Cover Story:
Where's the future we were promised? We look at the real science of skycars, teleportation, ocean habitation, and artificial intelligence; and we'll introduce you to the engineers, entrepreneurs, inventors, and visionaries turning science fiction into reality. PDF available
By Arnold Brown
Perfection ain’t what it used to be. As the twenty-first century moves toward its second decade, the search for perfection that characterized the twentieth century is fading away. In its place is a burgeoning concept—functionality.PDF available.
By Andy Hines Part II
In the second installment of a two-part series, a professional futurist looks at the big trends in culture, values, media and infrastructure that will shape the world in the next decade
PDF available.
Part I From July-August 2008
By Andy Hines
In the first of a two-part series, a professional futurist looks at the big trends in demography, money, and consumerism that will shape the world in the next decade. PDF available.
The World Future Society asked its members to describe their experiences in realizing the importance of taking an active interest in the future. Here are a few of their responses.
By Thomas J. Frey
With Kenneth W. Harris
The rise of the global middle class, natural limitations, and radical innovation will define automobile transportation in the years ahead.
PDF Available.
Sanitation in the Third World
The search for sustainable solutions
Dust Storms and Hurricanes
Dust, it turns out, is bad for hurricanes.
Nepal Reinvents Itself
Himalayan nation gets training in the rule of law.
Beating the Cyberbullies
Targets of taunting need help turning the tables on tormentors.
Eat Right For a Healthy Brain
A study shows why losing weight could save you from brain damage.
Majoring In the Unusual
“Out of the box” college programs for Generation Y.
When Avatars Come Out to Play
Review by Rick Docksai
Three Forces Shaping Our Future
Review by Aaron M. Cohen
Yet another reason to watch your weight: A new study says that it could cut your future risk of dementia by as much as 20%.
“There is a strong correlation,” says May Beydoun, postdoctoral research fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and co-author of the study. “The rates of dementia increase with the rates of obesity.”
The study reviewed 10 previously published reports on dementia and obesity. Beydoun and co-author Youfa Wang, assistant professor of international health, found the incidence of dementia to be 20% higher among obese adults. Incidence of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, was 80% higher.
“Preventing or treating obesity at a younger age could play a major role in reducing the number of dementia patients and those with other commonly associated illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease,” according to Wang.
There is reason for worry. World Health Organization data for 193 surveyed countries indicates that 160 saw their populations’ overweight and obesity rates increase between 2002 and 2005.
WHO expects the problem to get worse in the years ahead, projecting that the numbers of overweight and obese adults, respectively 1.6 billion and 400 million in 2005, will total 2.3 billion and 700 million by 2015.
Most of the increase is in developing countries. The biggest increases in female obesity between 2002 and 2005 were in Haiti and Bangladesh; for males, Cambodia and Vietnam.
“Obesity and obesity-related diseases are now becoming a disease of poverty,” says Daniel Epstein, WHO public information officer. “Even if people are poor, they can get more caloric intake.” Epstein blames some of the problem on the increased availability of fast food, which tends to beat its healthier alternatives in price and convenience.
“If you go to a store and buy fresh fruits and fresh salad makings, it does turn out to be more expensive and more time-consuming than just feeding them junk food,” Epstein says. Fast food is also aggressively advertised. “A guy might see five fast-food commercials in one day. He might see one government commercial that says ‘Eat right. Take care of your kids. Feed them healthy foods.’”
There have not been nearly enough campaigns that might counter the advertising, according to Caitlin Carlson, communications officer for international aid group Mercycorps.*
“Our health teams aren’t seeing it. It hasn’t gotten the kind of responses that other problems like AIDS and hunger have,” she says.
Beydoun hopes that this study will help raise awareness of the long-term rates of obesity.
“There are more efforts to be done, especially on younger children and other adults. I’m not sure how much action is taking place now, but there are clear signs that we need to work more on this,” she concludes.—Rick Docksai
Sources: Public Health News Center, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 615 N. Wolfe Street, E3144, Baltimore, Maryland 21205-2179.
WHO Global Database: Data for Saving Lives” World Health Organization. Web site (June 1, 2008).
Sept-October 2008 Vol. 42, No. 5
A study shows why losing weight could save you from brain damage.
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For high schoolers plotting their future careers, these are confusing times. On the one hand, there’s cause for optimism: The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects that the U.S. economy will add 15.6 million jobs in the decade between 2006 and 2016. But those jobs won’t be evenly split across regions or industries.
Many economic sectors, like manufacturing, will see declines in the number of new workers they take on. New entrants into the labor force will be forced to compete with workers overseas for the best jobs. How does the modern college freshman navigate this uneven terrain? One strategy is to plan for a degree in an unusual field. The newest edition of They Teach That In College!? published by College & Career Press, offers a few fresh insights.
“Business, Social Sciences/History, and Education are the most popular college majors today, but not every student has the interest or aptitude to be successful in these fields,” the editors write in the introduction. “Additionally, many of these fields are glutted with graduates who are forced to take lower-paying jobs or positions that are unrelated to their field of study.”
The book details 96 unusual majors representing fast-growing fields with good salary prospects. “The major had to capture our imagination—in short, it had to be fun, and hopefully, interesting to our readers,” write the editors.
Among the most eye-catching:
• Sustainable Business. The popularity of the green movement is creating opportunities for more environmentally conscious capitalists. Sustainable business is defined as building and maintaining business profitability while employing practices that promote local communities and respect the environment. Interested high-school students should take classes in conventional business, environmental sciences, and biology.
• Computer and Digital Forensics. The Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies this as a specialization in the private detective field. While many conventional gumshoes (as they used to be called) spend long nights in seedy bars hunting down sources, or camped outside of motels to catch cheating spouses, digital forensics experts work in clean offices, retrieving and analyzing digital evidence found on cell phones, PDAs, and digital networks. BLS rates the future opportunities for qualified computer forensic investigators as “excellent.”
• Comic Book Art. Once the refuge of awkward teenagers, the market for comic books and graphic novels in the United States has grown 12% since 2006, hitting $705 million in April 2008. The surprising success of companies like Marvel Entertainment, which owns such properties as Spiderman, X-Men, and The Hulk, shows there’s money in doodles and ink. The company’s stock price has risen from $13 per share to $34 per share in the past five years. Many publishing experts consider comics and graphic novels the key growth area for print publishers in the years ahead.
• Nanoscience/Nanotechnolgy. Nanoscience, or the study of objects one-billionth of a meter in size, will be among the most important technological fields of the twenty-first century—of use to such industries as biotechnology, materials science, energy, and agriculture. “The field is relatively new and will grow dramatically. Consumer products containing nanotechnology are already on the market, including cosmetics, stain-resistant clothing, and batteries. As the need for alternative energy arises, nanotechnology will become more prevalent in solar cells,” says Alissa Agnello, an instructor of nanotechnology at Seattle Community College, which offers a nanotechnology degree.
• Strategic Intelligence. Think Harvard is selective? The most exclusive degree-granting program in the United States, the National Defense Intelligence College’s program in strategic intelligence, is open only to members of the U.S. military or federal employees with Top Secret clearance. But if you’re qualified, there’s no faster route to a job spying on foreign governments, or as it’s more politely known, “information gathering.”
Perhaps the most practical and potentially rewarding major is the relatively new field of entrepreneurship. Starting your own company requires a working knowledge of a variety of different fields, such as accounting, economics, and advertising. But for those willing to put in the time, entrepreneurial success pays well. Self-employed individuals report the highest levels of job and career satisfaction. While they comprise only one-fifth of the U.S. population, the self-employed make up more than 75% of U.S. millionaires. Now that’s a useful major.—Patrick Tucker
Source: They Teach That In College!? Second Edition. College & Career Press. 2008. 344 pages. Paperback. $22.95.
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Sept-October 2008 Vol. 42, No. 5
“Out of the box” college programs for Generation Y.
Rare-isotope research brings supernova processes down to Earth.
A new line of rare-isotope facilities, due to open in the next eight years in locations around Europe and North America, will collide atoms at high speeds to make them radioactive. The goal is to jumpstart processes that do not now take place anywhere on Earth, but that are commonplace in the cores of exploding stars.
The stellar collisions create isotopes, which are variations of the original atoms plus or minus a few neutrons. The new facilities will enable astronomers and astrophysicists to work directly with elements they could never get hold of until now.
The rare-isotope facilities “would extend nuclear research from the domain of stable or near-stable nuclei familiar in everyday life to nearly the full range of nuclei that exist in nature’s most exotic stellar environments,” according to the National Research Council.
These facilities might also provide more clues to what took place in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang that most scientists believe marked the emergence of the known universe.
The studies would have many earthly implications, according to Bradley Sherrill, associate director of research at the Michigan State University rare-isotope facility National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory.
“If we want to understand where gold comes from, we’ve got to understand these processes that go on in stars. We know it originated in stars, we just don’t know how. These experiments with isotopes could help answer those questions,” says Sherrill.
Sherrill says that researchers of many scientific disciplines not related to space would stand to benefit. National-security experts, for example, could apply the added knowledge about atomic reactions to undertake “nuclear forensics”: If a terrorist detonates a nuclear weapon, agency researchers could identify which country supplied it.
“Hopefully no one will ever have to use it,” says Sherrill. “My hope is that it could be an important deterrent if those supplying the nuclear weapon knew that it could be identified exactly where the material came from.”
The isotope research could also help physicians find new, lower-impact ways to scan patients and treat them using particles instead of scalpels and X-rays, the NRC notes. Instead of risky surgical procedures, physicians might opt for radioadioactive “scalpels” that destroy tumors and other diseased tissue by striking them with decayed particles.
Rare-isotope facilities might also make nuclear energy safer to use. Certain high-energy neutrons destroy radioactive waste. These radiation-defusing neutrons are hard to find on earth, but replicating the processes of star cores could make rare or nonexistant particles common.
“The elements found on earth, the ones stable against weak decay, are only a small fraction of those transiently produced in stars,” the NRC states.
The U.S. Department of Energy has taken interest in rare-isotope research, but the United States is a relative latecomer to the rare-isotope game. Japan has been producing rare isotopes at its RIKEN facility since 2006. Canada, France, and Germany are all on schedule to open new isotope facilities between 2010 and 2015. —Rick Docksai
Sources: Bradley Sherrill, National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, Michigan State University, 1 Cyclotron, East Lansing, Michigan 48824-1321.
National Research Council of the National Academies, 500 Fifth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001.
Lasers beat radio waves for speed and accuracy in communications. Data exchange between satellites could be increased a hundredfold by using lasers instead of radio waves, according to German researchers. Laser beams are also easier to focus than radio waves.
Data exchange requires bandwidth—the more data, the more bandwidth required. Space research and development is running up against radio waves’ bandwidth limits, making laser technology more attractive.
In the most recent satellite-to-satellite test of technologies developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology (ILT), transmission equivalent to about 400 DVDs worth of data per hour was achieved. Such rates would make it possible to transmit large data packets between satellites or between Earth and satellites.
Physical and mechanical challenges to laser-based satellite communications remain. Communications lasers in space are activated by pump modules, which must be resilient against the vibrations and forces of launches, and then survive harsh conditions in space, such as radiation and extreme temperature variations.—Cynthia G. Wagner
Source: Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology, ILT, Steinbachstrasse 15, 52074 Aachen, Germany.
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Sept-October 2008 Vol. 42, No. 5
Review by Aaron M. Cohen
Futurecast: How Superpowers, Populations, and Globalization Will Change the Way You Live and Work by Robert J. Shapiro. St. Martin’s Press. 2008. 358 pages. $26.95.
Three powerful global forces are currently reshaping humanity’s near-term future, writes former U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce Robert J. Shapiro in his new book Futurecast. These forces are globalization, an aging world population, and America’s unchallenged position as the world’s sole military superpower. Analyzing them, Shapiro creates a “global blueprint” that charts the likely course of the planet over the next decade and a half.
Most of the discussion revolves around the impact of globalization, which Shapiro believes will produce the greatest amount of change, as it breaks down barriers and opens up economies. He argues that the United States (along with the rest of the world) has no choice but to embrace globalization, despite its drawbacks and limitations. In fact, globalization will ultimately favor the United States and China, while creating much greater economic challenges for Europe and Japan (whose economies are significantly less productive overall). Indeed, the economic futures of America and China are intrinsically linked, for better or for worse, now that China has emerged as an economic superpower. One reason for this connection is the seemingly endless shift of production jobs to China, which provides a seemingly endless supply of low-skilled, low-wage workers.
“A decade from now, America will still be the world’s largest and most technologically advanced economy, and the one with the greatest impact on everyone else,” Shapiro writes. “But nothing will stop globalization from destroying job security for millions of Americans, along with their European and Japanese counterparts.” By the year 2020, the vast majority of manufacturing jobs will have permanently relocated to the developing world.
Shapiro reminds the reader that China’s economy is more than three times what it was 15 years ago, and he believes that its rapid economic ascension will continue unabated, as China has now become a key trading partner attractive to foreign investors. However, China’s economic growth may be happening too quickly. The rest of the country is struggling to keep up with the changes, including implementing key environmental and product safety regulations. Also, the vast majority of the workers who contribute to the growing economy remain greatly impoverished. Due to these struggles, China’s economic success is not guaranteed. Shapiro argues that China needs a more liberal political system to manage its liberalized economic system—conditions that are already in place in the United States. Shapiro also disagrees with the view that India will soon emerge as an economic force, and labels India “still a backward economy decades away from global economic influence.”
Longer Lives, Smaller Families
In addition to globalization, Shapiro also notes that an unprecedented shift from large families with short life-spans to small families with significantly longer life-spans is currently taking place across the globe. In Japan, “the median age will hit fifty by 2020.” Population change is something that can’t be legislated or regulated, Shapiro argues, and the economic ramifications of the shift will be felt everywhere. Labor forces will contract and economic growth will be stymied, the vast number of retirees will create a financial crisis for government pension programs in virtually every country that has them, the standard of living will drop, and taxes will increase sharply. The global health-care crisis will inevitably extend to China, where approximately 80% lack medical care: “For the nearly 80% of Chinese without insurance or the private means to pay, doctors won’t see them and hospitals won’t admit them, regardless of how sick or injured they are.” New technologies will only drive up the cost of medical care, which “inevitably will create enormous social and economic stresses in every major country over the next ten to fifteen years,” Shapiro writes.
While the U.S. will likely remain the dominant superpower with no direct challengers, Shapiro finds that the threat of terrorism is one of two wild cards that have the potential to unpredictably alter the projected future outcome. He analyzes what effects different terrorism scenarios might have on the new global economy before briefly identifying different means of technological advancement (the other wild card), including nanotechnology, biotechnology, and information technologies, and their effect on the market as well.
The passages discussing climate change expose the one major weakness of the book, however, for Shapiro doesn’t devote much of his powerful analytic skills to an in-depth discussion of the impact of global warming. Instead, he optimistically foresees nanotechnological breakthroughs leading to clean energy, making climate change a “manageable problem,” without elaborating much on what that implies. The topic requires more thoughtful analysis.
Shapiro’s writing style lacks the colloquial, hand-on-your-shoulder approach of award-winning journalists who have tackled similar subject matter, but when he delves into the specifics of the new global economy, his prose is engaging, and infused with real energy. At times repetitive, Futurecast would be more effective if it were more concise, but it succeeds in giving the reader a sophisticated awareness of many of the major challenges and unexpected developments in store for us within the next 15 years.
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Sept-October 2008 Vol. 42, No. 5
By Patrick Tucker
Teachers may despise them, parents may loathe them, but video games are a fact of modern life. Global video game sales are estimated around $12 billion annually and growing. The movement to harness the power of games for good has likewise been building and is gaining momentum in some unlikely quarters. A recent Games for Health conference in Baltimore played host to not only software developers but also health professionals looking toward a future where medical train training, even treatment for certain conditions, can be delivered in the form of playable software.
The Starlight Starbright Foundation is one of the emerging leaders in using video games as a component of patient education. The Foundation produces a game called Quest for the Code, which it has distributed to 1.5 million kids suffering from asthma. “With asthma, the problem was kids weren’t managing the disease,” according to Starlight Vice President Joan Ford. “Either they didn’t know how to identify symptoms or were afraid of being stigmatized for stopping play to use an inhaler.” Inside the game space, players can advance only by taking the necessary steps to manage symptoms.
On the other end of the spectrum, a 3-D immersive game called Zero Hour (from the Virtual Heroes company) is designed not for patients but for medical personnel and first responders. The player can try out different roles in emergency scenarios, such as an earthquake, bombing, or saran gas attack.
In the future, game trainers like Zero Hour will replace formal instruction for most medical workers, according to Bruce Jarrell of the University of Maryland Medical Center. He predicts that doctor and nurse shortages will pressure health-care providers to find new ways to recruit and train medics faster and more effectively. That means allowing them to train wherever they might be and evaluating medics in training in real time outside of classroom settings. “How do you train 100,000 physicians, or even a million patients to care for themselves?” he asks.
Mark Baldwin of Mind Habits sees video games not only educating patients but also, in limited capacity, actually helping them to cope with psychological issues like low self-esteem, which can be a major contributor to stress. Players engaging in the Mind Habits game are rewarded when they click on positive images and confidence- reinforcing messages. The idea that simply clicking on pictures of people smiling could lower anxiety may seem specious, but Baldwin has conducted a controlled study on the hypothesis and published his findings in the Journal of the American Psychological Association. When repeated often enough, the trick works, he says. Because the game is online, players can also track their progress over time and even see how stressed they were on certain dates, as well as how their stress levels have improved.
The total market for what are being called serious games—as in games that exist for
more than entertainment purposes—is more than $150 million, according to Ben Sawyer, one of the founders of the Games for Health initiative. He estimates that health-related games comprise 20% of the serious games space. In the future, he sees exercise gaming (also known as excer-gaming) going more and more mainstream and teachers using games to channel the excess energy of their most rambunctious students—rather than sending them to a corner when they act out. But his real hope is that video games will transform public health.
“What we’re trying to do is change the interface to health care,” he says. “The interface to games — there’s no argument about how great and fantastic it is. The interface to health care, no matter how you define it, the way you go to a doctor’s office, the way you fill out a form, fantastic it isn’t.”
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Sept-October 2008 Vol. 42, No. 5
Review by Rick Docksai
The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World by Wagner James Au. HarperCollins, www.harpercollins.com. 2008. 274 pages. $25.95.
As a young boy, Philip Rosedale wanted to change the world. In 2003, he would do just that by launching Second Life, recounts tech journalist Wagner James Au. In The Making of Second Life, Au takes readers on a tour of the online world that he calls “the best candidate to be a key feature in the Internet’s next generation.”
“Even if you have no home inside it now, odds are that you eventually will (or at the very least, find yourself becoming an occasional visitor),” Au writes.
Au spent three years as avatar Hamlet Linden, an “embedded journalist” who traversed Second Life’s cities, wastelands, and continents to report daily on its most newsworthy developments.
Second Life is an online world whose whole interior is formed and developed by registered users, or “Residents.” Residents interact as three-dimensional online personas, or avatars, and buy or sell a wide range of goods using Linden dollars. Second Life sets virtually no limits on what avatars look like, what they can build their surroundings into, or what kinds of commerce they can conduct.
“Everything within Second Life is given form and substance by its Residents,” Au writes.
He argues that, while many online worlds came before Second Life—Everquest, World of Warcraft, Active Worlds, and There, among others—the freedom of Second Life Residents to create and recreate their domain makes Second Life unique.
“In most online worlds, reality is part and parcel a conception of the company that created it,” he writes, arguing that it makes Second Life far more likely to impact real life than other online worlds. He recalls numerous examples from his travels of seeing it do so. Real-world adults dated and married after meeting each other in Second Life, and real-world relationships have ended because one partner was having affairs with other avatars in Second Life.
Au shares success stories of individuals who earned real-world income by selling services in Second Life: Jason Foo, an unemployed Iraq war veteran, earned $450 per week from running a Second Life casino. Alyssa LaRoche, a retired consultant, created the Second Life fashion line Preen, generating as much as $4,000 a month by selling clothes and accessories to avatars.
Real-world businesses, nonprofit groups, and politicians also have sought greater publicity by holding events as avatars in Second Life. These include the American Cancer Society, which has hosted virtual fund-raisers, and onetime U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Mark Warner, who became an avatar in September 2006 to speak to other avatars about his campaign.
That someone might use Second Life for professional reasons hardly surprises Au at all: “Any real-world business or enterprise that can be enhanced or leveraged by a 3-D world has a future at stake here,” he writes.
But how big a stake?
Au’s descriptions and anecdotes, while amusing and intriguing, leave questions about Second Life’s ultimate importance largely unanswered. The American Cancer Society was highly successful long before Second Life was born. And Warner’s avatar wielded little real-world electoral power: Warner is today a forgotten also-ran in the 2008 presidential race.
And if Second Life’s user freedom is a strong selling point, Au’s own numbers do not suggest it. He notes that, in mid-2007, Second Life had 500,000 active subscribers. He also notes that World of Warcraft had at that time around 9 million.
Even the buzz surrounding Second Life is relatively modest. Steve Rubel, an Edelman Digital marketing executive who publishes technology blog Micro Persuasion, noted that Technorati, a search engine that searches only blogs, recorded 12 times more blogosphere mentions of YouTube than of Second Life.
“Second Life is not growing nearly as fast as many perceive or as rapidly as other communities that encourage participation,” Rubel notes.
Au demonstrates in The Making of Second Life that Second Life is a remarkable test case in the capacities of virtual technology. He offers useful resources and tips for businesses hoping to establish a presence in Second Life, including a helpful glossary. But is he right in predicting that Second Life will become the Internet’s Next Big Thing? That remains for readers, and avatars, to find out.
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