmental groups—spoke about the pesticide dilemma with Rick Docksai, an assistant editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review.

THE FUTURIST: How would you characterize the overall pesticide use in Germany? Where is it trending—upward or downward?

Thomas Brückmann: The use of pesticides in public gardens is much too high, and on farmlands we have extremely high use of pesticides. And every year it is increasing. You have an enormous increase of glyphosate in Germany, and I think also in South America (editor’s note: Glyphosate is a popular weed-killer produced by agro-chemicals company Monsantor and marketed under the brand name Roundup).

THE FUTURIST: Why is pesticide use going up?

Brückmann: Farmers want to make a profit. With the high prices of food on the market, farmers are trying to meet the demands.

THE FUTURIST: What hazards do pesticides pose to wildlife?

Brückmann: We have had near extinctions of several bird species in the last 20 years in Germany, such as the grey partridge, northern lapwing, and the crested lark.

And we have large numbers of toads dying off. Toads live one or two months per year in ponds and the rest of the year on farmlands. So if we spray pesticides, it’s possible that we will kill the toads.

We also have a decreasing population of butterflies. And butterflies are a source of nutrition of the birds. The first to die, if you spray pesticides, are the butterflies, and a lot of the birds follow. This is the chain.

Additionally in Germany, we use a lot of herbicides, and this results in mass elimination of farmland weeds. Those weeds are another source of nutrition for other birds.

From the beginning of the 1990s, we have had a new group of pesticides produced by Bayer. This group is called neonicotinoids—same chemical that is in cigarettes. This group kills bees and is more dangerous than any other compound of pesticides. Henk Tennekes, a toxicologist in the Netherlands, called it “a disaster in the making.”

THE FUTURIST: What effects might pesticides have on human health?

Brückmann: An example of that would be a farmer in Saxony. His cows exhibited a disease, and then the farmer contracted the same disease. This disease is a strain of botulism, and it is known as a disease for cows, not for people. The doctors analyzed his blood and they found abnormally high concentrations of glyphosate.

We have a lot of new diseases—cancer, hormone disruptions, and others. In lesser developed countries, you have even worse problems. Farmers are using pesticides that are not allowed in the United States or in Europe. The multi-national companies such as Monsanto, Bayer, they have a big responsibility to protect people in farming countries from the use of pesticides, but they have not.

THE FUTURIST: I would like your thoughts on the “buffer zones” that I am told are constructed along some rivers that run near farms. How much protection can they provide the rivers from farms’ pesticide and fertilizer pollution?

Brückmann: Buffer zones are good possibilities to reduce the input of pesticides into rivers. But beyond buffer zones, we demand eco-farming, with 20% of the farmlands set aside for non-use, and along with that the use of better techniques, for instance, crop rotation (editor’s note: Crop rotation consists of alternately growing one crop on a field in one season and a different crop on the same field the following season; and every few seasons, growing nothing on it).

THE FUTURIST: Crop rotation would be a non-chemical alternative method for increasing farm produce?

Brückmann: It is. Our ancestors developed crop rotation to reduce insects, to produce more wheat and so on, and to improve the nutrition of the soil. If you use crop rotation, insects cannot settle there and live there through the next winter.

THE FUTURIST: What about weeds? What options do farmers have for controlling weed growth without herbicides?

Brückmann: We recommend use of regionally adapted plants. They are better protected against insects, against weeds, and against adverse climate conditions.

I will point out also that in Germany, consumer organizations in 2011 protested to the German government to reduce pesticide use. And now we have a pesticide-reduction action program—the government’s plans to reduce pesticides.

THE FUTURIST: It sounds like once you mobilized on the dangers of pesticide use, the government responded very quickly.

Brückmann: We have corporations and environmental NGOs fight together against the use of pesticides. And in Germany, more and more people buy organic food, since it is inexpensive and widely available in markets.

And all European Union member states have to develop programs to minimize use of pesticides (editor’s note: The Thematic Strategy on the Sustainable Use of Pesticides, approved by the European Commission in 2006, requires all EU member states to develop action plans to minimize pesticides’ potential harms to ecological and human health).

But the current regulations are not enough. Before a grower can use pesticides, the governmental agencies check it. But yet we have more and more diseases and damages to the environment through the use of pesticides.

Each farmer uses a lot of pesticides at the same time, and the combination of damages from multiple pesticides are not checked. Reactions between two compounds are very dangerous, and a lot of farmers use more than 10 different pesticides in one season. Therefore, a lot of people continue to become ill.

Leonardo Curzio Discusses U.S.-Mexico Relations with WFS President Timothy Mack

In an interview with esteemed Mexican journalist Leonardo Curzio last week, Society President Tim Mack discussed Mexico's promise for becoming an economic powerhouse. The 24-minute interview took place on November 14 and was broadcast on the popular Enfoque Noticias Primera Emisión program. Mack predicted that Mexico's growing economic strength will also change the nature of Mexico-U.S. relations. Click here to access the pod cast.

Mini Matters--an Interview with John Vanston of Technology Futures on Looking for "Minitrends"

Futurists, wisely, study the big picture. But John H. Vanston, futurist and chairman of the Austin, Texas, consulting firm Technology Futures, Inc., reminds us that sometimes the most important developments begin at a very small scale. He stresses looking for “minitrends,” which he defines as “emerging trends that will soon become important, but are not yet generally recognized.” An adept observer can spot them before they do, he explains, and can take advantage of them to benefit his or her business or organization. In his 2010 book Minitrends: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs Discover & Profit from Business and Technology Trends, Dr Vanston laid out a detailed game plan for detecting minitrends and devising ways to make the most of them.

He discussed his methods in-person at “MiniTrends 2012,” a conference that ran Oct. 17-18 in Austin, Texas. Nearly two dozen futures thinkers, including David Pearce Snyder, consulting futurist; and Rick Smyre, president of the Center for Communities of the Future, featured as keynote speakers and presenters. Stay tuned for Dr. Vanston’s follow-up conference, “MiniTrends 2013,” taking place this coming fall.

Dr. Vanston also spoke about minitrends in the following interview with THE FUTURIST. Rick Docksai, associate editor for THE FUTURIST, conducted the interview.

John Vanston

THE FUTURIST: In your book, you share a lot of helpful resources for discovering minitrends, and news media are among them. There are some widespread concerns about the quality of news media today, at least in this country: People worry that due to shrinking revenues and increasing corporate pressure, we have fewer reporters, and they are covering less substantive stuff. I wonder to what extent news media miss a lot of these minitrends; in that case, how do we manage to see what the reporters don’t see?

John Vanston: Although newspaper staffs are being reduced, I believe many do a fine job covering the news and, thus, remain an excellent source for uncovering attractive minitrends. However, I believe your question touches on a larger issue.

The objective of a minitrend application program is not to uncover every emerging minitrend. Rather, it is to uncover a sample of minitrends that could provide promising business opportunities.

You have to decide what trends you want to look at. And there are a few parts to that. One is the customers’ standpoint. Another is yourself—you’ll want to make a commitment to choosing what you want to do. You’ll want to find something you like. Then you can use approaches, such as comparing different minitrend possibilities and examining the overall attractiveness of the minitrends to the business community and to you, to determine which are worth pursuing.

THE FUTURIST: Businesses are making a higher priority of interacting with customers and in getting customers to promote their products and services by word of mouth. What opportunities exist for a customer or audience base being a help toward finding minitrends? And how might a business pursue it?

Vanston: You’ve got to listen to the customer. There are a number of companies such as BazaarVoices in Austin, Texas, who work with companies to get feedback from customers. And strong software programs are available to consolidate, organize, and analyze the feedback to pick up emerging trends. This process can identify important minitrends. I think that many times, the customers are very happy to tell you where something can be improved.

However, the consolidation of the input may well hide some important ideas buried in the consolidation process. More careful examination of individual responses may uncover minitrends that will lead to products and services that will truly delight customers.

Social media also provide a great way to gather views, opinions, feedback, and more from your audience base. Uses of such tools as UserVoice, Socialmention, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and even LinkedIn Group, can be invaluable when looking for important minitrends.

THE FUTURIST: What role could minitrends identification play in federal government agencies, when they are deciding which research initiatives or business ventures they will assist? -How fair would it be for someone to suggest that Solyndra, for example, was a failure of the Energy Department to recognize minitrends going on in energy R&D? Or, on the other hand, are losing some funds on some unsuccessful ventures just inevitable?

Vanston: The federal government is anxious to support truly innovative projects. The Small Business Innovation Research program, the Small Business Technology Transfer program, and the In-Q-Tel program reflect this reality.

To be truly innovative and make the most of taxpayer’s funds, these organizations need tools to help them when making investment decisions. Incorporating proactive minitrends identification practices to the investment decision-making process increases the country’s ability to be on the cutting edge of technology.

Obviously, the commitment to truly innovative investment will vary between departments and their leaders. As you point out, projects on the forefront of development have a higher probability for failure. Traditionally, venture capitalists are willing to accept a failure rate of four out of five investments if the one success is big enough. Such a failure rate would be politically unacceptable for a government agency, but there should be some realization that pursuing innovative approaches may involve some risk.

THE FUTURIST: You encourage individuals and businesses to set up formal minitrends programs for searching, evaluating, and exploiting minitrends proactively. To what extent can businesses or individuals utilize their own in-house resources for this? And in what ways are professional futurists still indispensable? What role would the latter play in the process?

Vanston: A successful minitrends exploitation program is widespread, exciting, and in consonance with an organization’s present structure and culture. The key to a successful program is the development in the organization of a MiniTrends Mindset process. By incorporating some of the techniques mentioned in the MINITRENDS book such as following the leaders, examining limits, and analyzing frustrations, the leadership of the organization can encourage the work force to be alert to any opportunities offered when a new law is passed, a new business is launched, an important person makes an unexpected statement, or a new technical or scientific discovery is announced.

This takes fullest advantage of the imagination of the organization’s primary asset—its people. It provides an avenue for all to be more agile, effective, imaginative, and, ultimately, successful. Ideally, new ideas are given consideration and useful ideas rewarded. The key as I see it is not so much the need for new committees and complicated processes, but rather, a change in the culture of the organization.

THE FUTURIST: On another note, I see that you conducted the first annual MiniTrends Conference in October, 2012. What are you looking forward to the most regarding MiniTrends 2013? And what’s something that has changed or newly emerged since the MINITRENDS book’s publication? Any new minitrends catch your eye?

Vanston: In regard to our goals for the MiniTrends Conference, we began by reviewing our basic mindset. Our overall objective is to make the MiniTrends Concept as well-known as megatrends and to familiarize as large an audience as possible with how to find minitrends and how to convert recognized minitrends into successful business and government operations.

It allows people who are not futurists to be engaged in the future. If they can establish this minitrend mindset, they can see a lot of trends and opportunities that they might not otherwise uncover.

I see interesting emerging minitrends almost every day because I have a Minitrends Mindset. For one, I see increasing concern about the trauma of military personnel returning from combat areas such as Iraq and Afghanistan. I believe new technologies and techniques for reducing this physical, mental, and psychological trauma will receive a great deal of interest in the near future. I believe that recent developments in DNA mapping will offer some new approaches to wellness and health.

In regard to health care, the Affordable Care Act will result in some forty million more people being covered by health insurance and the level of health care available being raised. This will result in a marked increase in amount of care needed, and it will probably be impossible for the number of available doctors to meet this need. Therefore, it will be necessary to change the structure of the health care system and the way health care is delivered, such as increasing need for doctors’ assistants and changing responsibilities of these assistants.

Progress in increasing the limits in processing large and complex data sets or “big data” offer many minitrend opportunities. For example, Streetline and Miltel are beginning to take advantage of sensing aspects of the advances.

I also believe that there will be new life in the minitrends examples that we discuss in MINITRENDS. For example, I think that we have only begun to see development of Web 3.0 techniques. New uses for Virtual Worlds are continuing to be developed. Certainly, the continuing increases in life expectancy offer opportunity for imaginative innovation. On the other hand, there will be needs for addressing the health hazards of growing obesity in the population.

Recently, I visited the Neste Oil company in Finland. This company realizes that it can’t compete with the Exxons and Chevrons of the world in commodity areas. Therefore, it is committed to be on the forefront of new developments. Currently, they are engaged in research to produce very low-contaminant diesel fuel and gasoline from various hydrocarbon waste materials such as fish residue.

THE FUTURIST: It sounds like, based on developments that you’ve described, futuring itself is set to evolve in fundamental ways. Can you tell me more about this?

Vanston: Basically you look at futurists, and you see two different parts to the overall group. There’s the group that sees the big things that are happening and says ‘we may not like them, but we can do things to change them and make them better.’

There’s the other group that says ‘this is what’s going to happen. We’re not going to take a position on whether it’s good or bad. We’re just saying it’s what’s going to happen, and you can use it to do what you want to accomplish.’

I think that the traditional futurists are the first group—we have energy problems, health care problems, and so forth. They’re defining the “megatrends”—major shifts in social, technical, economic, and political realities.

However, I believe that within the major shifts are smaller minitrends. Futurists identifying and analyzing these smaller trends are the second group, and I think this second group is going to become more important because those are things that you can utilize to make your own plans and so forth.

THE FUTURIST Interviews Dana Klisanin, Creator of the Cyberhero League

Several technologies and social innovations were featured in the second Futurists: BetaLaunch (F:BL) invention expo, part of the recently-concluded WorldFuture 2012 conference Dream. Design. Develop. Deliver. (Toronto July 27-29). F:BL is a “petting zoo” where WorldFuture attendees can interact with artifacts from the future and engage with the exhibitors. Below is an interview between THE FUTURIST magazine and Dana Klisanin, CEO, Evolutionary Guidance Media R&D, Inc. and creator of the Cyberhero League, a social platform that will enable children to actively impact the welfare of people, animals, and the environment through everyday activities, and one of ten F:BL winners.

CYBERHERO LEAGUE FOUNDER DANA KLISANIN

THE FUTURIST: Who is involved in your innovative project? Names and titles, project groups, inside and outside agencies—be as specific as you like/are able to be.

Klisanin: I designed Cyberhero League as a project of Evolutionary Guidance Media R&D, Inc. Our team, who share the intention of using the arts and media to co-create a better world, includes: Transmedia Producer, Kate McCallum; Creative Director, Melisca Klisanin; Lead Artist and Graphic Designer, Anastasia Kilani; IT Project Manager, Bridget Arrington; Graphic Designer, Josias Hernandez. Outside Game Design Consultation services provided by Pascal Luban of GD Studio; and freelance Game Development by Keefer Sery and Steward Hiltenbrand. My niece, TigerLily Klisanin-Ross, who attends Quest to Learn, a public school created by game designers at Institute of Play, serves as Youth Advisor. We’re currently creating a “hero-network” of approximately 45 non-profit organizations, starting with: The Millennium Project (Art and Media Node), c3: Center for Conscious Creativity, The Converging World, Pachamama Alliance, and Raincatchers. Our growing list of strategic relationships and advisors includes: Dan Mapes of MagNet Solutions; Ed Lantz of Vortex Immersion Media, Howard Esbin of Prelude, Gary Tomchuk of AwareGuide, and Jessica Chamberlin of Creative Human Capital.

THE FUTURIST: What is your professional and educational background?

Klisanin: As a psychologist, my background is in humanistic, transpersonal, and integral approaches to individual and societal wellness. I earned my Ph.D. from Saybrook University, an institution founded by pioneers of the humanistic psychology movement. While there, I began exploring the use and potential of the expressive arts as a means of supporting the development of character strengths and virtues. Ultimately, that research led me to ask how the arts and media might be used to promote planetary consciousness in a societal context. Cyberhero League is especially relevant to my scientific investigations in the area of evolutionary guidance media, an integral framework I designed to support the creation, use, and evaluation of media that aims to guide the evolutionary development of body, mind, and spirit, in self, culture, and nature. It was through this integral media framework that I began exploring digital altruism and the cyberhero archetype—two essential elements of the Cyberhero League project.

THE FUTURIST: What inspired you—or your team—to develop your innovation that you entered into Futurists: BetaLaunch?

Klisanin: Children are learning about global challenges, especially human-caused global warming and social inequality, but have limited power to affect the world. I am concerned that this lack of empowerment leads to feelings of helplessness, apathy, and depression, that continue into adulthood. Our innovation is designed to teach children 21st century skills, such as empathy, altruism, and compassion, through providing them with the means to help other people, animals, and the environment. By introducing children to the cyberhero archetype we hope to inspire them with the knowledge that they can develop their own strengths (physical, emotional, mental, & spiritual) and use information and communication technologies as a kind of “digital cape” to act heroically online and off.

THE FUTURIST: When did you first Dream about and Design your innovation? How far along are you in Developing it? When do you think it will be Delivered?

Klisanin: I began dreaming of creating a 21st century scout-like interactive gaming system in 2004—however, because much of the vision involved the use of handheld devices for bridging inside/outside play, such as “geocaching” treasure hunts, and so forth, the dream wasn’t practical. With the emergence of smart phones, the dream became increasing viable. The first design iteration began in 2007, under the name “Project Milky Way” and is described in an academic article I wrote on transception—the infusion of high moral values, such as compassion, equanimity, generosity, and loving kindness, into our digital technologies. That research led me to investigate digital altruism, which in turn, led me to explore the emergent cyberhero archetype. All of this research came together rather synchronistically when we began to develop the prototype in 2010. Our goal is to deliver in June of 2013.

THE FUTURIST: What challenges have you faced already in developing your innovation, and how did you address them? What challenges do you anticipate facing in the future?

Klisanin: In the beginning, the challenges were waiting for technology to catch up with the idea. More recently, the economic downturn presented us with funding hurdles. To overcome this difficulty we are launching a Indiegogo campaign to coincide with the Beta Launch event. We hope the press will become part of our “hero-network” and spread the word about our project, helping us generate the necessary funds to complete the project.

THE FUTURIST: What's innovative about your innovation? What are you doing that others haven't?

Klisanin: Our innovation empowers children, enabling them to act on behalf of other people, animals, and the environment, while doing what they enjoy doing best: playing! Through online and offline play, they learn qualities, traits, characteristics, and ways of being in the world that support individual, social, and environmental well-being. As an application of the Integral media framework, the project is designed to support on-going experimental research in areas such as compassion, empathy, and self-efficacy. Through open-ended narrative we are placing global challenges in a context that enables players to literally be part of co-creating a new story for the future (based upon their actions in the world). One way we are accomplishing this through bringing non-profit organizations and socially-responsible businesses together to support the member’s activities.

Something else we’re doing is designing the project to support trans-generational interaction. Our intention is to bring great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and children together in a spirit of play and adventure through providing them with a common goal: co-creating a better, more equitable, sustainable world. Our project serves as a bridge between the online and offline worlds, encouraging players to go outside to interact with each other and to experience the beauty of the natural world. Ultimately we hope to encourage players to cherish diversity and forge relationship with people from other countries. Never before have children been able to use their playtime and purchasing power to help others while changing business as usual. We are eager to see what they can accomplish with this ability!

THE FUTURIST: What inspired you to enter your innovation to be considered for Futurists: BetaLaunch?

Klisanin: Over the years, I’ve received a great deal of professional support from members of futures organizations, including the World Future Society and the World Futures Studies Federation. I was inspired to apply because I felt that the review committee would understand the integral media design approach and the project’s potential implications– both experimental and applied. I’m glad I did!

THE FUTURIST: What impact will your innovation have on society and technological developments in the future?

Klisanin: The pen is only mightier than the sword if the writing produced by it enables individuals to become more fully human—more empathic, altruistic, and compassionate. Likewise, the Internet and smart phones can only overcome our destructive practices, such as consumerism, waste, and greed, if we communicate 21st century values, such as empathy, creativity, interdependence, biomimicry, conservation, sharing, and so forth. Our innovation is designed to encourage social and environmental ethics. We see the project as a catalyst that will increase public demand for ethical media and ethical marketplaces.

Check out all the Futurists: BetaLaunch winners here; a special thanks to all who applied!

Note: a previous version of this story listed Kickstarter in the place of Indiegogo.

THE FUTURIST interviews Charol Messenger, spiritual and futurist author

People today don't just have more technology than their ancestors; they actually have more intelligence and a heightened sense of right and wrong. Just ask the neuroscientists who have documented an increase of more than 10 points in the average adult's cognition since the 1980s; as well as the Flynn Effect, a rise in global IQ scores since the 1940s. They're not entirely sure why these mental advancements are occurring, but they vouch that our brains are fundamentally higher-functioning than those of any generation that preceded us.

As for our ethics, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and Tulane University political scientist Christopher Fettweis both authored books in which they note declines in warfare and violence worldwide over the last century, and reasons to believe that the world will become steadily more peaceful in decades ahead. You can see THE FUTURIST's reviews of both books—Pinkers's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined; and Fettweis' Dangerous Times?: The International Politics of Great Power Peace—here and here, respectively.

Recently, FUTURIST associate editor Rick Docksai spoke with another voice of hope for progress, the futurist and spiritual author Charol Messenger. In her latest book, Humanity 2.0: The Transcension, Messenger describes a new evolutionary stage for the human species that she says is now under way: Communication networks are flourishing, cultural barriers are breaking down, and individuals everywhere are attaining new levels of empathy, insight, and awareness. She shared her thoughts with Docksai in this interview.

Charol Messenger

THE FUTURIST: You speak of an “evolution” that the human race has always been undergoing. This evolution is making a major “leap forward” this century. As you describe, it’s a mental, spiritual, and physical evolution. How does the physical evolution manifest itself?

Charol Messenger: Humanity’s physical evolution is the awakening of existing genetic strands. This exhibits itself in an increased ability to perceive complexities, and a sharper aptitude for intuitive reasoning. These characteristics result in a faster ability of mental processing. Some indicators are higher creativity, more sensitive intuitively, and a clearer comprehension of subtleties.

Examples of this are the people whose grasp of the finer realities is heightened; as in scientists who extrapolate scenarios based on conjecture rather than known results, and scientists whose ability to conceptualize new eventualities far reaches beyond previous thinking.

THE FUTURIST: IQ scores have been rising worldwide over the last century, according to researchers, who call it the Flynn Effect. To what degree might this be a sign of human evolution?

Messenger: The universal effect of a physical evolution in the human being is most evident in the capacity of the “faster brain.” We are in flux. We are not who we were. And we will continue to accelerate by every new generation. The long-range effect of this is an increasing ability to see the whole. We gradually begin to understand how “all are one.”

THE FUTURIST: Some would say that the social media revolution is a human consciousness shift—people all over the world can interact, exchange ideas, and be connected like never before possible. What role might Facebook, Twitter, and the like play in our evolution?

Messenger: The new technologies are one means by which all humanity begins to reach across the great gulfs between people and join common causes. The greatest benefit of this is community. We begin to draw together, to really feel how all peoples are parts of some greater whole.

There are complications. Not everyone is thoughtful. But the true shift in global consciousness is like a tsunami, and it is rolling through societies like a flood wave. It will continue and cannot be stopped.

THE FUTURIST: On p. 167, you describe a cultural values shift taking place in the Middle East, and it includes growing affirmation of children’s welfare and respect for women. What examples can we see of this?

Messenger: The world is still filled with unconscionable acts toward women and children. What is new is an increasing demand for justice. Women and children themselves are speaking out and leading this new soft revolution globally. The new movement to safeguard children and women has breath now, and it will only grow—in much the same way as a wildfire rages across a land by only a small breath upon it.

THE FUTURIST: You describe an “energetic resonance,” an energy field of Earth that has been accelerating in recent decades and positively affecting human evolution. This makes me think of the Global Coherence Initiative, in which engineers created a Global Coherence Monitoring System to track fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field and ionosphere. The system found that not only do the magnetic fields change right before certain natural disasters, but that people’s moods, heart rates, and thought processes change along with them. And, according to the Web site: ‘There is also evidence of a global effect when large numbers of people create similar outgoing waves.’ Perhaps it’s charting the same energy field that you are writing about. To what extent is Earth’s energetic resonance measurable? And to what extent can we interact with it?

Messenger: Basically, all of the topics discussed here are interrelated, not distinguishable. Already you can see the incredible effects of a faster brain, the most tangible evidence of an evolving human being. Secondly, as the human mind is expanding in its cognitive abilities—evident in increasing empathy—the planet is dynamically altering in its magnetic frequency.

The rate of one’s vibratory resonance or frequency is the primary indicator of the level of intuition (there are levels, or degrees) and the level of dimensional existence. The more resonant you are to higher thought (fast mind), the more you are able to embody empathy and to exacerbate intelligent intervention in solving the world’s problems. Bottom line, the Resonance Factor affects all living things.

THE FUTURIST: You write that a new spiritual consciousness is unfolding across the Earth. What is the future of the world’s religious traditions and creeds?

Messenger: The human race takes millennia to evolve. This includes changes in cultural practices. Structure was needed for survival. One form this took was organizations in all forms. Most people turned their lives over to people who did seem to have a more substantial comprehension of the great puzzle called life.

However, now all of that is shifting. For this century, religions and dogma continue. Yet the number of people awakening to a personal connection to the inner divinity is the main observable event. The new spirituality is without structure. It is in the self.

Religions, dogmas, creeds will disintegrate, in time, for the greater whole. The new spirituality is personal. It may be sharing. There may be groups. But there is no dogma. No one dictates required behaviors. The awakened self learns that the grace of personal humility is all the guidance one needs.

The new spirituality is individuals discovering that the true value of our lives is in how we open our hearts, how we treat each other, and how we are without judgment. As we, as a people, learn these qualities, that is the degree of our spiritual evolution.

The Futurist Magazine Interviews Stephen Wolfram

Continue to THE FUTURIST Magazine Interview with Stephen Wolfram

The Toronto Star Interviews David Pearce Snyder at WorldFuture 2012

David Pearce Snyder is a consulting futurist and WFS member who predicts directions and trends that many people overlook. The Toronto Star caught up with him at the World Future Society Conference July 27-29, held at the Toronto Sheraton Center.

The World Future Society Welcomes its New China Chapter

The World Future Society has been talking frequently about China for years. But just this year, for the very first time, the Society now has an actual presence in China. As Kenneth Hunter, chair of the WFS Board of Directors, announced Friday in an opening plenary speech at the WorldFuture Conference 2012 in Toronto, Dr. Zhouying Jin founded earlier this year a first-ever China chapter of the World Future Society.

Dr. Jin, who is a Society member and a senior researcher in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, looks forward to leading the new chapter in not only better acquainting Society members everywhere with China’s issues and perspectives, but also promoting foresight thinking throughout China’s public sectors, business circles, and local communities. She spoke about her hopes for China and her new Society chapter in this interview with Rick Docksai, associate editor for THE FUTURIST.

Dr. Jin presents in a session at WorldFuture 2012.

THE FUTURIST: When did you join the World Future Society? When did you start this new China chapter?

Zhouying Jin: I attended this conference first in 1998, and almost every year since then, I have attended. But a very sad thing is that very few people from China attend. Almost always, it’s just myself. So this time, we decided to establish the chapter of the World Future Society in China, and we now have almost 40 professional members.

THE FUTURIST: Who else is participating in the chapter now?

Jin: They come from universities, some from government agencies and institutions. Others are entrepreneurs.

THE FUTURIST: How would you characterize the Chinese government’s interest in foresight?

Jin: So far, most of the people, they pay attention to at least three years or five years three years. They have formal three-year and five-year plans. But as for long term perspective, they really lack attention. And we very much struggle for financial support for futures studies.

THE FUTURIST: China is in the midst of major change now—business growth and Web accessibility on the one hand; environmental challenges, economic difficulties, and political dissent on the other. What role do you see futurists in advising and directing developments in China toward the better?

Jin: This is our aim as futurists in China. We must show up for our crises and be a warning system on what problems they have. And our aim is to give them some design model for a good future. There is a good future that we want, and to get this good future, we need some road map. This I am doing as a systematic solution.

Science and technology are important, but they are not everything. Many people are very concerned about the engineering projects, but to change the development models, I think technology can have a role but not the main role. The important thing is how society—from the top leadership to the local officers—changes the thinking model from the traditional development model that everybody is pursing, based on money, to green development.

And it’s not just an environmental perspective. There are also the social and economic components that we must include if we are to have a harmonious society of smart growth.

And for that, government intervention is not enough. We must also include civic and local governance and researchers. But that is very difficult because, as a developing country, we’re in the stage of accumulating the primary assets. In government and business, they’re more interested in how to get the financial assets. But over 10 years we’re taking about the future. Most people don’t like talking about the future. They say we’re busy now.

Meanwhile, air pollution is very heavy. We just feel that the problem is not just the money. We need some comprehensive, systematic solution; not just more money, infrastructure, and technology. I’m talking about a systematic solution.

Governments, plus NGOs, and business community, they still mostly are more interested in economic profits. The central government realizes the long-term environmental crisis, but for many of the local governments, it’s a problem. Some local governments—we have 31 provinces—some local governments, they are more interested in economic development. They make economic development number one. That is understandable, but there is a huge social and environmental cost.

THE FUTURIST: What help can the World Future Society and related organizations give to your new chapter?

Jin: I really hope that the World Future Society can support China’s future studies and futures research, because we are in a very difficult position. But as for how to awaken the citizens and local officers, and even the central government, we need some deep research and forecasting to show how dangerous the situation is. We need long-term studies. But we have very few investments for them. It’s very hard to get the money.

I advocate to government officials, but my position is as a chapter leader. I want to remain an NGO leader, not a government leader.

THE FUTURIST: That is a position in which you have more independence, I imagine.

Jin: Yes, but independent means less money. So I really hope that the Society can help our work in China. I’ve been fighting this fight for almost 10 years.

The Futurist Interviews Andrew Keen, Part II

An Internet entrepreneur and Web critic is trying to remake the Internet from within.

THE FUTURIST: You’re perhaps the most outspoken critic of Web 2.0 and Internet culture to participate in Internet culture. You’ve railed against Twitter and Facebook even though you subscribe to both. What do you see as your mission?

Andrew Keen: I’m ambivalent about Facebook and Twitter and almost all of these things. But as a speaker and a social critic, I have an economic incentive in finding an audience. As mainstream media cracks up, the only way to build a brand successfully is to use a service like Twitter. That’s not to say that tweets in themselves have intrinsic value or will ever have intrinsic value. You’ll never be able to sell a tweet, no matter how beautifully crafted. I don’t have to admire or improve what’s happening, but I can’t be a Luddite, either. The people in the nineteenth century who refused to acknowledge the significance of the Industrial Revolution were swept away.

THE FUTURIST:You’ve been very vocal about how today’s Internet culture erodes privacy. Do you envision a future in which privacy neither exists nor is particularly missed? If so, what does someone with no conception of privacy behave like? What is the culture like?

Keen:I do envision such a possibility. In a culture with no concept of privacy, there wouldn’t be an inner life. Nothing would be kept to ourselves. We would lifestream 24 hours a day. The John Stuart Mill idea of the good life, with a clear delineation between inner and outer life, is turned on its head. I hope we never see it.

But you can already sense the way the Internet and artificial intelligence are tearing down the notion that we should have a distinction between public and private. I’m terribly hesitant about terminology like “transparency,” which suggests that businesses, institutions, even professionals, should try to put as much of themselves online as they can to reassure the public about their activities. This portrays that shift as something good, as more evolved. What does this lead to? Perhaps a culture of constant self-arrest, where we’re afraid to do anything because of how it may appear to others. Perhaps we’ll live vicariously through our AI entities.

THE FUTURIST: You’ve compared the Internet revolution to rock ’n’ roll, but it seems that the Internet revolution has the potential to be more hopeful. After all, rock ’n’ roll coincided with the rise of Jacques Derida and the deconstructionist philosophical movement. Many argue that the appeal of rock ‘n’ roll was the way it presented a violent teardown of prior musical forms. The Internet, by definition, is about construction, building the future. How exactly is the Internet like rock ‘n’ roll?

Keen:The Internet is more closely related to the rock ’n’ roll culture of the Sixties rather than of the Fifties. Richard Florida, who wrote Rise of the Creative Class, has talked about this. He makes a good point that the Internet, technologically, rose from the military-industrial complex of the Fifties, but the culture of it is better represented by the counterculture of the Sixties. It’s not that the Internet is like the Sixties; it is the Sixties.

The primary difference is that rock ’n’ roll generated a lot of money for certain types of people — namely, record companies and artists. The heroes of the Sixties were the rock stars and the counterculturalists. Many of them were obsessed with a childish revolt against authority, but some of them were remarkable. The wealth that’s been created out of the Internet revolution has been monopolized by technologists. The heroes of this age are entrepreneurs like the Google boys rather than the creative artists who have been relatively ignored for the most part.

The ultimate irony is that the artists were the radicals in the Sixties. In the Internet age, they’ve been rendered conservatives. Look at what happens to singers who try to defend intellectual property rights and the vitriol of the attacks to which they’re subjected?

Similarly, nothing of much intellectual or cultural value has come out of the Internet as an artistic medium. Intellectuals are able to use it peddle their own brands and ideas, but I’ve seen little Internet-based art with any lasting value. There haven’t been any real Internet movies; there hasn’t been a truly affecting Internet novel, though many have tried; Internet music has been basically a failure. Even when it’s successful, it isn’t created on the Internet, it’s just distributed on the Internet. Google, for example, is a remarkable company built by two computer scientists. Has it contributed to culture? At best, Google has undermined traditional media and destroyed it, and in so doing, it’s destroyed the way artists make money and the way experts make their livelihoods.

What does this mean for us now? The crusty old academic in a chair with a pipe reading books and giving lectures won’t work in the twenty-first century, but I don’t believe expertise will be swept away. I hope it will be modernized. Today’s expert needs to learn how to ride the wave, which requires not only wisdom, but speed.

THE FUTURIST:Watching these trends over the last few years, have you grown more optimistic or more pessimistic?

Keen:I’m more optimistic than I was when I wrote Cult of the Amateur, which was published in 2007 (St. Martin’s). People have begun to realize that Wikipedia isn’t reliable, that most of the stuff on YouTube has no value, that a tweet, by definition, cannot be wise. My hope is that by 2020 experts will be able to flood back into the production of culture. A legal scholar can tweet as well as a 12-year-old. It’s not the technology that undermines the expertise; it’s a cultural disrespect for authority and even for learning.

But culture is changing. We’ll require new experts to help us understand how that’s happened and what it means, particularly for education. Hopefully, people who are smart and well educated, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences, will seize back the tools of production and realize that they can have quite an impact by distributing their wisdom.

About the interviewee

Andrew Keen is an author and Internet critic and the author of Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing Our Culture (St. Martin’s, 2007). As an Internet entrepreneur, he founded the music site Audiocafe.com in 1995. His second book, Digital Vertigo: Anxiety, Loneliness and Inequality in the Social Media Age, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2010.

The above interview was conducted by FUTURIST senior editor Patrick Tucker and appeared in the March-April 2010 issue of THE FUTURIST.

The Futurist Interviews Andrew Keen, author and Internet guru.

January-February 2008 Volume 42, No.
In his book, The Cult of the Amateur, (Currency, 2007) blogger and Internet entrepreneur Andrew Keen explores today's new participatory Internet, (often referred to as Web 2.0). He argues that too much amateur, user-generated, free content is threatening not only mainstream media—newspapers, magazines, and record and movie companies—but our very culture. We asked Keen what today's Internet trends mean for the future of our increasingly Web-driven society.

THE FUTURIST: Summarize the basic premise of your book for us; what do you see as the great danger in the way the Internet is allowing millions of content creators to undermine established media?

Keen: I don't believe this is any kind of conspiracy. Most of the technologists behind Web 2.0 want to do well and they're decent people. The relationship between the rise of new media and the crisis of old media is causally complex. It would be a dramatic oversimplification to argue that the only reason mainstream media is in crisis is because of the Internet. They are intimately bound up with one another and are cause and effect, in some respects. But people stopped trusting and reading newspapers before the invention of the Internet. People, particularly in the U.S., have problems with all sorts of authority, with or without the Internet. It's a reaction against cultural authority.

It's no coincidence that most of the intellectual leaders of the Web 2.0 movement are children of the sixties. There's a book by Fred Turner of Stanford called Counterculture to Cyber Culture that traces the birth of Silicon Valley and today's Internet to people opposed to traditional forms of authority. When we look at Web 2.0 we're staring into a mirror. We're a society that's intent on exposing the unreliability and corruption of authority, whether that authority is an editor at a publishing house or newspaper, or an executive at a record label, or a producer in Hollywood, or a politician. The representatives of mainstream media have become a convenient punching bag, much like politicians.

The alternative to mainstream media, which is the Internet, is by definition untrustworthy because it doesn't have gatekeepers. It lends itself not to imagined corruption, but to real corruption. Ironically, the continual distrust of our supposedly unreliable mainstream media has given us a new media that is, by its very definition, unreliable.

FUTURIST: Was there a specific incident—perhaps something that you witnessed during your Silicon Valley days with Audiocafe—that convinced you that today's Internet is killing our culture?

Keen: I describe it in my book. I had an epiphany at an event called Foo Camp, which is Friends Of O'Reilly Camp. It's the classic Silicon Valley Unconference conference, with lots of people espousing jargon about democracy and interactivity and cultural flattening and openness. It was at that event in September 2004 that I had my transformation. I went from a digital believer to an unbeliever.

FUTURIST: What happened?

Keen: I just had enough of these wealthy Silicon Valley guys talking about democratization. It was the height of absurdity that these affluent people thought they knew what anybody else wanted culturally, politically, and mentally. It occurred to me that what was going on was intellectual fraud.

I think it's worth stressing that the book begins with this epiphany. The book itself, as a narrative, is premised on it.

FUTURIST: How do you see this trend evolving in the future? For instance, just as our technology habits got us into this mess, is it possible that a different, future technology might get us out?

Keen: I don't think this is a technology story. Hopefully, what's going on now will force people to realize that expertise does have value. Third parties—gatekeepers—add value to all media. They help produce much more truthful content. People will rediscover the value of expertise and authority figures who know what they're talking about, so I hope that Web 3.0, when it arrives, will reflect something new. Rather than the empowerment of the amateur, Web 3.0 will show the resurgence of the professional. Having talked to a number of people who are building their next-generation Internet businesses around proven expertise, I'm more optimistic now than when I first wrote the book. Many of the new Internet media startups pay the people who contribute content to their sites and don't allow them to hide behind anonymity.

FUTURIST: When do you think this change to Web 3.0 will be noticeable?

Keen: I think it's already happening. When you look at the Web sites like Mahalo.com (which is paying its contributors), HowThingsWork.com, and a number of other businesses I've written about, you see the change that's taking place. Smart people in Silicon Valley are now invested in those kinds of businesses.

But I have a feeling that the tipping point will come with something involving Google or one of the Google companies, like YouTube. YouTube is the driver of the Web 2.0 economy, and they epitomize the hypocrisy of Web 2.0, as well. They're making a fortune from the advertising sold around free amateur content, but they articulate this ideology of personal empowerment. I've seen some incredibly disturbing videos posted on YouTube. I think we're going to see a profoundly immoral example of how media—without a gatekeeper—lends itself to nastiness. That will be the low point.

The high point, so to speak, for Web 2.0 was when Time magazine voted "you" as the person of the year. I think we're going to look back at that as the PetFood.com moment.

FUTURIST: Is there anything else we might do now to reverse these trends?

Keen: One area I think we need to concentrate on is anonymity. I think it's one of the most corrosive things in the Web 2.0 world, and it lends itself to corruption, rudeness, vulgarity. I spent some time at Berkeley with a few research guys from Yahoo. All of their research shows that, whenever a site is dominated by anonymous posters, the quality of the content is dramatically lower than when the site encourages people to reveal their identities. I think that more and more business will come to understand that relying on anonymously produced content is actually a way of losing money.

For the rest of us, we need to ask ourselves, "Is Web anonymity really necessary in a democracy?" I just don't think it's justified unless you might be put in jail for your opinion.

The other great concern for me is media literacy. Young people need to understand the difference between Wikipedia and The New York Times online. There's a difference between a blog and book. I'm thrilled that education professionals out there are now teaching media literacy in schools. I think it needs to be taught not only in schools but also in universities.

FUTURIST: You've written a book, you blog online; what else do you do to get this message out there?

Keen: I'm doing a lot of speaking, I'm presenting to people in Vancouver. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be in Amsterdam, then London, then Greece, then Frankfurt. This is a message that's caught on. I've got translated versions of the book coming out in China, Taiwan, and Poland. The book is an opening salvo, a polemic to get people to think about these issues. I hope that after my book, people will write more thoughtful, scholarly works on this subject. My book is not a scholarly book. It's not a balanced book. It's an attempt to begin a conversation.

To read an excerpt from Keen's book where he discusses Foo Camp, go to: www.andrewkeen.typepad.com

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker .

The Futurist Interviews Arthur Shostak, sociology professor at Drexel University.

Arthur B. Shostak

2002

WorldView 2002 conference chairman Arthur B. Shostak, a sociology professor at Drexel University, has taught several courses on utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares. Based on his 40 years of teaching experience, plus contributions from 34 fellow scholars and 10 students, he has just published a compilation of source materials and sample course outlines for college use. Utopian Thinking in Sociology: Creating the Good Society (American Sociological Association, 2001), is available from the Futurist Bookstore. Order Now.

Future Times asked Shostak to explain why he believes utopian studies are important to a sound twenty-first-century education.

Future Times: Are utopian studies growing at this time in academia? Does this growth (or the lack of it) fairly reflect interest in utopias among the public at large and young people in particular?

Arthur Shostak: Judging by the extraordinary turnout recently for the New York Public Library’s exhibit, "Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World," interest in utopias among the general public is strong. Combine this with the public’s obvious long-standing fascination with dystopian visions in many films (such as A.I., Aliens, A Clockwork Orange, etc.), and it would seem the audience for such material is very large and possibly still growing.

Within the university, I am encouraged by the wonderful reception in terms of sales and accolades that has greeted our new teaching manual for sociologists. Utopian studies is a creative subject, wide-ranging, and multidisciplinary—a type of course increasingly popular nowadays.

And as for students, my 47 years on campus, the last 40 of them as a teacher (I’d rather say "co-learner"), have convinced me that young collegians are always hungry to explore the twin notions of possibilities and perfectibility. They are mature enough to understand that "possibilities" include a number of preventable futures rife with every sort of horror that human ingenuity at its worse can devise. Accordingly, they want instead to promote desirable possibilities and thwart the nightmare. Most crave more from life than is offered by the shopping mall, and they understand that living a life that matters requires pursuing ideal goals—including many that cannot realistically be achieved in their own lifetime.

FT: How can futurists best use the concept of utopia in their work?

Shostak: Gingerly. Cautiously. Very carefully. The concept is rife with problems, only some of which are evident. It is clear, for example, that the term "utopian" bears the burden of being thought a synonym for "impossible," "impractical," and "unattainable"—i.e., beyond human grasp or even human vision. Less clear are the veiled values, such as racism and sexism, that contaminate many past visions of an "ideal" society. These deep-seated faults take a heavy toll on many self-proclaimed utopias and are all the more damaging for being implied rather than stated openly. As if this weren’t enough, "utopia" will always and understandably mean very different things to different cultures, religions, and epochs.

All the same, futurists can profit from using the concept of utopia in three ways. First, utopias can expose and question commonly held assumptions about human nature, fate, the prospects for planned change, and the limits of human capabilities. Second, utopian studies allow us to compare and contrast different visions and to explore how different people define "the Good Life" and "the Good Society." These mental constructs, which vary greatly across times and among cultures, explain much about the future(s) we set out to create (or neglect) in the present. And third, utopias help us to expand our grasp of what is possible and what we really mean by "perfect." Helpful here are magazines like YES!, The Journal of Utopian Studies, and of course THE FUTURIST, as well as works of fiction like Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach and EarthFuture by Guy Dauncey.

FT: Do concepts like "preferred" or "normative" futures mean the same thing as "utopian studies," or are there crucial differences?

Shostak: I’d say one important difference is that utopian studies goes out of its way to celebrate humility, tentativeness, and respect for individual differences. I think the notions of "preferred" or "normative" futures should be kept dynamic and fluid—open to change and interpretation—rather than allowed to harden into what George Orwell, an astute student of dystopian terrors, has called "smelly little orthodoxies."

FT: In your opinion, have any practical experiments in utopia succeeded?

Shostak: Oh, yes—many. Once you concede that there are no panaceas, no single "right" vision of utopia, once you get past thinking that perfectibility is a state of being and realize instead that it is a process, a moving target. Then you can begin to appreciate just how well the early monasteries succeeded in helping to rescue learning during the Dark Ages, how thoroughly the early Kibbutzim in Palestine helped test socialist ideals, and how many good ideas for urban planning and sustainable community design were introduced and refined in the early New Towns built up outside war-ravaged London, and in certain nineteenth-century utopian communities in the United States.

Other praiseworthy utopian experiments include the creation in the 1840s of America’s system of public schools, the New Deal in the 1930s, the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s, the creation of the United Nations, and, more recently, such quiet (and unexpected) triumphs as the end of apartheid in South Africa and the peaceful division of Czechoslovakia. Each of these represents a profound contribution to our grasp of what is possible for humanity.

FT: How can individuals benefit from studying the attempts made to build utopias in the past?

Shostak: Naturally we can try to identify errors we might avoid repeating and highlight constructive lessons worth emulating. We can "stand on the shoulders of giants," and see farther and more broadly. We can revel in thrilling dreams of our predecessors, and dream our own still finer Dream. Above all, we can take inspiration and hope from the example of those utopia builders, like Gandhi, whose lives instruct and honor us all.

FT: Can multiple utopias, based on differing—or even conflicting—visions co-exist? Or must one set of basic values become broadly accepted to provide significant benefits on a sustainable basis?

Shostak: Given the primitive state of human intellect, insights, and emotions, it would be premature to consider closing off any of our future options. Far better is to greatly improve our models of change, our communication abilities, and so on, through a healthy competition among mutually respectful versions of utopia.

This said, 50,000 years or so of settled co-existence have field-tested a wide and steadily growing number of basic virtues that probably belong in any variation on utopia. Specifically, it would seem far more utopian for a society to end capital punishment, to reject the use of terror and torture, to provide for the needs of its least-well-off citizens, and to bolster the hopes and ability of all persons to compete.

Similarly, basic values that appear to promote utopian gains include the cultivation of artistry, caring, creativity, curiosity, empathy, faith, honor, humor, love, sensitivity, and other virtues celebrated by healthy, life-appreciating people everywhere.

FT: Is college the best time to explore utopian ideas and their application in history, or can younger students usefully study utopias, too?

Shostak: Pre-kindergarten children are old enough to "play" with ideas (and sounds, and colors, and fragrances). Such "play" enables them to test what is good, what seems better, and to imagine what might possibly prove ideal.

Every level of schooling, and every stage of our lives, offers appropriate material with which we can hone our skill at imagining possibilities and exploring how much closer we can get selected aspects of life to "perfection."

Lifelong schooling, provided we stay in touch with our frailties and our foolishness, should profit from a conscious exploration of utopia—a preferable and, I believe, an ultimately possible place. It will not be quickly or easily secured, but the endless pursuit of it has us draw on the best of our potential.

Besides teaching courses in futures thinking and utopian studies, Arthur Shostak has written numerous books and articles on labor issues and the future of work, including CyberUnion Handbook (M.E. Sharpe, 2001). His address is Department of Psychology and Sociology, Drexel University, 32nd and Market Streets, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104. E-mail shostaka@drexel.edu; Web site www.futureshaping.com/shostak.

This interview was conducted for Future Times by Lane Jennings and Cindy Wagner.
Interview posted on 28 November 2001.

The Futurist Interviews Aubrey de Grey

At WorldFuture 2011, FUTURIST magazine deputy editor Patrick Tucker took a few minutes to buy a beer for keynote speaker and renowned aging expert Aubrey de Grey who has famously said that the first person to live to be 300 years old has already been born. In this short video, de Grey discusses his near-term hopes for the future.

The video begins after Tucker asks de Grey how information technology might change the search for a cure for aging in the next ten years

The Futurist Interviews Azar Nafisi

THE FUTURIST: You are regarded as a proponent both of women’s rights in the Muslim world and of Westernization. How have recent events changed your views of the influence of Western culture in Iran? On the one hand, there is evidence that students in Iran were using mobile technology to organize protests following the 2009 Iranian presidential election. (Most of the people “tweeting” about it, however, were from the United States.) On the other hand, the Iranian government has used that same technology against protesters. Does mobile tech like cell phones and the Internet make the fight against authoritarianism easier or more difficult? What are the pitfalls?

Azar Nafisi: You see the adverse effects of technology in America itself. It’s become a challenge to turn information into real knowledge. The United States is becoming a superficial culture. But right now, inside Iran and other repressive countries, this technology is far more advantageous to the people than to governments. The Internet and cell phones are allowing the Iranian people to connect to the world through human-rights sites where texts about democracy are available. These texts are read and translated widely in Iran. I’ve connected with hundreds of Iranian students to learn about what’s actually going on there. A similar phenomenon is playing out in China. But the continuance of this progress requires the help of companies like Google and Yahoo.

THE FUTURIST: Looking more broadly, the current tension between the United States and Iran has become a dispute over technology — does Iran have the right to the same nuclear weapons capability that the United States has possessed for more than 60 years? Isn’t it hypocritical for the West to claim it’s seeking to aid the cause of progress when it is literally standing in the way of knowledge sharing on this issue?

Nafisi: Don’t get me started criticizing the problems of Western U.S. foreign policy; this isn’t among my criticisms. We should put our efforts into taking these weapons out of the hands of all countries, whether Pakistan, Iran, or North Korea. Yes, Ahmadinejad mentions this supposed double standard, and nuclear weapons are dangerous in America’s hands, just as they are in anyone’s. But the United States is far more open and democratic than is Iran. The system in the United States is more reliable. The government is more accountable than that of the Iranian regime. I can trust it more. But I don’t feel good about America or any other country having nuclear weapons.

THE FUTURIST: You’ve said: “At the beginning of the [Iranian] Revolution, not only the Islamists but also the radical left were all very set in what they wanted and the way they saw the world. As the revolution progressed, two things happened to the young Islamists. One was that the Islamic Republic failed to live up to any of its claims. Apart from oppressing people and changing the laws, and lowering the age of marriage from 18 to nine, [the Islamic government] did not accomplish anything economically, socially, politically, or in terms of security.” Today, as part of the so-called Green Revolution, thousands of Iranians are directly challenging the results of the latest presidential election. Do you think the Green Revolution’s aims are more realistic? Do today’s rebels stand a greater chance of success? And what’s the most important thing the 1979 revolution has to teach the Iranian rebels of today?

Nafisi: I was one of those starry-eyed optimists as well. But the new movement is mature. The Iranian people have paid a very high price for the mistakes of 1979. The most important lesson: If you’re going to join a revolution, you have to have as clear an idea of what sort of government you do want as what you don’t want.

The second lesson they appear to have learned is that democratic ends should be achieved through democratic means. The government won’t allow it. I have hope, but I’m not overly optimistic. The government is savage and terrified. The political leaders who would favor democracy, both in Iran and abroad, are now followers of the new movement, whose strength comes from the spontaneous actions of the people themselves. It’s truly a grassroots phenomenon.

What does this show? That Iran has a strong civil tradition. But there are times you need leadership and strategy. I expect the government will continue to kill and jail anyone who comes to the front.

THE FUTURIST: In your new memoir, Things I’ve Been Silent About, you write: “Looking back at our history, what seems surprising to me is not how powerful religious authorities have been in Iran, but how quickly modern secular ways took over a society so deeply dominated by religious orthodoxy and political absolutism.” Why do you think that was, and what does it say about the potential spread of Western ideals and Western notions of democracy in Iran and throughout the Muslim world?

Nafisi: Iran has a unique history; it goes back 3,000 years to the beginning of Zoroastrianism. Even now, the Islam practiced today in Iran is mixed and mingled with pre-Islamic traditions. The Iranian New Year is celebrated on the first of March; the names in the calendar are Zoroastrian deities. We are a multicultural society, with different religions, different traditions, living side by side. This provides the flexibility the country needs to accept the new.

So many people think changes and modernization in Iran just came from the West. I think the old system of monarchy just stopped working. The time of Western ideas coincided with a period of crisis. At the start of the last century, Iranians were bringing novels and theater back to Iran, but they were also boycotting foreign goods and fighting British imperialism. The history of the West in Iran is one of cultural and economic exploitation.

On the other hand, you have a close relationship culturally. This persists. The most important political leaders of Iran in the twentieth century were secular. And the most important of these was Mohammad Mosaddeq. The Ayatollah Khomeini hated him as much as he hated the Shah. Mosaddeq was religious but secular in governance, and his influence remains considerable.

When you talk about genuine, multiculturalism, you need a political and civil system that extends rights to all. You see that in the United States itself. There are people who think the country is Christian in nature, but this is a stagnant view. The Founding Fathers were Christian — they mention God — but without freedom of religion, no country can claim to be multicultural.

THE FUTURIST: What do you see as the likely future of Iranian–U.S. relations? What future would you like to see?

Nafisi: The problem lies with both sides. It’s to the advantage of the United States to have full diplomatic relations, but it’s not in the regime’s interests to make peace. The regime sees U.S. culture as the most dangerous weapon. An embassy in Iran, with people lining up to apply for visas, doesn’t help them maintain power. But the United States has been tactical and simplistic in its approach. It’s reduced its perception of Iran to the regime.

The United States has vacillated. I think the correct policy is pursuing dialogue with the regime, but also creating a dialogue with the Iranian people.

My ideal future is one that features genuine interaction and dialogue well beyond the government level. The problem is that connections right now aren’t through personal contacts but through governments. If people in the United States became more concerned with the human rights of the Iranian people, this would be a positive step. I’ve been looking for ways to create a connection between the two peoples. I do this through my books and through my teaching. I was first introduced to America by Huck Finn. I want people to come to Iran through Firdausi, a poet. Perhaps I can help with this. Art and literature should not be bound by nationality.

THE FUTURIST: Paint us a picture of the year 2020.

Nafisi: I hope that developments in technology, particularly visual and virtual reality, will bring us closer together. Imagine people across countries and continents “walking” into each other’s homes thousands of miles away. If we can create this experience through technology, the world will become a better place. I’m terrified of a future where we use gadgets, devices, and little amusements to shut ourselves in, to isolate ourselves. But new technology can actually serve the cause of empathy. If a girl is shot in the street in Iran during a protest, and a girl across the world can see it — can put herself in the place of her comrade across the sea — a tragedy becomes a victory for humanity. ❑

About the Interviewee

Azar Nafisi is the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran (Random House, 2008) and Things I’ve Been Silent About (Random House, 2008). She is a visiting fellow and lecturer at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, www.sais-jhu.edu.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine.

The Futurist Interviews Barney Pell, CEO Powerset.

Barney Pell

March 2008

Barney Pell is the CEO of Powerset, a company specializing in conversational search-engine technology.

Futurist: What's your time horizon for bringing a conversational AI to market?

Pell: There's two pieces, one is what we're doing at Powerset and one is what is happening in the industry in terms of natural language. Powerset is building a new search engine based on natural language understanding. Search engines today are built on a concept of keywords. They don't really understand the documents that you search; they don't really understand the user's query. Instead what they do is they treat the document as a bag of keywords. And they take your query as a bag of words, and they try to match the keywords to keywords. The result is that as a user, the human has to try to figure out what words would appear in the documents that I want that would match that would work with this kind of search engine. Some people are very good at that game and using very advanced syntax and features and they get a better search experience. Whereas the rest are missing something. That's not good enough because search is now our way of getting all of our information from the Internet. Why some people are better than others is because some people are better at working with computers. But it's not like we don't know how to express our intent. We do it everyday. Every one of us is very good at expressing intent. The problem is that computers are not yet able to work with us on our own level. We feel inferior and like we're missing out on something. The time is coming when people will be able to use their own natural built in power to say what they want just in English, for example, and have computers rise to the level where they are able to work with the meaning and the expression and match that against the meaning of the documents and give you a whole different search experience. Not just matching meaning to meaning like keyword to keyword, but also presenting the results in a way that shows that the system understands your question and can help you focus on the parts that are interesting and helps you follow up with more of a dialogue to help you clarify your intention to guide you to something that's good.

In terms the schedule for that, in a couple weeks, Powerset will open up early versions of our system for very early users to come and get feedback. We expect that over the next year, we'll be coming out with a fairly large search index where a system has read every single sentence on millions of Web pages and is using that to let users do a search with natural language.

Futurist: Where do you see the entire industry going in the next five to ten years, I know Wikipedia and Google were working on similar software tracks right now?

Pell: I think this is an inevitable future. I think natural language is the inevitable destiny of search. It's go to become the center of the whole industry. I make the prediction that within ten years, people are going to expect routinely that all of the electronic devices that we interact with have some level of linguistic processing ability.

That doesn't mean that every single device will all have very high language processing capability. It will mean that for every category of electronics at the lowest end will all have very large language processing capability, but it will mean that our expectations will be that for every category of things we would expect to have some language capability. Within search, it will be over the next five years that people will begin to expect to be able to use natural language as your query syntax and have that actually an impact as opposed to right now where that actually hurts you.

Futurist: On a personal note, what got you interested in AI?

Pell: Actually I've been interested in AI my whole life. I loved games from an early age. I always wondered how it is that we think and get better in these types of games. I realized that the reasoning ability of intelligence was central to being human. When I was an undergrad, I went to Stanford and I initially declared my major in symbolic systems, studying AI and cognitive science. I started working in natural language while I was an undergrad. My entire career afterward has been about AI research and then developing applications and commercialization aimed at changing the world. I'm interested in how building other systems that could be intelligent reflects on our mind, which I think is infinitely fascinating, and also the transformative power to create useful systems to transform people's lives in fundamental ways. AI has both of those aspects for me.

Futurist: Can you describe a moment where you were working on your current project and you realized the future was unfolding in front of your eyes?

Pell: When I first started Powerset, I went to evaluate a bunch of different companies based on the technology that I thought was going to be required. We found the technology at Park that looked like it would be a good basis for what we were doing. Before we licensed the technology, we worked very closely with Park to create a prototype. At first, there were a lot of bugs. It was hard to get anything to work at all. It was all very strange. Then there was a change in January 2006, the second version of the prototype. My goals were previously to have something work at all, getting the system to recognize any type of meaning. In this new version, the system was doing more of those type of things so well that now I was complaining because the tense was wrong, or I asked for 'who did IBM acquire,' and it told me 'who IBM might acquire.' That you could even be that picky about a system meant that a new threshold had been crossed.

Futurist: You're saying that by working on this invention, it really forced you to focus on the words you used at an almost Proustian level, to learn language almost entirely again?

Pell: When you interact with a natural language based system, it actually draws out our expectations of what a language should be and makes you more aware. One fun thing about these systems is that they find new interpretations of words and phrases that humans gloss over because of our rich knowledge, getting an interpretation that we never heard of.

Futurist: Is there a particular example that comes to mind?

Pell: We were looking at the kinds of concepts the system had extracted from Wikipedia, and sorting them by what concepts and relationships occurred most frequently. We found that there was a really high proportion of sexual acts happening in Wikipedia data. This puzzled everyone to see. Obviously there's some sexual content in Wikipedia, but could it really be that much? We looked deeper at the sentences the system thought were examples of people having sex. They included things like 'john took his dog to the park.' It turns out that there's a sense of 'take' and 'have' and 'do' that's sort of biblical. This was before our system was doing proper word sense and disambiguation. So all those different meanings were equally likely for the system. It was basically finding double entandras and innuendo in everything.

Futurist: Give me headline: Ten years from now, AI does such and such and it changes the way people think about AI on a very fundamental level.

Pell: Natural Language Queries Replace Keywordese. There's already people tracking the length of the average query and it's been steadily increasing from two words to three words, steadily approaching four words. There'll be a crossover point where queries expressed in regular English will exceed the proportion are using keywords. Its a concrete metric we can track. I'm going to call that in five years. Search is something people use everyday. Once that point is reached, companies will start pouring more money into natural language technology, AI, conversational interface and semantics. The pace will pick up and it will take people by surprise.

Futurist: Do you envision something like a Hal 9000 for every home?

Pell: Absolutely. I think we will definitely get to the point were you will expect to engage your household systems in conversation. We're a long way from that. Over the next decade, we'll expect to be using voice rather than typing to interface with all our systems. Voice-in, voice and data out. Voice will become first order citizens in terms of the way we interact with computers.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker

The Futurist Interviews Barry Kellman, DePaul University bioweapons expert

Barry Kellman, DePaul University bioweapons expert, says bioviolence will become a greater threat as the technology becomes more accessible. His May-June 2008 article in THE FUTURIST on the subject proved prescient. Last December a congressionally-chartered bi-partisan panel made headlines in the U.S. when it reported that a bio-attack was likely in the next five years. THE FUTURIST went back to Kellman, a WorldFuture 2009 speaker, to ask him how he perceives the threat of bio-violence now and how governments might better protect their citizens from one of the biggest threats of the 21st century. (Nov 1, 2008)

THE FUTURIST: In your article, you talk about what a bio-weapons attack might look like and which pathogens might lend themselves to weaponization. Has your view changed or evolved?

Kellman: I wanted to project a general perspective. My views have evolved slightly. Right now, I’d say that the primary threat agent is anthrax. This is based on the opinions of the U.S. intelligence community; I’m not really equipped to give an independent judgment other than to say that their reasoning strikes me as grounded in a far deeper understanding than I have about the inclinations of major terror organizations.

Smallpox is often mentioned as a key threat. I don’t believe terror organizations are equipped, or likely, to synthesize smallpox at this time, though this danger will grow. In the article, I highlighted influenza’s dangers and I would restate that concern. I also think, in discussing the threat of bio-weapons, it’s very important to strive for the right tone and be ever-vigilant against inciting alarm unnecessarily.

THE FUTURIST: What are the three most important steps the government should undertake to prevent a bio-terror attack?

Kellman:

1. Develop International policies
2. Develop Global policies
3. Develop Worldwide policies

OK, so the list above is just to emphasize the point: there’s an enormous amount that the United States is doing right now at the domestic level that could measurably augment security if expanded internationally.

Generally stated, we should:

1. Develop a Global Biothreat Reduction Initiative that would systematically tighten controls on lethal pathogens, increase security at bio-laboratories, and advance capabilities for tracking and maintaining records concerning the movement of potentially dangerous capabilities.

2. Strengthen national and trans-national capacities to detect and interrupt bioterror preparations by enhancing implementation of comprehensive national legislation (pursuant to UNSCR 1540), training and equipping police, encouraging cooperation between law enforcers and other officials (e.g. public health), and developing modalities for conducting trans-national investigations of suspicious activities associated with bio.

3. Enhance global preparedness for bio-attacks. Preparedness includes hardening targets (e.g., locking air circulation systems of major venues), improving biosurveillance and disease diagnosis, facilitating global development of countermeasures, and establishing a platform for rapid global delivery of vaccines/antidotes.

THE FUTURIST: Do you believe a bio-terror on the U.S. will occur between now and 2013? What makes you think this?

Kellman: I think it’s nonsensical to assign a particular year. Obviously, the greater the time span, the more likely the danger, but there’s no reason to agree or disagree with 2013.

A few points are worth highlighting:

First, the risks of a bioviolence attack increase with time as technological advance facilitates new modes of attack.

Second, at the current slow pace of policy development, the disparity between dangers and safeguards will widen appreciably over the next decade, likely sooner.

Lastly, the limiting phrase “on the U.S.” is inappropriate because a catastrophic attack anywhere in the world (especially involving contagion) will be horrifying for the United States.

About the interview:
Interview conducted by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine. Barry Kellman is the director of the International Weapons Control Center at the DePaul University College of Law, He is the author of Bioviolence —Preventing Biological Terror and Crime (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and a WorldFuture 2009 speaker. WorldFuture 2009 will be held July-17-19 at the Hilton Chicago.

The Futurist Interviews Barton Kunstler, Lesley University School of Management.

Barton Kunstler

July 5, 2001

THE FUTURIST: Throughout history, patronage and other forms of financial support have played a significant role in nurturing creativity. Is this still very much the case?

Barton Kunstler: Someone always pays for creativity. Renaissance patrons were not simply personal sponsors, though; their commissions were very often public works. In ancient Athens, the city itself played the role of patron. So patronage can be seen as one model of how a society pays for its creativity.

I see patronage more as an instrument of the hothouse effect rather than its cause. When the hothouse effect takes off, it usually generates the resources it needs.

THE FUTURIST: What, if any, role should the public sector play in supporting business creativity?

Kunstler: One way might be through supporting creative programs in public schools. Every school should be a creative hothouse and, if it is, students will bring that creativity and high performance to the workplace. Government should fund creative projects, but I don’t think government is a suitable engine of creativity in a business setting.

THE FUTURIST: Does the Internet culture make it easier or harder to nurture a creative hothouse environment? In other words, is face-to-face interaction among creative people an important element of the hothouse strategy?

Kunstler: The Net’s wealth of information, networks, highly visual environment, multiple applications, and global access offer a version of the important but elusive hothouse factor of "rapid exposure to meta-systems." But the Net itself cannot provide that automatically. Learning to use the Net optimally is not about information management, but about knowledge management.

The Net’s amazing--you can learn a lot about five or six subject areas in a few hours, link ideas and data in very creative ways, but you need the understanding and time to generate useful results.

THE FUTURIST: Are virtual organizations more or less likely to pursue hothouse strategies? How might they adapt some of the strategies you described?

Kunstler: The virtual organization is not a likely hothouse candidate, but you can set up virtual workgroups that function as hothouses for a short time.

Isolation makes people more prone to misinterpret or overreact to the messages they receive. In a virtual organization, communication may be dazzlingly fast, but connections between people become very tenuous and thin.

This interview, conducted by Cynthia G. Wagner, is adapted from "Building a Creative Hothouse: Strategies of History's Most Creative Groups" by Barton Kunstler, THE FUTURIST (January-February 2001).

Barton Kunstler is a professor and program director at the Lesley University School of Management. He also writes "A Futurist View," a biweekly column for Metrowest Daily News. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Kunstler has also discussed creative hothouses in "The Hothouse Effect: Time Proven Strategies of History's Most Creative Groups," Futures Research Quarterly (Spring 2000).

The Futurist Interviews Crisis Communications Expert Peter Sandman on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Meltdown in Japan

Two weeks since the nuclear power plant in Fukushima Japan entered a state called partial meltdown, Japan saw an exodus of foreign executives, a near 16% drop in its stock market (which has since partially rebounded) and shortages of food linked to hoarding. All this is occurring despite the fact that nuclear experts say that even the effects of a full-scale meltdown would be limited to the area around the plant.

FUTURIST magazine deputy editor Patrick Tucker saw the ongoing news coverage of Fukushima Daiichi both in Japan and the United States. The Kan administration has been roundly criticized for its PR response to the situation. Here, he interviews Peter Sandman about the Kan Administration's communications response to the event.

The Futurist: What were the specific crisis management missteps of the Kan administration?

Sandman: I will confine myself to crisis communication, the only aspect of crisis management where I have some expertise. And I will focus on one specific Fukushima crisis communication failure, the one I consider most serious: the government’s failure to speculate publicly about what-if scenarios it was certainly considering privately.

Every crisis raises three key questions:

What happened – and what are you doing to respond to it, and what should we (the public) do?
What’s likely to happen next – and what are you doing to prepare for it, and what should we do?
What’s not so likely but possible and scary, your credible worst case scenario – and what are you doing to prevent it (and prepare for it in case prevention fails), and what should we do?
There are other questions as well, of course – notably questions about how the crisis will affect “me” (my health, my family, my home, my income, my community). And there will be still other questions once the crisis ebbs or stabilizes – especially questions about blame.

But regarding external events – regarding the crisis itself – the three key questions the public asks are always: what happened, what do you expect to happen, and what are you worried might happen.

With regard to Japan’s March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the first question was far more important than the second and third. March 11 was a tragedy but not a cliffhanger.

The resulting nuclear crisis at the Fukushima power plants, on the other hand, was a cliffhanger but not a tragedy (at least not early on) – so the second and third questions were the crucial ones. As I write this on April 1, they still are. “What happened” remains a largely unanswered question; the answers keep changing as the situation evolves. But as long as the Fukushima crisis threatens to deteriorate, the most important questions will be about the future, not the past.

By far the biggest crisis communication error of the Japanese government has been its failure to answer the second and third questions satisfactorily: its failure to forewarn people about tomorrow’s and next week’s probable headlines, and its failure to guide people’s fears about worst case scenarios.

The second and third questions – what are you expecting (“likeliest case”) and what are you most worried about (“worst case”) – are the inevitable forward-looking questions in any crisis, personal as well as societal. They are what we ask our plumber or our doctor. They are what we were asking about Fukushima from Day Two. (Day One was mostly about the first question, what happened.) And the government of Japan rarely gave us adequate answers.

Talking about what’s likely and what’s possible is necessarily speculative. Some commentators and even some crisis communication professionals have argued that authorities shouldn’t speculate in a crisis. This is incredibly bad advice.

Imagine a weather forecaster who refused to say where the hurricane was likely to be headed: “Here’s where it is now. We can’t be sure where it’s going, and we certainly wouldn’t want to speculate. Tune in again tomorrow and we’ll tell you where it went.” Or imagine a weather forecaster who refused to say how bad the hurricane might get: “It’s only Category 3 now. Any mention of the possibility of it strengthening to Category 4 or 5 and what that could mean to the cities in its path would be strictly speculative.”

In fact the Japanese government didn’t shy away from reassuring speculation, only from alarming speculation. Officials were happy to predict that they would probably get power to the pumps soon and would then be able to cool the plants properly, for example.

But they failed to predict that there would probably be increasing radiation levels in local milk, vegetables, and seawater; that Tokyo’s drinking water would probably see a radiation spike as well; that plutonium would probably be found in the soil near the damaged plants; that the evidence of core melt would probably keep getting stronger; that all that water they were using to cool the plants would probably become radioactive, probably make repair work more difficult and more dangerous, and probably begin to leak; etc. After each of these events occurred, the government told us they were predictable and not all that alarming. But it failed to predict them.

My guess is that officials did in fact predict most of these events – privately. But they failed to predict them publicly.

It would have been a mistake – the opposite mistake from the one they made – for officials to predict all these events to the public confidently. They may have been confident about some of them but highly uncertain about others. Whatever their actual level of confidence/uncertainty was, whatever level of confidence/uncertainty they were expressing in their private planning meetings, that’s the level of confidence/uncertainty they should have expressed to the public. This is what responsible speculation requires: telling the public that X is probably going to happen, Y is a 50-50 shot, and Z wouldn’t be a huge surprise but it’s not really likely either.

My 2004 column on “Acknowledging Uncertainty“ offers specific advice on how to communicate your level of confidence/uncertainty. It’s not terribly hard to do, once you decide to do it. But especially when you’re talking about more bad news in what is already a devastating crisis, it’s very hard to persuade yourself and your organization to do. The nearly universal temptation is to keep quiet about your gloomy but still tentative expectations, hoping against hope that they won’t happen … until they do happen and you have no choice but to say so.

Officials not only failed to speculate responsibly about their gloomy but still tentative expectations. They also failed to address still more alarming (and still less likely) worst case scenarios: what if there’s an explosive breach of a containment, propelling nuclear fuel fragments high into the atmosphere; what if fuel elements melt together and achieve recriticality; what if we have to think seriously about evacuating Tokyo; what if we can never reoccupy a significant chuck of Japan; etc.

Because the government avoided alarming speculation, the people of Japan (and the world) kept learning that the situation at Fukushima was “worse than we thought.”

This violates a core principle of crisis communication. In order to get ahead of the evolving crisis instead of chasing it, crisis communicators should make sure their early statements are sufficiently alarming that they won’t have to come back later and say things are worse than we thought. Far better to be able to say instead: “It’s not as bad as we feared.”

Among the reasons why officials have been reluctant to speculate alarmingly is, undoubtedly, a fear of panicking the public. But despite some condescending newspaper columns about “radiophobia,” there is little evidence of nuclear panic in Japan or elsewhere. Nuclear skepticism, nuclear distrust, nuclear dread … but not nuclear panic.

Crisis communication experts know that panic in emergency situations is rare. People may very well feel panicky, but panic isn’t a feeling. Panic is a behavior. Panic is doing something dangerous and stupid – something you know is dangerous and stupid – because you are in the grip of intolerable emotion and can’t stop yourself.

It isn’t panic to try to get your hands on some potassium iodide, even if you’re thousands of miles from Fukushima and vanishingly unlikely to need it. Panic is when you knock down your grandmother in your haste to get to the drugstore before it runs out of potassium iodide.

And it certainly isn’t panic to stockpile food and water in case these necessities become contaminated or their supply lines are disrupted. That’s simply prudence. It is what disaster experts often recommend – right up until the disaster happens. Then suddenly their tone turns disapproving, and they call the stockpilers “hoarders” and accuse them of panicking. The government has been appropriately empathic about the suffering of victims – the families of the dead and missing, the evacuees sheltering for weeks in school gymnasiums. But there has been precious little empathy for the millions who were rationally worried that they might be among the next victims.

Moreover, the Japanese government’s failure to speculate alarmingly didn’t “protect” the public from alarming speculation. It simply left people speculating on their own, and listening to the speculations of outside experts (and outside non-experts). Knowing that public and media speculation are inevitable, a wise crisis manager guides the speculation, rather than boycotting it or condemning it.

The bulk of the criticism of the government’s crisis communication has assailed it for failing to provide information promptly and honestly. (The same charge has been leveled against TEPCO, by the government among others.) There is doubtless some truth to this charge … and a few months or years from now we may know that withholding information was the most serious sin of Fukushima crisis communication.

But I doubt it. For the most part, I suspect, the government has told us what it knew for certain. Its biggest sin has been failing to tell us enough about what it guessed, what it predicted, and what it feared.

These failures felt dishonest. And in a sense they were dishonest. We kept hearing alarming speculations from outside academics and anti-nuclear activists and even the U.S. government and the International Atomic Energy Agency that we weren’t hearing from the government of Japan. We kept waking up to bad news that the Japanese government hadn’t told us might be coming. We rightly judged that the government was failing to keep us on top of the situation – but not, I think, because it wasn’t telling us what it knew; rather, because it wasn’t telling us what it guessed, predicted, and feared.

When a bad thing happens without warning midway through an evolving crisis, there are only three possible explanations:

The authorities had reason to think it was going to happen, and decided not to forewarn people – not to give the public time to prepare (emotionally as well as logistically).
The authorities knew they didn’t know what was going to happen, and decided not to tell the public that – not to tell us that the situation is unpredictable and warn us to expect scary surprises.
The authorities thought they had a better handle on the crisis than they actually had – and the new development is as shocking to them as it is to the public.
The truth is usually some mix of the three.

To the extent that the Japanese government had reason to expect particular bits of bad news, it should have said so. It is absurd, for example, that the 12 million people in Tokyo were not warned to stockpile at least a modest supply of a readily available resource – tap water – in advance of potential contamination.

And to the extent that the Japanese government knew it didn’t know what to expect, it should have said that. Acknowledging uncertainty, ignorance, and the resulting inevitability of scary surprises is itself a kind of forewarning. Even if you can’t prepare logistically for what you don’t know is coming, you can at least prepare emotionally to be surprised.

The Futurist: What harm has resulted from the Japanese government’s unwillingness to speculate?

SandmanThere has been damage, obviously, to the credibility of the Japanese government, and therefore to its ability to lead its people through the hard times ahead. There has been damage to the future of nuclear power, exacerbating the damage done by the crisis itself.

The worst damage may be the public’s growing sense that the Fukushima crisis is out of control and uncontrollable, that it cannot be predicted and is therefore greatly to be feared. Perhaps that very frightening assessment will turn out to be an accurate one. But if the crisis does stabilize and begin to ebb, if we stop waking up every morning to further bad news from Fukushima, if worst case scenarios start coming off the table in the minds of experts, will the public notice and believe? If it doesn’t, that will be largely a legacy of the Japanese government’s unwillingness to speculate.

The Futurist: What should they do now?

Sandman: Obviously, be willing to speculate – and learn how to speculate responsibly. Jody Lanard and I entitled our 2003 essay on crisis speculation “It Is Never Too Soon to Speculate.” It is never too late to speculate either.

In recent days, I think, the Japanese government has been more willing to address my second and third questions – to tell people what bad news it considers likely in the days ahead and what worse scenarios it is taking seriously, preparing to cope with, and trying to avert.

The short-term effect of this increased candor about likely and possible futures may well be increased concern. Journalists and the public are picking up on the change in tone, and some are interpreting it as evidence that the situation at Fukushima is worsening. When even the government says things look bad, some people figure, things must look very bad indeed. This is inevitable when officials switch from stonewalling and over-reassuring to responsible speculation.

I hope the government stays the course. In fact, I hope it focuses even more on becoming Fukushima’s Cassandra, not its Pollyanna. If predictable bad things happen (as they surely will), the government’s having predicted them will help keep people from overreacting to them. If the crisis worsens (as it may), the government’s pessimism will at least have alerted us to this real possibility. And if the crisis eases (as we all hope it will), I look forward to the day when the Japanese government will have earned the right to say to the public, “it’s not as bad as we feared.”

Then it will be time to address the much smaller problem of being accused of having “fear-mongered.” That accusation is almost inevitable when crisis communication has been well handled.

That’s the crisis communicator’s choice. Either you over-reassure people, fail to forewarn them about likely bad news to come and possible worst case scenarios, and leave them alone with their fears. Or you treat them like grownups, tell them what you expect and what you’re most worried about, and help them bear their fears. In the former case, they are forced to endure scary surprises, lose their trust in you, and have trouble noticing when the crisis is over. In the latter case, they prepare for the worst, manage their fears (and the situation itself) better … and end up a little irritated at you for having been so alarmist.

What is the best corollary to the present situation? Does another incident come to mind that could be instructive?

The most compelling precedent for Fukushima is of course Three Mile Island. Like Fukushima (and unlike Chernobyl), it was a cliffhanger too.

Seven years ago, on the 25th anniversary of the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident, I wrote an article entitled “Three Mile Island – 25 Years Later.” In it I listed what I saw as the most enduring crisis communication lessons of the Three Mile Island Accident.

Several of these lessons strike me as relevant to Fukushima, and the rest of this section is adapted from that article.

Pay attention to communication.

Three Mile Island was technically much less serious than Fukushima; it was a near miss, but very little radiation was actually released. No local crops were contaminated. Pregnant women and young children were evacuated, but that turned out to have been unnecessary. What went wrong at TMI – really, really wrong – was the communication.

Communication professionals were minor players at TMI. I was at Three Mile Island, first for the Columbia Journalism Review (covering the coverage) and later for the U.S. government commission that investigated the accident. In the latter capacity, I asked Jack Herbein, the Metropolitan Edison engineering vice president who managed the accident, why he so consistently ignored the advice of his PR specialist, Blaine Fabian. (Risk communication hadn’t been invented yet.) He told me, “PR isn’t a real field. It’s not like engineering. Anyone can do it.”

That attitude, I think, cost MetEd and the nuclear power industry dearly. And that attitude continues to dominate the nuclear industry, contributing to one communication gaffe after another. Nuclear power proponents keep shooting themselves in the foot for lack of risk communication expertise.

I don’t know if TEPCO or the Japanese government has any in-house risk communication or crisis communication professionals, and I don’t know if either brought in outside risk communication or crisis communication advisors. I’m guessing the answers were no and no, at least in the first couple of weeks. There have been some signs of improved “uncertainty communication” and “worst case communication” in the last few days.

Don’t lie – and don’t tell half-truths.

Companies and government agencies try hard not to lie outright, but they usually feel entitled to say things that are technically accurate but misleading – especially in a crisis when they are trying to keep people calm. Ethics aside, the strategy usually backfires. People learn the other half of the truth, or just sense that they aren't being leveled with, and that in itself exacerbates their anxiety as it undermines their trust in officialdom.

Here is one spectacular example of a not-quite-lie from Three Mile Island. (We don’t know yet if there are comparable examples from Fukushima.)

The nuclear power plant in central Pennsylvania was in deep trouble. The emergency core cooling system had been mistakenly turned off; a hydrogen bubble in the containment structure was considered capable of exploding, which might breach the core vessel and cause a meltdown.

In the midst of the crisis, when any number of things were going wrong, MetEd put out a news release claiming that the plant was “cooling according to design.” Months later I asked the PR director how he could justify such a statement. Nuclear plants are designed to survive a serious accident, he explained. They are designed to protect the public even though many things are going wrong. So even though many things were going wrong at TMI, the plant was, nonetheless, “cooling according to design.”

Needless to say, his technically correct argument that he hadn’t actually lied did not keep his misleading statement from irreparably damaging the company’s credibility.

Get the word out.

Most government agencies and corporations respond to crisis situations by constricting the flow of information. Terrified that the wrong people may say the wrong things, they identify one or two spokespeople and decree that nobody else is to do any communicating. In an effort to implement this centralized communication strategy, they do little or nothing to keep the rest of the organization informed.

There is certainly a downside to authorizing lots of spokespeople; the mantra of most crisis communication experts is to “speak with one voice.” But I think the disadvantages of the one-voice approach outweigh the advantages. This approach almost always fails.

It failed at Three Mile Island. Reporters took down the license plate numbers of MetEd employees, got their addresses, and called them at home after shift. Inevitably, many talked – though what they knew was patchy and often mistaken. The designated information people for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the utility, meanwhile, had trouble getting their own information updates; those in the know were too busy coping with the accident to brief them. (The lesson here: There need to be technical experts at the scene whose designated job is to shuttle between the people who are managing the crisis and the people who are explaining it. As far as I can tell, nobody was assigned that role at Fukushima.) The state government felt its own information was so incomplete that Press Secretary Paul Critchlow asked one of his staff to play de facto reporter – trying to find out what was going on so Critchlow could tell the media … and the Governor.

In today’s world of 24/7 news coverage and the Internet, the information genie is out of the bottle. If official sources withhold information, we get it from unofficial sources; if official sources speak with one voice, we smell a rat and seek out other voices all the harder … and find them.

But crisis information wasn’t controllable three decades ago in central Pennsylvania either. As my wife and colleague Jody Lanard likes to point out, even in the pre-Gutenberg era, everyone in medieval villages knew when troubles were brewing. The information genie never was in the bottle. Keeping people informed and letting them talk is a wiser strategy than keeping them ignorant and hoping they won’t.

Err on the alarming side.

This is the Three Mile Island crisis communication lesson of greatest relevance to Fukushima.

In the early hours and days of the Three Mile Island accident, nobody knew for sure what was happening. That encouraged Metropolitan Edison to put the best face on things, to make the most reassuring statements it could make given what was known at the time. So as the news got worse, MetEd had to keep going back to the public and the authorities to say, in effect, “it’s worse than we thought.”

This violated the cardinal rule of crisis communication I discussed in my first answer: Always err on the alarming side, until you are absolutely 100% certain the situation cannot get any worse.

In the three decades since TMI, I have seen countless corporations and government agencies make the same mistake. Its cost: The source loses all credibility. And since the source is obviously underreacting, everybody else tends to get on the other side of the risk communication seesaw and overreact.

That’s why Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh ordered an evacuation of pregnant women and preschool children. MetEd was saying the amount of radiation escaping the site didn't justify any evacuation – and MetEd, it turns out, was right. But MetEd had been understating the seriousness of the accident from the outset. When the head of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency misinterpreted a radiation reading from a helicopter flying through the plume, thinking it was probably an offsite reading of exposures reaching populated areas, Thornburgh didn't even check with the no-longer-credible utility (which could have told him PEMA had misunderstood the situation). He decided better safe than sorry and ordered the evacuation.

In contrast to Metropolitan Edison, the Pennsylvania Department of Health adopted an appropriately cautious approach. The Health Department was worried that radioactive Iodine 131 might escape from the nuclear plant, be deposited on the grass, get eaten by dairy cattle, and end up in local milk. Over a two-week period health officials issued several warnings urging people not to drink the milk. Meanwhile, they kept doing assays of the milk without finding any I-131. Their announcements moved slowly from “there will probably be I-131 in the milk” to “there may be I-131 in the milk” to “there doesn’t seem to be I-131 in the milk, but let us do one more round of testing just to be sure.”

By the time the Health Department declared the milk safe to drink, virtually everyone believed it. While the Health Department’s caution hurt the dairy industry briefly, the rebound was quick because health officials were credibly seen as looking out for people’s health more than for the dairy industry’s short-term profits.

By contrast, the Japanese government said nothing in advance about even the possibility of radioactive milk, and then it suddenly announced that it had tested the milk from around Fukushima (apparently secretly), found more radioactivity than it considered acceptable, and decided to ban its sale. If and when the milk is deemed safe again, I wonder how soon anyone will believe it.

The Futurist: How would you advise a public official dealing with a potential nuclear meltdown to communicate the risks to the public without alarming them?

Sandman: I wouldn’t! Why on earth wouldn’t you want to alarm people about a potential nuclear meltdown?

There is a purpose to alarming people, after all. You want to motivate them to put aside more ordinary concerns and focus on the crisis. You want them to start thinking about what they should do to protect themselves, their loved ones, and their community – what they should do now, and what they may need to do soon if the situation gets worse. You want them to get through their adjustment reaction (a brief over-reaction to a new risk), gird up their loins, and prepare themselves not just logistically but also emotionally.

My crisis communication clients often want the public to take precautions … but don’t want the public to get alarmed. But the main reason people take precautions is because they are alarmed.

One crucial goal in risk communication, therefore, should always be to achieve a level of public concern commensurate with the actual risk – or at least commensurate with the experts’ level of concern, since the “actual risk” may be unknown. When the actual risk (or the experts’ concern) is low, you want people to stay calm (or calm down); you don’t want them focusing undue attention on a tiny risk. But when the actual risk (or the experts’ concern) is high, the level of public concern should be high too – perhaps too high for the word “concern” to capture. (You don’t install “fire concerns” in buildings; you install “fire ALARMS.”) Even “alarm” may not capture it. Sometimes, in really bad times, you should be aiming for fear.

That’s true even if the current situation isn’t very serious. Don’t forget the “pre” in “precaution.” Ideally, precautions are things you do (or at least prepare to do) before the risk is imminent. Since a key goal of alarming people is to motivate precaution-taking, you need to alarm them about what might happen, not just what’s already happening. Japan’s earthquake and tsunami were so deadly mostly because there was no time for precautions, no time to alarm people before their risk was imminent.

The Fukushima crisis has allowed plenty of time to ramp up people’s alarm … and preparedness. One of the most frequent non-sequiturs in Fukushima crisis communication has been to assure the public that there’s no reason to be alarmed because the current level of radiation (except right near the plants) isn’t dangerously high. But what’s most frightening about Fukushima (except right near the plants) isn’t the level of radiation so far; it’s what might happen that could send the radiation literally through the roof.

In crisis communication, the goal isn’t to keep people from being fearful. The goal is to help them bear their fear (and the situation that provokes it), and to help them make wise rather than unwise decisions about precautions.

Arguably the cardinal sin in crisis communication is to tell people not to be afraid. If your false reassurance succeeds, they are denied the time they need to prepare. If your false reassurance fails, all you’ve accomplished is to leave people alone with their fear – prompting them, justifiably, to take guidance from sources other than you, and frittering away your own credibility and thus your capacity to lead them through the worsening crisis that may be coming.

My clients hate this advice. Their fear of fear – their reluctance to frighten the public even when the situation is legitimately frightening – results partly from what I call “panic panic”: the mistaken tendency of officials to imagine that the public is apt to panic or already panicking.

The public rarely panics in emergencies. They are especially unlikely to panic when they feel they can trust their leaders to tell them scary truths … that is, when they feel their leaders are trusting them to bear scary truths.

There is a downside to frightening the public, but it isn’t panic. The downside is that the crisis may ease instead of worsening, and with 20-20 hindsight people will blame you for frightening them unnecessarily. In the winter of 2009–2010, the U.K. went through an unexpectedly severe winter and an unexpectedly (and blessedly) mild swine flu pandemic – and the U.K. media reproached officials (sometimes on the very same day) for having bought too little road grit and salt and too much vaccine. But it’s not damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The repercussions (and thus the recriminations) of under-preparedness are a lot more harmful than those of over-preparedness. When it comes to warning – and frightening – the public about a crisis that could get worse, it’s darned if you do and damned if you don’t.

About the Interviewee
Peter M. Sandman is one of the preeminent risk communication speakers and consultants in the United States. Learn more at Psandman.comn

The Futurist Interviews Cullen Murphy, Vanity Fair editor at large, author.

Cullen Murphy

November-December 2007 Volume 41, No. 6

The military and economic power of the United States has invited comparisons between America and the ancient Roman Empire. What, if anything, can the United States learn from Rome's decline? For answers we turned to Cullen Murphy, Vanity Fair editor at large and author of the recent book Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. Part of the November-December 2007 issue of THE FUTURIST magazine.

FUTURIST: What motivated you to write "Are We Rome?"

CM: Without being deterministic—which emphatically I am not—I’ve wondered about the Rome and America comparison for years (as many people have), and the events of recent decades have only heightened the perceived parallels. These involve not only America’s unsurpassed military strength but also developments on the home front, like corruption and the privatization of power. Cock an ear and you’ll hear Rome and America comparisons cropping up in the byways of pop culture and elite culture alike. So I began to wonder, just how well does the comparison hold up historically? Which parallels—if any—are worth taking seriously and which ones aren’t? Obviously Rome and America are profoundly different societies in ways beyond counting. But if some parallels really do hold up, then you can ask another question: Knowing this, can Rome’s history help America avoid some trouble?

FUTURIST: Why do you believe the idea of empire decline hold so much allure, particularly right now?

CM: The war in Iraq, however it may turn out, brings the question of America’s imperial role to a white-heat intensity. It’s only natural in these circumstances to think back to how Rome handled, or mishandled, its ambitions and responsibilities, and it’s only natural to wonder whether we are following a trajectory that is in any way similar.

The matters at stake are not just about "empire." Along with our power has come a change in our homegrown institutions. The American executive has gained power at the expense of the legislature—as happened in Rome. More and more of the public’s business is done in secrecy and for a price—as also happened in Rome. The migration across our borders of newcomers is seen both as essential to our economic well-being and as a threat to our national character—again, as happened in Rome.

In sum, there is much in the Zeitgeist to pull our gaze to the Palatine and the Capitoline.

FUTURIST: Why is it that instead of going on forever forward and upward societies often decline?

CM: It’s probably wise to avoid overly schematized explanations of why history turns out the way it does. The speculations of an Oswald Spengler, say, are ludicrous, and the attempt by some to mine the past for its predictive power is one reason why so many academic historians are rightly skeptical about trying to derive lessons of any sort from history. Which is a shame, because history does have useful things to say.

A few decades ago a German historian collected all the explanations ever offered for the decline and fall of Rome and came up with more than 200 of them, ranging from the barbarian invasions to the debilitating effects of slavery to the hot water in the public baths (which was said to cause infertility in men). I think that Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire caught the larger truth when he ascribed the end of Roman state to "immoderate greatness." Be they corporations or polities, systems can simply become too large to manage. By their very greatness they touch everything, helping to set events and behavior into motion that they can neither see nor control.

America is facing an example of this right now, in the attacks by violent forms of fundamentalist Islam. Large systems are inherently unstable. Anyone reading the story of the last two centuries of the Roman Empire in the West will be struck by how the very best of emperors must struggle desperately just to make the status remain quo for a few weeks or years.

"Immoderate greatness" isn’t a very scientific concept. Invoking it probably sounds as primitive as blaming illness on "humours." But I think it points to a big problem—for Rome, and also for ourselves.

FUTURIST: What can Americans--both collectively and as individuals--do to anneal our society from collapse?

CM: The last chapter of Are We Rome? does try to look ahead at steps America can take. But I’d hasten to note that these aren’t steps that will fend off the larger forces of history. There may be some who would wish we could flash-freeze the present moment, with the United States as the world’s greatest economic engine and more powerful militarily than all the other countries on the planet combined. That’s a preposterous ambition. No reading of history suggests that this can actually happen, or that it is even desirable.

The point I make is that the best things we can do are the ones that lie entirely in our own hands. And these, by and large, are things that have to do with the well-being of individuals in our society, not with the relative position of America vis-a-vis the world as a whole. In other words, we should pay attention to some of the things we’ve been neglecting, such as public education and public health. Rather than ranting against government, we should attempt to repair some of the basic institutions of our democracy, starting with the political process itself. We should make sure that our citizens feel at home in the wider world, rather than facilitating their withdrawal from it in fear and ignorance. Finally, our leaders should dial down the triumphalism and arrogance—it only damages the relationships we’ll one day need.

People forget that the fall of Rome was a centuries-long process rather than a cataclysmic catastrophe. And although a great political unity disappeared, ordinary life for the most part held together because the most basic things continued: strong local leadership, age-old ways of making a living and conducting trade, and the cohesive ties forged by family and religion. America has its problems, some of them grave but I don’t think we’re heading for the Dark Ages, not in the least. The world, in any case, is a very different place.

There’s a lesson from Rome nonetheless, which is not to forget the basics. Remember the words of Livy: “An empire remains powerful so long as its subjects rejoice in it.” If we give our own citizens some things to rejoice about, a lot of other things will take care of themselves.

About the Interviewee
Cullen Murphy is the editor at large of Vanity Fair and was for many years the managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly. His new book Are We Rome: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America was published in by Houghton Mifflin in May 2007.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker .

The Futurist Interviews Dennis Chamberland, director of the nonprofit League of the New Worlds.

Dennis Chamberland

Sept-October 2008 Vol. 42, No. 5

Dennis Chamberland, director of the nonprofit League of the New Worlds, a group whose mission is the colonization of the oceans and space. The League is building a deep sea module called the Leviathan and hopes that, in 2010, the completed Leviathan module will sustain three aquanauts underwater for 80 days in a central Florida lagoon in a live test. If the project succeeds, the league will follow up with the 2012 launch of the Challenger, an underwater laboratory and residential complex that will house people permanently at its planned site in the Gulf Stream.

FUTURIST: How will you get oxygen to the Leviathan undersea module?

Chamberland: There are all kinds of ways to get oxygen down to a human colony. You can access it from sea water; you can extract it from the hydrolisis of the water itself. You can do reverse osmosis and draw it out of the water itself. You can suction it from the air it pump it down by hose, which we are going to do.

We'll rely on the Blue Dominion. It’s a surface craft above water that’s a temporary step to human underwater habitation. You want to sever that surface water connection wherever possible, but you can never sever it completely. You also need a docking station.

We're also going to have a submersible surface support station. When a storm comes along we can submerge it and tie it down. You will need some surface connection and tie it down. Well have advanced life support systems.

FUTURIST: How close is the Leviathan to completion?

Chamberland: We ran into some funding issues so we’re looking to launch it in 2010. We just set the clock back today. It was supposed to launch in 2009. That’s one of the risks that you take when you try to coordinate a huge project with uncertain funding strains.

FUTURIST: How costly was it?

Chamberland: We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars for the navigation module, which we’ve completed. But I don’t have an exact figure since we haven’t completed the Leviathan itself yet. What you’re really talking about is planning funds.

FUTURIST: What challenges does building in the ocean present?

Chamberland: We haven’t been building in the oceans at present. The Leviathan is going to be in a lagoon in central Florida. You ask a good question because building in the ocean is much different than building in a protected lagoon. I want you to note that that is central Florida and not to be confused with the Keys. I say that because there is other work going on in the Keys and I don’t want to get the two mixed up.

We have our share of competition.

FUTURIST: Of competition?

Chamberland: There are other groups coming up with undersea projects. There’s tension going on in the community. It’s actually quite active. All of a sudden, there has been a huge swell in activities in this area.

FUTURIST: You mean in the last 10 years?

Chamberland: I would say that the trends seem to start with the planning of the undersea hotels. And I have no complaints against those hotels. They certainly serve to raise awareness about human habitation in the sea. My group planted and harvested the first crop in 1974 in Key Largo. We started the League of the New Worlds started in 1992. We began planning for it that year.

FUTURIST: So the hotels raised interest in underwater habitation?

Chamberland: I think it just happened. I think it all just started at the same time. I don’t think they are related. Certainly we’re not involved in undersea hotels. We’re designed to be a permanent community with families, research stations, et cetera.

FUTURIST: Do you get a sense that the public, and their elected officials, have long been skittish about ocean habitations, considering that the United States has declared multiple space exploration initiatives but never to my knowledge an ocean colonization initiative?

Chamberland: It just boggles my mind. How many people permanently occupy space? There are probably four on the International Space Station. How many people are living under the ocean? Zero. I

The Futurist Interviews Donald Norman, author, former VP of Apple.

Donald Norman

Sept-October 2008 Vol. 42, No. 5

THE FUTURIST interviews Donald Norman, Breed Professor of Design, Northwestern University; former VP, Apple; author of The Design of Future Things on the subject of flying cars.

FUTURIST: Since the physics of flight are pretty well established, what would you say are some of the design issues that stand in the way of a flying car for every garage?

Norman: Let me start with a comment about movies, science fiction, and predictions of the future. This comment will be important in discussing things like the flying car. I have a lot of friends who are good science fiction writers and some of them are really good at understanding trends and extrapolating predictions. I've always argued that science fiction writers are the best futurists because when you write a novel you can't just take any technology and plunk it in the future. You have to show how it works within a system. And that's also true of good movies. Minority Report is one I use a lot because a lot of things they show will actually happen. In fact they're already here. Their technical advisor was a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab named William Mitchell. But, you know, I can always tell fiction because it always works. Nothing ever goes wrong. In real life, our most reliable stuff, stuff that's been around for decades, generations, breaks down. When initial designs aren't perfected they cause trouble. All of our technologies, every single technology, the steam engine, they used to blow up, killing people. The early automobile? You used to have to travel with your own mechanic. All of these technologies had a really difficult launching period. Think of the teleporter. The first few ones would probably have transferred only half your body. I can't imagine how it ever got started.

Now automobiles; in the United States, it's 43,000 that die every year and something like 6 million injured in auto accidents. That's driving that is occurring in two-dimensions [meaning forward and backward]. Can you imagine what with three dimensions? Car drivers are untrained. Airplane pilots have to undergo years of training and commercial airplane pilots have to be re-certified every six months in simulators where they test every possible failure.

Forget the physics. Forget the economics of manufacture, which is what's really holding it back; I can't imagine the traffic calamities when people start taking off in all directions. There have been a couple of movies where people have had flying cars, like Blade Runner. They never show accidents. They never showed crashes. The Fifth Element was clearly an homage to Blade Runner. Remember that movie? The cab diver was crazy. You want to fly into that?

And finally, do you sail? Think of those great big sailboats and compare those to a little dingy, one that's two or three meters long, a little one sail and that's all, which is the equivalent of what most people would drive in a flying car. The dingy is harder to sail than the big boat because the big one is stable. The little one will tip a bit with everything you do. If you watch people out sailing, the little ones flip over a lot. The big ones? No no. When they flip over, it's a rare tragedy.

FUTURIST: I read something in your book--you talk about adaptive cruise control, which is: cars adjusting their speed and direction based on data that the systems in the car is gathering from the cars around it. You also call it the "gossiping: car. The Moller Corporation, who have been active in this field for a long time, want to combine technology like that with GPS to make a safe flying car. The Moller cars would avoid crashing into one another or crashing into each other based on the system's understanding of where it was in space, as opposed to the pilot's understanding. In your book, you create a hypothetical news story about a man named Neumann who gets stuck in a roundabout for 14 hours because his car, which has a very weak version of a similar system, perceives too many cars surrounding him and gives him a little warning whenever he tries to get out of his lane to get out of the roundabout, and the car gives him a little resistance in the wheel. Because of this, he's stuck in this roundabout for 14 hours and has to be taken to the hospital for dehydration and mild shock. So, something like adaptive cruise control, something born of fairly recent IT advances, does it really make the flying car scenario more plausible?

Norman: That's technology's answer to these questions. Automation will solve all those problems. Everyday drivers could not possibly fly their own airplanes but they wouldn't have to, the theory goes, because the airplanes will fly themselves. In principle, that's absolutely correct. But what happens when things go wrong? The Neumann story is one I made up, but it is realistic. There are other, true stories in the book about people who follow their GPS and wind up in the middle of streams or stuck in tunnels. Those are people who are following the suggestions of their technology, but the technology is faulty. For GPS to work like it's supposed to, you would need accurate [digital] map information, to within a few feet, of every single road, sign, and runway, and that information changes millions of times a day. The same is true of airline group maps, the maps that pilots use. You could argue that navigation would be easier with small planes than on the road because once you're in the air, there's nothing in the way. You don't have to know anything about streets or intersections or roads. But that's not completely true. In cities there are, of course, buildings.

FUTURIST: You also mention some firms that are actually working on this adaptive cruise control thing?

Norman: For cars, you know about the DARPA Grand Challenge? They had two Grand Challenges, the first was to automate a car to do a complex desert trip all by itself. They offered a million-dollar prize. I don't know how many cars entered the first year but none of them succeeded. The second year, a fair number of cars finished. I have no doubt that automated cars will happen. But there are a few problems. How do you introduce it? Now, in the case of a personal airplane, they would be completely automatic from the first. But in automobiles, they would not be. The only place they might work is certain cities in China and maybe Singapore, a country where they could create a mandate, could say "we're going to start over again and you can only drive a car that's completely automatic." In the United States it would be impossible. That's true of these individual airplanes too.

Keep in mind, there are kits for hang gliding, motorized hang gliding. There's general aviation. While a lot of these people are allowed to fly without fancy automation or even a flight plan, there are certain places you can't go. Do I think that eventually they'll bring out an airplane that will be reasonably affordable and will they be relatively popular? Yes, but we're talking tens of thousands of buyers, not hundreds of millions. If they're very successful, they might sell ten thousand.

FUTURIST: Earlier you mentioned that the sheer economics of flying cars is prohibitive. How do you mean?

Norman: Look at the same solution when applied to commercial aviation, the FAA has been trying for years to mandate a system--for every plane--where every single plane has to have a live map of the planes around it and the pilot can therefore select their own routes and they don't need aircraft control. And people believed there would be fewer accidents and the routes would be more efficient because, of course, today everyone must fly on these published roots. They can't fly horizontally. No one believes that central command and control is the most efficient way to regulate large-scale systems, what you want is individual intelligences. It's like the Internet, the way it works--there is no sense of control. Every little packet does its thing and knows where the other packets are and it works. But, the cost per airplane, just for that type of system, would be $10,000.

FUTURIST: Thinking about these 1960s television shows and the images that they've given us, I'm referring specifically to this the notion of living in an automatic universe, one of the great things that I liked about your book is this idea that the automatic world is an impoverished utopia, one where much of the task of living has essentially been relinquished. You also talk about how a more human utopia is one where machines help us do more of what we can do, and those tasks are more enjoyable. How do we, as a society, get over this silly dream of a future where everything is done for us by machines, and get more excited about this future where we're able to do more with our machines?

Norman: I don't think there's any problem. I don't think society has that dream. Authors do, inventors, some people have that dream; but even those people have things in their life they love to do and wouldn't want to turn over to machines. In that sense, I think society will regulate itself. For instance, I really like the fact that the heating in my apartment is completely automatic and don't have to think about it. I do have to think about it once or twice a year and I find that annoying. The refrigerator is completely automatic and I don't have to think about it. I like to cook but I don't like to wash dishes so I have a dishwasher and actually I wish it were easier to use the dishwasher, because the hard part about a dishwasher is loading and unloading. There are lots of things in my life like that. I don't develop any new skills loading and unloading my dishwasher. I think this is the way people move. You automate the unpleasant things and then manually do the things you like.

Music is a great example. These days, you never have to be without high-quality music. So, with all this wonderful music, why do so many people still buy musical instruments and expend a lot money learning to play? It's fun to play a musical instrument, even if you aren't good at it. So you do it yourself because it's fun, but until you're good at it, you listen to real professionals.

FUTURIST: So according to this theory, the only labor that survives in the future is that which is also enjoyable or ennobling aside from its central utility function.

Norman: What's nice about automation is that you can choose which things you won't worry about, or WHEN it will be done by a machine as opposed to when I'll do it myself, but it would economically unsound to think that technology could stop all physical work.

FUTURIST: What's your favorite future technology, the breakthrough that you see changing our lives for the better in a really dramatic way?

Norman: A technology that doesn't yet exist?

FUTURIST: Well...

Norman: No, I'm going to give you one, education. The educational system today is a baby-sitting system where workers have someone watch and, increasingly, for longer and longer. Most "education" today is done by someone lecturing to you or reading you a book. That's a teaching system, not necessarily a learning system. Teaching is what's easiest for teachers to do, but learning requires getting your hands dirty and doing things and what we need is a technology that motivates you, makes you interested. The best way to learn something is to do it. The same is true even complex topics. Teachers are always saying, "That's all very fine, but there are all these fundamentals people really have to know." The problem is, they teach the fundamentals first when the learners have no idea why they're learning; and they hate it. The proper way to make someone learn is to throw them into a problem so they get interested, and then maybe fail. Now, you tell them to go back and read the fundamentals and then they'll know why they're reading it.

We need to deliver education where it's needed. Some people call this kid learning or just-in-time learning. People are already playing with it. The principle is this, "I want to make the motor in my model car go faster so I want to figure out how I can improve it. I may actually have to learn a little bit about thermodynamics and the workings of engines. So I'll sit down at this machine and put a screen over my eyes and headphones over my ears and suddenly I'm in this simulation and I get to move and manipulate the parts and see animations and there's the mathematics, which I can explore and play with." The point is that just in-time learning would improve the world and be fun and it would be accessible around the world.

Interview by Patrick Tucker, Senior Editor of THE FUTURIST and the director of communications for the World Future Society.

The Futurist Interviews Douglas Rushkoff, best-selling author.

Douglas Rushkoff

July-August 2008 Volume 42, No. 4

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of Media Virus, and Innovation From the Inside Out. We asked him about writing and publishing in the 21st Century.

FUTURIST: Do you think the book has a future?

Rushkoff: Well, you've got to distinguish between the failure of Capitalism's scarcity model to generate income and the supposed failure of books to interest people. What we're really wrestling with on a fundamental level, if you want to talk futurism, we're looking at the end of the broken and ill-conceived model of economics. Economics is based on a renaissance ideal of monopoly currency creation. As in, the currency that would be created by a central authority that was interest-bearing and that really came into existence in order to perverse the status of the elite in the face of a rising middle class so that they could invest from a distance in the enterprises of other people and maintain the aristocracy without working. That's worked really well for four or five hundred years, but now we have technologies that make artificial scarcity really obviously fake, instead of maintainable through various myths. The role of publishers in trying to maintain that Capitalism has changed that job from distributing books to trying to prevent the distribution of books. That's a bad position for anyone attempting to promote prosperity.

FUTURIST: What can publishers do to re-imbue their industries with value in an era when tools have more economic value than words?

Rushkoff: They have to look at what is still scarce. For me, I make maybe ten times my book advances speaking than I do on the book. That's a revenue stream that my publishers deserve a share of. I end of doing the speaking. They don't know how or really want to participate in that. If they started asking for it, a lot of authors would go crazy. But if they integrated my speaking gigs with book publicity, they would sell a hell of a lot more books. Every time I do a big talk, I have to arm wrestle the publisher to help me sell a thousand, five thousand books to the people who want them. They want them at a discount because they want 5,000 copies. In reality, if I'm going to get $5000 on a talk, my publisher should get half of that money and should help me administrate the talk and getting books out. While the book isn't scarce, I'm scarce. I can only be in so many places. So there are a lot of different experiences that attend the book that they should be participating in to think about the book as a way to promote a set of ideas. How to work with those ideas is limited.

FUTURIST: Speaking of different access points, you're credited with creating the world's first open-source novel. What did you learn from that, in terms of what you would recommend that authors do now and what should they not do?

Rushkoff: I should have just found the money and programmers and done it myself, rather than go through Yahoo Internet Life. [Because Yahoo Internet Life died but my book could have kept living. So when Yahoo died, eleven thousand people's comments died and the project itself died. Unfortunately, or fortunately, our books last longer than our publishers. I rarely publish at a company with the same editor that bought my book because even they turn over so much. I would suggest people maintain independence, do things themselves, because corporations can lose money, turn off the server or let a project die and you as the author or content creator lose your long tail. The other thing, understand that what people want to do is create a community around your project rather than change your project. They want to be creative, but they want to add something as well...we're living in an increasingly DIY culture.

FUTURIST: In your talk, you mention Andrew Keen's book. In that book, he brings up a really interesting point, which is that old media is based on the concept of gatekeepers and that gatekeepers add value to all media by keeping out some spontaneous activity and refining it, making the stream a little more coh

The Futurist Interviews Ecologist James Spotila

Wildlife poaching on some of the world’s beaches is declining thanks to economic growth and robust conservation efforts, says James Spotila, Drexel University biologist, ecologist, and the author of Saving Sea Turtles: Extraordinary Stories from the Battle Against Extinction (Johns Hopkins University, 2010). But Spotila warns that ocean-going species throughout the world face other dangers: fishing, coastal manufacturing, excess tourist activity, and climate change.

Regulated fishing, sustainable development, and “eco-tourism,” which balances humans’ beach activity with plant and animal welfare, will be critical to ensuring marine wildlife’s long-term survival, he concludes. Spotila shared his insights on marine conservation in this interview with Rick Docksai, a staff editor for THE FUTURIST.

Rick Docksai: In Latin America, you and other turtle conservationists met frequent challenges from poachers. How would you describe societal attitudes toward poaching? To what extent have they been changing in recent years?

James Spotila: I think society is kind of split. On one beach where we converted poachers into (tour) guides, it worked really well. On other beaches, poaching is still pretty widespread.

There is a legalized taking of eggs at Ostional (a beach in Costa Rica), and people think ‘If I can take eggs legally here, I can take more from other places.’ We have guides poaching on other beaches. In other beaches in Mexico, however, they want to protect the turtles and their eggs, especially where there are tourists involved.

Docksai: So increased tourism actually motivates conservation?

Spotila: Absolutely. Responsible ecotourism is a real positive for these areas because it creates a new income stream for people other than poaching. And it raises the education levels in the areas, because to be a better guide you have to be better educated.

It is definitely less socially acceptable to take eggs than it was 30 years ago. There is a generational change, too. The younger student generation in Costa Rica is much more attuned to protecting turtles and their eggs.

Docksai: Latin America has seen an enviable amount of economic growth in the last 20 years. What impetus, if any, does the economic growth give to conservation efforts?

Spotila: Increased economic growth has been positive for conservation. As people become wealthier and have more leisure time, they have more education and are more concerned about conservation. In Costa Rica, they’ve always had a positive attitude about the environment, but there it's always been a struggle to obtain enough funds to maintain all the parks and other areas. But economic growth has been a positive.

Docksai: You wrote in your book that Mexico is pursuing policies of “regulated tourism” that seek to moderate human use of beaches. How attainable is this as a policy goal?

Spotila: It’s absolutely attainable. People swim on the beach in the daytime, and at night they leave the turtles alone to do their egg laying. That’s going on in a lot of places.

Docksai: As your book notes, sea-level rise brought on by climate change threatens to swamp many beaches. How much concern are citizens in the countries you’ve visited expressing? How concerned are local businesses and developers?

Spotila: I think that in many cases, people who build on beaches don’t care about climate change any more than they care about turtles. If I’m a developer, my incentive is to build it, run it for a few years, and then sell it. If the ocean level is going to be higher in five years, it won’t affect me, because I’ll be out of there. But people and businesses that have to live and work there on the beaches are starting to get concerned.

The Futurist Interviews Elaine C. Kamarck, Clinton White House policy advisor

In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council released a landmark study, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. The report lays out the possibility of a future very different from the reality to which most of the world is accustomed. Among the key possible futures:

1. U.S. influence and power will wane, and the United States will face constricted freedom of action in 2025. China and Russia will grow in influence. Wealth will also shift away from the United States toward Russia and China.

2. A broader conflict, possibly a nuclear war, could erupt between India and Pakistan. This could cause other nations to align themselves with existing nuclear powers for protection.

3. Rising world population, affluence, and shifts in Western dietary habits will increase global demand for food by 50% by 2030 (World Bank statistic). Some 1.4 billion people will lack access to safe drinking water.

As the report was published in November of 2008 in the midst of a historic financial crisis, some of these scenarios now seem not so much wild cards as prescient depictions of a near certain future. Others, in retrospect, seem further away. The once-indomitable engine of Chinese growth now seems significantly less robust. At 6% the country's GDP is scheduled to grow at half of last year's pace, but still much faster than the United States. The question becomes, which scenarios remain credible, which no-longer apply?

THE FUTURIST asked four experts—Newt Gingrich, former U.S. House speaker; Elaine C. Kamarck, a senior policy adviser for Democrat Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign; Peter Schiff, economics adviser to Republican Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign; and Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich—for their views on the report's key forecasts and what the future of the United States, Asia, and the global economy looks like now, in the wake of the global financial crisis. (Original interview date, December 2008).

FUTURIST: To what extent do you think the above outlined points—such as a wealth migration from the United States to Asia, potential war between India and Pakistan—are likely?

Elaine Kamark: I don’t see a shift in wealth away from the United States toward Russia or China, especially not Russia. That’s too pessimistic precisely because the structural components of innovation in the United States—culturally, legally—are so strong. The cultural and legal components for innovation in the rest of the world are, frankly, so weak.

Broader conflict between India and Pakistan? I don’t see the United States allowing that to happen. I think that, as bad as the United States has been when it comes to predicting asymmetric warfare, the United States is adept and prepared for more traditional kinds of warfare. We monitor nuclear materials around the world carefully.

As for rising world population and affluence, surely we’re already seeing shifts in Western dietary habits. There will be increases in world population in demand for food and in affluence, but this will be countermanded by the downsides of Western dietary habits such as obesity and all the diseases that come from obesity and there will be significant environmental problems resulting from the provision of all this food. This is a pretty complicated situation. Countries may take countermeasures instead of adopting Western dietary standards both for environmental and human health.

THE FUTURIST: Are you saying is that the primary focus in the United States must be maintaining a culture of innovation and economic openness?
Kamarck: That includes controversial things like keeping fairly open immigration. Immigration is one of the best sources of American talent, and so we have to be careful not to give in to those who would cut off immigration. There are a lot of things that go into the American economic competitive advantage, from education to innovation. Fundamentally, we’re the most innovative economy in the world. There are very few signs that any of the other big economies that surpass the United States in innovation.

THE FUTURIST: What about an apocalyptic scenario, where being more innovative economically and producing goods valued higher than goods be produced elsewhere, doesn’t matter because the entire system of valuing one thing over another deteriorates. How likely is that?

Kamarck: Isn’t that the basis of economic growth? Why would growth deteriorate other than in a severe recession? We’re not going to be in a severe recession before 2025, if that’s your time frame. In the short term, everybody has a problem, but between now and 2025 there will be new business cycles. We’ll likely lead the world out of the current downturn.

THE FUTURIST: Okay, but might one of these other developing nations develop an innovation model to match that of the United States in the decades ahead?

Kamarck: The big question is China, because China certainly has an entrepreneurial people and culture. But they still have an overhang from their communist era. When it comes to information, they’re still a closed society. It’s hard to imagine a society being truly innovative when there are so many restrictions on freedom of speech, as there still are in China. If that would change dramatically, and certainly the Internet is pushing at it to change, then China could become very innovative.

The second thing about China is that they still have significant corruption problems and they don’t have a rule of law that respects contracts. It's hard to attract significant investments from people when investors have doubts about getting their money out, or when there’s the question of state nationalization of industry. It’s not a legal structure that fosters innovation. Until that changes in other parts of the world, people will still come to the United States to develop new products.

THE FUTURIST: What about the theory that the U.S. consumer market is tapped, because real consumer growth lies in other countries and because of the amount of debt the United States has accrued as a nation. Is it overly pessimistic to think the U.S. is played out as a consumer market?

Kamarck: It’s not overly pessimistic for the short term. There’s still a lot of debt to be worked off in the U.S. economy. However, there is a very large generation coming up, the millennial generation. They're bigger than the baby-boomer generation. They’re now in high school and in college. They’ll need to purchase homes, consumer durables. They’ll have children. As people work themselves out of debt, and as a new generation that doesn’t have this debt (because they’re kids), become adults, you can see a return to a more normal set of consumption patterns in the economy. Hopefully, you won’t see a return to overconsumption. We’ve swung dramatically from buying everything with money we didn’t have to buying nothing. Clearly there’s someplace in the middle.

THE FUTURIST: The issue of the amount of debt that is being placed on the backs of younger generations is of great concern to me. The average college graduate carries $19,000 in school loans and an additional $12,000 in credit-card debt before they get out of school. When you add on future entitlement spending (social security and Medicare) as the baby boomers retire, the cost begins to sound significant. Many young people are leaving school with bleak job prospects and some burdens that the generation before them didn’t have. How would you rate that as a challenge for the United States going forward?

Kamarck: When you talk about debt to future generations in the U.S. economy as a whole that’s different from school loans. People get upset about loans, but loans are politically and practically a different thing. I think there will be ten hard years. That’s how long it will take for the overspending to move its way out. Eventually, people will need to buy cars, refrigerators, and houses again. That, plus whatever the Obama administration does by way of government spending, should help younger people to get jobs when they get out of college.

THE FUTURIST: You think it will take 10 years to move out of this current downturn?

Kamarck: It depends on how effective the stimulus package is and how quickly it succeeds in doing two things: it has to stop the rise in unemployment and it has to get the credit markets moving again so that the banks have some trust and can start lending to people forming new businesses. Then you start having a more normal economy. That’s why for the time being, frankly, spending is a lot more important than thinking about deficits. Once the economy gets moving again, then you’ll have to confront the deficit crisis. If the stimulus works to really get the economy growing again, you’ll grow out of some of the deficits. The question is, what is an acceptable level of debt as an aspect of GDP? Who knows if we’ll ever get back to the Clinton administration levels. But certainly by the time we’re coming out of this recession, hopefully the next administration will be poised to reinvent government and try and get inefficiencies out of government.

THE FUTURIST: Assuming that we do absolutely nothing correctly in the next 15 years, the intelligence report on 2025 has outlined what looks like a very bad worst case scenario. What’s your worst case scenario?

Kamarck: If we do everything wrong in the short term, we face a long period of deflation and unemployment. It becomes more difficult to meet our international obligations and maintain our military force. Then you begin to see some of the darker scenarios that we started this conversation with. But there is also a feeling that the U.S. economy has enough flexibility in it that people will work out of the present situation.

THE FUTURIST: What do you think is the most important trend to shape U.S. policy over the next two decades?

Kamarck: Domestic or international?

THE FUTURIST: Let’s start with domestic.

Kamarck: The aging population. That will determine a lot of government spending, because elderly people vote and are sophisticated about influencing the government. The probability of being able to achieve any significant savings out of either Medicare or Social Security is pretty slim. And so that will be the most significant domestic problem.

Internationally, the biggest challenge is to deal with terrorism more as an intelligence matter and less as a military matter. The Bush administration treated the war on terror as if it were a war, including invading countries. When we see terrorism stop, it's almost always the result of something similar to effective police and detective action rather than military action. The U.S. military, for all its talents, isn’t well suited to the prevention of terrorist plots. We need to build better alliances, and do better international police and intelligence work to preempt plots. That’s a change from the way the Bush administration dealt with the problem.

About the Interviewee
Elaine C. Kamarck is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She was one of the founders of the New Democrat movement that helped elect Bill Clinton president. She served in the White House from 1993 to 1997, where she created and managed the Clinton Administration's National Performance Review, also known as "reinventing government." She worked as Senior Policy Advisor to the Gore campaign and is the author of The End of Government As We Know It: Policy Implementation in the 21st Century (Lynne Rienner Publishing, 2006).

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine.

The Futurist Interviews Frank Daniels, COO of Ingram's Digital Group.

Frank Daniels

July-August 2008 Volume 42, No. 4

Frank Daniels is the COO of Ingram's Digital Group. We asked him about the future of publishing.

FUTURIST: What do you think is the future of publishing?

Daniels: The future of information is, of course, unlimited with technologies that are out there. I think the bigger challenge is, what is the future of different business models and technologies that are out there? What we're seeing is an either/and world. Consumers want their content either in print and in some other format--audio, ebook. The challenge is trying to figure out how that blend of business models works in an environment where most of the logistics systems are set up to deliver either digital-only or print-only. A blended world means we have to start thinking about how do we create blended business models that maximize the return for intellectual property owners such as publishers? We at Ingram spend a lot of time thinking about how to create a supply chain system that makes it transparent to the publisher as to what environment the consumer is getting their content. We think that as we build out with publishers those possibilities, there is very little limit to the opportunity for traditional publishers to embrace this future.

FUTURIST: Most authors consider working with words on paper to be their competency and they might be very intimidated by this notion that now you should have a podcast and possibly a YouTube vlog and do all right in front of a camera. A lot of authors probably wouldn't have been published in that world in the 1800s. You talked about how that change means that business models have to evolve very quickly. Do you see anything being sacrificed in that transition to a multi-modal business model?

Daniels: I would say the thing that people are going to struggle with is their notion of process. What people are comfortable in is a process. They understand how to take a story and migrate it into print and migrate it to a reader. If you think of that as a straight line and then you engineer your world around a straight line so that your competency is not so much what's a good story but how to take a story and move it to a consumer in particular process, that's going to be sacrificed. We're not talking about a straight line process. The thing that's going to change is, how do we help editors and then publishers understand that you have to think about stories and content before you think about the production process? Most editors think, 'how will this story work as a book?' instead of ‘how will this story look in all the different ways people can view it?’ Think of Eragon by Christopher Paolini. It began as a self published story and migrated backwards from a thought process into a traditional publishing model. We're going to see more of that coming from a short story or a photo book and migrating into all the different ways consumers use media. Like, 'I really like that set of photographs, I want the story behind that,' or 'I really like that story, I want it told as a video.' They'll be thinking about all the different ways that consumers might want to buy and absorb that experience, really expanding their view of merchandizing.

FUTURIST: Tell me a little about this new digital platform Ingram has going. I mean, a cutting edge author was releasing stuff online in chapter form bit by bit. He could pull his podcasts and video all together on site. How is what Ingram is doing now different?

Daniels: There's no pride of invention. It's really about making it more efficient. On the digital side, Ingram right now is focused much more education and academics--integrating a printed version of the book with animations, assessments, corollary and supplementary material, delivering that over Web over a download and making that a seamless operation. That's the program we're focusing on primarily today at Ingram. As we learn those pieces, we bring them out to the platform. But the integration aspects we've been primarily pushing on the academic and education scenes.

FUTURIST: Of all the technologies you've been looking at, at Ingram, which one is the change leader, which one is the most interesting to you?

Daniels: I'm not sure that any one technology is driving us right now. I don't see a game-changing technology right now. The beauty about the Kindle isn't that the device is great. The device is terrible. But the buying experience is wonderful. Some of the things that we're doing at Ingram within the textbook space isn't so much that the textbook is some great new metaphor of a book. Yes, we want to help publishers break the metaphor of the book and deliver something that's more appropriate and effective for students. That's the transformation in my mind. We want to make it so that it’s as easy to do digital stuff as it is to buy a book. As we get that done, publishers will say, 'Yes. There is a market there. I now want to add some video and audio and create truly a different metaphor.’ Right now when you say ‘book,’ you're thinking of 300 pages bound in something, delivered and consumed in one period of time. What is the new metaphor for the book? Is it something that exists more like a TV show? That's episodic? That's consumed both in one sitting or later? Or is it something more like a Website and a Web environment? You both own it and subscribe to it. As we create a platform where editors can be creative in their thinking process, then we will truly begin to break the metaphor for the book and have an experience for our consumers that they will consume and continue to consume.

FUTURIST: I think that a lot of editors feel like the editing process, which used to be very creative, has become less creative over the years. So you see creativity coming back into that job?

Daniels: I do. There are so many ways to take a book and turn it into something more than a book, or take a book that has gone away and can be combined with something new. Some of the most profitable publishing involves taking public domain material and making it relevant again. There are lots of different ways to take and recreate a story, combining new intellectual property and creating an experience that's richer and more informed for the consumer.

FUTURIST: In many ways, the publisher or the editor of the future is someone that not just works with the words as they exist in a document but someone whose working with a studio very early on to get something almost like a visual narrative up to correspond to it, working with a music studio, and it all happens at once, in a sort of seamless birthing that happens, in which the publisher plays largely a go-between role.

Daniels: Absolutely, and really, the publisher always was that. The publisher was an aggregator of a very creative editor, a very creative agent that pulled something together, and then someone on the other side packaged that and moved it along. As an either/and world. We'll still have books that just come out as a book. That's the very best way they should be. Nothing wrong with that. Obviously, some great stories can be delivered there. But stories should be told in whatever is the most effective environment for that story. Sometimes that's straight print. Sometimes it's print, pictures, and video. But it's the story that has to carry, and that's what editors should be great at. Editors really focus on the story and carry the story and worry less on which is the dominant medium to make that story go forward.

FUTURIST: I've talked to a lot of people today, and no one else has emphasized the story as product as much as you have.

Daniels: Well that's what we all sell. We monetize the story in many different ways, to bastardize the word. But all that we're doing is selling stories. Even a textbook is taking a set of facts and converting it into a story that can be absorbed and used and understood. That's what we all do. By story, I don't just mean novel. I mean a logical flow of information....

FUTURIST: But the same skills you use in one, you use in the other.

Daniels: Absolutely. Come on, what's the biggest thing that held up Hollywood in recent years? The writers went on strike. They're the ones who put the story together. We want to make sure in our world that we enable storytellers to take advantage of all the new technologies and make that work seamlessly.

FUTURIST: Why did you get involved in this process of distributing digital content?

Daniels: I came out of the newspaper business. Very early on, we were involved in integrating our newspaper...

FUTURIST: What newspaper was that?

Daniels: The News and Observer in Raleigh North Carolina. We created a Website called Nandonet and a variety of things like that. We ended up with a family of Websites. So we began...

FUTURIST: When was this?

Daniels: This was 1993. When Mosaic came out, we began doing World Wide Web sites and publishing on the Internet, and the thing that we learned was that it's all around story, it's about creating the opportunity for consumers to get information in the most effective way possible--what they want, when they want it, at the time they most need it. We began telling stories in multimedia with audio and interactive graphics and video stories back in 1994.

FUTURIST: Back in 1994, when you were first encountering this new medium, was there a moment where you looked at it and you said to yourself "You know, this is going to completely change journalism"?

Daniels: Absolutely. It happened in the fall of 1994, and we decided we were going to sell our newspapers, and we sold all our newspapers but one in 1995. That's what brought me here. I saw there was an opportunity to bring this either/and world to publishing.

FUTURIST: That's really remarkable. You took a look and said, ‘That's it, we've got to get out.’ Taking a look at what's going on right now, what would get out of?

Daniels: Well publishing should be about selecting stories and marketing those stories to the right people. If that's their expertise, what are the things they do that don't deliver that expertise? So if I were a publisher, I wouldn't own my own distribution system. But that's a bit of a selfish observation.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker

The Futurist Interviews Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at the University of California.

Gregory Stock

June, 6 2002

Like human cloning, technologies giving us control over our genetic destiny will be developed, whether they are banned or not. Gregory Stock, author of Redesigning Humans and director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at the University of California, Los Angeles, explains what these new technologies are, how they may be used to prevent disease and extend our lifespans, and how they may alter our social institutions.

WORLD FUTURE SOCIETY: We'd like to talk about the concept of germinal choice technology or technologies introduced in your latest book, Redesigning Humans. Please define what we are talking about here, what these technologies are and how close we are to achieving them.

GREGORY STOCK: The term germinal choice technology is one that I think is useful because right now there are a whole host of terms that are related to various aspects of interventions in reproduction. Most discussions often are very technology-centered, rather than looking at what the person actually is doing and what the consequences are. For instance, germline engineering is one technology that is mentioned. It comes from the word germ, like the germination of a seed. Germline engineering is an intervention, altering the genes in the first cell in the embryo.

The simplest intervention that would be made by that technology would be to go in and try to correct the genes. It would be exactly the same effect as would be accomplished by doing a screening test on the embryos, in which there were no intervention whatsoever, then looking at multiple embryos and picking one out that had the correct [or desired] genes. In fact, that is what is being done now in preimplantation genetic diagnosis [PGD].

Germinal choice technology refers to a whole realm of technologies by which parents influence the genetic constitutions of their children. That could be done through screening of embryos, or it could be done through making alterations of particular genes. When that technology comes online, it could be done by the kind of procedures like in cloning, which is the copying of the embryo.

A number of [these early technologies] are already in use today. For instance, the screening technologies have been in use for over a decade, and what can be tested for is going to become increasingly sophisticated in the next five to 10 years. These technologies will mature, and the kinds of decisions that parents can make will become much more sophisticated. They will have a larger range. The germline interventions themselves are being done (alterations of genes) already in animal systems. The approaches there don't require the safety or reliability that may be required in human beings.

One possible approach that I think could have that sort of reliability in humans is the use of an artificial chromosome. That technology, while it sounds very science fiction, is already in use in animal systems. Artificial chromosomes have been added to mice and have been passed on for several generations. They have been used in human tissue culture of human cells and have been passed ably for hundreds of generations, hundreds of cell divisions. That represents a stable "platform," as we say, and could be used for the insertion of whole modules of genes. This would include the requisite control mechanism that would turn those genes on and off at the appropriate time, just as our normal genes in our 46 chromosomes are activated or inactivated, [depending on] the type of tissue that they are in or the conditions that surround them and the variety of influences that they have.

WFS: So there is a possibility of correcting mistakes, with a regulatory method, and there would be a way of turning something on or off genetically?

STOCK: The important thing is early intervention. You would want [the interventions--gene modification--] to be very narrow in focus. You wouldn't want to have a gene that is on in a whole variety of tissues to go through growth development, because we don't know much about that process. It is quite likely that there would be secondary effects that would be undesirable and damaging. So the early intervention that one might make using an artificial chromosome would be to place those genes in the off position so they are not being expressed until an adult stage; then at that point they could be turned on in the proper tissue.

The mechanisms for doing that sort of control are already being used in certain kinds of animal testing where you want to see the effects of genes in an adult organism. There are of course controls on genes that do just that in the body all the time. Different sets of genes are turned on and off at different times and different places in [different] types of tissues, and so the kinds of regulatory structures that are associated with our existing genes might be copied to control other genes that have been put in place.

There is one interesting result that is sort of indicative of these possibilities. Recently it has been shown that children who have Down syndrome [have] much lower [incidence of] certain types of cancers. They have something close to 90% reduction in incidence of certain cancers. The thought is that because they have a third copy of chromosome 21 now--because they have all of the genes on that chromosome--that means that they have problems with expression levels that are responsible for the symptoms that are associated with Down syndrome. But probably there are a number of genes on chromosome 21 that, when their expression is increased by adding an extra copy, seems to be protective against cancer. And so that is an example of the type of intervention that one might imagine if one were able to identify which of those genes were responsible for the reduced incidents of cancer. Then you could imagine taking a set of those genes and placing them on a artificial chromosome and adding them so it could greatly reduce the incidence of cancer, which is seen in Down syndrome, without the untoward consequences of having all the other genes in place. This is an early example of the way it might work.

WFS: Is that the sort of development that is going to make the whole concept of germinal choice technology more acceptable to people?

STOCK: If there are clear examples of interventions that look like they will be meaningful and that seem to be safe and that are not able to be accomplished in other easier and safer fashions, then I think that people will want them and will welcome them. Right now, there is not enough known to imagine making those sort of interventions. But if one moves forward 20 years, then it seems to me quite plausible that there will be things of that sort. Right now, we don't know what to do, and we don't know how to do it very effectively and safely.

The use of artificial chromosomes might work quite well, particularly because the chromosomes themselves could be tested within the laboratory environment. They could be tested on animals, they could be validated, and then they could be used essentially in the same state that they were tested in. When you are doing gene therapies today, each gene therapy is done anew so that it is impossible to gain that kind of reliability.

As to what can be done right now, there is really nothing that anybody would look at as worthwhile enough to make that intervention. But the example of trisomy [as in Down syndrome's trisomy 21] is an example of the kinds of things that are going to be coming increasingly rapidly. All sorts of ideas will present themselves to the gene therapist of the future, that they will then test out and see if it is possible. But certainly the targets of reducing cancer or reducing the incidents of heart disease, of retarding aging, those kinds of global enhancements of health are ones that are going to be very very desirable, I believe.

WFS: Is antiaging one of the biggest targets for these types of therapies and enhancements?

STOCK: I think that it is, because it is likely, because it is something that people really would desire so strongly. Now if it turns out that there are interventions that could, through our unraveling of the underlying process of aging, [allow us to] develop pharmaceutical and other interventions that are effective in adults, then that is what everybody would want, because we are a little bit beyond the one-cell stage [when germline engineering would be logical].

But there are [interventions] that are much easier to do and can be done much more effectively in an embryo, because if genes are placed in an embryo they will be copied into every single cell in the body and you can make highly tissue-specific interventions. You could target specific interventions that would be very difficult using any [gene-therapy] technology that is known today. How do you get access to tissues, how do you put in the amount of DNA that is necessary to control the expression of those genes? It is a very very difficult effort. So it seems to me it is quite plausible that there would be intervention that could be made in an embryo that would not be feasible in an adult. And if that is the case then I think that parents are going to look at it as a chance, their one shot at giving their child some very significant health advantages.

WFS: That is a very human response, to do what is best for your child.

STOCK: You are absolutely right. In fact, there have been international polls that have shown that if you look at enhancing the physical or mental well-being of your children--and that is enhancements we are talking about, not what some people would look at as therapy where you are attacking particular diseases, but actually just improving their beauty, intelligence, strength, altruism, all sorts of values--there is at least a significant minority in every country polled who were interested in [doing] that. The low was about a quarter, which occurred in Japan. The high was about 80% in Thailand and India. There are lots and lots of people who will want to do these things once they are reliable.

People are rather cautious because it is their children. They are going to have to suffer the consequences and the guilt that is associated if it endangers their child. But we want to give advantages and benefits to our children. It is a very common feeling. When I talk about these issues, in virtually every audience that I have asked, significant numbers of people say they would want to make these interventions.

WFS: Does it make a difference to ask the question in specific terms versus very general, abstract terms? Asked, "Are you for or against genetic engineering," most people would probably just say no. But, as you said, when it becomes a personal choice for your own children, your motive changes quite a bit.

STOCK: That happens with all of these pertinent issues. As we make these issues less abstract and start talking about the challenges that you as an individual are confronting related to your own family, then you can project yourself into that situation, then you look at it very differently. It is certainly that way with, for instance, something as [controversial as cloning]. There is a great deal of fear these days about cloning, at least in Washington. When is a human going to be cloned?

WFS: But when you see a cute little kitty being cloned, you are not as scared. Let's talk about some of fears, because when those fears turn into to protests, does that slow down the movement toward the technologies being developed?

STOCK: Certainly the restraints on embryo research have had an impact on the development of biomedical technologies directed toward an area called regenerative medicine. Those restraints have definitely slowed that development in the United States, which is certainly the most aggressive nation in biomedical research. [Now some of that research] has moved to other countries, such as Britain. And now Singapore is setting up a huge program.

People's fears are related to the strangeness of various reproductive possibilities, and certain kinds of knowledge that will become available through genomics just makes them uncomfortable.

WFS: Certainly genetically modified foods didn't get any help from the people that started calling it "frankenfood." "Frankenkid" is somebody that is going to be in our kitchens.

STOCK: When you get a very ideological and often a religious or theologically based opposition that generalizes these things and abstracts them, making them symbolic, the effect I believe is not to greatly slow the most controversial uses of the technology. But what it does do is slow the mainstream research that translates these technologies into biomedical advances that virtually everyone would support. Cloning is probably a really good example, because the bans and restrictions on human cloning will probably have very little impact on the ultimate arrival of cloning. It will be done in some country; it will be done largely in an obscure and hidden fashion, as seems to be occurring now. All of the research that is occurring in animal systems is eventually going to make it feasible to do that in primates, and as soon as it is feasible it will be done. And probably before it is quite as safe as it should be. And so that will happen somewhere.

Now, what the bans do is block what is really very desirable medical research on embryonic stem cells, which [could] retard the development of cures for Parkinson's disease or diabetes, or certain kinds of cancer, or Alzheimer's--the kinds of things that have very very serious consequences for people who are suffering from these diseases. And there are millions of them. So while [protests and bans] may slightly delay or at least in some way the arrival of the first human clone (or at least delay the appearance of it in the media), [a ban on human cloning] has very little impact in a larger way. The biggest impact is on biomedical advances, and that's why the church's responses are very, very unfortunate.

WFS: Let's talk about some of the costs [risks] to companies that are developing [these biomedical advances--genetic engineering or therapy]. Obviously there are costs in all research and development; if there are protests, are companies going to pull back from funding these? Should investors invest in these companies or is it too risky? . . . "Snake oil" is a very real fear.

STOCK: The area where that ["snake oil" effect] has happened the most is in aging research, where there all sorts of people profiteering on the desire of the general public to have something that is going to make them healthy and vital for a longer period and to keep them young. There are a lot of snake oil salesmen. The real results [from life-extension medical research] come much more slowly.

In more productive biology, such as gene therapy, the efforts are directed toward somatic therapy at this time. As far as germline gene therapy is concerned, I would say no one is seriously involved because it is too distant to be viable commercially. And it would be too dangerous; the path to making a real business that makes a profit out of this is too long.

The reason that these technologies are inevitable is that it doesn't really require anybody to be actively pursuing them at this stage. They are growing out of basic biomedical research. As we get closer to there being real clinical and practicable developments (by "very close" I mean a matter of being just five years away from it), then you will begin to get a lot more commercial involvement. But it doesn't happen at this stage. The only area where that is happening to some extent is in embryo screening, which is a technology that has already been around for 10 years and it is going to greatly expand as a result of the whole Human Genome Project. [We'll see] the deciphering of the associations between various genes and various aspects of who we are and various aspects of our medical risks. That work is going on completely independently, so the application to embryo screening is a spin-off. We didn't do the Human Genome Project so that we could selectively screen embryos. But given the power to understand what genes mean about various aspects of who we are, then we'll use these on embryos just as we use them on ourselves.

WFS: We were talking about aging and anti-aging. What steps could be taken to speed up the arrival for a cure for aging? Is there anything we should be doing to accelerate that?

STOCK: What could accelerate a "cure for aging" would be an infusion of funds into research on the biology of aging. Right now, that is a rather underfunded area. Much much more money, for example, is being spent on finding cures for the diseases of aging rather than trying to understand the underlying process that may be responsible for a wide variety of age-related diseases, everything from cancer and heart disease to Alzheimer's, arthritis, and diabetes. So more funding would help a great deal.

Another thing that would [accelerate the arrival of that "cure for aging"] would be raising the profile of the entire field. This is beginning to happen, but slowly. The idea would be to attract young researchers and serious scientists to explore this realm. One of things that I have been trying to do is raise the funds for a series of high-level prizes in the field of aging research. These prizes would be for particular advances that are on the path toward the development of clinical interventions that would retard aspects of aging. I think that that could really focus the energies of the field.

WFS: Let's talk a bit more about parental choice. Parents could conceivably be able choose the genes for their children, including such traits as beauty and strength, and hopefully wisdom in addition to IQ points. Should parents be allowed to use the genes of an entertainment star?

STOCK: That is a very sensitive issue. People are very resistant to the notion of stealing somebody's genes and using them, or cloning someone without their permission. That kind of thing people find objectionable.

When you are trying to ask what are limits of parental rights as far as making decisions about their children is concerned, we are going to push up against a number things that make us very uneasy. But it's probably not worth worrying about at this point, because that is very distant. We are going to go through a lot of things [before then] that will change our thinking. We will get used to the ideas of these new technologies before we are called upon to make decisions in that realm.

The things that are more important, it seems to me, are [decisions on possibilities] that already exist that could happen much sooner. [For instance,] whether parents could make choices about the sex of their child. It is legal in the United States, but illegal in some other places. There are quite a few people who think that it should be illegal. [Another more immediate decision will be] whether parents can simply screen for broad numbers of genetic diseases, some of which may not be terribly serious, or whether parents can make choices about the height or IQ of their children, or other aspects of temperament and personality--very straightforward things that are probably already present in their own genes. The first wave [of dilemmas for society] is going to just be making choices based on genetic testing and screening, such as choosing whether to have one embryo as opposed to another. It will be very difficult for a lot of people to accept initially; I think it's almost impossible to regulate. But on the whole these things are not very dangerous. On the whole, they will be beneficial rather than have adverse consequences.

WFS: What about the role of insurance companies--would they begin requiring people to screen their embryos?

STOCK: That is a concern I have heard mentioned--the idea that there will be pressure on parents to avoid certain types of genetic conditions that have adverse health consequences. I can certainly see that occurring, because as you begin to be able identify medical risk factors while you can do that at an early stage, it seems likely that private health insurance will be taking that into consideration. [With] the arrival genetic diagnostics that really allow us to determine our many health-related risks, whether we use that information for purposes of screening embryos or not is going to have huge consequences for both medical and life insurance. That’s most easily seen in life insurance. If [you have] this information and the insurance company does not, then you are going to change your behavior and load up on low-cost insurance if you are high risk of same serious disease. But if the insurance company has that information, they are [likely to] charge you enormous premiums--or else exclude you entirely. [This will affect the insurance industry because once-]unknown risks suddenly become known. Insurance is a way of sharing unknown risks, so when those risks become known, insurance can no longer function in the way it did before. I think that this is a more fundamental problem. We as a society are going to have to come up with tools [that will give] people some feeling of safety in their lives, that they are being taken care of in some way for some basic level of insurance. You don't want people to be profiteering.

And who should pay if a parent is bringing a child into the world and specifically selecting an embryo that would intentionally [result in] a child with very serious health conditions? There is going to be a question as to whether a parent should be allowed to that at all.

WFS: Why would anyone want to do that?

STOCK: It is rather astonishing, but in the deaf community there is a whole movement that is very opposed to the use of cochlear implants; they feel this damages the culture of the deaf community.

WFS: Parents want their children to be like themselves, only more so?

STOCK:There are deaf parents who have said that they would use these kinds of technologies to ensure that their children were deaf. That is not to [say they would] take an embryo and damage it, but [they would] select an embryo that would develop into a deaf child.

[Will society be] willing to make value judgments about basic health and say that any individual is equally worthy of life before [it is born]? [We are] not [talking about] making a decision with an existing person as to whether to value that person's life or not, but about a yet-to-be-born person. [Will we] say, well, it doesn't really matter, everyone, [deaf or nondeaf] is equal? Then we are going to confront the realities of those abstract philosophies. To this point, they have been abstract, so it is easy to wave one's hand and say, well, there is no reason to value a healthy individual over a person who has various health challenges and problems. If we feel that way, then we won't regulate that [sort of choice by parents] at all. [But] if we really begin to come to grips with it and decide there is a problem there, then we will have to confront that and how to handle it.

WFS: Governments will certainly play a role in some oversight over the development of the technologies and their uses.

STOCK: Yes, I think they will. But I will argue that with fast-moving technology the important thing is not to regulate it in advance. These technologies are not dangerous in the sense of atomic weapons, where you can have an accident and suddenly a lot of innocent bystanders are killed. These technologies are really only dangerous to those who choose to go out and use them voluntarily. You don't really want to project your hopes and fears into the future and say "such and such a technology" is going to be too dangerous, and say we must stop cloning, for example, before it occurs. It is just too awful a possibility.

It seems to me it is much better to allow early cases of this technology. Probably cloning is the best example. Maybe a better example is various type of genetic screening that might occur. To try and sort our or hypothesize how it is going to be used and who's going to do what and what the consequences will be for the children and for the family. The reality is that no one really knows. We will have ample time to regulate these things after they begin to play out and after can see what the challenges really are.

Sex selection is really a better example of that. People want to regulate sex selection whereas, in my view, it has already been shown in the United States and in the developed world there is not a problem of large gender imbalances that arrived. In fact, in the United States, those choices are equally balanced between boys and girls, with a slight preponderance of girls. That is not the case in the less-developed world, but we are talking about the United States. People imagined that if we decide to allow people to have that control that would be a serious problem, that we are going to have all boys. It is not the case, so that isn't really a danger.

Some people also argue that parents shouldn't have that power over their children at all. Well, they aren't really clear about what the reasons are. In my view, if the parents really, really want to have a girl for some reason, or really want to have a boy, letting them fulfill that desire is probably not going to be damaging to the child. Just the reverse is true if they have a girl when they really wanted a boy. Probably a child of the "wrong" gender is going to have a hard time of it. I would say that there are net benefits to allowing that level of choice for parents.

And yet, one could have imagined [scenarios] beforehand and tried to regulate [gender-selection technology], with all sorts of stories about the damages that would occur. If it changes in the future and we start to have real gender imbalances, then you can start to address policies that are very specific about what they are trying to accomplish--rather than [creating policies] based upon vague fears and ideological views about what is and is not playing God.

WFS: Let's go way, way out into the future. I assume we are still not talking about adding gills and wings to human beings, but we are talking about a vision of humanity that is substantially different from what we already have. Are we really at risk of losing our humanity in the future?

STOCK:I think it very much depends upon what you mean by our "humanity." Does it have to do with very narrow aspects of our biology, or does it have to do with the whole process of engaging the world and with our interactions with one another? We certainly have changed socially in very many profound ways. Does this make us "not human" in some sense? The fact is, we would modify ourselves in other ways. For instance, if our lifespan were to double or more, would that make us "not human" in some sense? It would certainly change the whole trajectory of human life. It would change the way we interact with one another, it would change our institutions and our sense of family, and it would change the way we view education. It would change everything in a very deep way. But in my opinion we would still be human.

WFS: Humans are very adaptable.

STOCK: Exactly. If the hunter-gathers imagined living in New York City, they would say that they could no longer be human, that that wouldn't be a human way of living. Yet, we look at it as not only a human way of living, but [a better one--]we would not want to go back to a hunter-gather lifestyle. So I think it will be same way with the types of changes [that will occur] as we begin to be able to alter our biology.

WFS: It is certainly reassuring to have our own evolution in our own hands. Where do we stand right now in the human evolution timeline? Are we adolescents, babies, or fully matured adults? Where do you think we are on evolutionary scale?

STOCK: As I look forward, I would say we are just in the very early stages--early adolescence at most. When future humans look back at this era from a period of 1,000 years from now, they're going to look at this as a very primitive time, a difficult and challenging time.

It was an extraordinary moment when we laid down the foundations for the changes that are going to completely establish the way that [those future humans] live their lives. It is hard to imagine what life will be like for us even a hundred years from now.

WFS: People are already implanting electronic devices--there is [cybernetics professor] Kevin Warwick in Britain, for example. Is that the wave of the future? Futurists like Ray Kurzweil have been saying we are going to have more electronics in our bodies.

STOCK:I think that Ray has really got it wrong. In the future, what is really going to matter to us is our biology, because we are biological creatures. The notion of having chip implants in our brains sounds a little seductive until you imagine the realities of going in for brain surgery--a risky operation--and the actual benefits you'd have to be offered in order to be willing to subject yourself to that kind of an operation.

Repairing deficits of one sort or another is something that we will do, and there have been all sorts of implants related to that. But the idea of going into a person who is healthy to try and expand their ability to recall tunes or something is very unlikely and not very realistic. We will have the opportunity to do those sorts of things through close associations that we have technology. Things that we carry with us, that we wear, that we speak to, we won't need to penetrate our bodies for that.

It will be the biological developments that are going to really be important to us because, face it, as wonderful as technology is, you get old. You lose your mind, you die. No chip implant is going change that. If you are going to have a chip implant in your brain to expand your intellectual capacity but you're going to get Alzheimer's at the same time, it doesn't work.

WFS: I want to get back to whose choices these are and the idea of the wealthy benefiting and the have-nots have yet one more thing to keep them down. Do you see technologies, germinal choice technologies, as more of a democratizing force or more of a divisive one?

STOCK:It depends how they are used and what the political environment is around them. The effort to block these technologies will simply render them extremely divisive, because that will guarantee that they are only available to the wealthy who are able to circumvent any kinds of restrictions rather easily, either by traveling to other locations or simply paying money to get black-market services. But if you get at their core, they could be very democratizing, because the kinds of interventions that will be available initially are going to be ones that are able to compensate for deficits. Those are the easiest things to do. It is always much easier to [enhance] someone who is not functioning very well in some capacity or another.

WFS: You make up a 90 IQ to 120, for example?

STOCK: Right, rather than take 150 IQ up to 160, which is going to be a real challenge. That is going to be hard to do because it is a combination of all sorts of little factors brought together to create elite performance. We have so many examples of functioning at normal levels; we have models for how to modify a system so that it can be average, whereas we don't have many, or any, examples of how to make a superhuman.

It seems to me that, while people pretend that we are all created equal and that we are equal under the eyes of the law, [they think] it means we are all the same. We aren't. The genetic lottery can be very very cruel.

WFS: Ask anybody who is six-feet tall in seventh grade.

STOCK: Yeah, or who is just very slow, or has a genetic disease of one sort or another. They don't believe in some abstract principal of how wonderful the genetic lottery is. I think they would like to be healthier or have more talent in one way or another. And so it seems to me that the broad availability of these technologies would level the playing field in many ways, because it would give opportunities to those who otherwise would be disadvantaged genetically.

Another point is that these technologies, as do any technologies, improve rather rapidly, and so the differences will be not so much between the wealthy and the poor in one generation (although obviously there will be more things available to those who have more resources), but between one generation and the next. Even for a Bill Gates today, with a lot of money, the genetic enhancements or services that could [be offered] a child today will be primitive compared with what any middle-class person is going to be able to accomplish 20 or 25 years from now.

WFS: At the bottom line, are you optimistic, pessimistic, or realistic?

STOCK: I think I am realistic. An important aspect of wisdom is to know what we have the power to control and what we don't. Many people go around pretending that we have a choice about whether these sorts of technologies are going to infuse into our lives. I think that we do not have a choice about that. It's going to happen. The dynamics of the situation are so strong that we will use these technologies.

We have some level of choice about exactly how we will use them, how divisive they will be to our society, and how they will serve our values. And I think that is what the discussion should be about. I am very realistic about that and I also am very hopeful about these technologies. If you look at them, the chances for the benefits far outweigh the problems that they are likely to cause us and I think that future generations are going to look back at these technologies and wonder how we lived in such a primitive time, when people lived only 70 years and died painful, difficult deaths at that early age.

WFS: What kinds of questions should individuals being asking themselves now? What should we be asking our institutions?

STOCK: For now, it would be useful to ask government and policy makers to not try and block the [research], to consider not only the risks of injuries that might occur when new technology is wrongfully applied or when accidents occur, but also to consider the many many people who are injured when technologies that might have been are delayed. Right now, there is an extraordinary bias toward trying to gain unreasonable levels of safety to prevent individual accidents from occurring, at the sacrifice of the safety of large numbers of people who will be affected indirectly. An example of that is in vaccines. For many years, vaccines were not even developed because there were too much litigation involved. If any child were injured, there would be huge consequences. And yet, clearly, it is much safer to the population as a whole to have the vaccines.

I think you have the same problem with the focus on cloning, which could affect a handful of people at the most anytime in the near future. To deny extraordinary possible medical advances that would affect millions of people who are suffering, and to justify that by saying that it is out of respect for human life--I don't understand that logic.

WFS: One last question, on a side issue: I noticed in your book [Redesigning Humans] you refer a great deal to science-fiction films. Do they help us visualize the possibilities of the future, or are they just entertainment that distracts us from the real issues?

STOCK: I think good science fiction deals with trying to project into the future a lot of developments in the present and the possibilities that are embodied in present technology. It is inspiring to lots of scientists. When you talk to the scientists, often they were avid readers of science fiction at one point or another in their careers. It is a way of communicating and thinking about the future and about the human impacts of developments. So it's part of that conversation of coming to grips with the new.

WFS: I think you mentioned in Star Wars they have all sorts of strange looking critters that we interact with but basically humans are still humans.

STOCK: There is some science fiction that has pushed beyond that, but I think that essentially it is very difficult to make drama that doesn't involve human beings.

WFS: But by the same token drama involves conflict and my feeling about science fiction is that it dramatizes conflict to the exclusion of cooperation, for instance.

STOCK: That is interesting. It depends. I remember Cult City in the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke. He presents this perfect world and then picks it apart, the problems that are associated with it. I remember reading that as a child.

Life is conflict, in a way. Not necessarily war, but there is certainly conflict that is going on. That is certainly what drama is about. I guess I like science fiction; I haven't read as much of it recently as I used to. But I think that people are often familiar with some of those [stories and themes].

WFS: Well it is a very useful tool for futurists, and we have had our share of science-fiction authors in THE FUTURIST.

STOCK: Science-fiction films I don't think are generally useful. When I think of science fiction I think of novels, where you have a chance to explore these sorts of things in much fuller ways than films. Films are not very effective tools for the most part, I would say.

Gregory Stock is director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at UCLA’s School of Medicine, NPI, 760 Westwood Boulevard, Box 9, Los Angeles, California 90024. Web site http://research.mednet.ucla.edu/pmts/Stock.htm.

His most recent book is Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), which is available from the Futurist Bookstore for $24 ($21.95 for Society members), cat. no. B-2410. Click here to order.

For more information and discussion on human germline engineering, visit http://research.mednet.ucla.edu/pmts/Germline/default.htm.

This interview was conducted March 28, 2002, by Cynthia G. Wagner, managing editor of THE FUTURIST.

Interview posted on 6 June 2002.

The Futurist Interviews Ian Bremmer, author of The End of the Free Market

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine.

THE FUTURIST: In your new book, The End of the Free Market, you write that human rights and free markets are inextricably linked, yet you perceive a future where many large and profitable state-run corporations exist, advancing neither free-market principles nor human rights. Briefly, was there a particular moment or incident in your travels where you reached this realization?

Ian Bremmer: These tectonic shifts have been under way for a long time. I’ve seen this on the horizon since I started the Eurasia Group. All states are going to become a much bigger driver for global investment. It’s happened more structurally in countries that have state-capitalist systems. Those countries are becoming more important. The eureka moment came several months after the financial crisis first hit. I got a phone call from the protocol office of the Chinese mission in New York. They said the vice minister of foreign affairs, He Yafei, was coming to town. They asked if I would have time to engage in an exchange of views. We got together a small group. I was sitting right across from him, and he said, “Tell me, now that the free market has failed, what do you believe the appropriate role for the state in the global economy should be?” I had to suppress a smile. It was a bold statement.

My response was that, just because the self-regulation of banks proved to be a bad way to run the global economy, does not mean that the absence of the rule of law, or an independent judiciary, or the presence of the state as both principal actor and arbiter of the economy is a better way to run an economy. That was the beginning of a long conversation where we began to engage each other’s worldviews. But the fact of the matter is, on some fundamental philosophical level, these worldviews and systems are incompatible. We in the United States have been able to ignore that, because America has done well in China, and China’s been a very small country (economically speaking). In other words, there’s been a lot of free-riding. It’s now 2010. China is growing at 10% a year and the United States has 10% unemployment. This is going to become a very politicized relationship.

THE FUTURIST: How will people in the United States begin to see that polarization?

Bremmer: Here’s one example: In 2008, as an American voter, you could choose McCain or Obama without any interest or concern as to what their views were in regard to China. That will never happen again.

THE FUTURIST: How does the United States navigate that relationship? What happens to our argument for greater openness in China, greater respect for human rights?

Bremmer: The first thing we have to do is understand that you can’t navigate something without a map. We haven’t had one. There are big problems with the basic narrative that Americans subscribe to about China. Here’s the story we tell ourselves: There’s an authoritarian, communist government on one side and there are people yearning to be free on the other. In that struggle, ultimately, the Chinese people will win; therefore, the United States stands on the side of the Chinese people. We don’t seem to understand that the vast majority of Chinese are exceptionally supportive of their leadership.

Imagine for a moment that there were political reforms put into China right now. They had free and democratic elections. Would the resulting government in China be more beneficial, antithetical, or indifferent to American interests than the government now in place in Beijing? I could make a very strong argument that the resulting Chinese government would be less pro-status quo, more nationalistic, and more problematic to U.S. interests.

THE FUTURIST: You could argue the same thing happened when Hamas won elections in Palestine.

Bremmer: Indeed you could. We tend to fetishize elections in the United States.

THE FUTURIST: What’s the most important thing the U.S. government can do to ensure a better relationship with China, one that’s mutually beneficial?

Bremmer: Be indispensable. We’ve forgotten about this. Many years ago, James Chase wrote about America as the indispensable nation. Today, the United States is in comparative decline vis-à-vis countries like China. I’m not a declinist. But the rise of the rest does mean the comparative decline of the United States. In policy terms, that means we need to focus on the places where we can make them feel that we are indispensable.

1. We have by far the world’s largest military, and it’s essential for humanitarian response after a disaster, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that struck Indonesia. The United States has more capability for large-scale coordinated operations because of the size of our military. Hard power becomes more important over time, especially as parts of American soft power, like financial leverage, deteriorate, comparatively speaking.

2. Reiterate our commitment to regulated free markets; that includes being open to Chinese investment in the United States. In 2005, CNOOC — the state-owned Chinese National Offshore Oil Company — made an offer for Unocal [a U.S.-based oil company]. At the time, U.S. lawmakers expressed concern over the Chinese government acquiring a U.S. energy interest. Ultimately, Unocal was sold to Chevron for millions less than the CNOOC offer. Some of the people who really wanted the sale to CNOOC to happen were Unocal management. Chevron already had good managers, but China wanted Unocal managers at CNOOC. More Western management in Chinese firms is insidious; it shows we do this stuff better than they do. They want access to better accounting and more transparency. We have it. This know-how over time makes us more indispensable to China.

3. Most important, we want to avoid protectionism. We don’t want the Chinese to look toward decoupling. That’s a bad scenario. But the argument for globalization will become harder to make politically in the United States, as laid-off workers complain that globalization favors Beijing more than Detroit.

THE FUTURIST: How do you sell globalization to an electorate that’s feeling increasingly pressured by it?

Bremmer: It will become a less popular sell. That’s why you see people arguing in favor of protecting automotive sector jobs even if they aren’t competitive. It’s why the European Union spends 40% of its budget on the farming sector, just 8% of the population. The Europeans just shouldn’t be farming. They should be spending more where they have an advantage.

THE FUTURIST: The United States, too, should focus on its advantages?

Bremmer: Yes, and the United States has huge competitive advantages. A couple of months ago someone asked me, is America even going to be relevant in 10 or 15 years? I told him to ask that question again, but replace “America” with “world’s largest economy.” So, in 10 to 15 years, is the world’s largest economy going to be relevant? The question is farcical. The United States will still, overwhelmingly, be the world’s largest economy and reserve currency.

Research and development throughout the world is U.S.-driven. The world’s best institutions of higher learning are in the United States. It’s harder to get immigration into this country, but scientists are still seeking training here. Who would I bet on to make the next world-changing patents in 20 years for new energy technologies? I’d bet on the United States, of course. If Iwas betting a pool of money, would I bet as much on the United States after 20 years as I would today? No I would not. Would there be a significant shift? Probably yes. But I would still bet on the United States.

Unfortunately, the trajectory is moving in a way that’s more and more uncomfortable. U.S. institutions, which operate well in a steady state or during times of increasing wealth, are terrible at responding to impending crisis. India has been dealing with this same problem for some time, which is why China continually eats their lunch. The kind of system that we have in the United States is decentralized away from the president on key legislative issues; it’s one where individual constituencies win political battles except in the bleakest crises. Given that, it’s very hard for elected political leaders to make globalist arguments publicly. That’s a weakness in the American political system that is structural and will become increasingly apparent as we muddle through these deficit and spending issues.

As a political scientist, I expect that America won’t address these issues proactively; as a consequence, the war between states and corporations will look increasingly combative.

THE FUTURIST: Do you assume the average American voter is incapable of grasping the inherent logic of a globalist perspective?

Bremmer: I would never say “incapable,” but there is a serious collective-action problem. The average American is capable of understanding why voting is important, but what are our voting numbers? As the economic situation, especially from a comparative perspective, becomes tougher, as deficits grow, you’re also going to see much more populism. Some of that will be driven top-down, and a lot of that will be driven by frightened, upset people. It’s a reality. The United States is not well positioned — given all of our priorities on a daily basis — to actually deal with these globalist perspectives. That’s clearly true.

When I talk about these issues, I’m trying not to be ideological about them. The embrace of globalization is how, I am convinced, we will ultimately have the strongest global growth with the most boats rising. But I also understand why it is relatively unlikely to happen. We have to be honest about that.

THE FUTURIST: The year is 2020. Is the average human being — take the aggregate, Russia, China, Iran, western Europe, the United States — more free or less?

Bremmer: A little less, for two reasons. First, the dynamics playing out between the United States and China and within China itself will not have run their course by then. As a consequence, we will increasingly experience an absence of global cohesion and institution making. There will be no sufficient global response to climate change or to proliferation. That creates more volatility and instability, which tends to empower these entrenched authoritarian systems.

The second reason is the increasing risk of the diffusion of dangerous technologies. Rogue states and individuals are more empowered, irrespective of the amount of money going into counterterrorist efforts. It doesn’t take teams of people to take down planes anymore but one sufficiently motivated individual, and not just planes but other targets with real-time market implications. That’s going to have an impact on individual liberties.

The combination of those two things, the dangerous technology growth and the tectonics of an increasingly non-polar world, will affect the spread of freedom and democracy. The fight between free but regulated markets against state capitalism will result in swings in that direction.

THE FUTURIST: On the most micro-level, what can a reader of THE FUTURIST do to improve that situation?

Bremmer: I focused just now on the massive decentralization of dangerous technologies. The flipside of that coin is the decentralization of empowering technologies. The most significant of those is the Internet, the blogosphere, and communications networks. We’re living in an increasingly content-rich environment. Some of that content is dangerous, but more of it is benign.

We’re also living in a world where really interesting and valid content becomes more important even if it comes from people who have not been anointed by the powers that be. The average insightful reader with something intelligent to say can contribute ideas and criticism in a way that has actual and meaningful potential to affect the way political, civic, and economic leaders think and act, and in a way that 10 or 20 years ago was unimaginable.

About the Interviewee

Ian Bremmer is an American political scientist specializing in U.S. foreign policy, states in transition, and global political risk. He is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, a global political risk research and consulting firm providing financial, corporate, and government clients with insight on how political developments move markets. His latest book, The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? will be released by Portfolio in May 2010.

The Futurist Interviews Jeanne Guillemin, MIT bioweapons expert.

Jeanne Guillemin

May-June 2008 Vol. 42, No. 3

Biowarfare isn't a new threat, rather one that's always changing. We asked MIT bioweapons expert Jeanne Guillemin to put the issue into perspective.

THE FUTURIST: In your book Biological Weapons, you discuss the Japanese biowarfare efforts in Manchuria as well as those of the United States and the Soviet Union. Is there any single episode or event in the history of biological warfare that stands out as particularly relevant today?

Guillemin: In the Tokyo War Crimes Trial of 1946-1948, Occupation officials could have prosecuted the Japanese biological weapons activities as war crimes. Instead, the crimes were buried in intense secrecy. The United States and other prosecutors turned a blind eye to the evidence even as U.S. military intelligence personnel were offering immunity to Japanese program scientists in return for technical information, not unlike the bargains the United States made with Nazi weapons scientists.

Like the Nuremberg trials, the Tokyo trial brought international attention to horrendous crimes against humanity, but, influenced by Cold War antagonisms, it left out Japan's horrendous biological weapons research on forced human subjects, (which rivaled any of the horrors revealed in Nuremberg) and the repeated, intentional infection of thousands of Chinese with fatal diseases. Japanese leaders already in the dock could have been charged with violating international laws against harming civilians in war and the use of biological weapons.

By not prosecuting them, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and subsequently the Soviet Union were able to pursue their own secret biological weapons programs without fear that their scientists and officials would be dragged before a similar court for war crimes. It matters today that individuals, including heads of state, who might be contemplating biological weapons activities understand that these weapons are now internationally illegal, according to the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.

THE FUTURIST: How is advancing technology changing the threat of biological warfare in the twenty-first century?

Guillemin: Technology by itself is not the driving force behind the threat of biological weapons. That force continues to be political. But for the sake of discussion, we can say that the technology for biological weapons is characterized by two levels of threat. One is residual, emanating from the old program, (including those of the United States and the Soviet Union), in which the weapons potential of anthrax, tularemia, plague, and other infectious diseases was developed.

Many barriers exist to protect targeted populations. The political problem, which was demonstrated in the U.S. response to the 2001 anthrax letters, is that those people on the margins of mainstream society will be less well protected than those of higher social status or income. The other threat concerns innovations in human genetics and neurology that someone could exploit for military ends in the same way that physics and chemistry begat weapons in previous centuries.

THE FUTURIST: How do you see this threat evolving in the next 10 years? The next twenty years?

Guillemin: Just as in the past, the threat of specific technical innovations will directly depend on government secrecy and on willingness of skilled scientists to dedicate themselves to military programs that appear to be in the interests of national defense, though they defy international law. Unfortunately, history shows that the military pursuit of advantageous knowledge can lead to capabilities that are more offensive than defensive. In World War II, based on faulty estimates of German capabilities, the Allies moved forward with important germ weapon innovations that they initially claimed were for retaliation but that had inherently offensive potential. The mass production of anthrax bombs is an example. The Soviet Union covertly expanded its own program during the 1970s and 1980s, explaining to its scientific cadre that the expansion

The Futurist Interviews Jim Motavalli, author of High Voltage: The Fast Track to Plug In the Auto Industry

Electric vehicles have existed as a concept since the 1890s, but now the technology is finally here to make them a standard consumer vehicle of choice, according to Jim Motavalli, environmental writer, in his new book, High Voltage: The Fast Track to Plug In the Auto Industry (Rodale, 2011). He sees a huge market growth ahead for electric vehicles, and for hybrid vehicles, as well.

Nearly every major is planning new electrics and hybrids. Ford, for instance, intends to roll out five new such car models by next year. One industry expert that Motavalli cites expects that by 2025, one out of every 10 vehicles on the world’s roads will be electric vehicles (EV), and another four will be hybrids. The EVs will run on lithium-ion batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, and other non-gasoline energy sources.

Motavalli, who blogs on clean car technology for the New York Times, Plugincars.com, NPR, and other media outlets, spoke about his book and his expectations for the clean car market, and some of the remaining challenges to its success, in this interview. Conducting the interview was Rick Docksai, assistant editor for THE FUTURIST.

THE FUTURIST: In your book, you express a lot of optimism for hydrogen fuel-cell-powered cars. Today, such cars are a rarity. What advancements will we achieve between now and 2025 that will make hydrogen fuel-cell-powered cars a mass commodity?

Jim Motavalli: The issue isn’t so much with the cars. They’ve made steady improvements in size, cost, and output of the fuel itself. The issue is more with the lack of a hydrogen infrastructure. We have fewer than a hundred hydrogen stations in all of the United States.

There is an attempt to put a network of hydrogen stations in place, as a private effort. Tom Sullivan, the founder of Lumber Liquidators, he has just started a private chain of hydrogen fueling stations along the east coast. It’s called SunHydro.

THE FUTURIST: The federal government has been hydrogen-powered car technologies. But what you’re describing sounds like the private sector is stepping up, too, and taking action in areas where the federal government has not yet done enough.

Motavalli: Under Steven Chu, the Department of Energy has been very negative about hydrogen and has defunded it. Chu is seen as the enemy of hydrogen. Hydrogen advocates can’t say enough bad things about him.

In addition, four car companies—Daimler, Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai—plan to roll out tens of thousands each of new hydrogen-powered cars by 2015. The question remains, however, of will there be an infrastructure for them. They may end up being sold in Europe or Japan because we don’t have the hydrogen stations.

THE FUTURIST: To what extent are Europe and Japan ahead of the United States on hydrogen infrastructure?

Motavalli: Their public commitments are much stronger. The U.S. government has had an on-again, off-again relationship with hydrogen-powered cars. The Bush administration was actually very much into them. The Obama administration is not. Right now, it's not looking great for hydrogen funding in the United States.

THE FUTURIST: You’re hopeful that consumer demand will rise for all kinds of electric and hybrid cars, hydrogen-powered and otherwise. What role might gas prices play in this? After all, they gas prices are going up and are likely to go up much further in years ahead. Maybe that would trigger more interest in cars that run on little or no gasoline. What do you think?

Motavalli: Gas prices are a wild card. It's impossible to predict what will happen with them. High prices suppress economic activity. Then the suppressed economy activity lowers gas prices. And that triggers more economic activity, which in turn raises gas prices.

Most of the increased demand for gas is from the developing world, from China and India. I do think we will reach a point of peak oil, but I don’t see gas prices getting dramatically lower

I think people adjust to higher prices. Paying $3.50 per gallon seems normal now, but if you had gone back just a few years, people would have been horrified at it.

I would predict that, with all the factors I know now, by 2020, 10% of all the new vehicles will be plug-in electric or hybrid.

THE FUTURIST: And that’s all new vehicles worldwide, or on U.S. roadways?

Motavalli: That’s all new vehicles worldwide.

THE FUTURIST: Considering what you said about Europe and Japan building up much more hydrogen-powered vehicle infrastructure than the United States has, I wonder if we’ll end up with the scenario of Europe, Japan, and other industrialized parts of the world going electric while U.S. automobile owners continue to guzzle gas. How likely is that, and what would the economic implications be if so?

Motavalli: I don’t see that right now. The EV demand is higher in the United States than in anywhere else. I don’t expect the situation to stay like that, though. I think demand in China will surpass the U.S. demand very quickly. I think China will become the largest EV market. China has put in place some of the world’s best incentives for electric cars, and quite a few manufacturers are lining up to sell them to Chinese buyers.

THE FUTURIST: Demographic trends might help the electric car market. It’s said that more and more people will move to cities. This means more people needing vehicles that can get them short distances, usually at low speeds due to traffic and pedestrians. To what extent is this favorable for the electric-car market?

Motavalli: There are two interesting factors here. First, a lot of auto makers perceive electric vehicles as city cars because they can only go short distances and at low speeds. The problem with that is that they still have to address how EVs are going to charge in the city. That hasn’t been resolved yet.

In cities like New York, there isn’t going to be on-street parking for EVs. There isn’t on-street parking for much of anything in New York City, honestly. With all the red tape for putting in an EV charging unit in New York, it isn’t going to be happening. We’re probably going to see EV charging units in garages and buildings. It's not really been established yet.

THE FUTURIST: So we still need to put EV-friendly societal reforms in place, and time will tell if we succeed at that.

Motavalli: That’s right. Suppose you own a condo, and you want to install a charging station on the condo grounds. You have to bring in the condo association on it, and it's going to slow things down. There need to be guidelines for apartment dwellers to charge EVs. Right now, that doesn't exist.

The Futurist Interviews John Challenger, labor expert

John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, is one of the most quoted labor and employment experts in America. He’s become a regular fixture on CNN, CBS, and a host of other networks and is a featured speaker at WorldFuture 2009, the annual conference of the World Future Society.

The current recession, expected to be the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, will surely put to rest those old concerns about looming labor shortages, right? Probably not, says Challenger. THE FUTURIST magazine asked him about the major labor trends playing out in the current recession and how immigration, globalization, outsourcing, and other trends affecting employment and the workplace will evolve over the next five, 10, and 20 years. (May 1, 2009).

THE FUTURIST: Since the beginning of 2008, more than 1.8 million job cuts have been announced in the United States. Economists are projecting that U.S. unemployment may top out at 10% by the middle of next year. At Challenger, Gray & Christmas, you not only look at official unemployment, but you also track job cut announcements; these provide an indication of where the job market is going in the short term. You’ve recently turned a little more optimistic. Why is that?

Challenger: It feels to us like the job market may have bottomed. The rate of layoffs in the last two months has dropped. That rate is still high, but it’s decreasing. We’re not in a roaring recovery, but [it’s] a faint signal that the worst of the worst is over. On the one hand, manufacturing jobs in the U.S. continue to vanish, but on the other, the layoff rate in the financial sector seems to have stabilized. We talk to human-resources people around the country on a casual, anecdotal basis; the people we’re speaking with are taking whatever measures they can to avoid making layoffs. They don’t want to be short-staffed in the event of a turnaround.

As I said, these are subtle indicators. The employment situation in the United States remains fragile, but there are hopeful signals.

THE FUTURIST: As unemployment continues to rise, do you find you’re being sought out more and more to give advice on how to find work?

Challenger: Absolutely. I run an outplacement company; we’re a hospital for the unemployed. We’re seeing a lot of traffic on our Web site and a lot of interest from people looking to improve their employability.

THE FUTURIST: What’s your key piece of advice for job seekers?

Challenger: Get a fast start—that’s number one. The second is, be open to changing industries. There are whole industries, like health care, that need people in a variety of fields. Look outside your normal boundaries, but look within your job function; you’ll want to look for jobs that correspond to your core competency and that let you do what you do best. Also, be open to changing locations.

THE FUTURIST: What are the best locations in the U.S.?

Challenger: The most stable employment is actually in the Midwest plains area—Nebraska, Kansas, even South Dakota—that corridor.

THE FUTURIST: A lot of American workers fret about their jobs moving overseas to China and India. What’s the five- to 10-year future of U.S. jobs moving to those countries?

Challenger: The world continues to globalize, the U.S. will tap into those markets. In order to do that, companies will hire local. As they hire people in the places they want to do business, communities in China and India and elsewhere will become will become core centers of operation contributing to national economic growth. More people in these countries finding work will create a bigger market. China will continue to build factories and operations in order to put her large population to work. But the Chinese workforce is generally not as technologically educated as the Indian workforce, where you have a strong a mathematics and engineering center. Then, in the Philippines, you see an accounting and health-care center; in Korea, you see a manufacturing base. All these of countries will experience employment growth.

THE FUTURIST: Right, you’re the head of an international outsourcing firm; you help American companies find labor in other markets. Outplacement and outsourcing have become convenient punching bags for pundits of late. One of the things you’re very vocal about is that the common picture of outsourcing—of U.S. jobs flying overseas—is overly simplistic and thus inaccurate.

Challenger: Exactly. The global labor market is not a zero-sum game. There are a lot of reasons to hire in the U.S. as well. We have a highly skilled labor force, but what we also have is the most diverse population of any country. We’re uniquely suited to reach out to people all around the world on their own terms. U.S. companies need to be able to compete in these international markets if they are to expand in the United States. The strength of the U.S. economy lies in its ability to capture global growth, participate, and integrate into economies all around the planet.

Let me give you an example. IBM is one of the first big companies that transitioned out of the colonial expansion model into a more community-focused expansion model. This is to say, they sent their workers out to actually live amongst the population. They said, we have positions open overseas but the jobs will be in local wages. A lot of workers in the States thought that was a joke, but the younger people, and the people in their fifties and sixties, the workers who didn’t have to worry as much about paying down mortgage or private school, who were either just starting out or who were looking to do something other than traditional retirement, said How exciting. It may be a wave of the future, exciting and increasingly de rigueur. More people are beginning to recognize this. Larry Summers at Harvard was speaking to a bunch of alumni not long ago. He commented that, long ago, the final requirement to graduate was to swim a lap around the pool. In the future, it will be having spent a semester overseas.

THE FUTURIST: What does the workforce look like 10 to 20 years ahead?

Challenger: We’ll see people who carry their offices on their backs, a mobile workforce. The idea of the nine-to-five glass box will have eroded. People will be working from wherever they are connected, working especially from customer sites, but also from home and on the run. That will be the big change. The twenty-somethings now—the same group we talked about earlier who are willing to work for U.S. companies in other countries—will lead this change. The U.S. will have spread well beyond its borders, and the most successful U.S. companies will be the ones that succeed in integrating into communities. I hope we’ll see the same in reverse. This would mean more of the world population coming to the U.S., working, as an element of our economy, going to school. Our ability to attract these people is our key strength. In the years ahead, it will pay dividends, not just economically but in terms of more-effective foreign policy. I hope people from around the world will still want to come here and take part in the U.S. educational experience. But our educational institutions will also be global brands with campuses all over the world. We’ll also see much smaller and more local companies, but that’s already taking place.

THE FUTURIST: One industry that’s been shedding jobs at a horrendous pace is media. Ad pages in magazines are down 26% this year. What sort of jobs will exist in that field?

Challenger: I think we'll see a split in the types of news organizations that exist, and you're seeing the beginnings of it now. There are cities without major local newspapers. In the future, we'll have news sources that deliver information about a specialized particular field or regional interest, and we’ll have very global sources for news information.

THE FUTURIST: You have graciously offered to give the closing keynote presentation at our conference in July on the topic of employment trends in a post-recession economy. One of the long-term trends you forecast is the development of labor shortages. What are the consequences of these labor shortages?

Challenger: For certain workers—physical therapists, doctors, technologists—these shortages will mean rising pay. Skilled workers will be in greater demand, and there will be a shift in balance between shareholders and stakeholders, as stakeholders reassert themselves. Another important lesson in this trend: Lifelong education is crucial. There will be plenty of opportunity, but those opportunities will go to the people with the right training. People need to think about their field and area of expertise and ask what kinds of technologies are relevant to that field.

THE FUTURIST: In the summer of 2005 you wrote an article for THE FUTURIST and laid out a number of possible future occupations. Offshore outsourcing coordinator, retirement consultant, corporate historian, and eco-relations manager were some of them. What do you think of those future career occupations now?

Challenger: We’re still going to need multicultural coordinators in our workplaces to help people from different countries, religions, etc., work together, and we'll need sustainability managers as well.

THE FUTURIST: A number of World Future Society members are in government or are associated with planning and legislation. What sort of policies might help the U.S. labor force stay competitive?

Challenger: Immigration reform is number one. We need to remain an attractive destination for talented and skilled workers from around the world. Government can also find ways to support lifelong education. As new fields grow, education must become a permanent part of our careers.

About the Interviewee
John A. Challenger is the chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. He will be speaking at the WorldFuture 2009: Innovation and Creativity in a Complex World, the annual conference of the World Future Society. July 17-19, 2009 • Hilton Chicago • Chicago, Illinois Professional Members' Forum: July 20, 2009. Learn more and register online today under meetings.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine. May 1, 2009

The Futurist Interviews Jonathan Nesteruk, Occupy Wall Street Photographer

For more than a month now, hundreds of protesters have been amassing in New York's Zuccotti Park as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. And for more than a month, reporters from around the world have been gathering at Zuccotti to glorify, ridicule, and summarize a phenomena that defies easy packaging. Neither the mainstream press, nor political elites, nor at times the protesters themselves seem able to make sense of a movement that has no leader, no specific demands, boasts a litany of grievances that sometimes conflict, and re-invents itself anew in every location to which it spreads.

On October 11th, Brooklyn photographer Jonathan Nesteruk set up a small studio in Zuccotti Park, not much more than a white backdrop and a sign, which reads: "Help keep a human face on the protest. Tell me your story." Whether you agree with the protesters or disagree, Nesteruk's pictures add a sense of coherence and personhood to a movement that seems at times chaotic and formless. FUTURIST Deputy editor Patrick Tucker asked Nesteruk a few questions. The photographer's answers are posted below along with what Nesteruk is calling Portraits of Protest. Nesteruk's Web site is http://owsp.tumblr.com/

THE FUTURIST: How did you get started in photography?

Nesteruk:I've been photographing for years. I started shooing in high school. It was my first real creative outlet and I haven't wanted to put it down since.

FUTURIST: Describe for me your eureka moment when you came up with this idea.

Nesteruk: When I first heard of the protests I was concerned about the images we were seeing on TV and in papers. I felt depictions of Occupy Wall Street were purposefully skewed and focused on the few particularly eccentric people at the rally. People with legitimate concerns were not represented well. I wanted to see what each individual had to say. I have been working on a personal project of photographing random people on the streets of Brooklyn. You can see it here. http://brooklynportraits.tumblr.com/ . I think it's in the same spirit of the protests in a lot of ways. It was very easy to bring what I had been doing in Brooklyn to Wall Street.

FUTURIST: What has been the most memorable part of this experience so far?

Nesteruk: The most memorable part has been how quickly people have shown appreciation for this project. There are a lot of very sympathetic and passionate people down there and they were thankful to me for helping them share their story.

FUTURIST: Who has been the most memorable photo subject?

Nesteruk: Unfortunately it was a guy I didn't photograph. I had a great conversation with a banker. He had lots to say and had sympathy for the rally. He wouldn't let me photograph him. He was afraid his wife would see him with the protesters.

FUTURIST: What do you want to come from the photos?

Nesteruk: I want to help put a human face on this movement. I hope that someone will see these images and decide to go down to Zuccotti Park and check it out for themselves.

FUTURIST: What do you want to come from the protests?

Nesteruk: I hope it provides more people in this country with more of a voice. I think a lot of people feel helpless and this protest is giving them a chance to express themselves.

FUTURIST: Where do you see your photography in ten years?
Nesteruk:I can only hope to still be making images that have a truth to them.

FUTURIST: Where do you see the country?

Nesteruk: I think this country is much stronger and resilient than a lot of people give it credit for. The next ten years will be a huge challenge, but I think we have a pretty good shot.

The Futurist Interviews Larry Bean, editor and chief, The Robb Report.

Larry Bean

January-February 2008, Volume 42, No. 1

There are both more billionaires and more millionaires inhabiting the globe than ever before in human history. With economic growth accelerating in places like China and Russia, it's a safe bet that luxury marketers have a bright future. To find out what's on the minds of the world's wealthy, and what, besides big bucks, they might have in common, we went to Larry Bean, editor-in-chief of Robb Report magazine, which covers the luxury lifestyle like no one else.

FUTURIST: More and more super-wealthy people are seeking out unique luxury experiences over material objects. Rock and roll fantasy camp and private space exploration are two examples. How do you see that trend evolving in the future, because of course, once the price comes down on private space exploration, it becomes more common and then...

Bean: Where do you go from outer space? Something to keep in mind when you talk about international space travel is that there are a couple forms available. A trip to the international space station goes for, what, $20 million? Richard Branson, on the other hand, is hoping to offer a suborbital flight for about $200,000 where you get about five minutes of weightlessness. So, obviously, there are places to go beyond the suborbital flights. We did a piece on this for our October issue, which looked at things coming down the pike. One of the things we looked at was the concept of space hotels. I put that in quotation, 'space hotels.' There's a company based in Barcelona called the Galactic Suite that started this, what they're talking about are structures that you could go to that orbit the earth. They're expecting to launch these things in 2012. It will be like a molecule with pods attached to each other. That would be like $4 million for a three night stay. So obviously it's a little more than a stay in the country.

FUTURIST: It's a like a space station for tourists?

Bean: Right. The idea is you would participate in some experimentation, but they want to present it as being for tourists. That's the direction various space agencies--like the Russian space agency--are taking. They've figured the best way to fund things like that is through private sources, if someone is willing to spend $20 million then, great, we'll take that money. There's another company in Las Vegas called Bigalow aerospace; they're looking to build these inflatable, orbital habitats, which, in theory, could be used as space hotels. They're not promoting them as such so much as pharmaceutical research stations, but again, one of the other uses could be as a tourist destination. The biggest problem with these is that a reusable means of transportation--practically speaking--doesn't really exist, yet. Even the space shuttles that we have now are very expensive to launch. So in terms of what might be next, it might be that, whether or not it will happen, or whether it will happen by 2012, who knows.

FUTURIST: Is there anyway to tell what Superwealthy people will find interesting?

Bean: I try refrain from lumping people together in one category, speculating about the sort of things the very wealthy as a group might want. What do most people value? Many of the people we poll say privacy and convenience. A better question might be, once you're seeking those things, and you have nearly boundless means, what's possible? We've touched on is the concept of a supersonic private jet, something to get you from Paris to New York in a couple of hours. There are a couple of companies that are working on those. One of the problems was the sonic boom, with the boom you're somewhat limited in terms of where you can fly; a lot places won't let you fly those over land, so they're not so convenient if you want to fly from the East coast to the West coast. They were trying to create a supersonic plane that didn't create a sonic boom. They weren't that far off in the future that they were thinking about doing this. That's an aspect of the private flight industry, which is four times what it was a few years ago, and what that offers is convenience. But at some point, you have to wonder, might there be some backlash against private flight? How much fuel does a fleet of private supersonic jets burn? What sort of pollution do they make?

FUTURIST: Do you see a lot of wealthy people becoming more eco-conscious? Do you see a premium being placed on great environmental or eco-experiences for instance? Ecotourism is very popular among middleclass tourists.

Bean: Right, and there's a trickle down effect. It starts off being something that only a small percentage can afford and, with everything else, the price comes down, what was luxury becomes mass market. That's certainly been the case with eco-tourism. There were just a handful of resorts touting themselves as eco-conscious a few years ago. Now everything is. Eco-experiences are now fairly common. What you see now though, in terms of the higher end market, there are certain places that had been inaccessible that people with the means now want to see, in part because few other people could go there. Bhutan is an example. Recently a large hotel group opened a resort there. So, you have to have the means to get there, and there's a nice place to stay. I guess there are still some places like that, and we're always looking for that. We target readers that want to be ahead of the trend, that want to be the first on the block to have something. So we're always looking for destinations where you can have a comfortable experience yet there aren't as many people going there.

FUTURIST: Antarctica is all that's left.

Bean: I don't know many five-star places there, but with global warming, all these infrequently visited places could become tourist destinations. That's putting a very positive spin on things.

FUTURIST: The number of billionaires on the planet today according to the most recent Forbes list is 793 who, together, control $2.6 trillion in assets, about 1/5 of total U.S. GDP. That number is up from just 13 billionaires in 1982. Clearly the number of super wealthy individuals is advancing far faster than the pace of inflation. Where do you see this trend going in the future as more people develop super-wealth at an ever faster pace?

Bean: Certainly good for us. That partially explains why we've already launched a Robb Report Russia and are looking to launch a Robb Report China. You're seeing a lot of growth in the luxury market in China, Russia, and the Middle East, certainly.

FUTURIST: What trend in the way the super-wealthy spend their money interests you the most?

Bean: We look at it in reverse, in a way. We don't look at what they're spending on so much as what's out there to spend money on.

FUTURIST: What's the most interesting thing that you've covered lately?

Bean: Some of the new yachts, like the Maltese Falcon yacht that Tom Perkins owns, are certainly awe-inspiring not just in terms of the size but the technology involved, and the fact that, in theory at least, one person can sail that thing. That's fascinating to me. But I think some of the innovations being made in the green realm are also fascinating. For instance we did a piece on the new Tesla Roadster, it goes zero to sixty in less than four seconds and it's electric. That's a hundred-thousand-dollar car, and if you're going to spend that much on a car, it has to have the capabilities of a hundred-thousand-dollar car; it has to go fast, handle well, and look nice. This car has all of that. So you can have it all and you don't have to compromise the fun of driving the car, for those who enjoy getting whiplash. BMW, too, is doing a lot of work with hydrogen cells. What's interesting about that is, again, the trickle-down effect. They're introducing these products at the luxury end. If they appear like luxury products, then they become more palatable to the mass market later on. There's another company doing work on a solar-powered private plane.

FUTURIST: Very admirable, but I'm not getting in that thing.

Bean: No, Not on a cloudy day.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker .

The Futurist Interviews Lewis Lapham, editor and historian.

Lewis Lapham

November-December 2007 Volume 41, No. 6

Is Western civilization bound for collapse? How apt are comparisons between the U.S. and the Roman Empire in its final days? We broach the issue with celebrated editor and historian Lewis Lapham.

FUTURIST: Needless to say, our civilization faces a number of very real dangers, global warming, resource exhaustion, threats to safety and security. Yet, one could argue that we are also well poised to address these issues. We produce tremendous amounts of information, technologies already exist, and are well known, that could ease our transition to a more sustainable economy. More people than ever before are finding ways to collaborate and solve the major issues of our day like meliorating poverty, advancing education, addressing global health problems. And much evidence exists to suggest that they are meeting with some success. Yet, a sense of despair and looming catastrophe seems to permeate much of our cultural life at the moment. Why does the idea of civilization collapse hold so much allure, particularly right now?

Lapham: I wrote a couple of good pieces about this years ago, one of which was called the "Death of Kings," and the other one was called the "Longing for Armageddon." I'm reminded of the great speech in Richard II, it starts, "Of comfort no man speak. Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings." It's a very self-pitying speech. This fascination with civilization decline is an American narcissism. I'm not sure you'll find the same moaning at the bar in the Chinese press or the Indian press, or even the French press. It's not new either.

In the twenties and thirties World War I, had shaken people in New York. The young men in the evening clubs with slicked-back hair were all very hard on themselves. They talked about how the times were going from bad to worse; these were men in the Plaza hotel posing as the "Lost Generation." Bernard De Voto, who wrote for Harper's magazine in the twenties and thirties, to my mind, one of the first-rate American writers of the twentieth century, wrote that he was sickened by this spectacle because he remembered how at the end of the civil war, the defeated armies, both those of the south and of the north, left the battlefields in many instances barefoot but then built a great, industrial colossus.

Much of this current fascination with decline is wallowing in self-pity. You'll find it in our media elite. They go to a conference, spend a couple of days on the golf course drinking high-end white wine and then deliver Jeremiahs. There's something very comic about a preoccupation with self like that. If you're in Los Angeles, in Brentwood say, and you're sitting around the pool, you're likely to hear different versions of the same conversation; the world is going to hell. It's not what it used to be. America is past its Zenith. The sun is setting. The Chinese are rising. On the other hand, if you're in the Mexican part of Los Angeles where people are working hard, low-pay jobs in order to make for themselves a better future, you get a completely different future.

That having been said, there is also the sense that, over time, a complacent oligarchy goes rancid in the sun like cheese. And you end up with people who think that they're so rich they don't have to pay attention, which is what you have with the fatuous dreams of empire that have been coming out of Washington, really, since, the early 1990s. Then you have people who embark on a truly foolish war for a number reasons, not knowing anything about the geography, or the cultural history, or the language of the desert on which they are about to descend. And that's a form of folly.

Barbara Tuchman wrote a wonderful book called The March of Folly some years ago in which she compares our little adventure in Vietnam with the British loss of the colonies in the 1770s. Prior to the American Revolution, no British member of parliament or the aristocracy bothered to come to America. They knew almost as little about America as we know of Baghdad. She also tells of the medieval Renaissance Christian church that becomes so besotted with its own dreams of grandeur that it can't really look at its own behavior. The next thing you know, you have the reformation. So there are forms of self-destruction. Usually they take the form of willed ignorance.

FUTURIST: Thinking of Cullen Murphy's book "Are We Rome?" Do you think drawing a parallel between our own culture and Rome in decline can be helpful?

Lapham: I read Cullen's book. I thought it was fair-minded. Not a lot of 'oh woe is us' and rending of garments and so on. He's very fair-handed in discussing the different approaches to the idea of Rome. It's not the presumptuous, puffed-up Charles Krauthammer kind of argument. And, as I recall, at the end of the book he has a couple of suggestions for how to address the future to try to identify the real problems, to lower one's expectations, to essentially join the human race, and also to know that America has remade itself over the course of the last two-hundred years, and we're likely to do so again. We have that energy which was not there in 2nd century.

FUTURIST: What can we do to tap that energy and use it constructively right now?

Lapham: You see the example of Gates, Buffet, Soros, you see 120 billion dollars a year raised in charity to build hospitals, do medical research, improve our educational system, and alleviate the hardships of the poor in various parts of the world. There's a lot of free-floating idealism in the United States. It tends to take smaller, local, more specific forms. Nader's point was a very good one when he was writing in the election in 2000. He said that we can remake this country if a million people in the United States would spend 100 dollars a year and work 100 hours in some form of public service. That, to me, seems the simplest, most direct answer to the question of how do we make our society stronger. Whether your working for the environment, health, or education, it doesn't matter so much as long as you're working at it. The great resource of any country is the energy and intelligence of its people. That's where the investment of money and thought ought to go, and that's why the war is such a criminal waste.

About the Interviewee
Lewis H. Lapham is editor of Lapham's Quarterly. He also serves as editor emeritus and national correspondent for Harper's magazine.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker.

The Futurist Interviews Librarian Futurist David Lankes

Libraries Move Beyond Books

As more information moves online, traditional libraries are losing relevance, but librarians are becoming more important than ever. This is according to R. David Lankes, author of The Atlas of New Librarianship (MIT Press, 2011). Himself a librarian—he is the director of Syracuse University’s Library and Information Science Program and an associate professor in Syracuse’s School of Information Studies—Lankes sees librarians’ roles evolving into that of “facilitators of conversation” who interact with their communities to support each one’s informational and learning needs. Rick Docksai, staff editor for THE FUTURIST, spoke with Lankes about his book and his views on libraries’ future.

THE FUTURIST: A lot of people question whether libraries have much of a future. They say that young people read fewer and fewer books, and that libraries are losing relevance as the world becomes more and more digitized. But your book takes a much more hopeful stance: If libraries learn to be more interactive and innovative, they will have a very positive future.

Lankes: I think so, and I think there are a couple of things going on. One view is that libraries need to be about a lot more than books. Kids are actually reading more than they used to; it’s just more than books—Web sites and online gaming, for example.

Books and printing have been the most successful user interface ever for a couple thousand years. But as they have evolved and gotten cheaper, they have evolved into a communications channel and less of a broadcast channel. This happens with any technology. Television started as broadcast and now its more reality TV. We see the same thing happening on the Internet. The first web sites were brochure-ware: This is what my company does. Now it’s evolving into a more of a communications medium.

THE FUTURIST: In your book, you cite young people who wanted their libraries to deploy blogs for holding conversations about books. This intrigued me because many commentators think that digital media and books are opposed to each other. Your examples suggest something different: Digital media can enhance book reading. How hopeful are you that most libraries will learn to use digital media to their advantage?

Lankes: I'm very hopeful. The reason the book focuses on librarians, not on libraries, is that it’s the people in them that make something happen. I predict that the future is going to be fewer libraries and more librarians. The facility is transitioning from places where librarians do their work and to places where communities meet and gather. The physical space is simply where the librarians sit. The electronic medium is where they can research and read.

THE FUTURIST: Some library systems now let patrons download rental copies of the books online. This seems ideal for a world where iPads, kindles, and other mobile systems on which people read books are becoming the norm. To what extent might libraries’ patrons shift from physically borrowing books to virtually borrowing them?

Lankes: Let me give you a thought experiment. Imagine if every time you bought an e-book-like device, they charged you 10 bucks more than whatever the cost they were going to charge, and that 10 dollars goes into a big pool. And for your 10 dollars, you can download any book you want from the beginning of time. Would it be a good thing or bad thing for libraries? If you look at libraries as a physical collection of stuff, it’s a horrible thing. They’re out of business.

On the other hand, if you look at libraries’ mission as to increase the knowledge of their communities, it’s a wonderful thing. If your ideal scenario is knowledge building, then the more information that’s available in more modes, the better.

THE FUTURIST: I would imagine that if libraries’ physical space were downsized, fewer librarians would be needed.

Lankes: By disconnecting the librarianship from the physical maintenance, yes, we would need fewer libraries in the physical world. But if we’re looking at this as opening up libraries, this could actually mean more librarians.

THE FUTURIST: You also write about libraries hosting more community social events, such as lectures and writing workshops. Here, too, I wonder how digital media will impact this. Web sites such as Craigslist and Meetup are popular means for residents of a community to organize social events or jumpstart public discussions. What use do you think libraries will make of social-networking sites? In what ways might social networking sites compete with libraries for the public’s attention?

Lankes: The first point is not to feel like they’re competing with all these folks. Working with Craigslist, working with these tools, is important. The other point is that a lot of people look at libraries as a place to consume information, not about communications. The medium is becoming more about communications.

Some scholars in the UK did a survey where they sent people to look at online databases and the people said it was awfully quiet. They said, “When I go onto these spaces, I feel very alone. There is no one to talk to me and help me through it.” We need to look at the online world as more social environments.

THE FUTURIST: Libraries used to hold volumes of archived newspapers and magazine articles on microfiche slides. Then they shifted them to computer disk drives and to online archives. What will libraries’ media archives look like in the future?

Lankes: There is still a role for libraries to coordinate knowledge. Microfiche is still the most permanent form we have for documents. That said, things are available in digital, and digital has a lot to say.

There are studies about when you look at an object, how separable are the information aspects of it? You wouldn’t buy a house online. You need to walk through the house. There will always be some things where the physical object matters. As a society, as a community, we need to decide which ones these are, and that’s an ongoing conversation.

The Futurist Interviews Longevity Expert Sonia Arrison

Live Very Long and Prosper a Lot

SONIA ARRISON

Think how culturally and materially richer we would be if people could live, be healthy, and contribute to society up to ages of 150, 200, or beyond. Thus argues Sonia Arrison, senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. In her book 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith (Basic Books, 2011), she tracks the advancements of “life-extension” medical techniques, which undo the damage that our bodies incur over time. With further refinement of such procedures, Arrison hopes, we could look forward to unprecedented innovation and societal reform as brilliant innovators stay with us and share their knowledge and experience for decades—and in time, centuries—longer than they would today. She spoke about this with Rick Docksai, assistant editor for THE FUTURIST.

THE FUTURIST: Your book will find a lot of fans here in the World Future Society. Life extension is a topic that excites a great many of us.

Sonia Arrison: One of the things that excites me is that a lot of the science sounds like science fiction, but it isn’t science fiction anymore. You might have heard about the man who had cancer of the trachea and was going to die. Doctors tried an experimental procedure to grow a new trachea in the lab. The surgery was done using a synthetic scaffold. It's been a month since the surgery, and the man is cancer-free.

THE FUTURIST: Countries across the globe anticipate having huge populations of senior citizens on their hands and not enough resources to serve all of them. People are living longer than ever as it is, and it is actually creating some problems. In such an environment, why would countries want to pursue life extension?

Arrison: If people are around longer and they're healthier, then the entire society is going to be wealthier. That’s because we’re not giving up the experience. Think of all the older people you know who are super smart and have tons of experience, but then they die and it's lost, and the next generation has to rebuild. If we didn't have to lose all that experience as quickly, we wouldn't have to keep rebuilding. It would be a tremendous resource for society.

If we look back at history, most of the greatest innovation is done by people in their later years. Elderly people, because of their experience and because of the trial and error they have been through, are really good at coming up with new products and ideas.

THE FUTURIST: I imagine that progress toward life extension will vary country to country. South Korea is reportedly far ahead of the United States in stem cell research, and some people expect that much pharmaceutical research now taking place in the United States might move to France and Germany. What advantage would countries like South Korea, France, and Germany have over others? If they achieve super-long life spans before other countries do, how would geopolitics change?

Sonia Arrison: That’s a really smart question. One of the reasons America is a leader in the world is because we're so wealthy. Economic research shows that health creates wealth. There are seven country studies that show that living extra years creates extra growth. If one country has a five-year advantage in life expectancy then real income per capita grows between 0.3 and 0.5 percent faster per year. That’s pretty significant when you consider that between 1965 and 1990, real income per capita growth was only 2 percent per year. And that’s just with a 5-year advantage. Imagine if it’s a 20-year difference! This really could put the U.S. at risk if we don’t keep up.

THE FUTURIST: As you note, life extension has a lot of skeptics and some opponents. Perhaps speaking of “life extension” and “living to 125 or more” can unsettle people. Perhaps the concept is more palatable if presented as boosting senior citizens’ well-being and reversing aging. What do you think?

Arrison: I think the best way to make the pitch is to take a look at what our health-care system looks like now. Most of the money spent on health care is spent at the end of life. If we could come up with technologies to make people healthier longer, we'd be spending less money on health care period.

THE FUTURIST: What would death look like, if people aren’t getting sick and dying of all things that they do now?

Arrison: I think the progression of morbidity would be different. I think we would be healthy for a long time and drop off quicker. I’m looking at a health span of 150 years. But eventually, we will see a society where we just keep repairing people indefinitely. The only thing that’s going to kill you is accidents or some plague or something that we can’t predict. There would still be things that can kill you, but they'd be quick, and you wouldn’t spend months in the hospital sucking up a lot of resources.

THE FUTURIST: How fast are we moving toward the extended life spans that you describe in the book? How fast should we move, ideally?

Arrison: I think that we are moving a lot faster than most of us realize, but we're also not moving fast enough. The reason we're moving faster is new technology, plus people are more interconnected today: There is the Internet. Another reason is expanding computer power.

But we’re not focused on this as a goal. I don’t see society as concentrated on being healthy and living longer, like it was on going to the Moon. We’re going to lose a lot of people we would not have lost in the first place. I don’t want to lose all those people, so I want us to move faster.

About the Interviewee
Sonia Arrison is a Senior Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute and a columnist for TechNewsWorld. Her work has appeared on CNN and in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. She lives in Atherton, California.
END.

The Futurist Interviews Maddy Dychtwald, life-cycle expert.

Maddy Dychtwald

March-April 2008 Vol. 42, No. 2

In this interview, life-cycle expert and WorldFuture 2008 speaker Maddy Dychtwald says that planning for life past 65 is more important now than ever before.

THE FUTURIST: Longevity is encouraging people to explore different approaches to work schedules and changing the way we live. You have a book out on the subject.

Maddy Dychtwald: I do. Cycles: How We Will Live, Work, and Buy talks about a new model of life. Age is being redefined. We're moving from a linear to a cyclic life plan. We used to define 50 as over the hill. That's just not the case any more. People now have the opportunity to reinvent themselves throughout adulthood.

FUTURIST: Why is that?

Dychtwald: We're in a longevity revolution of a kind that's never been seen before. A hundred years ago, the average life expectancy was 47; today it's 77. That's huge! We've seen a 30-year increase in 100 years.

FUTURIST: The rewards of longer life seem obvious—more flexibility, a more broad and meaningful life experience. What might be some of the risks?

Dychtwald: The model that's emerging frees us from some of the limitations we've faced for generations—where your position in life was determined in many respects by how old you were. The reality is quite a different thing. It's frightening for us not just as individuals but as a society, because the paradigms that we have in place are based on the concept that people go to school until the age of 25 or so, work, and then retire at around the age of 65. Our social, political structure has emerged around these set boundaries. But the bureaucracies we have in place are no longer relevant to who we are as a society and where we want to go.

FUTURIST: How might different bureaucracies and institutions adapt to this change?

Dychtwald: The adapting is happening at the grassroots level. People are questioning the concept of traditional retirement because a lot of people can't afford to retire. Instead, people are leaving their first career and going on to a second. We did a study on behalf of one of our clients and we asked people what they wanted to do in the second half of life; 42% said they wanted to cycle between work and leisure-time activities. People want to continue working beyond the traditional retirement age, but not as hard or as inflexibly. Many want to go into their own business. More than 50% of them said they wanted to try a whole new line of work.

What it takes to do that is something else again. First, if you're going to try that, you have to do some great planning. You've got to sit down and recognize that you may live 100 years or longer. Ask yourself, How can I take breaks from working to reinvent myself for a new career.'

FUTURIST: Do you think the rewards and fun to be found in re-careering and reinventing oneself are going to be evenly distributed across socio-economic lines? Or does coming into it with a lot of money and education give you an advantage that just increases with time?

Dychtwald: Reinvention takes money, frankly. People that don't have any financial wherewithal are going to be even more limited in life. Likewise, education is going to be a big ticket item going into the future, just as it has been over the last several decades. We're already in an economy where your intellectual commodities are just more valuable than your physical strengths.

The composition of the workforce is transforming itself, especially in the United States. That's something that will work to the benefit of everyone in terms of giving people the chance to re-invent themselves individually. In 1980, 51% of the workforce was under the age of 35. In 2000, 50% of the workforce was between the age of 35 and 54. In 2011, half of all U.S. workers will be over the age of 45. Going into the future, there are going to be fewer younger adults working. The potential exists for a shortage of younger workers and a need for older workers. Labor-force participation by people over the age of 55 is going to need to increase by 25% in order for the United States simply to maintain current levels of productivity.

There's a need to reeducate and retrain people. You're going to see corporations take on that task. They haven't yet. They've done a poor job of paying attention to this and trying to recruit older workers. We've heard mutterings over the last 10 years about changing these things, but no one's done anything about it. They don't take it seriously, just like they don't take the debacle with Medicare and Social Security seriously. This could lead to intergenerational strife and possibly even age wars.

FUTURIST: What might an age war look like? Could you give me scenario? In France, for instance, we recently saw a lot of young people angry about the fact that benefits that have existed for generations are being cut just as they're entering the workforce, so they took to the streets. Is this something that might realistically happen in the United States?

Dychtwald: Keep in mind, we keep hearing about the social security trust fund and what its depletion might mean and Medicare is a much bigger issue with much larger ramifications. But politicians aren't willing to address it. They're only willing to tip-toe around Social Security because there's a debacle unfolding in front of their eyes. When these entitlements were first put in place, the realities were completely different. There were 40 workers for every one retiree and average life expectancy was 62 and a half. So policy makers chose 65 as the age to issue retirement benefits. These were meant to form a safety net—not an entitlement lasting 20 or 25 years.

As average life expectancy keeps rising, the costs will increase, and that's a terrible burden to put on our children, who are the young people just entering the workforce. So, I think that intergenerational war in the United State will take the opposite form from what's taking place in France. Young people won't march for benefits; they'll march to stop benefits for others. I think that young people are going to say, "Off with their heads. We don't want to take care of older adults to the extent that it cuts into our paychecks." The whole idea of the government entitlements that allow people to retire on social security for 20 to 25 years will soon be a thing of the past. It was an experiment that worked for a short period of time.

FUTURIST: So you think more Gen Xers will open up to the idea of ending entitlement programs because they probably won't be able to participate in them?

Dychtwald: A group of Gen Xers recently surveyed said they that they thought it was more likely that they would meet an extraterrestrial than see Social Security payments in their lifetime. It's an emotional trigger-point. Numerically, and thus politically, Gen X is a comparatively small cohort. There are only about 46 million of them. Millennials are very different. They're very close to their parents. There's a lot of confluence between the generations and a lot of sharing back and forth. I think that comraderie they feel and the synergy they develop will help bridge that gap so we don't have an age war. I think the two generations will figure out how to work together pretty effectively.

FUTURIST: Why do you think careers that offer only material rewards are less appealing now than they were during previous decades?

Dychtwald: It was the boomer generation that moved workforce forward, particularly the women of the boomer generation, who have really been pioneers for both men and women of the younger generation. They're the pioneers of the idea that you can move into and out of the workforce a little bit more fluidly, the fact that you can work from home and be just as productive if not more productive, the idea that you can change careers, that you need to plan for your educational sabbatical. It was baby-boomer women who really pushed corporations to support these concepts.

FUTURIST: Do you see today's younger generations perpetuating those beliefs and trends?

Dychtwald: One of the things I talk about in my book, if we look back to the 1950s, we find that the generation before the boomers, what Tom Brokaw calls "the greatest generation," was the generation of guys with jobs for life, with pensions, the ones who were loyal to a particular job. The boomers were much more interested in developing themselves, having more than one employer, having a careerpath. I think that Gen X is the recipient of all the good that came from that. There's a flipside to that, though. The greatest generation had one thing that is largely gone today, stability, in the form of both job security and retirement security in pensions. It was disappearing during the baby-boomer phase, but today it's something of a dinosaur.

We're now in the individual economy, where the individual takes on a lot of the parenting roles we once associated with the corporation. Workers in this new economy will need to have portable pensions and benefits. Present-day laws throughout much of the United States stand in the way of that, but we are seeing the beginning of more portable pensions. The good news/bad news on that is that you're responsible for your own career path. Younger workers need to understand finances and begin saving and investing at a very young age. They'll have to handle their own health insurance—with all the complication that entails—and they're going to have to take charge of their own health issues early on.

Can young people take on all of that and still forge their own career path? No, it's way too much. So I think we'll see the rise of a new professional class to guide people through those choices about investments and retirement, as well as health insurance, private school, and life plan decisions. You won't go down to Merrill Lynch and select from plan A, B, and C. It will become more of a relationship. You'll have to ask yourself, do I need to go back to school in five years? If I take time off from work, how will I pay for that? These are things you'll have to think about for yourself. No one is going to think of them for you. That's a very different paradigm than what we've lived under. That's both exciting and also very scary.

About the Interviewee

Maddy Dychtwald is the author of Cycles: How We Live, Work, and Buy. Free Press 2003. Learn more at www.agewave.com. She will be in attendance at WorldFuture 2008, the annual conference of the World Future Society.

This interview was conducted by FUTURIST senior editor Patrick Tucker.

The Futurist Interviews Marc D. Hauser, Harvard Evolutionary Biologist

Marc D. Hauser, an evolutionary psychologist and biologist, is the Director of the Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Harvard. He's also the author of The Evolution of Communication, Wild Minds: What Animals Think and Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. For our January-February 2009 issue, he told us about where morality lives in the brain, how to coax it out and what lies ahead for the future of moral science.

Futurist: What have you been doing to discover the basis of moral reasoning?

Hauser: We've been using a variety of techniques. The question of the source of our moral judgment is one that has to be hit form a variety of different directions. For example, several years ago, some students and I built a Web site call the moral sense test and that Web site, up for more than three years and running, has attracted some 300,000 subjects. When people log on, they provide information about who they are in terms of their nationality, their background, their education, gender and so forth. And they proceed to respond to a series of moral and non-moral dilemmas. They display judgment. That Web site provides a really powerful engine to look at very large data sets with some cultural variation to see what people make of these different types of moral dilemmas. Sometime, they're familiar cases. Sometimes, they're very unfamiliar, made-up cases. Each question targets some kind of psychological distinction. For example, we're very interested in the distinction between action and omission when both lead to the same consequence. It's an interesting distinction because it plays out in many areas of bio-medical technology and experiences. Most countries reject the idea that doctors should be allowed to give a patient in critical care and in pain with no cure an overdose injection and end that person's life, but it is legally permissible to allow that same patient to terminate their own life in the same way.

Futurist:What significant conclusions have you drawn?

Hauser: Even though there's been a very long and philosophical and scientific discussion about moral psychology, what's happened in the last ten years is there's been a lot of excitement about the revival of the question, in part because of new technologies and new theoretical perspectives. Two of my grad students, Lee Ann Young and Mike Koenig, looked at patient population for one study. They looked at individuals who, in adulthood, suffered brain damage bilaterally, to both hemispheres to an area in the frontal lobe, particularly an area called the ventral medial pre-prefrontal cortex. This area, in many previous studies, had been implicated as the crucial area for connecting our emotional experiences with our higher level social decision making. So when I make the decision about how to interact with somebody, or what to do when I'm interacting with somebody, that area will be active--where our own welfare and someone else's welfare critically links with our emotional experiences. Much of the work that had been done with these patients suggested that when that area is damaged, the [patients] lost the ability to make moral decisions. We decided to have a re-look at the patient because much of the work that had been done looked at [the patient's] past to justify moral judgments. And one of the critical ways in which the work that we've been doing has been able to change that is to make a distinction between the intuitions, often unconscious, that may drive our moral judgment and the factors that determine how we behave in a particular moral situation.

So to give a quick example that you may be familiar with, about a year ago Leslie Autry, a man standing on the platform of a subway station in New York with his two daughters, leapt onto to the track to save a man who had fallen in front of a train and easily could have been killed. So while the behavior is rare, most people won't do it, if you ask people 'is it permissible to jump onto a track like that?' they'll say of course it's permissible. But if you ask the question, would it be obligatory or forbidden, people will say no. The judgment provides one kind of an angle on our moral knowledge. We looked at that, went back to the patients, and created a whole bunch of dilemmas. What we found was a very interesting pattern. For the non-moral dilemmas, these patients were no different than healthy people, making social decisions as if they had no moral weight. Secondly, within the class of moral dilemmas, there were some that we called impersonal, meaning [the dilemma] involved an action by one individual that did not involve contacting anyone; it didn't involve hurting or pushing anyone; it involved maybe flipping a switch on a trolley track to let the trolley go somewhere. So those cases, which were emotional and moral, were none-the-less judged by these patients in the same exact way as a healthy subject. Here was a very important result, because even though these patients had brain damage that basically knocked out their social emotions, they were nonetheless judging these cases as though they had a perfectly intact moral brain. Even though emotion may play some role in our moral psychology, it doesn't seem to be causally necessary for these kind of judgments.

There was set of dilemmas where the patient did show a difference, specifically when the action itself was personal and involved actually hurting somebody, specifically hurting them where the consequence was saving the lives of many. Here's where the [brain-damaged] patient, in contrast to healthy subjects, went for the greater good. They said, 'this action is worth it because I'm saving many people'--willfully hurting one person to save many people. Healthy subjects went the opposite direction, 'using someone as a means to the greater good is not okay. Therefore I say no.' Here was a case where the lack of emotional insight was causing a difference....

Futurist: ...Makes one more available for the presidency of the United States, one might argue....

Hauser: That's an interpretation. Some people argue that utilitarianism is the right way to think about the moral world, that when our emotions get in the way and we don't think about the utilitarian outcomes and that's when we fail. The Nile Levin case is interesting. One, it was a decision by the United States government that it would be okay to shoot down a plan under terrorist control to serve the greater good. If that was an option, that's what the government would do. Interestingly, the German government that decided the same exact case after 9/11, decided against. They said it would not be permissible to do that. Their reasoning really fell along the lines of the structure of German law, which is strictly anti-utilitarian to a large extent because of course the Nazi period was one in which people justified bad behavior on utilitarian grounds. So here we have cases where two legal systems that have diverged and one of things we're very interested in is the extent to which explicit laws actually impact upon intuitive psychology. Our assumption is that it will not, that the law will give people very local rules, very local specific cases, but when you move people away from the specific cases they won't show any pattern different from any where else in the world.

Futurist:Explain to me this idea of moral grammar.

Hauser:There's a strong and weak version of the idea. The strong version is that the way morality works it really is like language in the sense that you have a very encapsulated system in the brain that basically traffics only in moral situations. The anatomical features that are specific to the moral domain don't overlap with other areas or thoughts. The principals and rules that underlie our moral knowledge are unconscious and inaccessible. When we make moral judgments, we're unaware of the principals that are driving those judgments. Damage to certain parts of the brain would take out the moral system and leave everything else in intact and so forth. It really does seem to work like language, with clear universal rules. The variation that we see in the moral domain comes not from difference in what people know about morality but how a particular culture puts emphasis on a particular way morality could be substantiated in that culture, in the same way that a child who speaks English, if they had been born in Spain would, speak Spanish.

What the moral system does is give us a tool kit for building our own moral system, and they vary by culture in the same way languages and lexicons vary by culture. That's a radical hypothesis. But we're just starting. The less radical hypothesis is that we use our understanding of language, the questions that have been raised come from Chomsky in the fifties, carried forth by many people--we use those questions about the nature of language to ask the same questions about morality. It doesn't work just like language but the crucial questions are the same. For example, is there a critical period in development for acquiring our moral system? Once you acquire your first moral system is acquiring a second one like acquiring a second language? Is it hard, whereas the fist [acquisition] is more natural? So those are the kinds of questions you would ask about morality that really have not been asked. That's what I find exciting about this is that these questions, regardless of what the answers are will be interesting to understand.

Futurist: What sort of reaction have you received from people who adhere to a more conventional moral code?

Hauser: It varies. I've had some interesting responses from students, certain people at public lectures. It's a mixed bag. Some people see this work as artificial, that what morality is really about is how we behave, therefore, the judgments, this research is irrelevant. That's one form of disagreement. If that were true the entire analogy with modern linguistics, with Chomsky would have to be thrown out because it's all about the nature of judgments and intuition. There are some people who expressed anxiousness, of course if you're religious, your moral view of the world is very different, and on that level, maybe what we do winds up being different because the devils and angles on our shoulder are different, so there's an anxiousness in part because one possibility, and again, we're really at the early days, but much of the work that we've done suggests that a religious background doesn't have an effect on these intuitive judgments.

The hypothesis that we're tracking goes something like this--and this is independent of the benefits that people obtain from being associated with religion, I have nothing to say about that, to each his own--does having a religious background really change the nature of these intuitive judgments? The evidence we've accumulated suggests, no. If you look at the variety of moral dilemmas we've presented to people, with fairly large sample sizes, you simply make a contrast between people who claim to be religious, and people who claim to be atheists, you take the extremes, and you ask is the pattern of judgment different, the answer is no.

Now this is for cases that are not familiar. If I ask people, is abortion right or wrong, of course I'll get a different response. What's interesting nowadays about stem cell research and the ethics that surround that debate, if you walk down the street and ask most people, do you think stem cell research is morally good or morally bad, many people will say bad. But then you ask what is a stem cell, most people won't have a clue. What they've often done, they've masted 'stem cell research' onto 'killing a baby.' If killing a baby is bad then stem cell research is bad. That's a matter of using a moral problem one is familiar with judging a new case, one is not familiar with. We do that all the time.

The question becomes, to what extent is the resemblance between those two questions reasonable? What science should be doing is trying to educate, say look, the blasctocyst is a cluster of cells that stem cell research is focusing on, a cluster of cells, where we're getting the power to formulate new organs are nothing like a baby. It's the potential--with lots of change and development--the become a baby, okay. But it's not a baby. There's an onus on researchers to educate, in the absence of education, what people do is examine moral cases in terms of what they're familiar with.

Futurist: What about bioethics, one criticism of your book is that this research--reducing morality to the sum of its physical parts, has a way of devaluing ethics in the decision-making process. I'm speaking specifically of Richard Rorty's review of your book in the New York Times. He says this fascination with morality that expresses itself through surveys, through answering questions, side-steps the role of ethics in morality and all of these more murky moral questions that can't simply be answered in the yes or no kind of way.

Hauser: When people read things about the biology of x, and x could be attractiveness, morality, language, they do one of two things, first, they often assume that the biology of something implies fixedness, a predetermined outcome. That's a misunderstanding of biology and what it is. Rorty, in his review, and this has been true of other people as well, missed the distinction I belabored to show between how people behave and how they judge. The book is about the science of judgment. The fact that people do what we often consider to do morally outrageous things like clitorectomies, really, really, really horrible, that's not what the science is trying to explain. Of course there's going to be that kind of variation culturally. But what the science is trying to say is look, could the variation we observe today be illusory? Could there be real regularity, universals that underpin that variation fundamental to how the brain works? That's sort of the second response to the Rorty criticisms. The third response, there's no doubt that there are a lot of issues we don't just have these flashes about. Because we're confronted so often by moral dilemmas with which we aren't familiar.

We also encounter situations all the time where we may experience a flash of intuition about what's right and wrong but that intuition is ill-formed because, again, we're looking at it in the context of a moral decision we've already made, we're making it resemble something we're already familiar with. There's two things to keep in mind, of course you can't really have a fully formed intuition about certain things. Second thing, just like John Rolph purposed, and many of the ideas I'm pursuing, is that you have these intuitions, but ultimately what we want is to do is have these intuitions, think about them, and place them in a context to determine whether or not they are reasonable.

Futurist: Put in that way, it sounds like what you're doing is just presenting new tools to people that they can use in decision making processes, as opposed to something Orweillian, a new way to rewire your moral system in order to arrive at some new "evolved" state of moral decision making. Understanding that the science is in its infancy, do you think that there are possible future policy-ramifications for this research? What would social policies that more effectively take these findings into account look like?

Hauser: It's premature to say. I think the goal here is more general. The goal in some sense is to provide a rich, descriptive set of information about how people come to their moral judgments. What are the psychological distinctions? How do they breakdown in brain damage, how does imaging reveal which circuits are different physically? How does that then play out in terms of what is often described as the proscriptive side of decision making--what we ought to do? At this point, the best I can say is one would think that a proscriptive morality, of the sort that institutions traffic in, would be better informed by an awareness of kinds of intuitions that people are going to bring to bare on particular moral cases. So, for example, we already know that how you frame something, the words you use, can greatly affect how people end up with certain kinds of judgments. A Jury could be greatly biased depending on whether you frame something as an action or an omission. In some of the work we're now exploring, we're very interested in this question of--are the details of a story more memorable when they're described as actions as opposed to omissions, even when the consequences are the same. There's a lot of work ahead but at this point in time, our cause is to really showcase the psychology that's brought to bear on people's moral judgment and our hope will be that that will inform how law is carried out, how one might think about the power of any particular doctrine in terms of how it affects people's behavior, before enhancing a doctrine or law.

Futurist: Thinking about the work that lies ahead, what's the big breakthrough that happens in this research in the next ten years that's going to really change the way we think about how we make decisions?

Hauser: There are some questions that are open questions that the behavioral sciences are unlikely to answer. For example, there's a real question right now we're focused on--we know that emotion plays a role in our moral psychology in general. The question is, does emotion follow from the moral judgment or is it the inspirational source of the moral judgment? Take people who have been caught and convicted of serious crimes that involve harm to others. The classic clinical diagnosis is: these are people who have very limited emotional development. They don't feel guilt, shame, or remorse. Because of those deficiencies, they just don't know what's right or wrong. That may be what's going on, but here's an alternative, they know what's going on, they just don't care. This brings us back to that distinction between the intuitive systems that allow us to make judgments as opposed to those that allow certain kinds of behavior. The alternative is that when we test, we're now in the process of doing, when you test psychopaths in a wide variety of moral dilemmas, our predication is that they'll make judgments very much like normal non-psychopathic individuals, but when it comes to behavior, they will do the wrong thing. Emotion failed to check the behavior, but did not affect their moral knowledge. That has some very serious implications for how the law works. This is a case where the richness of the philosophical discussion that's been going on for hundreds of years married with new technologies in the neural sciences will greatly enrich how we understand how the brain makes moral judgments.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine for the January-February 2009 issue.

The Futurist Interviews Marvin Cetron, Forecasting International.

Marvin Cetron

Posted September 11, 2001

Just days before the September 11, 2001, apparent terrorist attack on the United States, including the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the World Future Society spoke with futurist author and speaker Marvin Cetron on the global threat of terrorism.

World Future Society: What do you see as the biggest threat to the security of nations, individuals, and organizations today?

Marvin Cetron: To society as a whole: terrorism, without a doubt-- specifically the terrorist use of NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical) weapons of mass destruction. Both international and domestic groups pose threats. The greatest threat to individuals and companies is kidnapping.

WFS: Multinational corporations have a global presence, so shouldn't they share responsibility with governments to help keep the peace?

Cetron: No. Not directly. But because they are often the targets of terrorism (if you can't attack the U.S. embassy, you can try the local Coca-Cola plant) they should--and largely do--cooperate with governments and law-enforcement agencies.

WFS: How might businesses be more involved in national security without superseding governments?

Cetron: Share information with host country, embassy, and international organizations (e.g., Interpol); provide special training for employees (on how to reduce kidnapping risk, defensive driving, etc.); hire guards and professional consultants, such as cyberterrorism specialists.

WFS: It seems corporations are constantly at odds with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) over globalization. Is there a way to bridge this gap?

Cetron: The two are not always enemies. Some NGOs (Red Cross, Project HOPE, Doctors without Borders, etc.) are heavily funded by corporations--a fact often overlooked by those who march to protest at meetings of the IMF and the World Bank. On the other hand, there are groups who think capitalism itself is no good, and they are unlikely to be reconciled to business--particularly those who already embrace actions outside law and ethical behavior. This is actually one practical definition of a terrorist: any individual, whether acting alone or in a group, who rejects available legal and ethical mechanisms to promote or effect social change, but instead resorts to physical violence, destruction of property, and reckless endangerment of the public to get attention.

WFS: What advice would you give the CEOs of the world's largest multinational corporations to help them ensure a better future for their organizations?

Cetron: Operate within the laws of every country you enter--and treat your workers better than the local law requires. Ideally, pay workers the same scale wherever the same work is performed. Don't exploit locals--no sweatshops, no slave labor. In short: Be a good neighbor. Not only is such a policy ethical, it is smart and, in the medium- to long-term, profitable, too. Local benefits include gains in worker loyalty and productivity, less need for physical protection, and better public and government relations.

Publicizing these policies can also stimulate sales and defuse criticism at home and in other markets.

WFS: What can individuals do to protect themselves against terrorism?

Cetron: First, take the threat seriously at every level. Americans could lobby Congress and federal agencies to implement strategies against terrorism, such as protecting public buildings, maintaining stockpiles of vaccine against anthrax and other likely biological terror agents, and training doctors how to recognize and treat victims of chemical and biological weapons.

When Americans travel, they should avoid appearing obviously American or rich. Don't wear U.S. insignia or loud "tourist" clothes. Don't flaunt your U.S. passport. Don't fly first class, and when you have the choice, avoid sitting on the aisle (where you can be easily grabbed as a hostage). Most important, always be aware of your surroundings, notice how the people near you look and behave. If you begin to feel uncomfortable or conspicuous, move away. Your instincts are probably warning you of danger.

WFS: What is your biggest fear about global security right now?

Cetron: I see an ominous trend in the growing number of people who live in nations ruled by fundamentalist religious extremists. Such regimes (for example, Afghanistan, Iran, Chechnya, and Sudan) are frighteningly effective at controlling public access to media and information, stifling debate, and promoting stereotypes that make compromise appear intolerable. They may not direct terrorism, but their official policies and actions clearly enable and encourage unofficial groups and desperate individuals to plan and carry out terrorist acts.

WFS: What gives you the most hope?

Cetron: The fact that national governments are not sponsoring terrorist activity. Some countries still harbor terrorists--permitting them to train and organize on their territory--but nowhere do we find government agencies actually directing and coordinating terrorist attacks. This represents a marked change from the past, and it shows the effects of global economic pressure and diplomatic initiatives to combat terrorism.

WFS: What, in your opinion happened on September 11?

Cetron: This was planned. It wasn't simple. But I don't believe this was the act of another government against the United States. A lot of terrorism has to do with symbolism. Each act of terrorism has to be bigger than the last.

Futures consultant and speaker Marvin J. Cetron, co-author of Cheating Death (St. Martin's Press, 1998); Probable Tomorrows (St. Martin's Press, 1997), and many other books, is the president and founder of Forecasting International Ltd., e-mail marglo@tili.com.

Marvin Cetron will be co-hosting a panel on Terrorism and National Security at the World Future Society's upcoming WorldView 2002 conference in Philadelphia (July 20-22, 2002). In addition, his article describing vital signs in national security is scheduled to appear in the January-February 2002 issue of THE FUTURIST.

Collaborating with science writer Owen Davies, Cetron prepared a special report for the World Future Society for publication in early 2001: "50 Trends Now Changing the World" (28 pages), is available from the Futurist Bookstore for $8 ($7.20 for Society members), cat. no. R-2369. Click here to order.

This interview was conducted for the World Future Society by Lane Jennings and Cindy Wagner.

The Futurist Interviews McKinley Conway, engineer and founder of Conway Data Inc.

McKinley Conway

The Futurist Sept-October 2008 Vol. 42, No. 5

McKinley Conway is an engineer and founder of Conway Data Inc., a firm involved in research, publications, and telecommunications, specializing in futures studies, global megaprojects, and site selection. The Futurist interviewed him on the future of ocean habitation

FUTURIST: Crescent Hydropolis has gotten a lot of fanfare for its plans to open an underwater hotel later this year in Dubai. It hopes to open other hotels afterwards in other locations around the world – London, New York City, and the Isle of Man among them. It's a fun tourist gimmick – lots of people might pay good money for the experience of looking outside their hotel windows to see fish swimming past and coral beds surrounding them. But might this be the start of a bigger trend? Might humankind be officially seeing about a colonization of the world’s oceans?

Conway: As we know, there’s a lot of pressure on the development in coastal zones. And we have people who really want to live in the water and engage in water sports. And a lot of people are interested in marine life. We have a pretty extreme situation in Dubai with the subdivisions. Since ancient times there have been floating villages and villages on water. So I think it’s a pretty logical step.

FUTURIST: Do you see this interest in the ocean increasing in the next few decades?

Conway: There are a lot of reasons for living offshore. The Japanese have proposed a number of community developments offshore. Such developments would not be bothered by changes in sea level. A floating community would just rise up regardless of what the shore is doing. Of course we might not be too happy, for example, during a hurricane. But those are the risks we take.

FUTURIST: Is building closer to the surface more feasible than building underwater?

Conway: There is a lot of activity right now to develop energy using the oceans. One is turbines below the surface. I feel sure that that is going to become more important over the next couple of years, that we’ll develop an impetus for building underwater. That might be the prelude for something more permanent.

There is considerable interest in Florida right now in tapping the energy of the Gulf Stream. Look what happened in the wind industry with the wind turbines. You can place turbines underwater with the ocean currents and derive quite a lot more energy from the water using turbines because the water is more dense.

Water turbine possibility looks more feasible when compared with wind. It looks like it might be more efficient in some cases. The whole idea is to connect it to a grid. The opportunities that exist in front of us now, we have three sources of renewable energy that look awfully good–the sun, the wind, and the water. They’re plentiful, they’re cheap, and there are opportunities for business groups to develop them. We have a fair expectation that renewable energy could replace fossil fuels and leave us in a much healthier position.

FUTURIST: Nuclear energy seems to be very popular right now.

Conway: Nuclear energy is well-established and well-known. The ocean energy is not yet well-known. It still has to make a name for itself. Over the years, people will be given a choice, and I hope the choice will be for the three safest. They all will be connected to the grid.

FUTURIST: By a grid, you mean power lines?

Conway: Yes, an interconnected system for electricity. Since the light bulb, we haven’t had an adequate means for storing electricity until recently. You could only use solar energy on sunny days and then it shut down at night. Wind systems, they’re great as long as the wind is blowing. If the wind is intermittent, then they don’t work well. Both solar and wind are not considered consistent enough that you can be wholly dependent on them.

But if you have wind, water and solar, it’s unlikely that they will all shut down at the same time. And they will work better interconnected.

One of the more controversial energy projects is offshore wind farms. There is often a lot of opposition of locals to what they would see above the surface. They don’t want to see it.

The underwater turbines, they have that merit in that they don’t interfere with the view along the coast.

There isn’t any large-scale development of any kind, though, that won’t bring forth some kind of negative reactions. But everyone is trying to minimize the public reactions against the projects.

FUTURIST: In addition to power generators and grid systems, what might we be seeing in the way of permanent living stations in the ocean?

Conway: That may come. But that is looking quite a ways ahead. That gets into the realm of pure speculation. We’ve ventured quite a way with communities. One example is domed communities and using domes to control climates.

Several decades ago I was traveling in northern Burma. I came across a small community on a lake I was taken out in a small boat and was showed the village’s stilts. It was supporting itself on stilts. And they had hydroponic floating gardens for the vegetables. You see things like that on the outer Amazon basin. People are adventurous and surprise us with what they are willing to do. I hope that whoever is our president next year and in the years to come will put a lot of chips on renewable energy. We need to have a strong national program to develop energy from wind, water, and solar energy. That will become important to us.

FUTURIST: But colonization, on the other hand, is not something we’re likely to see?

Conway: I wouldn’t think it would be near term. There are rare occasions, like tourist hotels. You see things like the ice hotels in Scandinavian areas. There are no limits to what tourists will subject themselves to. The Dubai people have used a lot of creativity and imagination. I commend them.

FUTURIST: We could stay on land indefinitely, at least for the foreseeable future?

Conway: The biggest problem we have is population. I think most people agree on that. I believe the key to handling that problem is lead time. If we were given enough lead time, we could solve just about any problem. It’s the ones that surprise us that give us a lot of trouble. Knowing that we have a population crunch I think we could find ways to manage it.

Interview by Rick Docksai

The Futurist Interviews Michael Rubin

The Futurist Interviews American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin.

THE FUTURIST: What do you see as the best strategy the U.S. might employ to further the cause of human rights in Iran?

Rubin: First and foremost, the White House should use its bully pulpit. After this past summer’s election protests erupted, the Obama administration muted its response, fearing that to throw support to the protestors might taint them. This is a valid concern, but there is no reason why the White House and the State Department can’t speak up for broad principles, such as democracy, justice, free speech, and free association.

After the Berlin Wall fell, we discovered that Presidential rhetoric meant more to dissidents than we ever imagined. There’s a tendency today to want to address human rights issues silently, but discreet diplomatic inquiries are rarely as effective as public support. Regimes prefer to murder in silence; when a dissident becomes a public symbol, not only does the cost associated with a dissident’s imprisonment or murder increase, but the dissident’s story can be a driving force in mobilizing public pressure, as it humanizes the abstract. We saw this in 1999, when Ahmad Batebi became a symbol of the student uprising when he appeared on the cover of the Economist holding a bloody shirt, and 16-year-old Neda, shot in the street by the paramilitary Basij, became a symbol of the situation in Iran in 2009.

The U.S. government should take care against bestowing undue legitimacy upon the regime. When Iranians are taking to the streets in protest against not only the legitimacy of their post-election government, but also their system of government, the White House’s reference to the Islamic Republic of Iran implies endorsement of the theocracy, and their efforts to engage a government which the Iranian electorate does not support also implies recognition. Instead, the White House and State Department might direct their comments to the Iranian public in general and, if necessary, simply refer to the ‘Iranian government’ or the ‘regime,’ as every president—whether Democrat or Republican—did until President Obama changed the formula.

Most controversially, it is important for the U.S. government to consider aid and assistance to Iranian civil society and independent media. For example, the State Department working through non-governmental intermediaries might assist programs which seek to document Iranian human rights abuses or help independent trade unions organize. Fears that U.S. funding might undercut the opposition and strengthen the regime are real, but misplaced. Opponents of civil society support argue that the presence of funding enables the Iranian government to taint all civil society work. The problem with this perspective, however, is that the Iranian regime always accuses its opponents of foreign connections regardless of U.S. action, so supporting civil society would not appreciably alter Iranian behavior. If fear of Iranian rhetoric toward its own internal opposition were to shape U.S. policy, then we’d also have to rule out dialogue, since Iranian security forces have taken to toward accusing any Iranian who engages with American institutions—Yale University and the Carnegie Endowment, for example—of treason.

THE FUTURIST: What about in China, where the attendant economic risks from the Chinese sale of U.S. Treasuries are much greater?

Michael Rubin: U.S. support for human rights and free speech might antagonize the Chinese government a bit, but the chance that Beijing would respond in this fashion is slight to none. It’s simply not in the interest of the Chinese government to sabotage the United States economy to that extent given the level of U.S.-Chinese trade. At the same time, turning a blind eye toward abuses in China also has some inherent, even if indirect, risk. The Chinese government has no incentive to reform and to correct government abuses against its citizenry. Economic disparities run deep from coast into heartland. Absent an outlet for dissent and a system which forces the government to be accountable to the people, there is an inherent risk of wildfire outbreaks of instability in China. Certainly, gentle U.S. prodding for democratization in China is in both our countries long-term interests.

THE FUTURIST: Do you see the Iranian regime persisting in its present state until the year 2020? What might happen when it fades from existence?

Michael Rubin: If we take a snapshot of Iranian demography, it might look like the Islamic Republic is in trouble. The Iranian economy is stagnant, living standards are declining, and the regime can’t provide enough work for young people finishing the university. Time is, unfortunately, working in the regime’s favor. In the years immediately after the Islamic Revolution and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini encouraged large families. The regime put up posters showing ‘a good Islamic family’ with a mother, a father, and six children. After the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, the Iranian government realized that it could not handle such a large population. Suddenly posters appeared depicting ‘a good Islamic family’ as having a mother, a father, and just two children. As Patrick Clawson, an economist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy points out, the Iran-Iraq war years’ baby boomers are in their 20s, precisely the age of the protestors. In five years, however, the number of 20-somthings is going to decline while the current protestors are going to be in their 30s, and beginning to settle down with young families, their personal priorities elsewhere.

The regime is nervous, though. There is no question that the regime is unpopular across a broad cross-section of society. The evidence for this is not only anecdotal, but also quantitative. Using Persian speakers in Los Angeles, polling companies have surveyed Iranians by taking every telephone exchange in Tehran, and randomizing the last four numbers and conducting what, on the surface is an economic survey but which also provides insight into political altitudes. In September 2007, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reorganized and implemented what its new commander, Mohammad Ali Jafari, called the mosaic doctrine. Rather than orient the IRGC to defend against foreign armies—as it had been from the days of the Iran-Iraq War—Jafari divided the IRGC into inwardly-oriented units, one for each province and two for Tehran. Jafari argued that internal unrest and the possibility of a velvet revolution posed more of a threat to the regime than foreign armies, a judgment validated by the June 2009 unrest.

The key issue in regime survival therefore lies with the loyalty of the Revolutionary Guards. It matters not if 90% of the Iranian people turn against the regime so long as the IRGC remains loyal to the Supreme Leader. Western politicians can hope for muddle-through reform, but ultimately change will come when the IRGC defects, much like regime change came to Romania after Nikolai Ceausescu’s security forces switched sides. The Iranian regime is aware of this, and so IRGC members are seldom stationed in their home provinces minimizing the risk that units will refuse to fire on crowds which might contain family members, friends, or neighbors.

If the Islamic Republic does not fall, then the regime will have made a Faustian bargain. The IRGC will become a predominant force, dominating not only political life, but also economic and religious life. What we are now seeing is a slow, creeping coup d’état. The Islamic Republic is becoming a military dictatorship, albeit one with a religious patina.

THE FUTURIST: Of all the trends playing in terms of human rights at this moment, from China to Iran to the United States, which ones concern you the most? Which make you the most hopeful?

Michael Rubin: What concerns me most is cultural relativism—the willingness of Western states to accept the arguments of oppressive regimes that Eastern cultures simply do not uphold the same values of individual rights and Western demands that they should is simply new age imperialism. We see this primarily with regard to women and women’s rights.

Communication offers the most hope. From telegram to radio to television to fax to IM and mobile camera and twitter, technology is empowering citizens and preventing human rights abusers from acting with impunity.

THE FUTURIST: Paint us a picture of democracy in the year 2020? What does the word mean? Has the world come to some agreement on it? Is there, on a whole, more of it than existed 10 years ago or less?

Michael Rubin: I’d define democracy not only as representative government accountable to the people, elections contested by political parties who have abandoned militias, and but also a proven record of peaceful transfers of power between government and opposition. I am an optimist and see the spread of democracy is inevitable. I also believe those who argue that certain cultures—Chinese or Arab, for example—are impervious to democracy are wrong. Here, Korea is instructive. Harry S Truman was lambasted for the Korean War and for attempts to bring democracy to South Korea. Critics said that democracy was alien to Korean culture, and it certainly was a process. But today, when we juxtapose North and South Korea, I doubt there are many people who do not believe the price was worth it. Taiwan, too, showed that democracy can thrive in Chinese culture and, while the Iraq war remains a polarizing debate, it is telling that ahead of the March 7 elections, no Iraqi knows who will lead their new government.

About the Interviewee: Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School, and lecturer at Johns Hopkins University.

The Futurist Interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

2004

One of cosmology's leading stars is astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. Tyson was appointed to serve on the nine-member commission on the Implementation of the U.S. Space Exploration Policy (the "Moon, Mars, and Beyond" commission) in 2004. His book Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, co-written with astronomy writer Donald Goldsmith, was published that same year by W.W. Norton.

Futurist: In your new book, Origins, you write that these are "auspicious times for learning what's new in the cosmos." Why is that so?

Tyson: Enabled by technology, we live in a time when our investigations of the universe unfold simultaneously on five frontiers: extremely large ground-based telescopes, large space-borne telescopes, supercomputing models of cosmic phenomena, space probes to the planets, and particle accelerators, which recreate the conditions of high temperature and pressure in the early universe, just after the big bang.

Futurist: How does thinking about the universe's destiny relate to thinking about the near-term future and its complex problems?

Tyson: The universe's destiny has very little to do with the near-term destiny of Earth. But the destiny of the solar system and its constituents is another matter. A rogue asteroid can hit Earth at any time, leaving humans extinct. Mars was once a wet place. But no longer. Something bad happened there. What knobs are we now turning in Earth's ecosystem that may someday leave Earth with the same barren fate? With a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus, our "sister" planet, we can ask the same question about global warming.

Futurist: You write that our atoms are traceable to the big bang, which makes us a part of the universe itself. Why is this concept important for people to understand?

Tyson: If people knew these facts--really knew them--would they still wage war on one another? Would they still act selfishly in their personal affairs? Would they harbor hatred for their neighbors? I do not know. Perhaps so. But you can bet they'll think twice about it. By looking up into the vast darkness of space, you are forced by your conscience to take pause and reflect on your own place in the cosmos.
Futurist: On a more personal note, you are an astrophysicist, a communicator, and an administrator of a public institution. What role gives you most satisfaction?
Tyson: When I engage in research on the frontier of cosmic discovery, I occupy a mental and emotional plane of fulfillment accompanied by an itch to share that joy with the public.

Futurist: Who (or what) inspired you to become a scientist and to specialize in the universe?

Tyson: A visit to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City at age 9. A pair of binoculars at age 11, and a friend who told me to look up with them. I've been hooked ever since. More like a calling, really. Later, while in junior high school, my first scientific and pedagogical role model was the head of the Hayden Planetarium. My parents supported my interest in every way they knew how, although they themselves were not scientists.

Futurist: What made you choose to apply your scientific curiosity and imagination to astronomy rather than, say, medical research or artificial intelligence?
Tyson: There was no contest. Indeed, when I was a kid, I thought that if everyone looked up the way I did then everyone would want to study the universe just like me--how could they not? This naiveté is what tells me that my interest was more a calling than a rational comparative assessment about what to be when I grew up.

Futurist: What would you say your "future-changing" idea is?

Tyson: More people need to look up in the world.

This interview was conducted by Cynthia G. Wagner

The Futurist Interviews Net Democracy Expert Evgeny Morozov

The “Twitter Revolution” in Moldova, dissident bloggers in Iran, revolution in Egypt organized by social media—democracy activists around the world use social media to gain supporters and to coordinate action. So, however, do authoritarian governments. Evgeny Morozov, a New America Foundation fellow and the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, spoke with Rick Docksai, a staff editor of THE FUTURIST, about how the Internet can both help and harm global struggles for human rights and political freedom.

Rick Docksai: Populist revolts against authoritarian leaderships have been unfolding throughout the Middle East over the last few months. How optimistic are you that actual democracy is going to unfold in some of the affected countries? And what role, if any, would you expect social media to play in shaping it?

Evgeny Morozov

Evgeny Morozov: I don’t think the Internet will play much of a role in shaping them, compared to other factors. The things to watch for are how they shape the new constitutions and how they deal with the elements of the previous regimes. All those things are way more important than what happens online. I wouldn’t bet that the Internet will be a great help.

As for the extent to which they become democracies—it’s a wild guess for anyone, me included. They have a chance, but how it turns out will have so many factors, including internal policies and external conflicts. I don’t buy in to the cultural notion of Arabs not being ready for democracy. Democracy in the Middle East may succeed. But it will depend on how they work with the existing challenges.

Rick Docksai: As for the revolts themselves, it was said that the organizers use blogs, Twitter, and other social media. So they use the Internet. But that does not mean that they revolted because they had the Internet. How likely is it that these revolts would be taking place now if the Internet had never been invented?

Evgeny Morozov: They would be taking a different shape, and they may have happened three to six months later. The revolts were driven by people having economic grievances and being aggrieved with political oppression. They turned to the Internet to publicize their grievances and their resistance. The fact that new media and blogs were present probably set a different tempo to the revolts. If the Internet wasn’t around, the regime might be tempted to crack down in a much more brutal way.

It’s hypothetical to say how it would have happened without the Internet, but revolutions throughout history are driven by cultural factors. I think the events probably would have happened differently and would have turned out differently. We have to entertain the possibility that these events could have turned out much more violent and taken much more time if they hadn’t had the publicity that they had thanks to the Internet.

Rick Docksai: So the Internet could make regimes more cautious in how they deal with protesters?

Evgeny Morozov: It depends on the regime, not on the Internet. From that perspective, a mild authoritarian regime like Egypt, yes. A regime like Libya, no. Just because people can twitter and blog doesn’t stop the Libyan government from instituting a violent crackdown.

It's hard to generalize based on the future of the Internet. We don’t have a one-size-fits-all approach to every country. We adapt our policies for each country. That’s how foreign policy works. But in the case of the Internet, we have a tendency to generalize that this must be how it works everywhere, even though that isn’t the case.

Rick Docksai: Xinhuanet had a Jan. 2, 2011, feature on the Chinese government’s formation of Web sites where citizens can file complaints about corrupt local leaders. Actual firings, demotions, and criminal prosecutions of police, judges, and local officials have resulted. (URL). Perhaps the Internet cannot bring China democracy, but it can bring China a government that is more accountable to its people. What do you think? How realistic an outcome is that? And how satisfied should we be with it?

Evgeny Morozov: You have to look at regime legitimacy. Normally a regime that fights its own corruption has more legitimacy with its own people. From that perspective, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the Internet is making the Chinese government more accountable, but I would say that it is making local officials more responsible.

The government may be eliminating corruption in the provinces, making the people happier, but that doesn’t mean that they’re eliminating corruption at the top. So the distribution of corruption might be changing. But I do think government might use the Internet to solicit more citizen input. That won't undermine the government. It will bolster its legitimacy.

Rick Docksai: It sounds paradoxical. China’s government is authoritarian, but it solicits its people’s opinions.

Evgeny Morozov: It’s not paradoxical. The fact that the government is soliciting their opinions does not mean that the government is listening to them. It wants to give the people the impression that it is listening to them. In some sense, it creates a semblance of democratic institutions. It's all about creating a veneer of legitimacy.

Rick Docksai: The Internet does not always inspire democratic activism. Your book cited cases of people in authoritarian countries who gained Internet access for the first time and used it not to watch news, but to watch pop films and browse pornography. This is especially common in Russia, according to your book; you say, in fact, that the Russian government actually mass-distributes online entertainment precisely to distract people from reading news and becoming politically active.

I wonder why the Internet might bolster reform movements in Egypt and China but not in Russia. What makes Russia different? What would it take for a strong Russian reform movement to finally emerge?

Evgeny Morozov: I don’t think there is anything unique about Russia per se. It's just their government is smarter than the Egyptian government about how to use the Internet. The Egyptian government didn’t do anything online. They didn't engage in propaganda, didn’t deploy bloggers, didn’t launch cyber-attacks. They missed the train.

The Chinese have access to the same pirated films and pornography that the Russians do. I don’t think that there’s anything that makes Russian unique. I think the difference is that the people who built up the Russian Internet ended up working for the government. The Egyptian government’s approach to the Internet was very shallow, and it had to pay the price, eventually.

Rick Docksai: Even if people in an authoritarian country receive news from democratic countries via the Internet, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are learning about democracy. They are not necessarily getting educations on how a democratic government works and how to set one up. They will need that education, though, if they are ever to make their country democratic. What role can the Internet and social media play in giving aspiring democratic leaders the necessary education and training?

Evgeny Morozov: I think the question you just asked assumes that there is a mass movement of people that are new to politics. The people who were instrumental in making the Egyptian revolution happen weren’t new to politics. Almost all of them were part of existing political and social forces. They had had plenty of training and organization by various Western foundations and governments.

I don’t think the view of this as being a spontaneous revolution was true. I myself have been to several democracy workshops in Egypt. I wouldn’t necessarily view these people as atomized individuals. They have been trained offline.

Rick Docksai: That’s an interesting point about democracy workshops. The U.S. government and U.S. foundations have been sponsoring educational programs on democratic governance for decades, some of which bring foreign students here, and some of which send U.S. instructors to the countries themselves. You wouldn’t hear much about them, though, compared with all the buzz over social media. But maybe this in-person education over time was a more critical factor in spurring today’s revolutions?

Evgeny Morozov: Of course it was, but the problem is you wouldn't have heard as much about it. Who's paying for those workshops? It’s the U.S. government and U.S. foundations. In this sense, Facebook and Twitter are much better cover, because it looks spontaneous. I think it will be very misleading to suggest that that all the connections forged by these activists are virtual. It's a lot more about building human networks.

Rick Docksai: You state in your book that whether a reform movement will succeed depends more on the country’s internal conditions than on any new communications technology. The Soviet Bloc fell because the communist governments were weak, not because the protesters had photocopiers. Many observers say that North Korea’s government is very feeble right now. What use—if any—might Internet media serve in hastening its final collapse?

Evgeny Morozov: At this point, I wouldn’t have much hope in the Internet, since North Korea is a country with some of the fewest Internet connections in the world. And you have to understand, those people have been brainwashed to such an extent that you have serious psychological challenges that you can’t overcome just by using blogs and Twitter.

North Korea would be one country where I would expect the least change to come about through the Internet. It would be much harder than a country like Belarus, where one third of the country is online. Mobile phones might play a role in getting more information out. But it’s unlikely that Facebook or Twitter will play much of a role.

The Futurist Interviews Neuroscientist Eliezer Sternberg

The brain is one of the most mysterious systems scientists have ever studied, but the mystery is gradually unraveling. Using the latest computer-based simulation programs, brain imaging, and other new tools, scientists are slowly uncovering how the brain is composed, how its parts interconnect, and how they influence human our behavior. With more research, a clear understanding could finally emerge of where mental illnesses and behavioral disorders begin—and how to stop them. Eliezer Sternberg, a Tufts University School of Medicine doctoral candidate and the author of My Brain Made Me Do It, spoke with Rick Docksai, staff editor for THE FUTURIST, about where brain research might proceed in the decades ahead.

THE FUTURIST: Genetic intervention therapies could reportedly deactivate genes that are linked to disorders. We’ve identified genes that are linked to violent behavior and to mental illnesses. Realistically speaking, how soon would it be before we develop the means to turn those genes off? More importantly, what consequent drop in crime would society probably see if we did?

ELIEZER STERNBERG: Identifying the genes—we can do right now. And I think we’ll be able to find more of them in the future. I think the problem would be that aggressive and violent behavior is not controlled by one gene, or even by a few genes. There are so many genes that coordinate it. I don’t think a simple on- and off- switch would do the trick.

So would we get there in the next 10 years? I doubt it. But even in the next 10 years, if we find ways to connect how they all work and how they develop pathways of activation, we can start to talk about that.

But in the meantime, I think that just correlating genes to violent behavior is kind of a simplistic understanding. Right now, we can say things like ‘A higher percent of a XYY genotype is disproportionately represented in criminal populations.’ That’s interesting; that’s an insight. But there are people with that genotype that aren’t particularly aggressive and don’t do anything violent at all.

To say ‘We just need to find the gene and turn it off’ is premature. I don’t think we know enough about it in depth to say we have to know what it is and then we have our answer. I'm not saying we aren't going to get there, but we do need to learn more.

THE FUTURIST: From what I’ve been told, the genes for certain behaviors often don’t lead to the person having the behaviors until he or she is subjected to certain triggers in the outside environment. The environmental triggers cause the genes’ codes to go into effect.

ELIEZER STERNBERG: With genes, there are codes for proteins in the body. Just having the genes, you can’t necessarily tell what’s going to happen. The environmental interaction is the key. There are segments of chromosomes, and having the gene there doesn’t necessarily tell the degree to which it will be expressed. You have to see how the person lives and their interactions with other people.

THE FUTURIST: You cited many individual cases of adults whose personalities dramatically changed for the worse after they suffered serious injuries that damaged certain lobes of their brains. What kind of help can we offer patients such as these at present? And how might our abilities to help them improve in the next five to 10 years?

ELIEZER STERNBERG: Let’s take the example of a stroke. It destroys half of the motor function in the body, so you can’t move one side of your body. The issue is that you destroyed a lot of circuitry, so the neurons have died. You have broken circuitry. The problem at present is that we don’t understand the circuitry and that it's too small and too complex for us to go in there and fix it.

That distinguishes it from other physiological problems, like a circulatory system problem. With the arteries, they're bigger. We’ve seen them all and mapped them all. It’s a plumbing job. Whereas with the brain, it's much too complex.

What we have been able to do is take advantage of the brain’s natural processes and natural plasticity. Connections in the brain can be rebuilt using those functions. A successful treatment for stroke victims is forcing the patients to use the sides of the body where they lost motion and forcing the neurons to re-grow.

But when you have damage in the frontal lobe, for example, there really is nothing substantial we can do. What we need to be able to do to fix the piping, fix the circuitry, is to have the knowledge of all the circuitry and be able to map them out. We’ve been working on trying to make visual simulations. That technology has a long way to go, but that’s the technology that we would have to master before we could try that.

THE FUTURIST: It sounds like the brain is still largely uncharted territory.

ELIEZER STERNBERG: Exactly. It’s been called the last frontier of science. Its one part of the body we know so little about, but research has picked up in the last 15 years. So I think interesting things could be happening over the next decade.

THE FUTURIST: Mental illness has been in the news a lot lately with the shooting in Tucson, Arizona. The alleged shooter is reported to have paranoid schizophrenia. I’ve read, however, that the vast majority of people who have schizophrenia are no more violent than any “normal” people.

Why is it that one person with the disorder might murder several people while others who have it would never do such a thing? How understood – or misunderstood – are people who have disorders such as schizophrenia? How accurately can we determine whether a person who has such a disorder will commit violent acts as a result of it or not?

ELIEZER STERNBERG: I think schizophrenia is one of these disorders that are least understood. We really don’t know what’s going on with it. What we can say is it’s a chemical imbalance, but it has an incredibly large spectrum of the disorder and a wide variety of symptoms, ranging from hallucinations to depression and things like that. So a diagnosis doesn’t necessitate the makings of a psychotic criminal.

I think what we can do now is through psychiatric evaluation, you can tell who is more dangerous than the rest. I have patients who tell me they have voices in their heads telling them to kill, telling them to harm themselves, and that they're thinking about listening to the voices. You know who to keep an eye on. With others, it's mild and the person seems under control. But there is no way to use an MRI and take a look inside. There’s no arbitrary method that you can use to tell one way or the other.

The more serious problem is the people who don’t get treatment, people who don’t have family to take them to a doctor. That’s where you have trouble. Someone who has serious psychosis and it’s seriously questionable whether to let that guy out on the street, it’s not going to be hard for a doctor to tell.

THE FUTURIST: You noted on page 130 that criminals may cease their antisocial behavior once they start taking medications that balance their brain chemistry. But clearly, medication only works if you take it. Recent history presents many cases of mentally ill individuals who were on medications but went off their medications and then committed violent acts. The decision to quit a medication – is this rational will at work, or is it brain chemistry? If brain chemistry plays a part, then to what extent are some disturbed individuals essentially untreatable?

ELIEZER STERNBERG: The percentage of people who are good about taking their medications is surprisingly low. There are a significant percentage of people who just don’t want to take their medications. I think in general it takes a responsible person to take medications at the right time every day. Some people are not. Especially within the population of people who are psychiatrically ill, there the percentage of people who are not is going to be higher.

People who are in the psychiatric ward might take their medications in front of the nurse. Of if they live outside the pscyh ward, nurses might go to them in their homes and give them their medications. But both options take a lot of personnel hours and medical expenditures. Outside of that, you need to trust the patient to do it. And if they can’t, then maybe you have to do one of those two things. That’s one of the issues with medicine: If you don’t take it, it doesn't work.

THE FUTURIST: With the new knowledge science is gaining about how brain wiring and human behavior interconnect, it seems like judges, criminal prosecutors, and defense attorneys all really need to know their brain science if they want to reach fair verdicts in criminal cases. How well do most judges, prosecutors, and lawyers understand the science? If they don’t understand it, what would it take to bring them up to speed?

ELIEZER STERNBERG: The first part I would say is that most of them know very little beyond the common knowledge. I think they will all have a common knowledge of how the brain functions. The question is what is the gap between common knowledge and the amount of knowledge needed for the legal decision-making process? How large of a role does brain science really play in the legal processes, or should it play?

At this point it does not play a very large role. So they don’t need that much beyond the insanity defense. There’s not much brain science that comes into play. There are people that testify and try to argue from MRIs or other medical findings but in those cases it’s an outside medical expert arguing, not a lawyer or a member of the court. Brain science doesn’t play more of a role than other niche areas of study.

The next question is should it play a larger role. A chemistry professor I know at Brandeis University, she argues that brain science has revealed that free will doesn’t exist, and that given that free will doesn’t exist, we need to a much better understanding of crime and punishment in general.

I personally don’t believe in that. I don't think that neuroscience has disproved free will. I think we need to incorporate brain science more in future ways that it can serve as evidence. It can also aid certain types of lie detector tests that measure brain activity; while the subject is being asked questions, you can judge from the brain activity whether the subject is lying or not. There are prototypes and they work well, and I think in the future they might take over the current lie detectors that measure stress and don’t work very well, since most people strapped to a lie detector will be stressed whether they are lying or not.

HE FUTURIST: Switching gears a little bit, I’d like your take on artificial intelligence. It’s clear now that human consciousness is extremely complex and that recreating it with mechanical parts is a huge challenge. What is the missing part or parts that robot engineers have so far failed to replicate? How likely is it that they will replicate it some point in our lifetimes?

ELIEZER STERNBERG: The basic approach right now is from computer science. What that means is putting together a set of formal rules, using the programming languages, and using them to try to simulate all the behaviors of a person. I think this approach itself is a dead end in the following sense: It will not duplicate the way that our brains work; it will not duplicate human consciousness. You are not going to make a conscious being out of a computer programming method.

That's not to say that you’re not going to make useful devices. Computer technology is brilliant. It's changing the world. You can make extremely powerful processing machines. But I think the human brain has a certain flexibility and creativity, and there’s no room for that in a strictly algorithmic program system, such as a computer programming system is.

When you look at a computer program, it’s all mapped out. You know exactly how it works. It’s a very strict system. We must do it differently. How we would do it, I don’t know, but it would take a much greater understanding of how our brains work and a new method of creating them.

THE FUTURIST: What I’m hearing is that the brain is a pretty unpredictable system. We can identify the parts and say what they will be inclined to do, but you won’t know for sure what they do until you see the person in everyday life.

ELIEZER STERNBERG: You can argue that in two ways. I can play devil’s advocate and say it’s unpredictable because it’s so complex and we can’t guess how it works. But I think it's something more than that. It's more fundamental. We have an inherently flexible processing system, and that enables us to think the way we do. It’s fundamentally different from how a computer thinks. If we discover it, I think it will perhaps be the greatest leap in science to see how the brain works. But in the meantime, we need to learn a lot more.

The Futurist Interviews Newt Gingrich, former U.S. House Speaker

From the July-August 2009 issue of THE FUTURIST

In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council released a landmark study, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. The report lays out the possibility of a future very different from the reality to which most of the world is accustomed. Among the key possible futures:

1. U.S. influence and power will wane, and the United States will face constricted freedom of action in 2025. China and Russia will grow in influence. Wealth will also shift away from the United States toward Russia and China.

2. A broader conflict, possibly a nuclear war, could erupt between India and Pakistan. This could cause other nations to align themselves with existing nuclear powers for protection.

3. Rising world population, affluence, and shifts in Western dietary habits will increase global demand for food by 50% by 2030 (World Bank statistic). Some 1.4 billion people will lack access to safe drinking water.

As the report was published in November of 2008 in the midst of a historic financial crisis, some of these scenarios now seem not so much wild cards as prescient depictions of a near certain future. Others, in retrospect, seem further away. The once-indomitable engine of Chinese growth now seems significantly less robust. At 6% the country's GDP is scheduled to grow at half of last year's pace, but still much faster than the United States. The question becomes, which scenarios remain credible, which no-longer apply?

THE FUTURIST asked four experts—Newt Gingrich, former U.S. House speaker; Elaine C. Kamarck, a senior policy adviser for Democrat Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign; Peter Schiff, economics adviser to Republican Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign; and Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich—for their views on the report's key forecasts and what the future of the United States, Asia, and the global economy looks like now, in the wake of the global financial crisis.

THE FUTURIST: To what extent do you agree with the four key points outlined in the Global Trends 2025 report?

Newt Gingrich: The influence and power of the United States may decline but this will not be a decline in our economic, political, or military strength. Rather than the United States enjoying the role of the world's lone superpower, as we do today, the influence of other countries such as India and China will increase in relative terms. As the countries with the two largest populations, India and China will certainly have a voice in the next quarter century, and their current economic growth, along with the attendant increase in their military strength, will support that voice.

With respect to India and Pakistan, the United States can do much in the way of reducing tensions between them. What we are witnessing is a continuing ascendance in the strategic importance of both nations. The November 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai have raised tensions between India and Pakistan considerably. The United States can continue to work with both nations to reduce these tensions, find common ground where possible, and forge a cooperative relationship between them.

THE FUTURIST: Are the events laid out in the report inevitable?

Gingrich: Nothing is inevitable. In my book, Implementing the Art of Transformation, I provide a point of reference for considering what the decades ahead may look like. There will be more growth in scientific knowledge in the next 25 years than occurred during the past one hundred years. We are exceeding, by four to seven times, the rate of change of the past twenty-five years. This means that, by even the most conservative estimate, in the next twenty-five years, we will experience the scale of change experienced between 1909 and 2009.

THE FUTURIST: How might the negative scenarios be averted?

Gingrich: Access to natural resources and energy may be the most important challenge the world faces in the next quarter century. We must develop a strategy for global energy abundance that maximizes both production and the efficiency with which energy is used. This sort of strategy would have a significant positive impact toward reducing or preventing future conflicts.

THE FUTURIST: How might the U.S. government, and how might U.S. citizens, cope with a state of diminished influence, a wealthier more powerful Asia, and intensified competition over resources?

Gingrich: Education will be the key issue that determines our continued strength and prosperity in a world where China and India have increased influence. If you read A Nation at Risk, published more than 25 years ago, it makes clear that the education of our children is a serious national security concern and that parents, administrators, teachers, lawmakers, and leaders of this nation need to view it as such and respond accordingly. Finding innovative ways to dramatically improve how our children learn—especially in math and science—will make the biggest difference for our future.

THE FUTURIST: What do you see as the worst case scenario, and the best case scenario, of the above events coming to pass?

Gingrich: Within the key points you provide, the worst-case scenario would be a belligerent China and a resurgent and belligerent Russia. Likewise, a complete breakdown in relations between India and Pakistan and a corresponding threat of nuclear war would be destabilizing to the entire world.
Obviously, the best-case scenario would be increased cooperation and stronger, closer relationships among the United States, China, Russia, India, as well as Pakistan. A common recognition of the future threats to our livelihood that the global community faces as our populations increase and our needs for greater amounts of energy increase is essential. This recognition by all today and cooperation in achieving solutions would do much in terms of growing the global economy, as well as enabling health and prosperity for all.

THE FUTURIST: Might decreased geopolitical influence, with increased power in China, actually be good for the United States in some way?

Gingrich: It depends. We have a choice with China: cooperation or competition. Certainly if we strengthen our relationship with China, an economically and militarily strong China would be within our national interests to maintain stability in the Western Pacific region.

THE FUTURIST: What is the report overlooking?

Gingrich: The report doesn’t look closely enough at the impact of a failed Mexico. A failed state on our southern border is a significant national security threat to the United States.

THE FUTURIST: What would you add to the above list of key points?
Newt Gingrich: Cyber-security. As we continue to integrate computers into every single aspect of our lives, we are creating a significant vulnerability to our very livelihood. What we need today is a cyber-think tank staffed by the generation today that lives and breathes in the electronic world. The institution would be set up much like the RAND Corporation was, with the exclusive purpose of ensuring the survivability of our networks and data.

THE FUTURIST: What’s the most important trend that will shape U.S. policy in the next two decades?

Gingrich: Increasing worldwide demand for energy with decreasing resources. We must take concrete steps today to become energy independent.

THE FUTURIST: What can we begin doing now to ease our transition into this new world?

Gingrich: We must make smart choices today that are an investment in our future. We need to fundamentally transform litigation, regulation, taxation, education, health, energy, infrastructure, and our national security apparatuses. The policies that we have in place today reflect the realities of the twentieth century. We can't compete globally with our current laws, systems, and obsolete bureaucracies that cannot operate at the speed of the twenty-first century; they don't have the flexibility or effectiveness required to manage the issues of the day. All of this seems to be a huge undertaking—and it is—but it can be done. It must be done.

About the Interviewee
Newt Gingrich served as the speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. He is the author of more than twenty books including, most recently, Real Change: From the World That Fails to the World That Works. He’s also the founder of the group American Solutions for Winning the Future. Web site www.americansolutions.com.

This Interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker, senior editor, THE FUTURIST magazine.

The Futurist Interviews Patri Friedman, executive director of the Seasteading Institute.

Patri Friedman

Sept-October 2008 Vol. 42, No. 5

Patri Friedman is executive director of the Seasteading Institute.

FUTURIST: Seasteading, for those readers who are not familiar with it, is essentially staking out a long-term residence on the ocean’s surface?

Friedman: The frontier is part of how we think of it. The frontier thesis is: America came in large part from people who were willing to venture out and attempt new ways of living. Looking at a frontier is looking at new ways of living, a spirit that is kind of lacking right now. It’s not just that the ocean is empty and we want to fill it. It’s about finding new uses of living space and resources.

FUTURIST: What does technology allow us to do right now?

Friedman: Oil platforms - they are permanent, they are fixed. They can take the beating of the waves. However, they are incredibly expensive. One thing we’re trying to figure out is how to make it less expensive. Are they expensive because they are on the ocean’s surface, or because they are drilling oil, which is in itself expensive?

Another example is cruise lines. They sustain people very comfortably while sailing atop the ocean. They too, however, are very expensive. What we need to do is make something that’s permanent and spacious but also cheap. We see it as a technological solution to a political problem. People are bad at changing human nature or changing politics, but very good at finding new technological means to make things work better.

FUTURIST: What maintenance challenges does Seasteading present – what kinds of wear and tear would you have to address?

Friedman: You can expect to pay the construction costs in maintenance every 20 years, which is not good. One of our challenges is going to be to try to minimize that. What does help is that we’re not going to move any place very fast. We could use cheaper things like cement. Cement is good in that it’s cheap and its strong. Steel has a good weight ratio but is very expensive. Plastics hold up against water really well also.

FUTURIST: This research into more durable materials could probably serve us well down the road when we’re trying to build spacecraft that could transport people to other planets.

Friedman: It could. We view this as a more achievable frontier.

FUTURIST: Your Web site makes some mentions of self-governance. Might seafaring give rise to independent communities and even whole new sea-based nations?

Friedman: Absolutely. That is our interest, the idea of experiments in self-governing. Instead of a few large firms or countries, having many small firms and niche markets. One of our hopes is revolutionizing the government industry. Things floating on the ocean can be moved around and changed quickly. A floating city can be modular, a building can be detached and be rearranged. If a business doesn’t like a new tax that is passed, it can move it to another city. It will give cities more incentives to do a good job.

That would be true in space also you can move around different things. The next frontier is the ocean state. They have this weird dynamic that you can rearrange things and make it work more smoothly.

It’s kind of like if everyone lived in an RV, except everyone lives in something spacious and comfortable. There is a lot of space on land but it’s a place we could go to in order to get more resources. Aquaculture will be a necessity. There is decline in wild fish stocks. Currently, coastal and freshwater aquaculture freshwater areas are limited they tend to be sensitive environmentally. Offshore aquaculture, where you basically maintain fish farms in the deep ocean, There’s demand for fish. It’s a way to increase the amount of food that we can produce. So we increase the earth’s food-bearing capacity. And fish are known to make you smarter. So we’re also making the world smarter. The ocean is a lot less sensitive. There is a lot more space. One problem, though, is it is food-poor. When things die, they drop down to the bottom where only bacteria live. Most of the life is concentrated in natural upwellings. We’ll have to either locate in those areas or artificially create upwellings by means of artificial pumps, or OTEC generator that pumps nutrient-rich water from the deep ocean pipes that run way down. OTEC plants generate a lot of power and they generate fresh water. As a side effect of the heat engine, you end up boiling water. The water condenses and you have automatic fresh water. We’re not doing anything with OTECs right now because you need a community that can afford a couple-hundred-million-dollar power plant.

FUTURIST: How far along are you in developing Seasteads right now?

Friedman: We’ve established a research institute that is applying for non-profit status. We’re planning to hire a researcher and engineer and do some designs work that could figure out what the best design is and do some cost effective work. First we’d want to build one in the San Francisco Bay. Once we’ve built it and tested it, then well look to build bigger ones

FUTURIST: It seems that while space stations and space colonies would require the resources of whole countries and consortia of countries, Seasteads could be built by communities or even by individuals.

Friedman: That’s true. We’re very focused on an individual-level path. We think it’s important to make a lot of stuff that people can try on a small scale.

Interview by Rick Docksai

The Futurist Interviews Paul Moller, Inventor of the M400 Sky Car.

Paul Moller has spent the last 40 years trying to bring a flying car to market. We talked to him about his latest prototype, where you can get yours (hint: not in the U.S., and not anytime soon), and some of his brushes with death flying homemade, experimental aircraft.
Also, are flying cars a bad idea? We ask designer Donald Norman

FUTURIST: I'm hoping you might be able to indulge me on the M400, your latest prototype. My understanding of the principles by which the M400 flies is: two air-cooled, single-rooter engines swivel to provide vertical lift and forward acceleration. Is that about right? It also goes to 380 miles per hour?

Moller: Well, all of those numbers are a little confusing. I would say it uses multiple engines, which can vary from six to eight depending on the configuration. The idea is to get around a gearing arrangement; 40% of all helicopter failures are due to the gearing. Most of the actual accidents are related to transmission. You don't really want gearing in the vehicle. That means you have multiple engines. That's why we've designed our vehicle to know what's called a critical failure mode.

In other words, there's no single flying component. If you're going to sell something like this to the civilian market--whether I'm selling it or some future production market sells it to that market--it's got to be pretty fool-proof. You can't rely on something that has, historically, always been the center of failure, and that's gearbox transmission. So we have a bunch of independent engines. We have a minimum of six engines but typically eight engines, of course, all controlled by computers. So it's not like you to start eight engines, eight engines start, and you never know that the separate pieces are all parts of the design.

FUTURIST: I noticed in your ABC interview, you talk about how your working on a prototype that allows the driver to program in a destination and go directly to that destination without being involved in the process. When I spoke to designers, one of the things that seems the most scary and far-fetched is that you can't trust an average citizen to reliably control a flying car. They can barely control regular cars.

Moller: I absolutely agree with that. I mean, these kinds of vehicles will eventually be in the air. It's a question of when, not whether they will or won't. You'll have a situation where they are going to be flying fast. One of the beauties of evolving technology and transportation infrastructure, we end up going faster and have to spend less of our time doing things to get from point A to point B. Of course, our highway infrastructure is going just the opposite direction.

So, this vehicle is going to be fast. We've shown that it can cruise very comfortably at 200 miles per hour at sea level. But, as you've said, people can't handle highway speeds today. Highways are getting more and more overcrowded. I see more and more accidents myself, personally, on the freeways. So I think it's essential to find a system that cuts the human out of the loop 99% of the time.

FUTURIST: Do you think GPS and adaptive cruise control technologies have evolved to the point where they can be an integrated part of the system and really making the idea much more plausible and realistic?

Moller: Yes. But it's essential that we rely on more than simply one GPS system. You need an inertial coordinate system as well [which locates a moving body in space mathematically, based on acceleration and the physical forces acting upon said body]. The inertial coordinate system would be the escape system. In other words, say a big thunderstorm happened and you weren't able to access GPS. The inertial system would take over and get you back on the ground. But it would pull you out of the virtual highway in the sky, which is the vision NASA has put forward for how this would work. I'm sure you've heard about this idea of automating highways... The key is, you don't just rely on GPS. You don't just rely on an inertial system. You rely on transponders, on a whole bunch of other things, so you have multiple safety backups. This is not like the movie where everyone is crowded into a city with these kind of vehicles. The vehicle is intended for those trips of 50 miles or more.

FUTURIST: What would you say is the difference between the M400 and the previous prototypes? I know that you were selling these on eBay not too long ago.

Moller: We're calling that the Jetson but that's probably not where you directed your attention. That car didn't fit the role that you're envisioning here, which is the relief of [earth-bound] travel from point A to point B. The Jetson will come back into the market as a recreational utility vehicle because, with that vehicle, if you don't fly above the diameter of the vehicle, you're not under DOT control or FAA control. That means I can sell a product to you that can ride around, 10 to 12 feet above the ground, and you don't need a pilot's license. It's an interesting border patrol vehicle, rescue vehicle, farm accessory vehicle, or whatever. We're very close to bringing that onto the market. You probably won't hit it this year but we're already building a number of them. The difference between those two vehicles [the Jetson and the M400] the is that, the Jetson, by the nature of its design, probably would not have gotten past 100 miles her hour and would have burned a lot of fuel at that speed. It was a safe vehicle, had all those elements of safety that I referred to, but it didn't have the economics of operation in flight, nor the performance capabilities that people wanted, the capabilities that would really change the transportation paradigm.

FUTURIST: In terms of selling flying cars, I guess the thing I'm trying to get a handle on is, why is it so very, very hard?

Moller: I could spend a few years on that one. There are three components that make or break this technology: engines, electronics, and materials. For the engine, the most critical element is power. Once you reduce the diameter of the propulsion system, you go from a helicopter, to a fan system, you're moving less air. The problem is, the less air you move, the more power it takes to generate a certain kind of thrust. We've spent about $35 million over a period of 40 years developing the power plant for this project. The credit goes to Wankle. So engines are number one. That's held everything back. Every design you see that that we've flown, including half a dozen different varieties over the years starting in 1965, all focused on the engine. If I took a helicopter and made the diameter one half the diameter, I would have to immediately add 60% more power. I halve the diameter again, I have to add 60% more power again. The M400 has over 1000 horsepower.

FUTURIST: So power is an essential component. As we get into more discussion about hydrogen fuel cells and the role they'll play in the future GM line, bringing regular terrestrial vehicles, making them more energy efficient, do you see something like a hydrogen fuel playing a role in a future prototype?

Moller: I don't think you'll see a hydrogen fuel cell for ever. I think you'll see controlled fusion first. Because it's a weight-to-power issue. What you will see, and I gave a paper on this to the FCC conference, where I showed that what you probably end up with a hybrid vehicle is electively driven just to assist getting off the ground where you need a big sense of power and then drops out of the system for flight so then you don't have to have this huge amount of power just to take off and then not being able to use it effectively at high speeds. That's why you need 1000 horsepower. You can imagine if I use 1000 horsepower to go forward, my range would drop to one-third the range. Really there are specific where this is practical and above those speeds it just becomes a gas sucking machine. So that's the real point. We will see hybrid vehicles, and I'm sure it will be in my system in the next three years where we use electrical power from probably batteries, maybe super-capacitors if that science get better. We're about 50% away from a battery that would work for take off.

FUTURIST: That's still the number one barrier?

Moller: I think we have a machine right now that's practical. I don't need a battery, it would improve the economics if I had it. The other problem that you have is that you're trying to change the transportation paradigm. Who's going to join you in a program like this when the government can't tell you when it's going to be cooperating or when they can't give you changes in the FAA that will allow certain things? You've got a vehicle that's going to need to be certified. That's probably $100 million. There's just all those elements.

FUTURIST: The issue of finding the correct legislative environment, I know you have offices in South Korea, do you see yourself one day entering into a partnership with a country that's on the threshold of uniquely these uniquely twenty-first century possibilities? That's ready to leapfrog into a new infrastructure?

Moller: Funny you should mention that because I just came back from giving a talk in Dubai. There's a huge enthusiasm. I went to Dubai to talk about entrepreneurship and innovation. The majority of the money that's been invested in my company has been from countries other than the United States. The majority of my stockholders are American because they aren't big stockholders. But my big stockholders are from other countries.

FUTURIST: So in answer to that old question, where's my flying car, the answer in the next 20 years may be "go to Dubai?"

Moller: It's true. The people in Dubai are building these Palm Islands, which I'm sure you're well aware of. They say, well, how do we get around on these things? We have the problem of getting from the island to land. We have boats but boats aren't really convenient. So, they're open to the idea more so than in America. But what is the old saying? You're always a stranger in your own land? But getting back into the three components, after engines, we've spent a similar amount of money, maybe $20 million on artificial intelligence. We build our own computers, our own software, everything else. It's a long process. The algorithms have to be very specific for the particular job. The third component, of course, is modern materials. The development of new materials like carbon fiber and new materials in fan design, to help us make our fans more efficient, reliable, and bulletproof--these are a factor as well. Those are three factors, engines, electronics, and materials.

FUTURIST: Looking at the second factor. I know that the problem with AI is that it's really great for figuring the answers to numerical riddles working with numbers that can have two different values, but trying to build something that processes binary code to understand something that's going on in an actual physical space, that's where you're overwhelming the system with data that you yourself haven't totally processed yet.

Moller: Certainly that's a big a piece of the problem. The other is the reliability of the hardware when you put it all together. Even triple redundancy just isn't safe enough.

FUTURIST: But as the computer becomes a bigger part of the flight process, essentially freeing the pilot from having to make decisions, you envision the act of flying becoming not so much like an act of driving but a straightforward computer interface but happening at 380 miles per hour above the surface of the earth.

Moller: Right.

FUTURIST: Would you say that's the biggest difference between what you can work with now and what you were working with 40 years ago?

Moller: Right. But if I had what I have today 40 years ago? I wouldn't have known where to put it.

FUTURIST: Thinking of the last 40 years of working on this and creating this dream out of nothing, prior to you, there was no sense that people could actually do this, except in the government. This is the public manifestation of a very old dream. What was your best moment on this journey?

Moller: The best, it always relates to the first flight, when we started off with the xm2 in 1965, I started this off with some of students. Just getting in that vehicle and hovering, one foot off the ground, separating yourself off the ground by any means, in a vehicle, is exciting. I would say the next most exciting thing, it's hard to believe it wasn't decades later, it was 1969, it was a successful flight, I was up quite high, but I actually was aware of the fact I could die very easily. There were lots of reasons why, if the craft crashed, I would not have survived. This is an experimental aircraft. We are underfinanced always. I did the testing myself. It was terrifying. If a ten cent transistor had burnt out on the signal component system, I would probably have died. I suppose the best moment was after I completed the flight, I said to myself, I'm going to live. It was the best sensation I think I've ever had.

FUTURIST: That makes sense.

About the author: Patrick Tucker is the Senior Editor of THE FUTURIST and the director of communications for the World Future Society.

The Futurist Interviews Peter Norvig, Director of Research for Google.

Peter Norvig

March 2008

Peter Norvig is the Director of Research for Google

Futurist: If there was one key breakthrough in AI that would radically change the way people think about it that was printed, on the front page of the New York Times, what would the headline read?

Norvig: That's a hard one. It would have to do something that people care about. It could be winning a prize competition, there's various turning prizes. It could be a product. I guess that's why they call it the Singularity, because you don't know what it's going to be.

Futurist: You do a lot of work with language, how has your experience as director of Google affected your appreciation of how technology change the way people think, speak and write?

Norvig: I certainly believe language is critical to the way we think. Not necessarily in the Worphian way, but in the way we can form abstractions and think more carefully. The brain was meant for doing visual processing primarily. A large portion of the cortex for that; it wasn't meant for doing abstract reasoning. The fact that we can do abstract reasoning is an amazing trick; we're able to do it because of language. We invent concepts and give them names and that lets us do more with the concept because we can move it around on paper. Language derives all our thinking. How is that changing as a result of search engine technology? We now have access to so much more. We now have an expectation that if you have a question, it's resolvable in the amount of time that's worth it. It used to be, you would have a question, you would have to consider, 'Gee, I have to go to the library, it's going to take me half an hour to get there, another half an hour to go through the stacks. Is answering this question worth it? For most questions the answer is no. For the important things you still go through that process. Now, it's 'it's going to take me ten minutes to do this search. So there's a much lower barrier, and more things you're willing to find out. There's a change in what you have to memorize vs. what you know you can get on demand.

Futurist: There's a downside to this, embodied in Christine Rosen's term "ego-casting" which is the narrow pursuit of one's personal interests online. A lot of people say that search-engine technology and the internet enables more people to do this, the fault of course being not with the technology but with the whims of the people who use that technology. How do you see future breakthroughs mitigating or meliorating that, or is even possible because it's a flaw that's unique to humans?

Norvig: I do see a trend in that way. In many cultures, people have elected to have practices that tie things together. So, you have your traditions, stories, and myths that everybody learns. In some cultures you have a universal school curriculum, where everybody learns the same thing. In other cultures you have hit TV shows that everybody watches. So there's a shared sense of "I know this," and "I'm attracted to people that now the same thing." The internet allows you to go broader. But I don't necessarily see that as isolating or egotistical, because you're still connecting to other people. By definition, if you saw it on the Internet, its because someone else wrote it. It's just that you're connecting with a smaller group, not necessarily physically close by.

Futurist: Considering that 50% of high school seniors can't tell the difference between an objective Web site and a biased source, what avenue is there to preserve and empower critical thinking skills in the wake of this extremely convenient and efficient technology that does, in many ways, a lot of the thinking for you.

Norvig: I think that is important, I don't know the statistics, but I agree that that's a problem. Kids have good skills in finding answers but poor skills in telling the difference between The New York Times and the Onion. What can you do about that? I think part of it is education. We're used to teaching reading writing and arithmetic, now we should be teaching these evaluation skills in school and so-on. Some of it could be just-in-time education, search engines themselves should be providing clues for this.

Futurist: What do you see as the key breakthrough that has to occur in order for AGI to be fulfilled in some recognizable way?

Norvig: I don't think we know enough. If we knew that answer we would be working on that problem. I think there's lots of possibilities. In the meantime, we should let lots of different groups work in different things.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker.

The Futurist Interviews Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital

In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council released a landmark study, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. The report lays out the possibility of a future very different from the reality to which most of the world is accustomed. Among the key possible futures:

1. U.S. influence and power will wane, and the United States will face constricted freedom of action in 2025. China and Russia will grow in influence. Wealth will also shift away from the United States toward Russia and China.

2. A broader conflict, possibly a nuclear war, could erupt between India and Pakistan. This could cause other nations to align themselves with existing nuclear powers for protection.

3. Rising world population, affluence, and shifts in Western dietary habits will increase global demand for food by 50% by 2030 (World Bank statistic). Some 1.4 billion people will lack access to safe drinking water.

As the report was published in November of 2008 in the midst of a historic financial crisis, some of these scenarios now seem not so much wild cards as prescient depictions of a near certain future. Others, in retrospect, seem further away. The once-indomitable engine of Chinese growth now seems significantly less robust. At 6% the country's GDP is scheduled to grow at half of last year's pace, but still much faster than the United States. The question becomes, which scenarios remain credible, which no-longer apply?

THE FUTURIST asked four experts—Newt Gingrich, former U.S. House speaker; Elaine C. Kamarck, a senior policy adviser for Democrat Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign; Peter Schiff, economics adviser to Republican Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign; and Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich—for their views on the report's key forecasts and what the future of the United States, Asia, and the global economy looks like now, in the wake of the global financial crisis. (Original interview date December, 2008)

THE FUTURIST: In your television interviews and your books you talk a lot about the wealth transfer to Asia. According to your Webs site, it’s one of the key components of your investment strategy at EuroPacific Capital. To what extent do you agree or disagree with some of the scenarios in the Global Trends 2025 report?

Peter Schiff: Rising influence in Asia? I definitely agree with, China more so than Russia. But there are other countries in the equation, like India. Japan will also have more clout in 2025. It won’t merely be China and Russia that will see an increase in their influence and wealth. I think the United States will see a reduction in its economic, political, and military power. We’re in serious trouble.

Our economy is mess, but more worrisome is that the U.S. government is poised to completely destroy it. What Obama is seeking to do could ruin the economy.
The economy is a mess because of bad fiscal and monetary policy in the preceding years. But what we need in order to recover is more capitalism, more free markets. We need more savings to make credit more available to businesses that could borrow to build more factories and start producing again to repair the industrial base. We should make repairs to our infrastructure but only when we can afford it. There’s a lot of serious work to be done. Unfortunately, President Obama seems intent on building roadblocks that will just prevent market forces from correcting the problems in our economy. By assuming more and more control and micro-managing our economy, by making the government bigger, our economy is going to be much less dynamic. The standard of living is going to fall more precipitously than would otherwise be the case. We’re going to recreate another great depression, only this one will be worse than the one the government created in the 1930s.

THE FUTURIST: How can individuals, particularly people in the United States, cope with the trends you’ve laid out? What’s an action plan for them?

Schiff: Their action plan is to get out of U.S. assets entirely. Don’t hold bonds or U.S. currency. Get out of U.S. real estate. U.S. assets are going to lose substantial value especially relative to assets in other parts of the world and certain commodities. People need to understand that U.S. assets are going to be substantially marked down.

THE FUTURIST: Is this something that will have an effect geopolitically and militarily going forward?

Schiff: Of course. As the dollar loses value, it becomes more expensive to maintain the military—to supply it with food, fuel, and ammunition. Most of U.S. military equipment runs with imported components and imported parts. If we’re going to keep our planes in the air, our tanks rolling, ships steaming, we’re going to have to import more expensive foreign components. We have military bases all around the world. As the dollar loses value, it’s more expensive to maintain those bases.

THE FUTURIST: What about the argument that the United States will maintain its dominance because it has a unique culture of innovation, with the world’s best universities?

Schiff: We don’t have a unique culture of anything. American citizens aren’t innately smarter or harder working than people anywhere else. We’re no better than the Italians, the French, the Mexicans, or the Chinese. What enabled Americans to be so much more successful than people of other countries was that we were freer. We had a better system of government because we had a constitution that limited the power of government so we had minimal regulation and minimal taxes relative to the rest of the world... Now, I think, there’s more entrepreneurial capitalism going on in places like China than there is in the United States.

FUTURIST: Many developing nations face tremendous political uncertainty in the years ahead. To what degree will they become more open? To what degree will they become more democratic? Will there be social upheavals?

Schiff: There will be social upheavals in the United States. We’re going into a situation with severe economic hardship in this country. The inflation that the U.S. government is unleashing will lead to spectacular increases in the cost of living. Ultimately, it will lead the Obama administration to implement price controls for products including food and energy, which will result in food and energy price wars. When people are cold and hungry, there’s a tendency to commit crimes, and this will lead to social unrest. There are a lot of problems in that respect coming to the United States. There’s also the chance the United States government will act in much more oppressive ways. I think the U.S. government might start seizing assets from its citizens such as precious medals and foreign stocks. There could be outright confiscation and seizure. Moving money out of the country could be very difficult.

THE FUTURIST: Do you think there is any chance that the U.S. government would begin to pursue an open market strategy?

Schiff: I don’t see that happening soon. I see a lot more damage occurring in our economy before Obama comes to that revelation. But hopefully he comes to it in time. The failure to come to it in time will produce a hyperinflation. The dollar will be wiped out completely. That economic crisis will be far worse than the one we’re dealing with today. The United States will not be the largest economy based on GDP well before 2025. It will be China. The United States will still be behind Japan and it will no longer be in the top twenty countries in per capita GDP. We’ll see a significant reduction in our stature in the world.

THE FUTURIST: Do you think China and Japan will be able to shift from being export economies toward being economies that stimulate domestic consumer spending?

Schiff: They will certainly be consuming a lot more domestically, particularly China. But Japan and a lot of countries that are now exporting to the United States will simply export to other countries. For instance, Japanese exports to China will pick up significantly. It’s certain that a country that’s going to see one of the most dramatic increases in domestic consumption will be a country like China.

THE FUTURIST: When does it get very bad for the United States?

Schiff: When the only buyer left for U.S. debt is the Federal Reserve itself, that’s when hyperinflation kicks in. That’s when the bond market plunges and consumer prices really take off. That’s when we’re really up against a serious crisis.

THE FUTURIST: That can happen anytime between now and…

Schiff: That can happen any day. It could happen tomorrow morning, next year, two years. You just don’t know. The fact is it will happen. Even Bernie Maddoff knew he would be found out eventually. Ponzi schemes can’t go on forever. That’s why they’re illegal. If you could make it work then it wouldn’t be illegal.

About the Interviewee

Peter Schiff is the president of Euro Pacific Capital in Darien, Connecticut. He is also a contributing commentator for Newsweek International and served as an economic advisor to Republican Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign. His book Crash Proof: How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse was published by Wiley & Sons in February of 2007. His second book, The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets: How to Keep Your Portfolio Up When the Market Is Down was published by Wiley & Sons in October of 2008.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine

The Futurist Interviews Peter Voss, Adaptive A.I. Inc.

Peter Voss

March 2008

Peter Voss is the founder of Adaptive A.I. Inc.

Futurist: What are some books or texts that influenced your thinking?

Voss: That's kind of hard to pin point because there's really a very broad spectrum of things that I read. I studied lots of philosophies but one philosophy I got very involved with was objectivism. There's a lot of things I disagree with objectivism on, but there were some really important insights in terms of how important concept formation and context is and really a theory of knowledge that I got out of that on how knowledge needs to be acquired, integrated and represented and that it isn't just a closed, logical system. I couldn't really pin point one source of inspiration. I have a long list on my Web site.

Futurist: As you know, there's a debate in the field right now as to whether an AI will be built or evolve of its own accord. Where do you fall on that? Do you think it's possible to build an AI?

Voss: I think there are two paths, one is that we just continuing developing narrow AI and the systems will become generally competent. It will become obvious how to do that. When that will happen, I don't know, or how it will come about, whether through sim bots or some DARPA challenge or something, it would be a combination of those kinds of things. But that goes fairly well out in terms of my time frame. The other approach is try to specifically engineer a system that can learn and think. That's the approach that we're taking. Absolutely I think that's possible and I think it's closer than most people think.

Futurist: When?

Voss: I would say less than five years.

Futurist: This brings us to the most important aspect of these trends in terms of our readers. How will the advent of this technology affect human civilization? Obviously, it's impossible to tell for certain because it's the future, but can you give me a best case and a worst case scenario for what you think the advent of AGI might mean for people?

Voss: I believe it will make us better people over all. It will improve our morality, health and wealth, and dramatically our longevity as well, if we choose to live longer. We don't know that for sure, but I think that there's a very good chance that it will be a positive outcome. Clearly, not everyone's going to be happy with change. There are a lot of people now who don't like mobile phones, iPods, television or whatever. But you see there's a threat, if you feel threatened by it, that's a problem. Overall, I think it will just make us more competent. Better human beings, better society. There are risks, clearly, we can't know that it won't end in tears. We don't know that. For one, it could be used incorrectly in some ways; there could be some kind of escalating warfare of some kind using AI. I would argue against that likelihood. I'm not saying it's impossible but I think machines will inherently make us more rational, and through that rationality, more moral. I mean, if people had more foresight, if they could think things through more clearly, would they go to Iraq for instance? You could maybe argue that they would have gone in with more force, or be more competent at it, but I would argue that people would better foresee the consequences of their actions. I think that much of what passes for immorality is actually irrationality and much of AI can help us think better, make better decisions.

Futurist: Is it possible that by outsourcing more human activities to artificially intelligent entities we're paving the way for our own obsolescence? For instance, could AI render the written word as we know it a functionally obsolete technology, and through that, I see an entire generation of people less informed, less cultured, possibly with an entirely different and arguably inferior value system than people who were extremely literate? You could say that Plato and Socrates saw the same thing with the advent of writing, Socrates of course said that advent of writing itself would mean that people didn't have to remember as much. But you could also say that the converse is also true and that human knowledge in general ballooned with the advent of writing. Thinking about the potential consequences of these vast amounts of mechanical intelligence and how they might affect human intelligence, human ability, and human culture, do you think that AI might render something like literary culture obsolete?

Voss: Well I think that it will radically transform it. It's hard to make a case that we would be better off without writing. Yes, people maybe don't speak as well anymore, and maybe speakers aren't valued as they were, but people can use new abilities in different ways, so other skills will become important. One of things we haven't spoken about is how will upgrade ourselves through AGI. If we suddenly develop photographic memory through our AI companion, we have access to any fact that we want to, any text that is written anywhere, anything that's accessibly on any computer network, that will allow us to do a whole bunch of other things we can't do now. So yes, the current skills that we value will fall by the wayside as technology progresses, but I think it will allow us to do greater things.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker

The Futurist Interviews Ray Kurzweil

World Future Review: What does it mean to build “new and improved” human intelligence? And where are we in terms of bringing this to reality?

Kurzweil: There are two components must be achieved to create a human-level artificial intelligence.

First, the hardware capacity of the human brain and, second, emulating the brain’s own software techniques.

There are a number of different ways to analyze what the hardware requirements are. If you take the most conservative analysis, which is 1016 calculations per second [10 million billion calculations per second or 10 billion MIPS], we’ll actually have that by next year in a supercomputer and we’ll have it for about $1000 by 2020. By 2029, that level of computation will be very inexpensive....

But the goal is not just to create a simulation. The actual goal is to understand how it works, understand its basic principles. That’s the software. We can engineer systems that don’t have the restrictions of a human brain, which, for example, has to fit into a less than one cubic foot skull that runs on a chemical substrate that sends messages at a few hundred feet per second (which is a million times slower than electronics), that computes at a mere 200 calculations per second, and so on. We won’t be limited to a billion pattern recognizers in the cerebral cortex—we could have a trillion. And if we understand the basic principles by which the brain creates intelligent behavior, we can focus and leverage it and create much more powerful systems.

I’m actually writing a new book to amplify that case called How the Mind Works—and How to Build One, which will talk about the tremendous progress since The Singularity Is Near came out in 2004 in this reverse-engineering project. Human level intelligence in machines is not going to displace us, compete with us, it’s not an invasion coming from Mars—these are tools we’re creating to basically expand ourselves, who we are. And that’s what we’ve done with tools since we’ve had tools. Ever since we picked up a stick to reach a higher branch, we’ve used it to extend our reach—the things we couldn’t otherwise do. First physically and now mentally.

World Future Review: What are the most pressing environmental issues that we should be concerned about as we move forward? And in a world where nanoengineered photovoltaic panels have eliminated fossil fuels, what will our obligation to the environment be?

Kurzweil: The first industrial revolution technologies were a compromise. They are harmful to the environment. Like, for example, fossil fuels. We are running out of energy if we limit ourselves to 19th century technologies like fossil fuels, but obviously we don’t need to do that.

We have the opportunity to move away from fossil fuels. Solar has the most headroom but there are others … [for example,] there’s also a tremendous amount of geothermal energy. There are many different renewable, decentralized, environmentally-friendly technologies that ultimately will be extremely inexpensive. There’s a 50% deflation rate to information technology (an implication of the law of accelerating returns). It’s actually about 25% in the case of solar energy—a 25% deflation rate each year—but that means that it ultimately will be very inexpensive—much less expensive than comparable fossil fuels—and it has the added advantages of being environmentally-friendly and decentralized, unlike today’s supertankers and nuclear power plants, which are centralized and therefore vulnerable to catastrophic centralized destruction. New technologies in general are decentralized, and that makes them safer. The Internet is decentralized—if a piece of it goes down, the information just routes around it.

Over the next one or two decades, there will be another food revolution. We’ll go from horizontal agriculture, which has dominated humanity for the last several thousand years, to vertical farming—basically, computer-controlled factories creating hydroponic plants for fruits and vegetables and in vitro-cloned meat, which could be engineered to be much healthier. [For example,] you could have beef with Omega 3 fats rather than saturated fat.

Same thing for housing. There’s an emerging industry of three-dimensional printing. Right now, the key features are at the microscale, but within 20 years, it will be at the nanoscale and we’ll be able to print out three-dimensional objects of extreme complexity. Today, we can print out modules to build inexpensive housing that’s very sturdy, earthquake proof, and basically snap them together Lego-style. These little modules have all the pipes and communication lines built in. One of the projects at Singularity University was to use three-dimensional printing to create low-cost housing for the developing world. We can house people very comfortably if we convert resources in the right way. Ultimately, with nanotechnology being able to produce inexpensive modules for houses as well as everything else we need, we’ll be able to do that at very low cost.

World Future Review: You recently said in a interview with H+ Magazine, “whereas we can articulate technical solutions to the dangers of biotech, there‘s no purely technical solution to a so-called unfriendly AI. We can‘t just say, ‘We‘ll just put this little software code sub-routine in our AIs, and that‘ll keep them safe.’ I mean, it really comes down to what the goals and intentions of that artificial intelligence are. We face daunting challenges.” In THE FUTURIST in 2006, you acknowledged that unlike nanotechnology, “superintelligence by its nature cannot be controlled.” Can you elaborate a little more on the risks and dangers? Also, given those risks and dangers, if there’s no real way to safeguard things from a dystopian scenario, why is strong AI desirable?

Ray Kurzweil: I don’t think we should envision it with a model of, someone’s going to create this Strong AI in a laboratory and unleash it on the world. That’s not the way it’s going to happen. We have hundreds of examples today of Narrow AI—programs doing tasks that used to be done by human intelligence but doing them better and less expensively—and the narrowness is gradually getting less narrow. And this intelligence is deeply integrated with our own already, even if, for the most part, it’s not yet in our bodies and brains. There’s going to be a continuous exponential progression of computers getting more powerful, getting smaller, and we’re going to become more and more integrated with them. And they’ve already made us smarter, and I don’t just mean as measured by IQ tests. I mean by measurement of intellectually capability of our civilization, which includes all of the things that we can do with biological and non-biological intelligence working together.

That integration is going to become more and more intimate. In 2035, you’re not going to be able to walk into a room and say, “humans on the right side, machines on the left.” It’s going to be all mixed up and integrated—one complex, dynamic, chaotic human/machine civilization. Gradually over time, the nonbiological portion of humanity’s intelligence is going to grow exponentially. The biological portion is fixed. It’s really not going to change—not to any significant degree. So, over time, nonbiological technology will predominate. But it’s still going to be one civilization with people having different philosophies and arguing about values.

I would maintain we actually have much more consensus on human values than might appear. People focus on our differences and talk about culture wars, and yes, there are certain issues, but what we all agree on is actually much more pervasive than what we disagree on. This includes a belief in progress. The idea of progress is a fairly recent concept in human history. People didn’t think in terms of progress a thousand years ago. There actually was progress, but it was so slow as to be unnoticeable.

World Future Review: There are tens of billions of devoutly religious people around the globe. How do you sell the idea of super-intelligence, technological human enhancement, and virtual immortality to a global populace who would have to give up their core religious beliefs to embrace such a future? And would traditional religious beliefs be compatible with a world governed by technology?

Ray Kurzweil: First, I think we should recognize that the major religions emerged in pre-scientific times and we need to update our philosophies based on what we’ve learned in the thousand years or so that we’ve had science. However, such ideas are not necessarily inconsistent with religious beliefs. In fact, the major religions have embraced technology and technological progress and the idea of human beings applying tools to overcome human suffering and extend life here on earth,. The major religions tend to be very pro-life and clearly support medical and scientific progress to expand human longevity. While they may not necessarily talk about radical life extension, [such concepts] are just natural extensions of the idea of human progress which the major religions do endorse. Even the pope has endorsed the idea of using science to overcome disease.

World Future Review: Speaking of e-commerce, you point to a future economic boom based on the exponentially increasing capability of computer power, coupled with decreasing cost, through the fulfillment of Moore's law. Can you tell us a little about the explosion of wealth that will follow the explosion of technology?

Ray Kurzweil: We have economic growth every year. If there’s a very slight downturn one year, we consider that a disaster and call it a recession. But there is economic growth in almost every year and all of that comes from information technology. The information industries grow 18% in constant dollars each year, despite the fact that you can get twice as much each year for the same price, because as price performance reaches a certain level, whole new applications explode. People didn’t buy iPods for $15,000 each15 years ago, which is what they would have cost. Social networks weren’t feasible six or seven years ago. And as new applications become feasible, they suddenly take off. E-books are now taking off because all the enabling factors are in place.

Every industry is gradually transforming into an information industry. Health and medicine is making that transformation now. Most of the economy will be information technology in the 2020s. … This is what’s providing economic growth. The non-information technology industries are shrinking.

World Future Review: I want to talk about something a little different, and that’s the role of creativity in a post-Singularity world. You're the author of some of the first computer programs that compose poetry and music. What place is there in a post-Singularity world for those classic works of art and literature produced by non-enhanced humans—Shakespeare and DaVinci, for example—and how will we redefine creativity and the creative process in general? What will be lost if we give up these processes to software programs?

Also, is there room in the digital future for analog processes? There’s no linear progression when it comes to artistic tools—but there are constellations of widely-varying processes that are different from—but not superior to—the others. Movies didn’t render plays obsolete, for example. What will be lost if we give up these processes in our haste to embrace a fully-immersive technological future?

Ray Kurzweil: Well, first of all, digital technology has already revolutionized the creation of art in every field, including graphic arts and music. Perhaps less so in language—although even there, certainly, research tools and other online tools are certainly helpful. But I was recently at the National Association of Music Merchants show, which I’ve gone to since 1983, and aside from the elaborately-dressed musicians and the cacophony of musical sounds that you hear on the trade show floor, it really looks and reads like a computer conference. I mean, there are some acoustic instruments, but for the most part, the instruments are very sophisticated from a technological perspective and the users are speaking in very sophisticated terms of single-processing and other computer paradigms. Same thing at a graphic arts conference. Graphic artists are using very sophisticated tools. Almost all of commercial music—at least popular music—is done by synthesizers. The digital world is doing a better and better job of emulating specific art forms that have evolved using real-world methods. It’s really just one aspect of virtual reality. I’ve been very involved with that in the musical field.

The ability of the digital world to emulate the real world is advancing and getting more and more subtle. Virtual reality today is cartoon-like, but if you look at Second Life, over the last 18 months, it’s become much more realistic. You can see where it’s headed to being very realistic and three-dimensional and full-immersion. That is the goal of the digital world: to emulate the natural world.

There are still many things that we can’t do in the digital world. You can simulate brush strokes and so on with digital tools, but you can’t yet really achieve the three-dimensional effect of an oil painting. But that’s the direction we’re headed in.

This interview was conducted by Aaron M. Cohen for World Future Review. Patrick Tucker contributed to this interview.

About the Interviewee:
Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

His many books include The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (Viking, 1999), The Singularity is Near (Viking, 2005), and his most recent, co-authored with Terry Grossman, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (Rodale, 2009). He is the co-founder (along with X Prize Foundation chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis) of Singularity University. He was also a keynote speaker at WorldFuture 2006 and WorldFuture 2010, the annual conference of the World Future Society.

The Futurist Interviews Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Democrat, 10th District of Ohio

In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council released a landmark study, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. The report lays out the possibility of a future very different from the reality to which most of the world is accustomed. Among the key possible futures:

1. U.S. influence and power will wane, and the United States will face constricted freedom of action in 2025. China and Russia will grow in influence. Wealth will also shift away from the United States toward Russia and China.

2. A broader conflict, possibly a nuclear war, could erupt between India and Pakistan. This could cause other nations to align themselves with existing nuclear powers for protection.

3. Rising world population, affluence, and shifts in Western dietary habits will increase global demand for food by 50% by 2030 (World Bank statistic). Some 1.4 billion people will lack access to safe drinking water.

As the report was published in November of 2008 in the midst of a historic financial crisis, some of these scenarios now seem not so much wild cards as prescient depictions of a near certain future. Others, in retrospect, seem further away. The once-indomitable engine of Chinese growth now seems significantly less robust. At 6% the country's GDP is scheduled to grow at half of last year's pace, but still much faster than the United States. The question becomes, which scenarios remain credible, which no-longer apply?
THE FUTURIST asked four experts—Newt Gingrich, former U.S. House speaker; Elaine C. Kamarck, a senior policy adviser for Democrat Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign; Peter Schiff, economics adviser to Republican Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign; and Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich—for their views on the report's key forecasts and what the future of the United States, Asia, and the global economy looks like now, in the wake of the global financial crisis.

THE FUTURIST: To what extent do you find these scenarios to be credible?

Kucinich: I would suggest that such reports are interesting but they’re not constructive, because they don’t allow for our ability to change the direction of events. If the United States does not take control of its economic destiny, and if the country keeps spending money on wars and allowing the accelerated creation of material wealth—either through the instrumentation of government of because of the theft of Wall Street—certainly the United States will be in a precarious position.

When it comes to the globe, we need to look at ourselves not as a nation apart from other nations but as a nation among nations. We need to come into resonance with the founding principles of this country and its first motto: E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one). We are one people, not just fifty states, but we're also one with a world that is increasingly interconnected. Why not rally around these ideas to save the world from scarcity, from drought, and from hunger? We need to do that now, not in 2025. These warnings that we get from economists, from environmentalists, from people who study global trends are warnings we should pay attention to not because they predict the future but because they give us a snapshot of what’s happening today. We can change the outcome.

THE FUTURIST: Getting more specific, what do you see as the most important trend that will shape U.S. policy over the course the next two decades?

Kucinich: The trend toward a more equitable distribution of wealth. In the last few decades, the United States has become a massive machine where all the instruments in government were aimed at accelerating the creation and accumulation of wealth. The last administration put in place more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts that went to the wealthiest 1% of the U.S. population. Our military spending is used to accelerate the accumulation wealth of the nation through war and huge amounts of defense spending. Our environmental policies deteriorated the quality of our air and water and appreciated the financial assets of companies who contaminated our environment. Our energy policies accelerated the accumulation of wealth by turning over our energy supply to the oil companies. These companies [were able to] determine the kinds of energy we had.

We've allowed insurance companies to run our health-care systems. One hundred million people in the United States are either underinsured or uninsured. Massive displacements are going on economically because people can’t afford health care.

You can look at every system of government over the last few decades and you can see how special interests have allowed the acceleration of the creation of wealth. We’re living with the culmination of lack of regulation. This lack resulted in fraud. We need to have a system that causes a more equitable distribution.

THE FUTURIST: Global collaboration seems to be one of your focal points. What sort of future opportunities do you imagine for the United States to collaborate with the developing world to improve the future?

Kucinich: We have an opportunity to stop looking at it as a world that needs to be developed. These distinctions need to be challenged. There’s a lot about the "developed" world that I don’t find particularly acceptable, such as the geography of nowhere. This is where everything looks alike, where local cultures are obliterated by concrete. This is an aspect of the so-called developed world. We need to come into rhythm with the natural world. We shouldn’t be talking about the developing world. We should be talking about the natural world.

THE FUTURIST: Do you envision a way to achieve this equilibrium you talk about and maintain the supply-side economic system?

Kucinich: We can’t sustain the system we have in place. We already know that. It’s predatory. It’s broken down—why should we revive it?

THE FUTURIST: Some might argue that supply-side economics over the last two decades has led to an increase in quality of life, especially parts of the world outside of the United States. On that note, one of the key issues the Global Trends report is how the shift to Western dietary habits in many parts of the world, particularly in Asia, is one of the primary drivers putting strain on freshwater, because as people switch to eating more meat they deplete groundwater. This speaks to a broader concern: How do you convince other people not to follow the growth path that the United States has established?

Kucinich: I think that most of the rest of the world sees that supply side economics is failure. If we want to restore our credibility with the people of other nations, we need to reject the canards of the past and start talking about human values that have proven to be sustainable. We need to set ourselves on a path where there’s a job for all, housing for all, education for all, health care for all, retirement security, clean water, clean air, a sustainable food supply, and peace.
This is not a pipe dream. All of this is achievable. We have it within our reach, but we have to change our institutions so that [those] institutions can respond and evolve with human potential.

THE FUTURIST: Which institutions in particular?

Kucinich: Every institution. Jefferson talked about the fact that institutions come from the mind of man and evolve with the mind of man. They have to change. They are our products. They didn’t make us, we made them.

THE FUTURIST: Why do you think it’s important for individuals to take their future seriously?

Kucinich: I think it’s important for individuals to live joyously. I think we need to live without fear of the future and enjoy the moment, live it to the utmost and live it with great heart and love and courage. That’s what I think we should do. If you do that, the future will take care of itself.

About the Interviewee
Dennis Kucinich is a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives, currently representing the 10th District of Ohio. He was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in the 2004 and 2008 elections. He is the recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award, an annual award bestowed by the Religious Society of Friends-affiliated organization Promoting Enduring Peace. Web site www.kucinich.house.gov.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of THE FUTURIST and director of communications for the World Future Society.

The Futurist Interviews Robert James Woolsey, former CIA director.

Robert James Woolsey

July August, 2007

Reliance on oil is a major environmental concern among industrialized nations, particularly the United States, which uses and imports more oil than any other country. Oil dependency is emerging as a major national security issue as well. Last fall, we asked former CIA director James Woolsey for his take on ending the oil era.

Futurist: Why is U.S. dependency on foreign oil so dangerous right now?

Woolsey: There are several reasons; it’s really overall dependency on oil, and the fact that much of the infrastructure for oil production and distribution in the world is outside of the United States. For example, natural gas is usually distributed within a continent. We get most of ours from either U.S. or Canadian wells via pipeline. Most other energy is local. There’s some international shipment of coal, but not a great deal, which is more cost-effective.

Oil is different because it has a lot of energy in it per unit volume. The oil infrastructure that we rely on is in the U.S. but in a lot of other countries as well, particularly the very volatile Middle East. So if you have Ahmadinejad deciding to pull 1 million barrels a day off line because he’s unhappy with us pressing him not to develop nuclear weapons, you can have oil go up to $100 per barrel or so. In Saudi Arabia, if for example Prince Nayef, the interior minister, should succeed king Abdullah someday, you’d have a Saudi king who is very close to the Wahhabi and might adopt policies that would be difficult for the United States. If you look back to February '06 when al Qaeda attacked the Abqaiq production facility in Northeastern Saudi Arabia, one has to realize that had they gotten within mortar range of that facility, they could have taken out the sulfur clearing towers. Robert McFarlane, President Reagan’s National Security advisor, tells us that would take six or seven million barrels of oil a day off line for probably over a year and quite likely send oil up to $200 per barrel.

So we don’t have control over the security either of the supply or the stability of the infrastructure they way we do over our electricity grid. Now, we have some things we need to fix about our electricity grid, some vulnerabilities, but it’s within our ability to do it. We cannot re-design the Abqaiq production facility in Saudi Arabia. So that is one major reason our dependence on foreign oil is a problem.

I think there’s another aspect to this that is difficult; Saudi Arabia made $160 billion last year [2005] exporting oil; they give several billion per year to the Wahhabis, an Islamist sect that controls religion and education in Saudi Arabia, and other Wahhabi institutions in other parts of the world such as Pakistan. Those madrassas, for instance in Pakistan, teach Pakistani children to hate Shiites, Jews, Christians, anyone who can be counted as an infidel. Depending on the Imam, some of the things they say, particularly about Shites, Jews, and homosexuals and apostates are essentially genocidal. That is really al Qaeda’s ideology as well. The Wahhabis and al Qaeda disagree about the legitimacy of the Saudi regime so they’re bitter enemies. But the underlying beliefs that are being taught around the world in those Wahhabi institutions are essentially al Qaeda beliefs. The result of is that the war on terror is the only war the United States has fought, with the obvious exception of the civil war, in which we pay for both sides. This is not a good plan. This current year we will borrow something on the order of $320 billion dollars, nearly a billion dollars a day, to import oil. Because a share of that does go to Wahhabi institutions around the world, I think it’s fair to say we are in a situation similar to the stated in the old comic strip Pogo, "I’ve met the enemy, and he is us."

Borrowing $320 billion dollars a year, more or less, is not good for the stability of the dollar. At some point, people are going to start balking at paying our IOUs, unless we start paying higher interest rates. And if interest rates go up, that can affect our economic health. And we haven’t gotten to global warming yet and oil’s contribution to that. So when you look at all of these factors together. I think you have to conclude that we have a serious problem with our oil reliance.

Now, we would not do anything at all useful by stifling our purchases from Saudi Arabia and buying from Mexico and Canada. That would just mean somebody else would buy more from Saudi Arabia or the Persian Gulf and our boycott would have no effect. So you don’t do anything by shifting trade patterns. What you have to do is reduce reliance on oil. I think alternative liquid fuels such as ethanol and butanol and diesel from waste products and with electricity, particularly in the form of plug-in hybrid automobiles, which you charge overnight and then drive for miles on cheap off-peak electricity, those are all positive steps that can help substantially.

Futurist: What obstacles stand in the way of Western nations, particularly the United States, reducing their dependency on foreign oil?

Woolsey: If you remember, we got interested in alternative fuel firms like the Synfuels Corporation in the late seventies and then in 1985, the Saudi’s dropped the oil down to $5 a barrel and bankrupted the Synfuels Corporation. The good news is that they bankrupted the Soviet Union, too, but they certainly undercut alternative fuel efforts. People got interested in alternative fuels again in the early nineties, then in the late nineties, oil dropped down to $10 a barrel and people lost interest, again. One of the things that we have to do is make sure that this rollercoaster effect can’t happen again.

Some people think it will be much more difficult in the future because the Saudi Arabian oil fields could be peaking, if not now then soon. We will also have huge demand, not only from the West but from India and China as they start to produce middle classes that drive cars. So the Saudis might not be able to drop the price to five or ten dollars a barrel by turning on their excess capacity, but they might be able to drop it to $20 per barrel. Most of the better of these alternative fuels are only really viable, (as far as we can see) if oil is say $35 per barrel or more. The one that’s viable even below that is electricity, because off peak, overnight electricity in many parts of the United States sells for between two to four cents per kilowatt hour. That is the equivalent to about a penny a mile driving where as gasoline is in the range of ten to 20 cents a mile at today's price. However much the Saudis might be able to drop the price of oil by turning on excess capacity, I doubt if they would be able to undercut off peak electricity in price.

But one way to ensure that is to make sure some of these other fuels, such as diesel from waste and cellulosic ethanol or butanol, have a chance to develop without the Saudis bankrupting them. We also need a different structure for subsidies. Today, ethanol is being subsidized even though it doesn’t need to be with oil that’s $60-$70 per barrel. What we might do is say, no subsidies unless oil drops to say $40 dollars a barrel. You start with small subsidies and then the subsidies get larger as the price of oil goes down. Now, most people are not forecasting oil to go below $40 a barrel now, so this might be an easier thing to implement. It would essentially be an insurance policy against the Saudis doing what they did in ‘85 and what happened again in the late 1990s.

Let me return to the potential for hybrid technology in cars, particularly plug-in hybrids. There’s nothing to keep a car from being both a hybrid and a flexible-fuel vehicle, sometimes it's driving all electric, sometimes it’s driving as a hybrid, and it may be that instead of the liquid fuel part of its energy being supplied by gasoline, it might be supplied by e-85 ethanol whether it’s butanol or renewable diesel. My Prius today gets just under 50 miles per gallon, but if that were to become a plug-in Prius, with six times the capacity battery, and I could drive it about twenty miles before it goes into its regular hybrid mode, then I could get a little over 100 miles per gallon.

Now, if the liquid fuel that I’m using were e-85, because the hybrid is also a flexible fuel vehicle, I would getting over 500 miles per gallon of petroleum product. That is not all that far off because we know how to make e-85. It’s on sale at several hundred stations in the United States. We know how to make flexible fuel vehicles; we’ve got millions on the road. We know how to make hybrids, and, at least in California, people are already upgrading hybrids to be plug-in hybrids, so none of this requires a Manhattan project to invent something entirely new; it’s a matter of getting things into production that we already essentially understand how to do.

Futurist: What effect do you think energy independence might have on other nations, particularly nations that export a great deal of oil, most specifically Iran and Nigeria?

Woolsey: Well, they will have to get work. The first thing I would do with any country that says, ‘Oh my goodness, our economy is going to be ruined if we can’t sell oil,' is I would take them to visit Israel. Israel now has a GNP per capita of $18,000 a year even though Israel is on some of the poorest land in the Middle East and has essentially no oil or gas whatever. What they do, unlike a lot of these other countries, is allow women to educate themselves; they pay attention to technology; they invest. It may well be the case that Iran or Saudi Arabia, or even countries in other parts of the world like Russia who depend heavily on exporting expensive oil, would have to get to work the way the Israelis have, the Japanese have, and other countries with minimal natural resources have who have built modern societies with highly educated and industrious people.

Futurist: In his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (March 30, 2006), Milton Copulos remarked, "Without Oil, our economy could not function, and therefore protecting our sources of oil is a legitimate defense mission, and the current military operation in Iraq is part of that mission." To what extent do you agree with that statement, and to what extent do you think protecting our energy sources factors into foreign and military policy?

Woolsey: I agree with it a little bit, but if all we needed was the oil the simple thing to do would have been to buy it from Saddam Hussein, he was perfectly willing to sell it. If he hadn’t been an absolutely terrible dictator who was responsible for the deaths of close to two million people over the last two decades, this war would never have been contemplated. We’ll always have to have substantial armed forces, we would still need them if the majority of our oil came from domestic sources. Up until the 1970s, world oil prices were effectively set by the Texas railroad commission but the United States had a very substantial armed forces. We didn’t start having armed forces when we started importing a lot of oil.

Futurist: How high should energy independence rank as a national security priority?

Woolsey: I don’t call it energy independence because there’s nothing wrong with our importing natural gas from Canada, and we don’t import coal, or hydroelectric power or solar or wind or whatever. It's really an oil problem. It’s a natural gas problem for Europe because they’re not getting their natural gas from a good neighbor like Canada; they’re getting it from Russia. Russia’s playing games by giving better deals on natural gas to dictatorships than to budding democracies like Georgia and Ukraine. So Europe has an oil and gas dependence problem. For us, it’s pretty much entirely an oil problem. I think this ought to rank very high on our needs because it constrains other things we can do, for example, we really would like, as would some other countries, to use the UN Security Council to authorize us to stop the genocide by Sudan in Darfur. The reason we can’t do that is because China will veto it, the reason China will veto it is because China has a major oil deal with Sudan. It would be nice to have the Security Council lean on Iran to stop the enrichment of uranium, leading to nuclear weapons capability. But Russia and China are both balking at that, and the reason China is balking again is principally oil.

Oil tends to concentrate power in a small number of hands, unless it comes into a democracy such as Canada and Norway. Canada and Norway are the only two oil exporters in the top dozen or so in the world that are not dictatorships or autocratic kingdoms. More than 60% of the governments in the world are democracies, but very few of those actually export oil. So OPEC is largely composed of dictatorships and kingdoms and a number of the other big exporters that aren’t OPEC like Russia are increasingly dictatorial as well. This is a foreign policy problem.

Robert James Woolsey Jr. was director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1993-1995. He is currently the chairman of the board of Freedom House, the chairman of the advisory boards of the Clean Fuels Foundation and the New Uses Council, a Trustee of the Center for Strategic & International Studies and vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker

The Futurist Interviews Rodney Brooks, CTO of iRobot.

Rodney Brooks

March-April 2008

Rodney Brooks is the former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and CTO of iRobot.

Futurist: What would you say is the principle obstacle before general AI?

Brooks: It's nice to think of it in terms of being a single technical hurdle. But, I don't believe that's the case. There's a whole raft of things we don't understand yet. We don't understand how to organize it, we don't understand what its purpose is. We don't understand how to connect to perception, we don't understand how to connect it to action. We've made lots of progress in AI. We've got lots of AI systems out there that affect our everyday lives all the time. But general AI, its early days, early early days.

Futurist: Looking ten to twenty years in the future or earlier, give me a headline. What's the big AI development that's going to change the way people think about the field.

Brooks: If you went back to 1985 and you told people they would have lots computers in their house, twenty years from now. They would have thought that was crazy. Where would we put those big boxes with the spinning discs? That was the conception of computers at that time. I think what people are going to see in their houses in fifteen or twenty years are robots, many robots. There's already more than two million people in the U.S. that have cleaning robots....

Futurist: Well thanks to you..

Brooks: They're simple little things. I think we're going to see lots, lots more robots. There are so many big companies involved in robots now that, twenty years from now, we'll look back and say, oh, yea, we've got robots.

Futurist: So you think the most visible and obvious manifestation of AI will be in the form of beings that operate in physical space.

Brooks: I think the biggest manifestation that people will associate with AI is going to be robots but the reality is people who use Google are using a big AI system all the time. You book an airline flight online, the airline's routing is written by an AI lab, an AI lab at MIT is writing such things. So, already, in people's everyday lives, they're using AI systems all the time, but they don't think of them as AI systems, they think of them as a web application, a cell phone, a map, but they're AI systems.

Futurist: Do you see any negative consequences from the way we use AI right now? You mentioned Google, many people use Google to access information, but you could make the argument that it has a negative affect on research skills, on critical thinking ability.

Brooks: When I was a boy, in elementary school, there was a big fuss about using ball point pens, even fountain pens. We had to know to use a nib and ink because, they said, 'if we lost that skill later in life, we would not be able to get along.' People keep saying, there losing that skill and this. They're gaining other skills and their adapting to modern life. I just don't buy it. People can become fantastic at using Google and getting information. Maybe a different set of people were fantastic at using other skills, but it's a set of survival skills and people that are better at it will prosper.

Futurist: What sort of stock do you put in the notion of runaway AI?

Brooks: I don't think we're going to have runaway AI in any sort of intentional form. I think there may well be accidents along the way where systems fail in horrible ways because of a virus, bug or something, but I don't believe that AI with malicious intent makes sense. People using systems as a vehicle may have malicious intent, but I don't think malicious intent from the AI itself is something that I'm going to lose sleep over in my lifetime. Now, 500 years from now, maybe. But I don't think in my lifetime it's going to be anything like an issue.

Futurist: Obviously we would hope that any artificially intelligent entity would reflect our values, but we're still in a process of deciding those values. Isn't that a key issue?

Brooks: We are the ones who are going to be building these systems so we are unlikely to be building ones we don't like. We could build really dangerous trains, but we don't. We just don't do it.

Futurist: How would you frame this issue for a general audience, what do you think is the big message that a lot of people aren't getting.

Brooks: You have to understand that technology will change the world around you, will change your life. Every so often, I go to the world economic forum in Davos in January. The industry and government leaders bring some of us technology leaders as entertainment, on the side. My argument is, 'we're the ones who are going to change the world you're going to have to deal with. You're struggling with digital rights management and copyright, that's because of technology.' But they don't want to hear about the technology even though technology is going to change the world.

Futurist: If you could give any advice to the young people who are going to be living in this world that you're creating, what you tell them? What advice, similarly, would you give to old people who aren't so used to change?

Brooks: Well the first thing I would say to the young people is that there's been a very unfortunate impression cast that jobs in IT are being exported overseas. In fact we're facing a tremendous shortage of skilled, Information Technology workers. The smartest thing you can do is major in computer science in college and you are guaranteed employment for life. I keep having parents come up to me saying, 'I heard all the jobs are going to India.' Not true, so, young people, go into computer science. You will be well served. Second thing is, one can be scared of technology changes, or one can think of change as opportunity. I like to think of change as opportunity. How can I do things more interesting? How can I do them better?

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker

The Futurist Interviews Sir Arthur C. Clarke

Before his death in March at age 90, Sir Arthur C. Clarke greeted many visitors from around the world. Among them was Venezuelan futurist and transhumanist scholar José Cordeiro, who here recounts his meetings with Clarke in Sri Lanka.

Like many people, from the very young to the very old, I was fascinated by the ideas and writings of Sir Arthur C. Clarke. He was a very prolific writer, with close to 100 books and more than 1,000 articles. He was also involved in many ways with the film industry, from his landmark 2001: A Space Odyssey with director Stanley Kubrick in 1968 to numerous documentaries about space and the future. An inventor and a futurist who met presidents, popes, and entrepreneurs alike, he was also a longtime member of the World Future Society's Global Advisory Council.

On December 16, 2007, Clarke had "completed 90 orbits around the Sun," as he would say in his famous Egograms, and a special video was prepared by his personal assistant, Nalaka Gunawardene, for the Internet. Clarke's thoughtful and witty 90th Birthday Reflections video became an instant success on the Internet. In it, he said that he had "no regrets and no more personal ambitions," but expressed three wishes for humanity:

1. Evidence of extraterrestrial life, since he always believed that we are not alone in the universe: "ET, call us!"

2. Cleaner energy sources for the future of civilization, here and beyond Earth.

3. Lasting peace, both in his adopted Sri Lanka and in the world.

He also explained that "I want to be remembered most as a writer- one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well."

Clarke liked the number three, and his Three Laws of the Future helped to make him famous. He started with just one law in his 1962 book Profiles of the Future. The second law was initially just an observation that was called a law by others, but then, in the 1972 edition of Profiles, Clarke added a third law, rounding out the Three Laws of the Future:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Clarke often joked that Newton had three laws, and so three were also enough for him. Additionally, his friend and colleague Isaac Asimov, with whom he sometimes competed, had his Three Laws of Robotics. However, in the 1999 edition of Profiles of the Future, Clarke added an additional law: "For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert."

Days before he died, Clarke reviewed the final manuscript of his last novel, The Last Theorem, cowritten with American author Frederik Pohl and expected to be published later in 2008.

Meeting Sir Arthur

To meet Sir Arthur C. Clarke in person was a real pleasure and an unforgettable experience. One could feel his genius and imagination when talking to him, listening to him, seeing him, reading him.

After setting up a satellite connection to contact him, I had the pleasure to talk to Clarke several times, and he invited me to visit him in his home in Sri Lanka. We met in 2004 and 2005 in his "Ego Chamber," which is decorated with many artifacts, from the dinosaur age to the space age. Here are excerpts from our conversations.

José Cordeiro: What do you think about the future?

Arthur C. Clarke: As others have said, the future is no longer what it used to be!

Cordeiro: What do you think about religion?

Clarke: Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses. I am afraid to be struck by lightning one day while saying this. [laughing]

Cordeiro: Do you think that there might be an afterlife?

Clarke: No, I don't believe in an afterlife.

Cordeiro: Do you believe in reincarnation?

Clarke: No, I don't see any mechanism that would make it possible. However, I'm always paraphrasing J. B. S. Haldane: "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine."

Cordeiro: What do you think about physical immortality?

Clarke: I have written a lot about it in my books. In fact, in Profiles of the Future, I wrote that we might conquer death by the end of the twenty-first century.

Cordeiro: Are you writing a new book?

Clarke: Yes, I have been working on The Last Theorem. I have written over a hundred pages. It is about Fermat's theorem, which a young British mathematician, Andrew Wiles, proved over 300 years after Fermat. It is quite fascinating that something simple took so long to prove.

Cordeiro: And are you also writing a book about science fiction?

Clarke: Well, The Last Theorem is science fiction, in a sense. But what is science fiction? That is a good question. And how is it different from fantasy? My definition of fantasy is something which we would like to happen but it can't in the real world, and science fiction is something which we would like to happen and it probably will.

Cordeiro: Have you revised your famous laws of the future?

Clarke: They stand as they are. Some technologies were pure magic only 20 years ago, and they are reality today, just like your digital camera and recorder.

Cordeiro: Would you like to add a new future law now?

Clarke: No, I don't think so. Has Newton added any new laws?

Cordeiro: Do you believe in the accelerating pace of technology?

Clarke: Yes, my best example is the CD-ROM. It is my favorite example of the first law. I still remember the first tape recorders we had years ago. Another incredible example is mobile telephones.

Cordeiro: Are you familiar with the NBIC (Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno) idea?

Clarke: It is quite possible that there will be a convergence of several technologies in the near future.

Cordeiro: How about nanotechnology and space elevators?

Clarke: I have talked about Carbon 60 (C60), Buckyballs, and Fullerenes that can be made commercially and will make travel to space cheap. Bucky [Buckminster Fuller] was a good friend, and the last time I saw him was in this room.

Cordeiro: How much would it cost to go to space with such new technologies?

Clarke: It will cost nothing to go into space.

Cordeiro: No cost at all to go into space?

Clarke: Well, OK. Just $100 to go up, but you could get a refund on the way back! [laughs]

Cordeiro: When do you think that this will happen?

Clarke: I will give you the same answer that I give everybody. Just a few years after everybody stops laughing!

Cordeiro: In 1999, you predicted clones by 2004. What has happened?

Clarke: Well, it was only a guess, but some people have claimed that it has already happened. In 1999 it seemed like a reasonable guess; it may be even an accurate guess, and we don't know yet.

Cordeiro: How about your 100th anniversary in space?

Clarke: Absolutely in 2017.

Cordeiro: But do you really plan to celebrate in space?

Clarke: Well, it depends on my health. I am suffering from postpolio syndrome.

Cordeiro: How do you feel physically?

Clarke: I am doing fine except for the postpolio syndrome, which means I can't really walk anymore and I have to sleep 15 hours per day.

Cordeiro: Will some future technology be able to cure it?

Clarke: Some doctors have worked on some electrical stimulation in paralyzed babies. I am quite sure someday that stimulation will overcome such problems.

Cordeiro: What do you think is the greatest achievement of humankind during the last century?

Clarke: We have finally traveled outside the Earth, we have gone to the Moon and beyond. We are now able to leave the cradle in our planet.

Cordeiro: And what do you think is the greatest failure of our civilization?

Clarke: We have traveled to the Moon and then we stopped. We landed on the Moon in 1969 but only a few years later abandoned it. We should continue!

Cordeiro: Which is your own favorite book?

Clarke: That is a difficult question. Maybe The Songs of Distant Earth (1986) and then Childhood's End (1953).

Cordeiro: Do you believe that there is life in the universe?

Clarke: I think it is quite common. Probably even Mars had life before!

Cordeiro: But how about really intelligent life?

Clarke: Sure, and the proof is that they are not here! The best proof that there's intelligent life in the universe is that it hasn't come here.

Cordeiro: When will we make contact with them?

Clarke: Well, we are still searching for intelligent life here on Earth. Who knows? Who knows? I mean, it could be tomorrow! I don't believe it has happened because people could not keep quiet about it.

Cordeiro: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of humanity?

Clarke: I believe one should be optimistic because there is a chance of a good selffulfilling prophecy. It is dangerous to be pessimistic because that could become a selffulfilling prophecy, but a bad one. However, one should avoid being naïvely optimistic.

Cordeiro: Do you think that time is linear or cyclical?

Clarke: Everything that can happen will happen. There are billions of universes proliferating everywhere.

Cordeiro: So, do you believe in parallel universes?

Clarke: I don't "believe," but it is a possibility since in a practically infinite universe almost anything is theoretically possible to happen somewhere.

Cordeiro: And, some of those parallel universes could have cyclical time?

Clarke: Yes, yes. In one of those universes I shoot you now, you see, and we end this interview. [laughing out loud]

Cordeiro: Fine, I get your point. Thank you so much for your time, and live long and prosper.

Clarke: Good luck, and thanks to you.

That was a witty way to say that the time was up. Clarke never lost his British sense of humor. After we met, we stayed in touch, and Sir Arthur even invited me to visit his scubadiving resort in southern Sri Lanka (which was badly damaged during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami). While he could, he loved floating underwater while diving, which he believed was close to the feeling of weightlessness in space.

The Biggest Big-Picture Thinker

Sir Arthur C. Clarke was a lover of both outer space and the deep water; a student of both the past and the future. He believed that we are not the end of "creation." In his view, life is an integral part of the universe and will continue to evolve. We have to carefully transcend ourselves, or we will finish the way of the trilobites and dinosaurs. Just like other earlier lifeforms are history today, humans might be history tomorrow.

In 2005, I organized a major international conference in Venezuela about the future of humanity, and Clarke accepted to be a keynote speaker. Unfortunately, because of his health condition, he could not travel from South Asia to South America, but he agreed to have a live videoconference during TransVision 2005: Towards a New World. Due to technical problems, however, we had to settle for audio only, but Clarke spoke brilliantly, with hope and optimism for humanity in the long term. He reminded us that many future prophecies are selffulfilling, and that is the reason why we have to be positive about the future. I asked him a final question: "If you could tell people one thing, just one thing, what would that be?"

"Don't panic!" was his brief and sharp answer.

I think that he was right. We have to avoid panic and keep building a better future, carefully, here and beyond Planet Earth (or Planet Ocean, as he liked to say). The time of humanity's childhood is ending, and our "Carbonbased biped" species should mature into a higher, postbiological level.

Sir Arthur, we Earthlings will always remember you as one of our great prophets of the future. Hopefully, we will meet again in 3001, but far beyond our little cradle, and in a much more advanced posthuman civilization. After all, that is the year of 3001: The Final Odyssey, when one of the original astronauts of 2001: A Space Odyssey comes back to life after cryopreservation in space. In the meantime, remember: Don't panic!

"Superman" of Futurism

On March 18, the Foundation named for him reported with quiet dignity, "After a prolific and esteemed career, Sir Arthur has passed away in Sri Lanka."

Best known as the author of the short story on which the film 2001: A Space Odyssey was based, Sir Arthur C. Clarke was both an inspired writer and a source of inspiration for others.

In a poll of futurists for the Encyclopedia of the Future (Macmillan, 1996), Clarke was ranked sixth of the 100 most influential futurists in history-ahead of Jules Verne and Isaac Newton.

He was an early supporter of the World Future Society, participating in its first conference, purchasing books about the future from the Society's specialty bookstore, and ultimately joining its Global Advisory Council.

Society founder Edward Cornish noted in his series on the Society's founding that "Arthur C. Clarke not only joined but sent in a membership for Stanley Kubrick, the producer/director of 2001: A Space Odyssey."

Described as a "prophet" for the space age for his inspiring stories and meticulous scientific perspective, Clarke was one of very few sciencefiction writers equally gifted on both the science side and the fiction side of the genre.

He was also modest; he demonstrated a graceful integrity when he wrote a letter to the editor to THE FUTURIST to correct another author, who had inadvertently credited him with "inventing" the solar sail-a sunpowered spacecraft he described in his story "Sunjammer."

Clarke could justifiably be described as the Superman of futurism, and not just for his longevity against extreme physical challenges. According to newspaper obituaries, he had suffered from postpolio syndrome for the past two decades, succumbing to respiratory ailments.

But his forward-looking spirit led him to "predict" in his 1999 book Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! that he would celebrate his onehundredth birthday as a space tourist, one of the first guests in the Hilton Orbiter.

In that regard, Clarke's goaldriven life calls to mind that of Superman star Christopher Reeve, who set a goal to walk again by age 50 after the riding accident that paralyzed him. The decision to strive for a goal is, in many ways, a more heroic act than achieving it.-Cynthia G. Wagner

Edward Cornish Remembers Fellow WFS Member and Futurist, Arthur C. Clarke

Sir Arthur C. Clarke played a key role in the founding of the World Future Society and was a member of the Society's Global Advisory Council at the time of his death.

During the 1960s, I happened to read his remarkable book Profiles of the Future, which carefully assessed the possibilities and impossibilities of the human future. I noticed that he had dedicated this book to his "colleagues in the Institute of Twenty-first Century Studies."

I wrote Clarke inquiring about the Institute, since I wanted to make contact with other people interested in the future. Clarke responded that there was no such Institute in reality. He was simply referring to his colleagues who shared his interest in the future.

His kind letter got me thinking about the possibility of establishing an association for people interested in the future, and that led about a year later to the founding of the World Future Society in October 1966.

The first regular issue of the Society's magazine, THE FUTURIST (JanuaryFebruary 1967), featured Clarke's book Profiles of the Future, and by the end of 1967, the Society was selling not only that Profiles but also other books about the future to Society members. Clarke turned out to be the Society's best customer. His books had to be carefully shipped half way around the world to his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka, but the Society's staff was delighted to provide him with this service.

When the Society held its first conference in 1971, Clarke told me he couldn't be listed on the program due to an agreement with his lecture agency. But he came unannounced and participated actively in the conference.

Clarke maintained a lively interest in the Society through the rest of his life. He was a good friend and an inspiration to us all.

-Edward Cornish, founder of the World Future Society

The Futurist Interviews Stephen Abram, Canadian Library Association

Stephen Abram

July-August 2008 Volume 42, No. 4

Stephen Abram is past president of the Canadian Library Association. We asked him about the future of publishing.

FUTURIST: In your talk on the future of publishing, you brought up the notion that there are two roads:, the road of trepidation, decline, extinction or the road of embracing the future. Let's assume everyone wants to go with B. What's the next step, for someone like a traditional book publisher?

Abram: What needs to happen is to stop telling people and to start listening, to start working from the reader's the user’s, the experiencer's contact in. Then they can start creating the products that actually match the behaviors of their user base. In many markets, the traditional publishing formats are misaligned with what needs to happen. So, for instance, if you're a medical publisher, do you want your cardiac surgeon to walk into your room before he does your surgery and say, 'I read the article last night'? No. You want him to have had a thousand experiences putting his hand in someone's chest and knowing what it feels like. It should be just like an experience a car mechanic has where he can put his hand on the hood of your car and say it's the manifold because he's seen it, heard it, smelled it a thousand times. So, how do you create an experience context where you put content that can be read into that space? How can you create content that actually aligns with learning behaviors? So, if you've got a publishing program to support the doctor, and streaming media to show what's going on, this? is infinitely superior when combined with text than just text. It means taking these Web 2.0 environments and incorporating what we today call YouTube, but really the whole streaming media package, the podcasting package, knowing that certain people learn better by hearing it--such as politicians; certain people learn better by seeing it, like surgeons; certain people learn better, like lawyers; and there are three-dimensional learners like engineers who? deal better with a visual interface that assembles the information in front of them. So if you work from your end-user in and you keep your mind open to the way they do things, then it makes a big difference. If you're looking at K-12 learners, where they haven't been funneled into very narrow learning styles or supporting very narrow learning styles, then you see that most of the textbook publishing has moved to Bloom’s taxonomy of learning styles and they're trying to use it all.

FUTURIST: Along those lines, a lot of people--writers--would say, 'I don't know how good I look on camera, don't even know how well I speak.' Nabokov himself once said, 'I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.' A lot of people would say that when you put in too many mediums, it clouds the focus and it gets in the way of people being able to exercise their expertise. This follows Andrew Keen's notion that so much participation, so much inviting the user into the experience creates a cacophony of people without information sharing uninformed opinions. What can be done to ensure this remains a process of authentic information creation, and what can be done to preserve expertise in an environment where everyone can act like an expert?

Abram: There are two questions that I hear: one is the uninformed opinion, which I'll address second. The other is, 'how do we create this kind of stuff? I don't look good enough, I don't sound good enough.’ Well that's why we have other professionals, it's why we have actors. It's why we have good looking people doing the news. There's nothing wrong with that. You need writers to put the words in their mouths. When movies went to talkies, think of all those silent film actors who totally failed because they had squeaky voices.

FUTURIST: A “Singing in the Rain” scenario....

Abram: Now, as for people sharing their uninformed opinions, that's part of the Internet as conversations. It's hard to lie or be incomplete on the Internet--by that I mean, you can put all sorts of stuff into Wikipedia and it gets corrected very rapidly. Remember that wonderful Nature study that showed that Wikipedia had the same error rate as Britannica. Britannica has what, 700,000 articles and Wikipedia has 8 million? I'm not against Britannica. It no doubt has very high-quality content for the narrow, very small part of the world it covers, but let's take an incredibly difficult and broad topic like Islam. Look at the entry in Wikipedia for Islam and you will find nothing but complaints about print sources on that where some editor decided what would be an appropriate way to try to learn something. Whereas the community-developed message on Islam in Muslim in Wikipedia delivers a much better organized understanding--detailing whether you're following Mohamed, Mohamed's brother Kadia, and how the different facets of Islam develop. It doesn't have the warfare that it had in the early days. I do worry about people spreading misinformation. But I also believe that the role of society and peer pressure seems to work to adjust the socially-driven Web. An informed opinion means you're open to all points of view. Some people's evaluation methodology for content is, is it the right point of view? We've set up our education to have kids make their own judgments now, instead of installing Point of View 1.0 into their heads.

FUTURIST: All of these points of view create a broader perspective, but, in touching on something that Douglas Rushkoff said...in many ways, the people doing the authoring in the 21st Century are the programmers. This is to say, that the ability to write Web applications has become more valuable than any particular piece of verbal content carried on an application.

Abram: If you ask somebody like Jimmy Wales, he would make a big distinction between the people who wrote media wiki, like himself, and the people who are providing the content. Which is more powerful? Infinitely more powerful? the people providing the content, not the programmers. Now the programmers are powerful in that they create the medium for content to be linked. But once their work is done, it becomes a matter of incremental improvements. At some point, another discontinuous change.

FUTURIST: Bottom line, you think it will still be possible to make money from words later this century?

Abram: It's like what's happened with music. Originally, you made your money from sheet music, then performances, then you made your money from LPs, and now it's gone back to making money from concert tours. More people in the nonfiction space make their money from consulting, teaching. The books are objects that are part of an ecology that includes performance, whether you're a teacher, a consultant, a marketer. Why do I write a blog? I have something to say, but I also have a context in which I say it, which is my software company. I have an ecology I contribute to which is the institutions I partner with to lead them into this next generation of the way the world is going to work.

FUTURIST: Okay, let's talk about that. It's twenty years in the future. I'm an author. That means I either have someone else read my material or--if I look okay and read okay--I read myself to make multi-media presentations.

Abram: Reading isn't going to go away, but it's only one aspect. Probably, it will be some combination of reading, visual conversations, lessons. Your authoring is contributing to a corpus that is significantly larger than it is now electronically. Most of the important stuff will have been converted twenty years from now. We can convert the entire Library of Congress for $9 billion right now, which, in terms of national priorities, is only 5 weeks of Iraqi conflict. It's doable. It used to be undoable. The corpus, the ability to create cultural context is going to change the nature of how culture is expressed when you look at culture as a cultural activity. So 50% of everything ever written in Chinese has already been converted and put into a central vault. They're 5 years away from almost 100% of all Chinese documentation and books being converted...

FUTURIST: That's a wonderful statistic...

Abram: When you look at what project Alouette in Canada, which is doing all the Canadian stuff, the Open Content alliance, the Google Digital Vault, the private sector vs. public sector vs. charitable initiatives including the Guttenberg project, the question is, is your tree falling in the forest more likely to be heard because it's been digitized, and at what point twenty years from now is it likely to be discovered? If it's digitized in such a way that you can actually find it beyond free text, using taxonomic, ontological search engines that actually find things, or behavioral context, tagging context, or somebody discovered who you trust and you say, okay, this person, who is an amazing person, really understands the nanotechnology of creating artificial eyes, recommends this article from 1962, will we be able to find that sort of stuff? I think publishers in the future are more likely to be guides. New publishing will be discovered not in the published frame work but in things like reprints. The entertainment object, like fiction, video, etc., is very different. When we look at significant portions of the scholarly space they will no longer publish, because they can get all the grant money they want. They have no issues with tenor. If you're in the genome, nanotech, or any of these bleeding edge disciplines, the twenty people who know what you know are so far out there that looking in the published literature is 10 years out of date. If it's juried, it's so far back that no one really cares. They're out reading blogs and sending out articles within their own social space and community of practice that are electronic and global. 20 years from now, that will be significantly more traceable in a social context. We're seeing the beginning of it in these white-label social networks, more developed in Facebook and Myspace and mixing in Bebo because they're public social spaces, but when we look at Ning and the private social spaces, the ability to put private conversation and bring in public conversation and public content into that space, it's fascinating......People are trying to deal with the moment right now.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker

The Futurist Interviews Steve Omohundro, Center for Complex Systems Research, Self-Aware Systems

Steve Omohundro

March 2008

Steve Omohundro is the co-founder of the Center for Complex Systems Research, Self-Aware Systems

Futurist: Tell me a little about yourself and your various companies.

Omohundro: My company is called Self-Aware Systems and I started it a couple of years ago to help search engines search better. We built a system for reading lips and a system for controlling robots. The particular angle that I started working on is systems that write their own programs. Human programmers today are a disaster. Microsoft Windows for instance crashes all the time. Computers should be much better at that task, and so we develop systems that I call self-improving artificial intelligence, so that's AI systems that understand their own operation, watch themselves work, and envision what changes to themselves might be improvements and then change themselves.

Futurist: Sounds like Niles Barcellini; he made the point that computers should be much better at writing programs than humans could ever be because it's their own language. So, thinking about Artificial intelligence and where it may go in the next five to ten years, what do you envision?

Omohundro: Well, it's really difficult to use precise time-scales because many of us feel there are a few key ideas that AI needs. AI has been a field that has over-promised and under-delivered for fifty years, and so its very dangerous to say, 'oh, by this date, such and such will happen.' There are still some key concepts underlying intelligence that we don't yet understand. But when you look at technological power, I don't know if you've seen Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near, he's analyzed trends in computational power and also trends in our ability to model the human brain and in the next few decades, we will most likely have the power to simulate brains on inexpensive computer hardware. That gives a base-point that says, hey, we're probably going to get something on the level on the intelligence of people, in the next few decades. What the consequences of that are is the main point of this conference.

Futurist: There are two schools, one that says you can build a human-level AI and another that says that one will evolve naturally. Your work seems to suggest that it has to be B, because a computer can write its own code better than a can a person, much like people can speak better than reptiles can. Are you an advocate of B?

Omohundro: It's a complicated issue, the history of AI started with a dichotomy between the neats and the scruffies, where the neats wanted a clear, mathematical description that used theorem proving, the scruffies were in favor of throwing circuits together like artificial neurons. Bayesian nets are good example of systems that have this ability to learn, but the approach is rational and conceptually oriented. That's the direction I'm going in, it's a merger of the two schools. The kinds of systems I build are very carefully thought out and have a powerful rational basis to them, but much of the knowledge and structure comes from learning, their experience of the world and their experience of their own operation.

Futurist: Do you think that they learn? How do you chart their learning?

Omohundro: There are a ton of systems today that use learning. The very best speech recognition systems are an example. You have a training phase; you speak to it. You use some known passages and it adapts its internal model, and it adapts its internal model to the particular characteristics of your voice. Systems that don't do that, that have one model that fits all people, tend to be very rigid and don't work very well.

Futurist: What do you think the growth in AI capability might mean for humans?

Omohundro: These changes are so momentous and so big, we have to focus full attention to what's going on. There are two components to what we need. One, we have to build into the logic of this technology. We have to know, if we build a certain type of structure, how is it likely to behave? Secondly, we need to introspect. We need to explore the depths of our human preferences, figure out what kind of a world we want. We have to create a vision that captures the things that make us most human so the technology doesn't just go off in some direction that we're not happy with.

Futurist: There's a theory that we'll build safeguards into the systems as we develop them and, as a result of that, they will necessarily contain or exhibit our values. But we, as species, have a lot of work to do to determine those values. What do you think is a best-case and worst-case scenario for a fully powerful AI? what might go horribly wrong, what might go fantastically right?

Omohundro: I think the worst case would be an AI that takes off on its own, its own momentum, on some very narrow task and works to basically convert the world economy and whatever matter it controls to focus on that very narrow task, that it, in the process, squeezes out much of what we care most about as humans. Love, compassion art, peace, the grand visions of humanity could be lost in that bad scenario. In the best scenario, many of the problems that we have today, like hunger, diseases, the fact that people have to work at jobs that aren't necessarily fulfilling, all of those could be taken care of by machine, ushering in a new age in which people could do what people do best, and the best of human values could flourish and be embodied in this technology.

Futurist: You say the advent of AI could allow us to push aside a lot of the tasks that we sometimes don't have the patience for, tasks that are too rigorous or too arduous. Do you think there might be something ennobling in doing some of those tasks, something that we might miss out on by virtue of not having to do those things? There are some activities, of course, that could truly be thrown to the wayside, but I'm not sure I'm qualified to know which from which, and I'm not sure I know who is. Might we lose something in the transition to--not the worst-case scenario--but the best?

Omohundro: I absolutely agree with you that that's an example of one of many, many moral dilemmas and decisions that we're going to have to make, for which it's not quite clear to us what is most important to humanity. I think we need an inquiry to establish some answers to questions like, is chopping wood something that strengthens you and brings you to nature or is it a boring tasks that doesn't ennoble you. How do you make those distinctions and who makes those distinctions?

Futurist: Is AI going to help us with that at all, or is that something we have to figure out on our own?

Omohundro: Well, AIs will certainly build good models of human behavior, and so, at the behavioral level, I think, for example AIs will be very helpful in terms of raising children. I think AIs will make very patient nannies, I think they'll understand what a child needs in order to grow in a certain direction. I think at that level they can certainly help us, at the core though, there are fundamental questions about what it is we most care about and I think those questions we don't want to delegate to AIs.

Futurist: Do you think there's a possibility that out of sheer laziness we might increasingly wind up doing so?

Omohundro: A tremendous danger. I've heard that the average American spends an average of six hours a day watching television, which is the delegation of conversation and story generation, so instead of being actively involved in your entertainment, you become a passive consumer of it and I think that's a huge danger. It's scenario where AI becomes the source of entertainment 24 hours a day and we lose some of the essence of what we currently most value in humans?

Futurist: what do you see the big obstacle to reaching this level of AI in the future? You had mentioned 3D brain scanning resolution, what else?

Omohundro: I don't prefer the brain scan idea as a route to AI. I don't think we want to build machines that are copies of human brains. The advantage of that scenario is that we can see roughly what it takes to do it. So we can predict pretty accurately when that's going to be possible. The direction I'm actually pursuing, potentially, could actually produce much more powerful systems based on theorem proving. So they can mathematically prove that a program doesn't have bugs in it, and is subject to certain kinds of security flaws. But theorem proving, for example, is very hard. No one has been able to do it. I believe I have some new ideas on how to do that. It's going to take some trying them out and running them. Back in the early sixties, people thought that something like machine vision would be a summer project for a master's student. Today's machine vision systems are certainly better than they were in the 60s, but no machine vision system today can reliably tell the difference between a dog and a cat, something that small children have no problem doing. Because it's so easy for us, it's hard for us to even understand why that's a challenging task. Whereas things like chess, which people thought would be difficult--it's hard for people, people have to study to become a grand master--was pretty easy for machines. So, it turns it on its head. What we thought was easy turned out to be hard, what we thought was hard turned out to be easy.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker

The Futurist Interviews Tim O'Reilly, publisher and tech guru

Tim O'Reilly

July-August 2008 Volume 42, No. 4

As the publisher of an extremely popular series of computer manuals, Tim O’Reilly has been dubbed the “guru of the participation age” by Steven Levy in a 2005 Wired profile and a “graying hippie” with a “hostility toward traditional media” by author Andrew Keen. O'Reilly will forever be known as the guy who coined Web 2.0 and launched the first commercial World Wide Web site. At his recent Tools of Change Conference in New York, we asked O'Reilly about the future of the Book, of writing, of publishing, and the Internet.

Interview by Patrick Tucker

FUTURIST: What is future of publishing?

O'Reilly: The future of publishing is a reinvention to discover what it has always been. A lot of people think of publishing as printing books on paper, paper between covers, those objects in bookstores. I always thought that publishing was about, first of all, understanding what matters, figuring out how to gather information and then gathering readers who that information matters to. There’s a kind of curation process. What the Internet has done is bring us new methods of curation. A lot of publishers are fighting those models. Instead of saying, ‘This is new stuff that helps us do what we do better. That’s why I love Adrian Holovaty, maker of a python toolkit called Django*. Because he talks about computer programming as journalism. How can you augment what journalists do with computer programming? How can you augment what publishers do with these new tools? That’s really one of the key things we’re trying to get at in this conference. It’s not about putting words on paper, it’s about reading the slush pile. Look at Digg, they basically found out how to harness the community to do that. Google learned how to harness the community to do that. That’s what page rank is. They figured out how to automate things that publishers used to do manually. You used to hire a bunch of college students to read all of these unsolicited manuscripts, find the one that was the great one that you would bring to the world. Well now, we have these new, better ways to find these things. How do you gather a community around it? How do you tell a story? If you look at O’Reilly, we realized that we’re in the meme business. We’re in the community business. And that’s why we don’t just publish. We organize conferences, we do early-stage venture investing, we do online publishing, we publish magazines, we have events with thousands of people. Our biggest event is Maker Fair with 45,000 people. We identified a community and an emerging trend and gave it a name. Everyone was like, ‘look at what’s really happening, we want to be part of that.’ That’s a publishing process, even though the product is a reinvention of the county fair. It’s just as much a publishing product for us, coming from our core-competency as publishers, as the book or the magazine.

FUTURIST: In many ways you’ve reinvented publishing for the twenty-first century…

O'Reilly: We’re not done yet. There’s a lot to learn.

FUTURIST: Do you think these older players can continue to be relevant in this technology driven, participatory environment? In many ways, editors are the last gatekeepers, and much of what you’re about is getting over the gatekeeper…

O'Reilly: I’m not sure of that. I mean, a really great example is a session here from a company called Logos Bible Software. Who would think of these guys as doing really cool stuff? They basically publish electronic editions of really obscure religious texts. Or scholarly texts that are used by people in religion. Would you like your Liddel and Scott Greek Lexicon online? Guess how they do it? They basically have community pricing software where they have people vote on whether or not they would have people buy the book. They buy it in advance. They basically expose, in Web 2.0 fashion, 'this is the price curve we’ve got. We’ve got people willing to pay this much, we have this many people, they show how many people are willing to pay at this price point.' And they show the line they have to get over to publish the book, sometimes they don’t get there. Usually the community feedback tells them what’s the best price for the book, and that aggregates the demand, and they eventually get enough to put it off. They’re actually harnessing community to set prices and to tell them which products to publish. That’s cutting edge. It’s in an area of publishing that’s traditionally been incredibly obscure. I think there’s a lot of innovation in publishing. Yeah, some of the giants are going to be slow to catch up, but they’ve come a long way.

When we first started trying to talk to publishers about trying to go digital in the late eighties, first started really pushing the idea of digital publishing, I was actually first working with SGML, which eventually lead to XML, which lead to our involvement and eventually to the commercialization of the Internet, They weren’t even thinking about trying to keep any electronic copies at all. You look at these announcement today, they seem too little, too late, where Harper Collins has this digital repository, and Random House has its digital repository, but it's allowing them to start innovating, and start engaging and to start and be part of the technology process. I’m very hopeful. I think the amount of energy and innovation at this conference is as great as at any other O’Reilly conference. That’s the beauty of conference, because you start to tell a story, you bring people together, it’s sort of the ultimate in helping to uncover what’s good that’s happening in a community. I think there’s a lot of exciting stuff here.

FUTURIST: You must feel very vindicated that these things you were advocating in the eighties, that mainstream publishers weren’t able to wrap their heads around at the time, now this place is crawling with publishers, and they’re seeing the future you laid out 20 years ago.

O'Reilly: I, along with a lot of other people. And of course, the future always takes unexpected twists and turns and so it never comes out the way we expect. I certainly don’t think of myself as a futurist, or someone who predicts futures. I see myself as someone who calls plays at a game. I see the play unfolding and I call it. When I said, hey, there’s this possibility for the commercialization of the Internet, back in 1992, I was calling the game. Sometime you have a small role in helping that happen. I actually got dispensation from the National Science Foundation to put the first commercial site on the World Wide Web and that unleashed the avalanche. [note: this is an actual quote but the claim seems dubious] Our bestselling authors were creating software that no one was writing about in the computer industry. We create this thing we call the open source summit. Because we came up with a new name, we were helping to create the future, but that was really just calling the play as it was unfolding. Same with Web 2.0, you see pattern, you give it a name. People say, ‘oh, that’s us.’ Right now, we’re seeing this, what we call in Make magazine, we’re calling it open source hardware. These are things that start with hackers, eventually we start to see a story and try to tell it in a way that’s bigger than us, bigger than our products, that allows people to come together around the possibilities of the future. You know, the future isn’t something that just happens by itself. We make it collectively in our choices, desires, passions. They come together. Sometimes, it takes effort, you can cause some new idea to crystallize out of a solution and people rally around that idea.

FUTURIST: You seem to sit on both sides of the aisle on that. I know you have a degree from Harvard and you won a NEA grant to translate Greek fables. But at the same time, you’re at the forefront of a technology that some people say is driving us toward a post-literate age.

O'Reilly: I don’t see this at all as a post-literate age. The people I know who are involved in technology are often profoundly literate. Most read a lot of books. Even if they don’t, they engage with ideas and content from the past. Anyone with a real appreciation of history knows about ideas, knows that the cannon of today has been forgotten for centuries at various times. I mean, Plato, we think of Plato as this shining light of Greek civilization. Well, he was lost pretty much for three or four hundred years and rediscovered in the first or second century A.D., and then he and Aristotle were brought into the fabric of the Catholic church and became part of what we today call the Classics, but it didn’t have to be that way, with many other classical authors. People go in and out of fashion. But creative re-use has a way of bringing things back. I could be wrong about this, but I would guess that Sappho is way more popular today than she was in the 18th century....

FUTURIST: Helps to become an adjective...

O'Reilly: Right, she was rediscovered and became part of our culture again. That whole remixing of the past is fundamental to humans. We’ll always do it. We’ll go back and find things and reuse them and sometimes twist them. Look at the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, what a tragic novel this is, right? They totally bastardized it. Maybe they missed the point. Notre Dame de Paris is not about the hunchback so much as it is about the church, and the idea of sculpture as a way of communicating stories, because in the pre-literate era, they told the stories through these churches that were basically covered with stone stories. Victor Hugo was lamenting the loss of that stone literacy, where people would look up at the church and know what it was about, and yes, something was lost. But we gained a lot. I remember a conversation I had at our open source convention with Freeman Dyson, the physicist, he said something wonderful. Someone asked him, ‘What do you think about the fact that we were losing something or other,. he said, ‘We have to forget. Otherwise, there would be no room for new things.’ That’s an important thing to take…be accepting of the losses and the gains. Celebrate the culture that we’re making, don’t hang on to the one we used to have. People are good. They’re creative. They will make a world that’s fascinating if we let them. They only thing we have to bemoan are the people that tried to keep things the way they were and who tried to stop people from expressing themselves or sharing their joy.

FUTURIST: Do you think that that’s the model that traditional publishing is still stuck in, with the dripping out chapters one at a time, not allowing too much material on the Net too quickly, Do you still think they’re in this trepidation mode or do you think they’re moving beyond it now?

O'Reilly: I don’t think publishers are any more stuck in the past than any other business that has an existing business model that’s being threatened. Creative destruction is the nature of an economy and every incumbent, whether it's IBM facing interpersonal computers or Microsoft facing the Web, or in some future years, Google facing whatever comes next.

FUTURIST: What’s next?

O'Reilly: We really are moving beyond the era of the PC into the era of ambient computing, where we’re interacting with the global network through devices that are sprinkled throughout the world, smart objects, and I think the next big thing is really not to do with the Web at all. I think the next big thing has not to do with the Web at all. I think it's beyond the Web.

FUTURIST: What do you think of New York?

O'Reilly: I love New York, I have a friend on the upper West side, who I’ve been visiting for 32 years. It’s sort of home away from home.

The Futurist Interviews Tyler Kokjohn, PH.D.

During the first week of May, 2009, the World Health Organization called an H1N1 influenza pandemic "imminent." The largest pandemic on record, the 1918 Spanish flu, spread to nearly every corner of the world and killed as many as 100 million people. Today, we are more capable of dealing with flu, but because of global interconnectedness, we're more capable of spreading communicable diseases as well.

Are governments treating the current flu with enough urgency? Too little? Too much? More importantly, if we have indeed entered a new "Age of Pandemics" (as the Wall Street Journal announced on May 2nd) what can we do to better prepare for the epidemics of the future?

We turned to Daniel J. Barnett , M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor in the department of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Tyler Kokjohn, professor of microbiology at Midwestern University and author of the "In The Shadow of Pandemic" to parse the future of flu (May 4, 2009).

Interview by Rick Docksai

THE FUTURIST: In your 2006 article on bird flu, you called proper vaccination of national populations “the most reliable and effective way to limit a bird-flu pandemic’s destructive scope.” But you also warned that a new flu could outpace our ability to manufacture and distribute vaccines. How ready are most countries to vaccinate their populations against swine flu? What could they be doing now to increase their readiness?

Kokjohn: We’re really caught here. This is a classic problem with the flu, it’s that you don’t know what it’s going to be until it finally shows up. If it shows up at the wrong time of the season, you're in great difficulty. We have to grow new chicken-egg stocks. We have to mass-produce chicken eggs, produce millions of them. We ramp up production over the summer to have the flu vaccine ready in October. But if the flu doesn’t cooperate, we’re in trouble.

THE FUTURIST: You specifically identified health organizations’ ability to respond as an area where improvement is needed: Influenza surveillance is “an especially weak link in the chain of public-health protection.” According to a Washington Post story, Mexican authorities first saw unusual cases of pneumonia within Mexico on April 6 but only notified the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization by April 16. Do you think this 10-day waiting period was appropriate, or do you think they should have acted sooner?

Kokjohn: I’m not sure they could have expedited this. One problem is that, at the local level, all they knew was they had a type of flu they could not type. After that, they had to gather samples and send them to a more personalized facility. That takes more money and infrastructure. It also takes considerable time. Some of that delay is just that the pipeline can’t accommodate such a quick turnaround.

You have to have some sympathy for the authorities here. The CDC is overwhelmed because their turnaround time can only be so fast. They only have so many people and so many infrastructures to work with. Their turnaround time is going to be slower than it was a few weeks ago, because they have so many more samples to test.

You’ve got to have enough machinery in place and enough people to get answers quickly. If you don’t, you’re going to hit the turnaround bottleneck. It’s possible everything stopped on a weekend. We’re not on a war footing all the time. Several days could have gone by.

It’s a wakeup call to see how we can get all the infrastructure elements in place quickly. The WHO and other organizations have asked the U.S. authorities to get the infrastructure built up for years. We could put every penny we have into the flu problem but that’s not realistic. We need to strike a balance. This is not the China SARS situation, where they covered it up. We’re not dealing with that at all.

THE FUTURIST: It sounds like health organizations and government agencies really have considered flu a high priority.

Kokjohn: I think so. And I think one of the challenges will be sustaining the priority status even after the threat dies down. I’m not a big fan of the Bush administration, but one thing the Bush administration did was that they were very proactive on flu and on looking at this as a long-term problem. My gut feeling is the Obama administration is going to continue this. I hope that we will sustain that. Just because this one went away, the next thing could come along and it could be much different.

We don’t know what makes killer flu a killer and we don’t even know whether this particular flu will qualify as a killer. There are too few cases as of now for us to get a handle on that.

THE FUTURIST: It’s largely a matter of wait and see?

Kokjohn: It is. In about two weeks, we’re going to know all. Once the flu gets into an area and starts going, it starts to break out. We’re going to see if we reach a strange plateau, or a rise in new cases, or if it starts to die down. Another possibility is that the flu is very seasonal. It could come roaring back in the fall. The big thing now is getting the numbers. There’s a major push to take samples in and see who has what.

THE FUTURIST: What does getting a sample involve?

Kokjohn: A sample can be a nasal wash or swab. They’ll send it to a lab, and they can detect the type of flu, whether or not it’s the H1N1, how often we’re seeing the H1N1, and whether we’re seeing more of it compared to what we had in the past.

Last year’s vaccine had an H1N1 flue virus in it, but those people that got the vaccine are not going to be protected against this new form. These viruses reassemble and re-assort. What I’ve heard about the current strain of swine flu is that it seems to incorporate parts from bird, pig and human: multiple sources combining in a new way, into a new virus. Our vaccines won’t work against it. A lot of us are not going to be immune to it.

On top of that, it mutates at a higher rate. It’s an RNA virus. And those have a much higher mutation rate. Someone taking an antiviral drug, they’ll adapt to that the antiviral drug and become resistant to it.

THE FUTURIST: In what way does the virus incorporate parts from birds, pigs, and humans?

Kokjohn: It has viruses that were once associated with birds, pigs, and humans. There are different types of flu floating around.

THE FUTURIST: It must get difficult for the monitors on the local level who might, in this case, have seen a few cases of flu out of season but had to decide whether or not to call up global health organizations and sound the alarms. Perhaps it is only fair that a government such as Mexico’s make sure a disease outbreak in its borders is truly serious before getting the rest of the world worried over it. When is too soon to notify global health organizations? Where to draw the line between prompt communication and alarmism?

Kokjohn:That’s a very tough call. Not long ago, people were trying to predict where the next flu virus was going to come from–Mexico in May was not anywhere near the top of the list. The current outbreak very much illustrates how the flu does what it wants to do. And it’s impossible to predict it when we see the bird flu build up in Asia and we try to confront it. We killed birds, but that didn’t work.

The best avenue for local monitors is to send samples to the WHO or PAHO but wait for more cases before issuing an alarm. We need to separate the idea of an alarm from the idea of analysis.

This is where Janet Napolitano, the CDC, and the Mexican authorities are truly going to earn their money. If they overreact now, they are going to kill tourism-—and that’s the last thing anyone would want to do, given the economic trouble we’re all going through. But if they under-react, it is going to get away from them. The whole goal of the WHO is to catch disease outbreaks early and respond early. You want to act fast, but there are consequences to acting too fast. Either way, the info they have is minimal.

THE FUTURIST: How big a priority should we make the flu, considering there are so many deadly diseases and health risks out there?

Kokjohn: There are a billion other justifiable needs out there. That’s a reasonable thing. We just don’t want to forget about flu.

Now that the flu is in the United States and Europe, what about Mexico? Who is going to get the vaccine? That is going to be more difficult. The United States will be somewhat protected. Europe will be protected. Nations wealthy enough to afford large vaccine stockpiles will be protected. But a large part of the world is just going to be left to its fate. That’s something we haven’t dealt with.

If we could develop means to vaccinate against the flu that are less costly, like RNA vaccines--you look at the virus, copy the genetic code, put it into the person and have them respond to it--that would be tremendous. It’s fewer steps. The efficacy of this is yet to be determined, but it will not involve raising millions of chicken eggs. The DNA could be handled more easily. It’s very stable. But we have to prove that it works. The NIH now has impetus to develop it.

This is all in the future. But one of the things we would like to do is get away from our dependency on the chicken egg as our sole source for producing a flu vaccine. We’ve been using this method for 62 years. And it works, but you can see that it has some drawbacks. This is going to be a long-term research program.

THE FUTURIST: A lot of experts see two critical trends in demographics taking place in the next few decades: Growth of elderly populations, and growth of populations of all ages in developing countries. This would sound like two groups that are more vulnerable than others to disease outbreaks. How worried should we be that future outbreaks will claim more victims?

Kokjohn: You’re absolutely correct. This is something people have seen for a while. And a part of the impetus for the programs we have now for dealing with this proactively is the growth of elderly populations, because one of the big problems we have with elderly patients in particular is even if we vaccinate them, many have an immune systems that are not able to respond. We have some significant gaps here. Those gaps are growing.

In the developing world, many of these problems have never been addressed. We can’t keep thinking “Fortress America." We’re not going to be healthy while the rest of the world is dying. We have to consider what the concept of “Lifeboat Earth” really means.

In the United States, we have a high standard of care, but if we have an outbreak, we’re going to quickly overwhelm the health infrastructure. It doesn’t matter how many ventilators we have, they’re all going to be in use. We’re not fully prepared for the real deal.

THE FUTURIST: Your article worried that global mobility might be a risk factor: “People and products traverse the world with ease, meaning that a future flu pandemic may engulf the world with unprecedented speed.” But perhaps a slowdown is in the cards. European officials warned their citizens recently to avoid travel to Mexico or the United States on account of the flu. What are the long-term implications for tourism in general? How many would-be tourists around the world will forego future vacation plans and only travel within their home countries, so as to be safe?

Kokjohn: I think you’re on target. You’re going to see a definite impact in travel. Some cruise lines have already ceased their Mexico stops. People don’t make these warnings lightly because the economic suffering they create. So this is definitely an issue.

Much will depend on how far this goes. If this dies down in a week or 10 days, we’ll be fine. Life will go back to normal. But if it’s sustained, the first thing people will do is not travel on vacation.

For business travelers, one of the first things you can do is know about where you’re going and make sure all your vaccinations are up to date. The SARS outbreak, they started looking at people on the airlines. And if they had a fever, they wouldn’t let them travel.

After the 9/11 attacks, air travel was significantly slowed. I remember. I flew in a few planes after the attack. Pretty lonely. The flue season was delayed two to four weeks in the 2001-2002 season. And some people ascribed that partially to the slowdown in air travel. That suggests we might be able to slow this down enough by slowing travel and closing borders. If we ever do have a formal advisory, I think that will kill tourism.

We have to worry about a comeback. In 1918, the flu showed up and faded away, and then it came back and it came back early. If we have a repeat of that, we’re in trouble.

We’re managing on the basis of anxiety.

About the Interviewee
Tyler A. Kokjohn Ph.D., is a specialist in bacteriophage biology with special emphasis on the identification and characterization bacteriophages lytic to the human bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Dr. Kokjohn was Assistant Professor of Microbiology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, from 1992 to 1997. He is currently Professor of Microbiology, Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine, Midwestern University, Glendale, AZ. He is a member of the American Society for Microbiology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society of Protozoologists. He is a member of the World Future Society and a frequent speaker at World Future Society conferences.

The Futurist Interviews the authors of The Techno-Human Condition

Technology is progressing, but is society? Arizona State University engineer Braden Allenby and Arizona State science and society professor Dan Sarewitz, authors of The Techno-Human Condition, worry about humanity’s capacities to keep up with innovation. The authors (speaking separately) discuss their book and their concerns during this interview with Rick Docksai, a staff editor for THE FUTURIST.

Rick Docksai: A message that I took from your book is the necessity of coping mechanisms. We humans need to be psychologically prepared for the radical innovations coming our way. How psychologically ready are we as a society now?

Braden Allenby: At the level of a private-sector firm, if you don’t innovate as rapidly as possible, you’re going to lose your market share to the ones that do. Because they have to innovate, they will adapt to change more rapidly.

But in general, individuals are having a hard time managing the rate of change, and society is having a hard time. I think many people meet the uncertainty and discomfort that characterize rapid, accelerating change by retreating into relatively rigid belief systems or apathy.

Daniel Sarewitz: The more people feel knocked back on their heels by techno-social change, the more they seem to be retreating into the world views that make them less able to understand and respond to the change.

Docksai: So in general, change brings out reactionary forces that resist the change. But how does that set us apart from past eras—haven’t there been Luddites and technophobes in every century?

Allenby: What is different is that we’re seeing technological change across the entire frontier of technology. The other thing is that the rate of change is more rapid than ever before and still accelerating. For those two reasons, our situation and the issues we face are different.

Sarewitz: Everyone is awash in information. You can participate in everything and are totally connected—comment on blogs, visit chat forums, et cetera—but on the other hand, there seem to be forces beyond anybody’s control.

Docksai: Technology and medicine both increase individuals’ performance capacity, as your book notes. With increased performance capacity comes increased expectations, however. People are expected to produce more. What is this doing to our stress levels?

Allenby: For a digital immigrant, trying to stay networked and multitasking can be very stressful, while, for a digital native, that level of information flow may be not just comfortable, but necessary to feel psychologically connected to others. For many people, change can be stressful, regardless of productivity demands. In the longer run, human psychology will be increasingly subject to deliberate engineering, raising the question of whether stress can be designed to more preferable levels.

Sarewitz: The connectedness of the wired world adds enormously to my stress levels, but I doubt my kid would look at it that way. I’m more skeptical than Brad that we’ll ever be able to finely tune such attributes like stress levels on a population-wide basis, but I agree with his general point that psychological diversity is clearly an asset for the species.

Docksai: This makes me wonder if human cognitive capacity will grow over time. I’m thinking of the Flynn Effect, the documented increase in worldwide IQ scores over time.

Allenby: We’re all used to thinking of cognition as an individual function. But with augmented cognition being built into weapons systems, and car companies building automated cognition into automobiles, and Google being a repository for human memory, we’re diffusing cognition across integrated human technology networks.

Cognition may be going away from the individual and more toward a techno-human network function. The question of individual evolution is moot. What we need to understand is how cognition occurs in these networks.

Sarewitz: We have the capacity to generate and process much more information, but there's a lot more information that doesn’t get dealt with. It just sits out there. I use my e-mail as an outsource memory for names because I can't remember them all. But it's countered by the fact that I'm overwhelmed and can't remember all my e-mails.

I don’t know if I want to say that we're getting more intelligent as a culture. I want to say we have different kinds of intelligence. Acting in the face of uncertainty and disagreement—that seems to be as difficult for us as ever.

Docksai: You discuss the prediction of average life spans surpassing 100. I see one plus in this: Society’s memory of history will improve. People whose perspective stretches back so many years would ideally represent a much-needed force for caution and for not repeating past mistakes. What influence do you see people with much higher longevity having in politics?

Allenby: I’m more inclined to suspect that a radical increase in longevity could lead to greater generational conflict, as older folks that have positions not only keep them, but try to impose their perspectives, and their views on technology, on younger cohorts. More “stop playing those computer games right now, young man!” seems probable.

Sarewitz: When we see more years of life, we also see more years of unhealthy life. Anyone who is middle aged is dealing with unhealthy parents and the slow decline that we all slowly go through. If current patterns are at all suggestive, then these increased healthy years will also be accompanied by increased unhealthy years. Dealing with the continual challenges of demographic change seems to be another aspect of the techno-human condition.

World Future Review interviews Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital

Don Tapscott, professor, and chairman of the nGenera Innovation Network, bestselling author of the book Grown Up Digital, and WorldFuture 2009 keynote speaker is a strong believer in the “Net Generation.” In this interview with World Future Review, he says that technology is, indeed, affecting the lives, values, and development of teens...by enabling them to transform society for the better.

World Future Review: What are some of the long-term effects that the global digital divide will have on those left behind? What will happen to those on the wrong side of the global digital divide? And is the gap currently getting wider?

Don Tapscott: There was a whole chapter [about the digital divide] in Growing Up Digital (McGraw-Hill, 1998), and what I said at the time was that there’s a danger that we’ll create this world of haves and have-nots, knowers and know-nots, doers and do-nots, people that can communicate with the rest of the world and those who can’t. This is called creating a structural underclass, and it creates wounds in society that will be hard to heal. I noted at the time that half of the kids in the world had never used a telephone, let alone the Internet.

So, flash forward twelve years. Since I said that, a billion people have come onto the Web and half of them are in this demographic. There are more young people in China today with access to the Internet than in the United States. So, I don’t think it’s true that the gap is getting bigger. I think it’s narrowing. Now, this is a complicated topic because the central divide is related to real economic and social divides in society as well, and it correlates perfectly with poverty. If you look at Africa, there are charts in [Grown Up Digital] that show the world map according to Internet access. Africa’s pretty much the biggest continent in the world, in terms of the world map according to [the percentage of] young people. But it’s the smallest continent on the world map according to Internet access.

Even in the United States, this is a problem. I pointed out in the book that there isn’t really just one generation—there are two. There’s the top half, which is doing spectacularly, that have Internet access, that go to reasonable schools, that are performing well. The universities are flooded with students right now—they’re graduating in record numbers. And there’s the bottom half that is doing terribly. The bottom third is dropping out of high school. So this is a big complicated issue and it’s right at the heart of how, in our economies, and in the global economy society, we will create wealth; in how we will have social development, and how we will establish social justice. That’s why programs like One Laptop Per Child are very important, and should be supported by everybody. It’s very sad that this program has detractors and vested interests that don’t want to see a cheap computer go out around the world to young people in underserved areas. I could go on and on about this…

WFR: There’s no real consensus on how to regulate the Internet. Is the Internet something that can self-regulate, or does it require governance?

Tapscott: Well, regulation works at a number of different levels. There is a role for laws. At the one end, you’ve got hard stuff like ensuring that the Web stays open, and that it’s not divided up into a number of world communities, that you access purely as a function of how much money you’ve got. At the other end, you’ve got all kinds of so-called “soft issues” for which I think that regulation makes sense, and that you can’t just leave it to markets. Stuff like privacy, and at least in European countries, we have some pretty good laws regarding this, and they don’t deter innovation as people say because privacy is good business practice. The trouble is that there are unscrupulous people who will violate basic principles of privacy to the detriment of everyone. So again, market forces are critical to the success of the Web.

I was at a group meeting of the World Economic Forum in Dubai and one of the things [participants] called for is a global digital Marshall Plan to roll out the Internet and broadband around the world, to make sure that every kid aged four has access to the Web. And that’s the kind of thing that Obama could play a real leadership role in achieving. Markets are never going to take this technology to Kenya, so you need to have government leadership. And given the current global economic crisis, government is no longer a bad word. Heck, there may even be a day when taxes are no longer a bad word.

WFR: Passing laws regarding privacy and copyright on the Internet is one issue and enforcing them is another. Is there any way to effectively enforce the “soft issues” on a global or even a national scale?

Tapscott: The basic institution of government is … nation-states based on national economies. Except that today, increasingly, we have regional economies and a global economy. Take legislation around financial services, it’s all domestic, and it’s become crystal clear that the nation-state is the wrong size to address the needs of the global financial marketplace. So, we’re in the early days of establishing important new institutions of global governance where you can start to have not just new forms of cooperation or new guidelines but actual regulation that has teeth and is enforceable on a global basis. Now, it doesn’t mean a global government because of the so-called Web 2.0. There are all kinds of new institutions and models that are possible, and we’re investigating this right now in a program that’s called Government 2.0. You can learn more about it at: www.NGenera.com/pages/innovation. There are also various communities on www.GrownUpDigital.com on education, government, management, marketing, democracy...we’re just getting this going right now.

WFR: In the U.S., this generation is facing so much more debt than previous generations. What’s driving that? Can it partly be attributed to the ease of purchasing products online? Doesn’t this generation have more access to credit than previous generations, and aren’t they using it? In other words, is there a danger that we’re creating a generation of online shopaholics?

Tapscott: There isn’t, because these kids have very strong values. Yeah, they like to shop, but that’s not mainly what they’re about. They mainly care about the world. I mean, just look at what kids want to do when they graduate. Of the top ten organizations they want to work for, five of them are government or not-for-profit [organizations]. When I was a kid, everyone wanted to work for IBM. In the Eighties, they wanted to work for Michael Milken or an investment bank. In the Nineties, they wanted to work for a dot-com. And today, kids graduating from Harvard want to work for Teach For America. So this is a generation with a very strong sense of integrity. They also have great B.S. detectors.

Now, when I speak of a generation the way I just did right there, it’s mainly about the U.S. There are differences around the world. Coming into the workforce in the U.S., money is number four. They want to learn, they want to do interesting things and meet interesting people, and they want to do something meaningful, and they also want to have fun. In India, money’s number one because if you’re the kid in the family who got to go to college, you have to come back and support the family. So you care a lot about how much the job pays. The big problem for kids in terms of debt is the crushing debt of having gone to university. Debt is a real problem but it’s not that we’ve created a generation of shopaholics.

As you know from reading the book, I’m very concerned about the negative portrayal of this generation—that they’re net-addicted, glued to the screen, losing their social skills; [that] the Internet is eating the neocortex of youth today, that they’re the dumbest generation, that the digital age stupefies young Americans and is jeopardizing our future, “don’t trust anyone under 30,” they steal, they violate intellectual property rights, they’re bullies, they don’t give a damn, they don’t vote. And so on.

None of this cynical, negative view of youth vis-a-vis their interaction with the Web is supported by data. We’ve created a “little army of narcissists,” says Jean Twenge in a book called Generation Me. People are making this stuff up. This is kind of the central issue to me. You have the biggest generation ever—they’re coming into the workforce, [into] the marketplace, into society. With them, and from their experience growing up, is a whole new culture. It’s a culture of collaboration and innovation and speed and integrity. This culture is meeting up against all of our traditional institutions. We’re in the early days of a huge generational clash. If we older people don’t smarten up and listen to them and learn from them as opposed to doing the opposite…

In all of our institutions, we do the opposite. Rather than embracing Facebook and social networking [in order] to get beyond electronic mail to create high performance collaborative enterprises, companies are banning Facebook. When you do that, you say to a whole generation, “we don’t get it, we don’t understand your technology, we don’t understand collaboration, and we don’t trust you.” So, the really big central issue about the future to me is: what are we going to do? Are we going to continue to defend our old models and old institutions in the face of this new powerful view and force that’s emerging, or are we going to embrace it and transform our institutions for the twenty-first century? Sorry, I get a little passionate about this stuff.

WFR: Speaking of strong values, one of the eight Net Gen “norms” you describe in the book is integrity. How is this generation defining integrity, and how is it going to play itself out in the future in the economic and political spheres?

Tapscott: I think that young people have had to form their own point of view about values. When I was a kid, you just went to church and Sunday school, and that’s how you got your values. And there was no porn and there was no Blackberry that Dad could pull out at the dinner table and be distracted from the kids. Life was pretty straightforward. I had access to two television stations, as an example. We had one newspaper that came into the house. And I just kind of assumed this was the way things were. These kids are confronted with all kinds of conflicting stimulant information. They need to form opinions, and they need to figure out where they stand.

I think another factor is just the baby boomers overall have been pretty good parents. They talk to their kids and there’s a much more open relationship between the Net Geners and their parents than between the baby boomers when they were kids and their parents. The family was a more closed kind of thing … the kids reported to Mom, and Mom reported to Dad. But now there are real conversations that happen in families. And the boomers have been criticized a lot, but overall, they’ve been pretty good parents on these questions.

Another thing is that because of the Web, young people have grown up having to scrutinize things and I think they have pretty good B.S. detectors largely because there’s so much B.S. on the Internet.

WFR: Any idea what the generation after the Net Generation is going to be like?

Tapscott: Well, one of the biggest ideas in Grown Up Digital is that because these kids have grown up spending their time differently, especially during adolescence from the ages of eight to eighteen, a critical period of brain development, they actually have different brains. Boomers have watched TV for 24 hours a week and that creates a certain kind of brain. And these kids have spent that amount of time interacting, collaborating, composing their thoughts, scrutinizing, authenticating, organizing information, having to remember things. And this creates multitasking, and this creates a different kind of brain. So the actual deep structure and synaptic connections in the brain are different for an entire generation. Which, by the way, explains why this is not simply a life stage difference. It’s a true generational difference.

So, what will be the impact of the next generation—the kids who are twelve and under, who are truly bathed in bits, immersed in digital technologies and in the interactive and collaborative way of accessing information? … all I can say is that I think they’re going to be a lot like the Net Geners—even more so—but we’re in the early days of really understanding that.

About the Interviewee

Mr. Tapscott's earlier books include Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (with Anthony D. Williams) (McGraw-Hill, 2006), The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence (McGraw-Hill, 1996), and Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (McGraw-Hill, 1998), to which his newest book is a sequel.

This interview was conducted by Aaron M. Cohen on behalf of World Future Review.