January-February 2012, Vol. 46, No. 1
The Best Predictions of 2011
Drawing from a variety of sources throughout the past year, the editors of THE FUTURIST take a look at some of the best predictions for the world’s future.
What makes a prediction a good one? Like any announcement that must compete for attention in the public sphere, the predictions that gather the most notice are the strangest or the boldest, or that paint a picture of a future state that challenge expectations.
Today, we still largely cling to this somewhat misguided notion of prediction as a remarkable statement. But the nature of prediction is changing as rapidly as our world. The scope of the predictable universe is expanding, thanks to new tools for acquiring and measuring data. The number of people with a platform to share a prediction — a statement about what will happen to the world — has grown and will continue to grow as rapidly as the Internet.
With that it mind, we present to you our list of the best predictions we read in 2011. They are surprising, often conflicting, and rise from a diverse pool. We evaluated each one in terms of what made it a good prediction, what could get in the way of its coming to pass, and what it all means.
While we tried to nail the experts down to specific dates, many made interesting forecasts that could not be tied down to a specific point “In the Future.”
This collection provides, we believe, a fascinating portrait of our present as we attempt to communicate with our ever-shifting future. —Patrick Tucker, deputy editor, THE FUTURIST
Predictions: Energy
Prediction: Nano-engineered solar panels will free the world from fossil fuels by 2016.
Who: Ray Kurzweil, speaking to Lauren Feeney of the online environmental magazine “Grist” in February.
Why Great: At present, solar provides less than 1% of U.S. energy needs, despite it’s obvious merits over fossil fuels, nuclear power, and especially coal.
BUT… No matter how it’s designed, no more than 70% of the sunlight that strikes a solar panel can be converted into energy, thanks to those pesky laws of thermodynamics. Also assuming that the U.S. coal lobby still has money in five years, we’ll still be using plenty of black rocks.
Bottom Line: You don’t need a nano-engineered solar panel to ask your local utility how much of their energy comes from solar.
Prediction: Renewables will provide 80% of our energy by 2050.
Who: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in their Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation released in May.
Why Great: The most credible body in climate science is sending a clear message to policymakers: renewables can work, here’s how!
BUT… The plan is contingent on policy-makers taking action on climate change, which could mean voting against the interests of labor and big business. Good luck.
What to do about it: Check out the report. Cite the stats in your windfarm business plan. Get a bank loan. Start a company. Get rich and save the planet at the same time.
Source: http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report
Prediction: Photovoltaic manufacturing capacity could reach 200 gigawatts (GW) globally by 2020.
Who: 72 internationally recognized experts brought together for a workshop organized by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), results summarized in Foundations for Innovation: Photovoltaic Technologies for the 21st Century, released in April 2011.
Why Great: This is a conservative estimate; by comparison, the current generating capacity of the world’s nuclear power plants is estimated at 377 GW. Photovoltaics represents a major growth area because it could potentially produce cleaner energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
BUT… It’s an expensive alternative to other energy technologies.
Bottom Line: The challenges are to improve the engineering and design of solar cells and enhance their longevity and performance. But it’s not just a science and technology issue; the workshop participants also note the challenges of tax and regulatory policies. The United States currently has 8% of the world’s share of photovoltaics manufacturing, but this could double with technological advances.
Source: NIST, http://www.nist.gov/director/prog-ofc/solar-042611.cfm
Prediction: Solar Power will be cheaper than both fossil fuels and nuclear power within five years.
Who: Mark M. Little, the global research director for General Electric speaking to Bloomberg Business News on May 28th.
Why it’s great: Little is putting his money where his mouth his. GE is opening a new solar thin film plant in 2013.
BUT… Right now, GE’s thin film panels have an efficiency of just 12% (meaning they can convert only 12% of the light that hits them into energy.
Bottom Line: In the words of Little, “If we can get solar at 15 cents a kilowatt-hour or lower, which I’m hopeful that we will do, you’re going to have a lot of people that are going to want to have solar at home.”
Prediction: By 2020, 15% of Europe’s electricity could come from arrays of solar panels in the North African deserts.
Who: Gerhard Knies, chairman of the board of trustees, Desertec Foundation
Background: Conceived a quarter century ago, the North African solar project is a plan to erect a network of solar plants across Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Algeria, and Egypt, with a grid of high-voltage transmission lines that would deliver the electricity to Europe.
Why Great: According to proponents of Desertec, the controversial mega-project not only would help Europe increase its use of renewable energy (its target is 20% by 2020), but it would also create jobs and economic development in a region that sorely needs it.
BUT… Skeptics see the Desertec as yet another way for developed countries to co-opt the resources of less-developed regions. Though investment would boost the economies these North African countries, it would also increase energy demand domestically.
Bottom Line: Desertec has support from the World Bank, but like many grand visions for solving cross-border problems, time is needed as much to build trust among all interested parties as to build the project itself.
Prediction: Fossil-fuel price shocks will intensify between now and 2030 as Japan, Germany, China, and other nations turn away from nuclear energy. Japan’s fossil-fuel imports alone could rise to 238,000 barrels of oil a day and 1.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day.
Who: Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College
Why It Is Great: Given the size of China, Germany, and Japan’s economies, if all three countries substantially increase their fossil-fuel consumption, the whole world will feel the pinch. This is especially so when the whole world is suffering higher oil prices than ever already. Further price hikes, related slowdowns in economic activity globally, and — of course — more smog and greenhouse gas emissions are all likely to follow.
BUT… Few buts, in this case. Klare’s logic is hard to dispute. Solar and wind technologies are certainly improving, to the point that the German government promises to replace all its nuclear power with wind and solar power by 2030. But that is 20 years from now, and in the meantime, these alternative systems are nowhere near ready to take up lion’s share of national energy production.
Bottom Line: In worldwide energy markets, as in any other area of life, every action — i.e., the Fukushima nuclear disaster — does indeed have an equal and opposite reaction.
Source: http://www.alternet.org/world/151201/3_massive_world_events_that_will_change_your_life?page=2
Predictions: Humanity
Prediction: The global Muslim population is projected to grow from 1.6 billion to 2.2 billion (an approximately 35% increase) by 2030.
Who: The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, in a report entitled “The Future of the Global Muslim Population: Projections for 2010-2030.”
Why Great: The growth can be attributed to increased life-expectancy rates and better living conditions in many Muslim-majority countries.
BUT… The population growth rate for Muslims is slowing. This decline is also being attributed to better living conditions in many Muslim-majority countries as well as two other developments occurring there: increased educational opportunities for women and greater urbanization.
Bottom Line: The Pew Forum reports that “globally, the Muslim population is forecast to grow at about twice the rate of the non-Muslim population over the next two decades. … If current trends continue, Muslims will make up 26.4% of the world’s total projected population of 8.3 billion in 2030, up from 23.4% of the estimated 2010 world population of 6.9 billion.”
Source: http://pewforum.org/The-Future-of-the-Global-Muslim-Population.aspx
Prediction: The United States will be 20 million college graduates short of demand by 2025.
Who: The Georgetown University Center on Education in the June 27th report “The Undereducated American.”
Why Great: Despite persistent talk of an “education bubble” the report finds that the United States has not been graduating enough college students to meet workforce demand, and this has persisted for more than 30 years now.
BUT… The alternate headline on this trend reads: University Suggests That More Kids Should Attend University.
Bottom Line: We need a more educated workforce. But there may exist multiple paths to reach that goal.
Source: http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/undereducatedpressrelease.pdf
Prediction: Half of the world’s poorest countries can escape poverty by 2020.
Who: UN, report by the Group of Eminent Persons appointed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
Why Great: Of the world’s 48 least-developed countries (LDCs), half may be able to achieve poverty-reduction goals within the next 10 years. This will require more-targeted development aid, as well as more advantageous trade agreements (i.e., quota-free access for exports), plus investment in education and agricultural productivity.
Reducing global poverty promises also to significantly reduce conflict. Economic well-being also reduces demographic pressures and could contribute to lowering birthrates in countries least able to support increasing populations.
Many LDCs have made social and economic improvements in the past decade, including trends toward democracy, increasing opportunities for women, and strengthening weak legal and economic institutions.
BUT… Only three out of 51 LDCs have “graduated” from that status since the UN first established the category in 1970.
Bottom Line: Consider fair trade and investment schemes promoting the development of LDCs’ assets, such as strategic minerals, arable land, and eco-resources.
Source: AllAfrica news service (UN), March 29, 2011. http://allafrica.com/stories/201105120527.html
Prediction: Schools won’t have days off for inclement weather anymore. Instead, homebound students and teachers will conduct lessons online, with in-person lessons to resume once the snow/hail/etc. subsides.
Who: Sina (Chinese media company)
Why Great: It is a boost for school productivity if learning continues even when the roads are icy. Also, although the article does not mention this, school systems in heavily polluted areas or areas particularly impacted by climate change will be much better able to protect their students’ health and safety — i.e., they can stay home and learn on those days when smog is acute or floods, heat waves, or other harsh weather is in effect.
BUT… For students to reach their teachers via Internet, they must first have Internet access. Not every rural, inner-city, and low-income home is connected yet (though this is slowly changing, as more Internet services set up shop in low-income communities and more low-income young people acquire inexpensive mobile phone-based Internet connections).
Bottom Line: In teaching, as in any other human activity, it is always good to have a backup plan. Distance learning, which is clearly spreading, could provide schools with a very convenient bad-weather backup — as long as students’ Internet access spreads as quickly.
Source: http://english.sina.com/technology/2011/0517/373795.html
Prediction: India will be the largest country in terms of population in 2050, with China in second place. United States will be the third largest, with 423 million people.
Who: The U.S. Census Bureau’s International Data Base.
Why Notable: According to the census bureau, China’s population seems to be stabilizing, while western Europe’s could slightly rise. In the United States, most of the population growth is occurring and will continue to occur in minority communities.
Also, there will be around 9.4 billion people living on the planet by then.
BUT… A growing population in India could hold the country back economically and foment internal struggles over already limited resources and access to basic necessities. The same holds true for countries in Africa, especially Nigeria and Ethiopia, which according to the census bureau’s projections will experience the largest population growth in the coming decades, percentage-wise. On the other hand, declining birth rates could continue to cause problems in developed countries, particularly Japan and Russia.
Bottom Line: The United States and the world will continue to see demographic shifts. Also, in addition to birth rate, increased life expectancy (particularly in developed countries) is another variable to take into account.
Source: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2080404,00.html
Prediction: Every book will be interactive and cross-platform by 2020.
Who: Author James Warner (All Her Father’s Guns), in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
Why Great: Say goodbye to outmoded linear text-based reading. Warner writes, “Future ‘books’ will be bundled with soundtracks, musical leitmotifs, 3-D graphics, and streaming video.” These enhanced objects of desire will also feature built-in social networking functions to provide further distraction from actually having to read them.
BUT… Digital simulations of the analog reading experience will appear in the decades thereafter. Breakthroughs in augmented reality will be able to perfectly recreate the now-illegal process of enjoying an actual book, down to the “sensation of turning the pages, the crack of the spine, and even the occasional paper cut.”
Bottom Line: Warner’s cleverly-argued, well-informed satirical take on the future of books cautions people not to be too quick to champion digital technologies over analog processes.
Source: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2011/3/24warner.html
Prediction: Medicare reform is likely doomed, whether proposed by Democrats or Republicans.
Who: Greg Ip, covering the Peterson Foundation’s fiscal summit for The Economist magazine on May 25th.
Why it’s great: This quote, which sums up the current American Medicare debate with perfect, post-partisan aplomb: “Any serious attempt to reform Medicare is going to be unpopular because it will cost the elderly something, and the elderly are on the way to becoming 30% of the voting population. Thus, the opposing party is inevitably going to use such a proposal to kill the other at the next election without advancing an alternative. And since both parties know this, the only Medicare plans they offer voters will be lemons.”
BUT… Multi-generation families are on the rise. More grandkids taking in elderly relatives could reduce reliance on social safety nets.
Bottom Line: Because no elected politician can afford to alienate the Baby Boomer voting block, Generations X and Y are going to be paying higher taxes for fewer government services than did their parents. At some point, they might decide that’s just not fair.
Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/05/politics_medicare
Prediction: Every book will be interactive and cross-platform by 2020.
Who: Author James Warner (All Her Father’s Guns), in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
Why Great: Say goodbye to outmoded linear text-based reading. Warner writes, “Future ‘books’ will be bundled with soundtracks, musical leitmotifs, 3-D graphics, and streaming video.” These enhanced objects of desire will also feature built-in social networking functions to provide further distraction from actually having to read them.
BUT… Digital simulations of the analog reading experience will appear in the decades thereafter. Breakthroughs in augmented reality will be able to perfectly recreate the now-illegal process of enjoying an actual book, down to the “sensation of turning the pages, the crack of the spine, and even the occasional paper cut.”
Bottom Line: Warner’s cleverly-argued, well-informed satirical take on the future of books cautions people not to be too quick to champion digital technologies over analog processes.
Source: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2011/3/24warner.html
Prediction: The number-one factor affecting quality of life for South Koreans in 2040 will be health; employment will drop from first to eighth place.
Who: Choi Hangsub, associate professor of sociology, University of Kookmin, Seoul, South Korea
Background: To foresee how satisfied citizens may be in the future, and to plan how to invest resources to improve quality of life, policy makers must be able to forecast what sectors (e.g., state of the environment, opportunities for leisure, income gaps) will be of greater importance to people in the future. A survey of specialists concluded that, whereas employment was the most important element underlying life satisfaction for Koreans in 2010, that factor will drop in rank to just eighth place by 2040, as concerns over an aging population’s health moves up from second to first place among happiness-seekers’ priorities.
Why Great: Sociologists are warning us that what will make us happy in the future aren’t necessarily the same things that make us happy now (at least according to quality-of-life researchers). As having a family decreases importance in the next 30 years, access to the Internet will increase, suggesting that the impulse for human contact will take on a more mobile character.
BUT… This particular study focused on South Korea, so it is difficult to make broad generalizations. However, the researchers’ point that happy cultures begin with happy citizens is well worth noting.
Bottom Line: Quantification of quality of life (i.e., happiness or life satisfaction) is of growing interest to policy makers and all who study macro trends underlying what we loosely call “progress.” This is a departure from traditional economic theory that looks only at GDP, income, employment, and marriage rates. (For example, those quantifying divorce rates might consider whether the impacts are perceived as positive or negative by the parties involved.)
Source: “Sociological and Futuristic Study on Quality of Life in 2040” by Choi Hangsub in Moving from Vision to Action, edited by Cynthia G. Wagner. (the World Future Society’s 2011 conference volume)
Prediction: The proportion of world population over age 65 will grow to 22.3% by 2100, up from 7.6% in 2010.
Who: UN
Why Great: World population grows two ways: more people being born and fewer people dying. The shift to a more mature world has social, economic, and political implications. More-mature cultures tend to be richer, more stable, and less violent ones.
BUT… More-mature nations tend to be weaker in terms of health and military might, making them vulnerable to threats from younger, poorer nations.
Bottom Line: Immigration is a third way that cultures can balance themselves demographically, as young people seek opportunities in wealthier countries around the world, thus offering a potential solution to the issue of the so-called pensioner crisis.
Source: UN data via The Economist, http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/05/world_population&fsrc=nwl (posted May 13, 2011)
Prediction: In the world’s wealthiest countries, spending on long-term care could double or even triple by 2050.
Who: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in new (May 2011) report, “Help Wanted? Providing and paying for long-term care”
Why Great: Increased longevity is considered good news for individuals but bad news for the institutions that need to pay for their care. The proportion of the frailest elderly in OECD countries (age 80 and older) will grow sharply to 1 in 10 by 2050, up from 1 in 25 in 2010. To meet the care gap, these wealthier societies will become more open to importing care workers as well as innovative technologies such as caregiving robots.
Bottom Line: Individuals, institutions, and governments can all invest now in future care, whether it be improving the health monitoring capability of smart houses and devices or educating a homogenous citizenry about the value of immigrant workers.
Source: http://www.oecd.org/document/12/0,3746,en_21571361_44315115_47904908_1_1_1_1,00.html
Prediction: The Middle East could be the host of a new scientific revolution that fosters huge breakthroughs in renewable energy.
Just as science in Europe was reborn in the seventeenth century following a series of political revolutions, the upheavals now sweeping the Middle East could free the region up for an intellectual liberation and the emergence of a democracy-driven science research base dedicated to people’s needs, contrasting with Western science industries that work primarily at the behest of their corporate and national-security sponsors.
Who: Dan Hind, a British science author and publicist. Commentary ran May 17, 2011, on Al Jazeera.
Why Great: The global implications would be massive: a bastion of fossil fuels becomes the source of solar energy to power the world; a region beset with tens of millions of unemployed and impoverished people could suddenly generate jobs and revenue streams; and R&D industries that are now based mostly in North America and Europe would soon have powerful new potential partners — and potential competitors. Worldwide innovation and economic growth might accelerate, emigration might slow, and terrorist movements would be further marginalized.
BUT… It depends on whether true democracy does take root in the affected countries, and that is far from assured.
Bottom Line: Hind’s vision is very desirable, but it will probably take earnest commitments from players in the Middle East and outside it to make it happen.
Source: Al Jazeera, http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/05/201151275441474476.html
Predictions: Cities
Prediction: Traffic congestion will increase by more than 30% in 18 U.S. cities by 2030. The biggest increase (54%) will be in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Who: Harvard Center for Risk Analysis (HCRA) at the School of Public Health
Background: If no further improvements are made to transportation capacity and infrastructure, cities already plagued with traffic problems will see things get worse. Smaller cities like Raleigh, which anticipate population growth as retirement meccas, will likely experience more premature deaths due to increased pollution and traffic accidents.
Why Great: Models for studying the range of trends and impacts — from urban growth to regional migration to the replacement of gas guzzlers with clean hybrids — are becoming increasingly sophisticated, thus giving policy planners in public health and transportation a great chance to invest the necessary resources for improving the quality of transportation.
BUT… In a business-as-usual scenario, the researchers project that U.S. traffic woes will cost a total of 1,900 premature deaths and $17 billion in social costs.
Bottom Line: How you get from here to there makes up a big part of your daily planning. You can also make it a bigger part of your life planning, such as simply deciding to live within walking distance of your office (or even working from home). It could save not just a lot of time, but also your life.
Source: Harvard Center for Risk Analysis (HCRA) at the School of Public Health, cited by The American Road & Transportation Builders Association http://www.artba.org/article/new-study-estimates-for-first-time-the-public-health-costs-of-traffic-congestion-in-us/
Prediction: Biofuel-powered hypersonic jets will shuttle passengers from London to Tokyo (and vice-versa) in less than two and a half hours by 2050.
Who: Airbus parent company EADS.
Why Great: High-speed international air travel that doesn’t generate air pollution would constitute a major achievement. The ZEHST (Zero Emission Hypersonic Transportation) would travel over 3000 mph powered by a combination of hydrogen and oxygen derived from seaweed, emitting water vapor instead of carbon dioxide. Also, at cruising altitudes just above the atmosphere of the Earth, it’s almost like space travel.
BUT… Commercial flights won’t be available for 40 years. What’s more, it may not be commercially viable: The aircraft will only be able to handle 100 passengers at most, so tickets would be prohibitively expensive. (MSNBC reports that seats on the ZEHST “will likely cost in the neighborhood of $10,000 to $30,000, according to aerospace industry experts.”)
Bottom Line: This ambitious project literally aims for the stratosphere.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43500622/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/
Worst Prediction of the Year Goes to
Prediction: The World will end on May 21st, 2011
Who: Preacher Harold Camping on his nationally syndicated radio show, frequently, since his last failed end of the World prediction in 1994.
Why Great: Millions of people woke up on May 22nd, pleasantly surprised to still exist.
BUT… 2012 is right around the corner.
Bottom Line: Camping joins a long-line of misinformed prognosticators — from the Jehovah’s Witnesses to former U.S. Presidential Candidate Pat Robertson — to issue public pronouncements about the end of the world and then miss by a mile. You can’t duck the future. Good news is there’s still time to make the future better, today.
Source: National Geographic and AP, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/05/pictures/110520-may-21-doomsday-harold-camping-judgement-day-rapture-end-of-the-world/#/apocalypse-prediction-rapture-may-2011_35778_600x450.jpg
Prediction: 48 metropolitan areas in the United States will not return to pre-recession employment levels until 2020.
Who: The United States Conference of Mayors.
Why Not So Great: But wait — there’s more. Most U.S. metro economies “will suffer persistently high unemployment beyond 2011, many of which will continue with high rates into the middle and latter part of the decade,” the report claims. It pinpoints 198 cities that will still face over 6% unemployment by 2015.
BUT… According to the report, “the vast majority of employment gains the U.S. will experience in the coming years will be provided by metro economies,” adding, “by the close of 2014 over half of the metro areas will have returned to their previous peak employment level.” It’s not exactly a silver lining, but it’s something, anyway.
Bottom Line: The report highlights the need for both short- and long-term solutions from federal legislators. It also calls for them to earmark some of the money being spent on military actions abroad to improving domestic cities and creating jobs at home.
Source: http://www.usmayors.org/metroeconomies/2011/
Prediction: Dubai’s airport will be the busiest in the world, serving over 75 million passengers annually by 2015.
Who: Dubai Airports.
Why Great: “Increased liberalization, GDP growth, and increasingly affluent and mobile populations in emerging markets will combine to propel air travel growth worldwide,” according to Dubai Airports CEO Paul Griffiths.
BUT… Two words: carbon footprint. Air travel isn’t exactly the most environmentally friendly way to get around. The question is: Can the planet handle an increase in fossil fuel-guzzling, greenhouse gas-emitting international air travel?
Bottom Line: Dubai will continue to be a major point of connection between emerging and established national economies.
Source: http://www.dubaiairports.ae/en/media-centre/Pages/press-releases.aspx?id=28
Predictions: Commerce
Prediction: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Russia will be responsible for over half of all global economic growth by 2025.
Who: The World Bank, in the report Global Development Horizons 2011 — Multipolarity: The New Global Economy.
Why great: These emerging countries’ economic growth will likely pave the way for improvement in other developing nations’ economies via increased financial and commercial activity across borders.
BUT… According to Mansoor Dailami, manager of emerging trends at the World Bank and lead author of the report, “A key question is whether existing multilateral norms and institutions are sufficiently strong to accommodate the passage toward multipolarity. The challenges of managing global integration among power centers makes strengthening policy coordination across economies critical to reducing the risks of economic instability.”
Bottom Line: The title says it all: Multipolarity. Global economic influence will be shared by various developed and developing countries and the U.S. dollar will no longer solely dominate the international monetary system. The likelihood of this scenario seems strong — the economic rise of these countries has been forecasted for quite some time prior to the World Bank’s report.
World Bank Pubs, Emerging economies will grow by 4.7% a year by 2025, and their global GDP will expand to 45%. Read http://ow.ly/5h2vI
Prediction: Prices for staple grains — i.e., food — will increase by 120% to 180% in the next two decades. [2030s]
Who: Oxfam
Background: Environmental, political, and economic forces are all driving up food prices, including climate change and pressure from the biofuels lobbies. Meanwhile, demand for food will increase by 70% as the global population reaches a projected 9 billion by 2050.
Why Great: Individuals, communities, and organizations are taking the future in their own hands — literally — by either growing their own food or joining cooperatives, and by supporting hunger-fighting politicians. Even Big Agriculture could benefit from nurturing the diversity of smallholder farmers, says Oxfam.
BUT… Failure to build a sustainable future for farmers could result in food wars, just as any resource scarcity provokes competition and conflict.
Bottom Line: A “new prosperity” is possible, says Oxfam: “The race to a sustainable future is on, and there will be huge opportunities for those who get there first.”
Source: “Growing a Sustainable Future” by Robert Bailey, Oxfam GB/Oxfam International, May 31, 2011, http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/papers/growing-better-future.html
Prediction: There may be a major cocoa shortage by 2020.
Who: Mars, the global confectionary giant.
Background: At issue is standards and certification for sustainability in cocoa production. Without sustainable practices, along with innovative agricultural technologies, “the industry as a whole can expect a shortfall of more than one million tonnes of cocoa in just nine years.”
Why Great: Mars Chocolate is a powerful influencer and has pledged to purchase 100% certified sustainable chocolate by 2020, focusing on “technology transfer that puts farmers first; innovations in agricultural science; and rigorous certification standards.”
BUT… The challenge is to improve the sustainability certification process, which will require industry investment in giving farmers access to advanced agricultural methods, including genetically improved cocoa that is more productive and more-resistant to disease.
Bottom Line: Mars recognizes that improving farming practices is good for farmers, the industry, and the planet. Whether chocoholics care much how their candy bars get to them, the prospects of major shortages could increase their interest in supporting sustainable chocolate.
http://www.mars.com/global/commitments/sustainability/cocoa-sustainability.aspx
Prediction: The world will no-longer rely on a single reserve currency by 2025.
Who: The World Bank, Tuesday, May 17th.
Why It’s Great: In the words of the study, “A multi-currency regime would more broadly distribute lender-of-last-resort responsibility and make it easier to boost liquidity during times of market distress without as much disruption as is often the case now.”
BUT… Since oil is denominated in dollars, a change to a basket of currency denomination system would send the price of oil much higher.
Bottom Line: The above-outlined emerging economies will grow 4.7% annually (on average)a year between 2011 and 2025, according to the World Bank. Advanced countries will grow on 2.3% a year, on average. This will affect the price of lots of things.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/17/businesspro-us-worldbank-emerging-idUSTRE74G5PJ20110517
Prediction: Student loan debt will spark worse economic turmoil in the United States than the credit-card debt crisis or the housing bubbles. Young people ages 16-24 suffer higher unemployment rates than any other U.S. demographic group, even though most have racked up gargantuan amounts of loan debt to earn their degrees. Organized student protests, and eventually civil unrest, will unfold unless the government takes action.
Who: Sarah Jaffe, contributor to Alternet.org [Michael Bloomberg predict]
When: 2010-2020
Why It’s a Great Prediction: Defaulted debts in the U.S. economy already contributed to one major global economic catastrophe in 2007-2008, one from which the world has yet to fully recover. Can any country on earth afford another, in this case tied to student loans rather than housing loans? The situation is ominous for the education itself, also: If people come to associate college degrees with underemployment and lifelong personal debt, then large numbers of young people may decide to forego college. America’s knowledge base will wither, and its standard of living — and by extension, that of the rest of the world — will sink further. The worldwide pain intensifies even more if Jaffe’s warnings of youth riots and violence come to pass.
But… Concerted political reforms and a robust economic recovery might pave the way toward a brighter alternative future. So, too, might more U.S. students turning to more fiscally sane education alternatives — like enrolling in Canadian colleges, eh?
Bottom Line: The United States is a world leader in coming up with overly expensive, credit-busting approaches to the good life. But this cannot go on forever.
Source: Jaffe, Sarah. “The Next Bubble is About to Burst.” June 2, 2011: http://www.alternet.org/economy/151149/the_next_bubble_is_about_to_burst%3A_college_grads_face_dwindling_jobs_and_mounting_loans_?page=entire
Prediction: India will become the world’s third largest auto market by 2020.
Who: J.D. Power and Associates, in the report “India Automotive 2020: The Next Giant from Asia.”
Why Great: India has already risen to become the sixth-largest market for passenger cars and light commercial vehicles. This growth is tied to general economic improvements (greater market liberalization and more foreign investment, in particular) and a growing consumer-driven culture, according to the report. “India could find itself well-positioned to fulfill the needs of the small car segment,” says John Humphrey, senior vice president of global automotive operations at J.D. Power and Associates. He adds: “That said, profit margins are thinner in the small car segment, so automakers are going to need to manage their businesses carefully to optimize profits.”
BUT… According to the report, India’s auto market has three “deficits” to overcome — in international trade, budget, and infrastructure (which is singled out as the largest challenge) — if it is to realize its full potential. Humphrey asserts, “Much of India’s future growth in the automotive sector will depend on successfully creating the infrastructure to support its economy.” The report also points to a fourth “deficit” in terms of skilled engineers and large-scale automotive parts production.
Bottom Line: 700,000 light vehicles were sold in 2000, and around 11 million are predicted for 2020.That represents some serious growth — but it’s far from guaranteed at this point.
Source: http://www.jdpower.com/news/pressRelease.aspx?ID=2011081
Prediction: The United States will need to create 21 million jobs by 2020 in order to achieve full employment.
Who: The McKinsey Global Institute, in their report “An economy that works: Job creation and America’s future.”
Why: The report’s authors looked at the current high level of unemployment (approximately seven million are still out of work as the U.S. enters into an extended “jobless recovery” period) as well as projected population growth over the next decade to arrive at this number.
BUT… If current trends continue, this is unlikely to occur. The economy will not be as strong as it needs to be and many will lack the necessary skills and education for the jobs that will likely exist.
Bottom Line: According to the report, which looks at the potential for job growth across 6 industry sectors, demand for college graduates is likely to rise, so government investment in higher education is imperative. “Our analysis suggests a shortage of up to 1.5 million workers with bachelor’s degrees or higher in 2020. At the same time, nearly 6 million Americans without a high school diploma are likely to be without a job.” The report concludes with a series of policy suggestions, including attracting greater foreign investment and supporting new industries and start-ups, which could help reverse the trends, given a healthy economy.
Prediction: Digital currency will be accepted virtually everywhere in the United States by 2015.
Who: PayPal president Scott Thompson.
Why Great: People will no longer have to worry if they have enough cash on them or go out of their way to stop by their bank’s ATMs. On a larger scale, a mostly cashless society would go a long way towards eliminating illegal underground economies and reducing criminal activity, as David R. Warwick points out in “The Case Against Cash” (THE FUTURIST, July-August 2011).
BUT… The news is coming from PayPal. Surprising? Also, it’s good news depending on how you feel about information gathering and privacy issues. There will be data on every transaction made and that data will need protecting (of course, this is already an issue).
What to do about it: In Thompson’s words, “embrace a digital lifestyle” and stop using cash and checks.
Bottom Line: Wallets may be destined to become antique collector’s items in the next few years.
Source: https://www.thepaypalblog.com/, http://mashable.com/2011/06/29/paypal-100-million/
Prediction: By 2015, the majority of organizations that manage innovation processes will galvanize innovation by making a game out of it.
Who: Gartner, Inc.
Background: “Gamification” — applying game mechanics, such as scoreboards and rules of play, to non-game systems — is a well-known trend underway in IT, Web development, and many other types of businesses and organizations. Their management teams are all looking to increase customer feedback, employee engagement, and idea generation. They achieve all three by creating game-like platforms that make the work of discussion and correspondence feel more like a game. For example, Great Britain’s Department for Work and Pensions created a social collaboration platform for its 120,000 personnel. Called Idea Street, it features points, leader boards, and a “buzz index.” In its first 48 months, approximately 4,500 users had registered and had generated 1,400 ideas, of which 63 had gone forward to implementation. The World Bank developed a similar application, called Evoke, which crowdsources ideas from players across the globe to solve social challenges.
Why Great: Plenty of adults, just like kids, enjoy friendly competition. The Department for Work and Pensions, the World Bank, and other organizations are clearly coming up with creative ways to channel grownups’ proclivities for games and, in the process, get higher volumes of serious work done. And who can argue with that?
BUT… No app is going to work magic. It is only as useful as the people who use it (or don’t use it). The two organizations above may have the dual benefits of an engaged population willing to contribute ideas and an open-minded leadership willing to receive new ideas. Both of these are important, and unfortunately, not every organization has them. Those that don’t will probably not see as much gain from gamification.
Bottom Line: Businesses and organizations are looking for, and often finding, highly productive ways to combine business and pleasure.
Source: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1629214
Prediction: Worldwide government debt will increase another 40% by 2016 (reaching $48,100 billion; up from $34,400 billion this year). Financial stability of every major economy on earth will be in jeopardy. Advanced economies are the ones running up the negative balances; emerging market economies account for 17% of global debt now and will account for 14% in 2016.
Who: Eswar Prasad and Menjie Ding, Financial Times
Background: Debt constitutes “a major threat to global financial stability,” according to Prasad and Ding in this report, and they detail steep aggregate debt increases across the global financial system to make their case. The causes are many. Sagging economic performance is setting back the United States and Europe. Japan’s economy is underperforming, too, while simultaneously contending with the aftershocks of the 2011 tsunami disaster.
Why Great: One need look no farther than Greece and Portugal to see what happens if debt is allowed to spiral out of control. If this report’s analyses are correct, there could be many more Greeces and Portugals across the world in the years ahead: No region is free of looming debt. What’s even scarier is that the major economies, such as Europe, have the most crushing debt problems. This matters because these larger economies are bailing the troubled smaller ones out now. If the larger economies remain in the red, they will have no more bailouts to spare, and troubled economies everywhere will be on their own.
BUT… Could BRIC growth soften the blow?
Bottom Line: It happened in Greece, and it happened in Portugal. It could apparently happen in a lot of other places, too.
Source: Brookings, http://www.brookings.edu/articles/2011/0731_debt_burden_prasad.aspx
Prediction: “micro-multinationals” will dominate the planet (with a little assistance from cheap robots) by 2025.
Who: Hal Varian, chief economist for Google, in an article for Foreign Policy.
Why Great: Thanks largely to the Internet, “even the smallest company can now afford a communications and computational infrastructure that would have been the envy of a large corporation 15 years ago,” Varian writes. These small businesses, known as micro-multinationals, can distribute their products (especially those that are Web-based) — and hire employees — in virtually any country in the world. Varian points to Skype, based in Estonia, as a successful example of such a company. Micro-multinationals can help prevent “brain drains,” too, since employees can work remotely from anywhere in the world. And soon, according to Varian, inexpensive robotic devices will be available to boost these businesses. This technology, which previously only large companies could afford, will further level the playing field.
BUT… Varian adds, that terrorists and others who seek to create disruption and chaos have also “benefited enormously from the same proliferation of information technology that has enabled micro-multinationals and robotics.” He further points out that any problems with the communications infrastructure itself could cause “catastrophes.” In addition, he mentions that legislative and regulatory issues, among others, could prevent the potential of inexpensive robotic technology from fully being realized.
Bottom Line: In summing up. Varian says, “A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have it in an additional decade.” While this may come across as an overly-simplistic (and overly-optimistic) forecasting shortcut, it does seem applicable in the business world.
Source: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/15/micromultinationals_will_run_the_world
Prediction: Thanks to a rebound in housing construction, unemployment will fall below 7% by 2013, earlier than the Federal Reserve is predicting.
Who: Warren Buffet on the Charlie Rose Show, following the publishing of his most recent Op-Ed in the New York Times.
Why It’s Great: It’s a bold, direct, and unapologetically optimistic statement about the resiliency of the U.S. economy from the world’s most successful investor. More importantly, it might actually be right. U.S. Commerce Department Data released the week of August 26th showed that 165,000 new houses were on the market in the month of July. That’s the lowest inventory of new homes on the market since the government began keeping track 47 years ago.
BUT… Buffett may be a great investor, but he’s not an impartial voice. Forecasting a rebound in home construction overlooks the fact that millions of Americans still face difficult credit conditions, U.S. consumer debt remains at historically elevated levels. In this environment, the consensus credit-worthy consumers will delay home purchases until the economy improves, which is a function of unemployment receding, which is a function of people buying houses.
Bottom Line: The U.S. economic recovery is surprisingly dependent on housing and consumer spending and thus will be volatile for some time.
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVOn371TCPo
Prediction: Baby Boomers easing into retirement will continue to dump U.S. stocks in favor of less risky assets, causing a 13% decline in the U.S. stock market by 2010 (relative to 2010).
Background: “Despite theoretical ambiguities, U.S. equity values have been closely related to demographic trends in the past half century. There has been a tight correlation between population dependency ratios… and the price/earnings ratio of the U.S. stock market. In the context of the impending retirement of baby boomers over the next two decades, this correlation portends poorly for equity values.”
Who: The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, August 22, 2011.
Why it’s Great: It’s an unusually honest appraisal of how changing demographics influence equity valuations. In broaching it, the authors of the letter are trying to look out for retail investors (which is probably more than their brokers are doing). Also, the authors use the same metric to product a robust bull market for stocks between 2025 and 2030. Good news for the grandkids!
BUT… Even the authors acknowledge that their metric is one just one among many. Technological breakthroughs creating new enterprises a loosening of immigration policy, other events could render the prediction moot.
Bottom Line: Be careful of stock brokers baring “buy” opportunities.
Source: http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2011/el2011-26.html?utm_source=home
Prediction: Iraq’s per capita GDP will double by 2015, thanks to oil revenues.
Who: Majid Al-Suri, a Central Bank of Iraq economist
Background: Oil may be one of the few bright spots in Iraq’s attempts to rebuild itself post-Saddam. National oil output in July 2011 stood at 2.8 million barrels a day — higher than pre-invasion oil production, which hovered at around 2.6 million barrels a day in early 2003, and equal to or higher than production at any time since. Al-Suri projects that output will keep growing and, when combined with steadily rising prices for oil in the global market, will push Iraq’s per-capita GDP from its present-day level of $4,500 up to $10,000 by the end of 2015.
Why Great: Iraq is still on the brink: Insurgent attacks are rising, security forces are weak, standards of living remain low, unemployment is horrendous, and corruption is rampant. A failed-state future looks increasingly certain, and that would be a scenario no good person wants to see: outpourings of civil warfare; mass flight of refugees; catastrophic drop-off in the global oil market; a resorgimento for Islamic terrorist networks; and the annihilation of movements for Middle Eastern democratic reform. Iraq’s government could still avert this implosion, but only if it massively boosts security, economic activity, and public infrastructure. Strong GDP growth would make all that possible.
BUT… Al-Suri sounds awfully optimistic, given the present-day mess. Does he really believe his prediction? Or is he just saying it to entice more foreign contractors and placate the U.S. government that has been getting on his country’s case of late about the lack of progress? No one disputes that Iraq has lots of oil to be drilled, but there needs to be law and order on the ground before anyone can drill it. Iraq is still plagued with sectarian violence that shows no signs of quitting. As such, the country is going to have a hard time convincing oil companies to set up shop. Ergo, revenue growth is going to be hard to achieve.
Bottom Line: Iraq needs economic growth to achieve stability, and it needs stability to achieve economic growth — it’s a nasty catch-22, no matter what rosy predictions a Central Bank of Iraq economist may dish out.
Source: Iraq Business News, http://www.iraq-businessnews.com/2011/03/14/iraqs-per-capita-income-to-double-by-2015/
Prediction: The euro zone will collapse, many of its member nations ditching the Euro for their own national currencies, by 2016.
Who: Nouriel Roubini, a French economist and the president of Roubini Global Economic LLC. He holds great renown in France for having accurately predicted the 2008 financial crisis back in 2006.
Background: France, Germany, and several other major European powers founded the euro zone in hopes that Europe’s many economies could be most successful if they pooled their resources and interests into one common market. In Roubini’s opinion, the member nations have not stuck to the plan. Their economic policies remain too divergent and too competitive with each other. Today’s European fiscal crisis is the outcome — bad fiscal management in Greece and Portugal drags down Spain and Ireland. He sees only two ways out. The first is that all euro-zone members adopt one single budgetary policy and tax system. In the absence of this, he says, the euro zone’s less successful member nations will give up the Euro and reinstate their own national currencies.
Why Great: This is bound to shake up global markets — but in a bad way, good way, or both? It’s debatable. On one hand, collapse of the Euro could hugely disrupt trade across Europe, which could wreck Europe’s stock markets. Unemployment and budget crises across the continent could worsen, possibly triggering the elections of extremist politicians and more global chaos. Immigration into Europe would slow, and emigration out of Europe might accelerate. But on the other hand, the countries who abandon the Euro might come out winners. Their new, purportedly crash-proof currencies might be held as more credible by domestic businesses and outside investors. Europe could see a new era of economic prosperity, just one with different centers of gravity.
BUT… Many European officials believe in the deep integration of which Roubini speaks and are trying to get it implemented. If they succeed, then his second, default scenario will not have to come to pass.
Bottom Line: Europe’s financial system gets few votes of confidence. Major overhaul now might be necessary to avert major collapse late on.
Source: Le Figaro, http://www.lefigaro.fr/conjoncture/2011/06/14/04016-20110614ARTFIG00351-roubini-predit-l-explosion-de-l-eurozone.php
Prediction: The present-day economic troubles now growing across the world will culminate in a new Great Depression by 2013.
Who: Nouriel Roubini, a French economist and the president of Roubini Global Economic LLC
Background: Roubini notes the simultaneous slowdowns of economic growth in the United States, United Kingdom, and the euro zone with alarm. He fears that they are the makings of a new, even worse financial crisis that will sweep the globe no later than 2013. He urges national leaders everywhere to quickly institute massive new stimulus initiatives to avert it.
Why Great: A new stimulus is definitely not going to happen in the United States. Few European governments seem disposed to it, either. In all, there is no good reason to think that Roubini’s prescription will be taken. That’s dire news for economies everywhere, if “Dr. Catastrophe” — as Roubini is sometimes called for having foretold in 2006 of the 2008 U.S. housing crash — is correct on his diagnosis of another impending global recession.
BUT… Hamilton hasn’t always been right. As Bloomberg reporter Scott Hamilton notes, “When the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index fell to a 12-year low on March 9, 2009, (Roubini) said it probably would drop to 600 or lower by the end of that year. Instead, the U.S. equity benchmark gained 65 percent for the rest of 2009.” Let’s all hope that he’s wrong about this new Great Depression, too.
Bottom Line: If you’re looking for good news on the economic front, you’re not going to get it from Roubini.
Source: Bloomberg, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-06/roubini-says-global-economic-slowdown-accelerating-next-financial-crisis.html
Prediction: By the 2020s, the Americas will supersede the Middle East as the world’s go-to source for petroleum. Geopolitics will shift considerably, as OPEC will no longer have so much clout.
Who: Mark Perry, University of Michigan economist
Background: North and South America combined hold far more underground oil reserves than the Middle East and North Africa. The Middle East was favored last century, however, because the Americas’ oil exists primarily in less accessible forms and environs — offshore deposits, shale rock, oil sands, and heavy oil formations. More recently, though, innovations in drilling and mining have made accessing these oil sources much easier. Consequently, oil industries in the Americas have grown quickly in short order. Perry thinks that the United States could become a prominent oil exporter and, in addition, share its oil-accessing technologies with European countries that want to tap their own domestic supplies instead of being at the mercy of oil-rich Russia.
Why Great: It’s good news for economic growth and job creation in the Americas. It’s not so good news, however, for environmental sustainability. A burgeoning oil industry in the United States would likely slow societal momentum toward weaning off fossil fuels and eradicating carbon emissions. Not to mention it could put a slough of hitherto-untouched wilderness areas in harm’s way.
BUT… Perry’s expectation that the United States would exploit more of its domestic oil reserves is very believable. It doesn’t necessarily follow, though, that the OPEC countries will lose business because of it. Many energy analysts expect worldwide energy consumption to grow enormously as the century wears on. Odds are there will be enough global hunger for oil that both the Middle East and the Americas will go on reaping huge oil revenues drilling their oil wells to quench it.
Bottom Line: Human civilization has room for many oil giants, though the same can’t be said of earth’s ecosystems.
Prediction High Levels of unemployment will haunt young people until 2012. The number of young people forced to delay their careers due to the recession of poor labor market will suffer diminished earnings ability for decades.
Who: Andrew Sum, an economist and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University
Background: Today’s young adults are facing the highest unemployment since World War II. Nearly one out of five lives in poverty.
Unemployment is two to three times worse for Gen Y then it is for baby boomers.
For Gen X, debts have been rising and incomes falling. In the words of Derek Thompson at the Atlantic, “They’re working harder — a two-parent family worked 26 percent more hours in 2010 than in 1975 — and making less. Thirty-something men had an average income of $40,000 some 30 years ago; today, it’s $35,000.”
Why Great: Acknowledging the debt and dim economic prospects of today’s young people is the first step in drafting federal policies (a student loan forgiveness bill?) to fix the problem.
BUT… Robust growth could reverse this trend.
Sources: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Who-Had-Worst-Recession-atlantic-3314192070.html?x=0
Prediction: The European debt crisis could lead to war in 10 to 20 years.
Who: Polish Finance minister Jacek Rostowski, speaking before the European parliament in Strasbourg on September 15.
Why great: The sooner you recognize a worst case scenario, the sooner and easier you can avert it.
BUT… The prediction reflects the historic German fear of hyper-inflation, which some German policy makers believe will ensue if euros are printed to cover the bad debts in Greece (and elsewhere.) Hyperinflation in Germany following World War I resulted in unprecedented social unrest and, eventually, fascism. But deflation, rather than inflation, remains the larger threat to the global economy.
Bottom Line: It isn’t the 1930s. The euro zone members should focus on the crisis at hand.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/jasek-rostowski-war-poland-2011-9
Predictions: Technology
Prediction: In the next 25 years [timeline year 2035], synthetic biology — the creation of life from nonliving chemicals designed on a computer — could produce thousands of synthetic genomes and life-forms not yet imagined.
Who: Jerome C. Glenn, director of the Millennium Project, extrapolating from the work of the J. Craig Venter Institute
Why Great: Scientists are expanding the tools available to solve a myriad of problems, from enhancing health to improving energy supplies.
BUT… If no one yet knows what can be created, neither can we know what mischief such creations could create.
Bottom Line: Technological development has always been a double-edged sword. Researchers who ignore potential side effects or the ethical implications of their work, and who do not govern their own activities, risk having government regulators (and public disdain) thwart any hope of achieving positive breakthroughs.
Source: “Global Situation and Prospects for the Future” by Jerome C. Glenn, in Moving from Vision to Action edited by Cynthia G. Wagner (World Future Society, 2011), page 8.
Prediction: Robotic aerial drones will be the must-have weapon for air forces across the globe. A global rush to build drone arsenals is on and may push global spending on drones to $94 billion — double its current level — by 2020.
Who: Teal Group, an aerospace research firm, in a 2011 market study.
Background: More than 50 countries have bought drone technology recently. Many may be attempting to catch up to the United States, whose Air Force now extensively uses drone aircraft for both reconnaissance and combat missions. China has been particularly diligent: Chinese analysts say that every major manufacturer for the Chinese military now has a center dedicated solely to drone development.
Why Great: Clearly, there is a huge new market opportunity for aerial engineering firms; expect many more collaborations between them and the world’s armed forces. Also expect a few more degrees of separation to rise up between human soldiers and the battlefields, with robots taking on more of the most dangerous missions that in years past would have claimed pilots’ lives. The prospect of wreaking more damage on enemy infrastructure while sustaining fewer casualties is real and obviously attractive to military planners the world over.
BUT… As the article points out, some academicians worry that drones will make warfare more common. They argue that since governments will perceive the drones as minimizing human casualties, they will have fewer reservations about launching military strikes on other nations. This fear sounds valid. The more that the sights and sounds of warfare become relegated to video screens, the less impact they will have on us — even if they remain as palpable as ever to the soldiers and unarmed civilians on the receiving ends of the drone attacks.
Bottom Line: Every century, a few huge technological innovations come along and change how wars are fought. The repeating rifle, the railroad, and nuclear weapons are a few examples. Aerial drones just may be the next big thing, militarily speaking. As with previous technological innovations, though, human planners will have to use moral restraint to make sure that it changes war for the better and not for the worse.
Source: Reported in the Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/global-race-on-to-match-us-drone-capabilities/2011/06/30/gHQACWdmxH_story.html?hpid=z1
Prediction: Alcohol-detection devices (to prevent a vehicle from starting if the driver’s breath indicates he or she has had one too many) could become a standard option for every U.S. automobile by 2020 and a mandatory feature sometime thereafter.
Who: Jayne O’Donnell, USA Today, reporter. She cites a Congressional proposal to develop prototype devices; a Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) spokesperson who wants to see the devices installed in every car; and an American Beverage Institute spokesperson who says that she fears this MADD aspiration will actually come to pass.
Background: Alcohol-detection devices — a.k.a, “ignition interlocks” — already exist, and courts sometimes sentence persons convicted of drunk driving to install them into their cars. These machines are flawed, however: They sometimes mistake mouthwash or caffeine in someone’s breath for booze. They are also hard to use: Drivers must blow into them several times for their cars to start. Further, they are too clunky, cumbersome, and ugly for any average driver to want to install them voluntarily. A bill proposed by two U.S. congressmen — Sens. Tom Udall, D–N.M., and Bob Corker, R–Tenn. — would direct $60 million for five-year development of new, compact, user-friendly, more effective devices suitable for automobile drivers everywhere.
Why Great: Alcohol-related driving accidents kill horrendous numbers of U.S. drivers every year. And stopping the offenders eats up massive amounts of law-enforcement budgets and manpower. Ideally, these devices could go into widespread use and prevent many drunk-driving tragedies from ever happening.
BUT… If it is only a standard feature, then will enough drivers actually buy it for it to make a tangible dent in drunk-driving accidents? Chances are most hard-core alcoholics who are responsible for most of the accidents will not. In that case, mandatory device installation would be the only solution — and it’s no sure bet that Congress will ever enact that. Industry interests are already gearing up to fight it; the American Beverage Institute spokeswoman is proof of this. Privacy hawks and libertarian groups would surely come out against it, too: “Big Brother is trying to control our automobiles!”
Bottom Line: Good intentions are behind this, but they may run aground against political realities.
Source: reported on USAToday.com, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-03-27-alcohol-detection-in-new-cars.htm
Prediction: Hotels will offer customers a selection of dreams as well as the opportunity to study and learn while they sleep by 2030.
Who: Futurist Ian Pearson, in a report for budget hotel chain Travelodge entitled “The Future of Sleep.”
Why Great: According to the report, “We will be able to replay our favorite dream from a menu just like choosing a movie. Also, we will be able to link into dreams with our partner or family and friends and enjoy a shared dream experience.” Furthermore technology could also monitor a hotel guest’s health and mood and adapt in such a way to ensure them a perfect night’s sleep: “Video, audio, smells, and tactile experiences produced using our bed or bed linen will play a key role in helping to make our dreams feel real.”
BUT… Such technological breakthroughs hinge on a vastly greater understanding of the human mind than currently exists. Also, do you really want a budget hotel chain — or anyone, for that matter — controlling what goes on inside your head?
Bottom Line: These types of predictions typically garner a lot of media attention (it’s almost as if they were calculated attempts to do just that), but the report also mentions more likely ways that augmented reality will be incorporated into hotel rooms over the next two decades (guests could have the option to digitally “decorate” their rooms themselves, for example). And remember — if the spinning top keeps spinning, then you’re still in the dream.
Prediction: By 2015, people will have a direct say in 25% of the display ads they see when they go to the computers and use services like Google.
Who: Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising at Innovation Days Internet Week, June 1st.
Why Great: According to Mohan, we are on the verge of a “ user-focused revolution, where people connect and respond to display ads in ways we’ve never seen before.” He sees display ads becoming a $200 billion per year industry and predicts that by 2015:
- The number of display ad impressions will decrease by 25 percent per person. (People will see fewer and better ads)
- Engagement rates across all display ads will increase by 50 percent.
- 35 percent of campaigns will primarily use metrics beyond clicks and conversions.
- Over 40 percent of online Americans will name display ads as their favorite ad format.
BUT… The big loser in this vision is traditional media. Also, the personalized a display ad, the more personal information it’s using about you to sell you things.
Bottom Line: Web advertising is going to get more user-specific, eerily so, in the next three years.
Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/theres-perfect-ad-for-everyone.html
Prediction: Global Internet traffic will quadruple by 2015, thanks in large part to over 3 billion Internet users and15 billion networked devices.
Who: The Cisco Visual Networking Index.
Why Great: New business opportunities are arising for tech entrepreneurs. Also, increased Internet traffic will lead to increased economic growth in developing countries, particularly Africa and the Middle East.
BUT… In just 3 years or so? That’s really soon. On the one hand, Cisco’s previous industry predictions on Internet growth seem conservative in hindsight. On the other, the technology and telecommunications giant only stands to gain from exploding online traffic, so it’s unlikely they’d be anything other than optimistic in a public report.
Bottom Line: The world will likely enter the “Zettabyte era,” as the report refers to it, sooner or later, if not necessarily by 2015.
Prediction: The majority (61%) of Internet traffic will be via video by 2015, with annual global traffic reaching the zettabyte threshold — that’s the equivalent of 250 billion DVDs, according to Cisco blogger Thomas Barnett (June 23, 2011):
Source: http://blogs.cisco.com/news/the-dawn-of-the-zettabyte-era-infographic/
Prediction: “Computers” will cease to exist. We’ll access the Web through our contact lenses, going online in the blink of an eye — literally.
Who: Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku.
Background: Miniaturization of all things electronic will allow more technology to be embedded on the convenient contact lens.
Why Great: Imagine never having to say you’re sorry when you don’t remember your telecommuting colleague’s name or what project you’re supposed to be working on with her. The information you need will arrive discreetly and instantly on your contact lens in a 3-D display visible only to you. You’ll even get subtitles if your partner is speaking a different language.
BUT… Augmented reality has a way of taking over your life. If people can’t even text and walk at the same time. look out for those whose visual displays are distracting them.
Bottom Line: The long-term trend in communications technology has been toward integration and convenience. As cool as things like the iPad and other tablets are, they are still stuff and have to be handled and carried and cleaned and protected. Computer contacts will be seen as a great boon to many people, and not just the usual early-adopter gearheads.
Source: various individuals cited by Australian blogger James Adonis “Internet via contact lenses, as computers die out” (May 27, 2011), Work in Progress, Sydney Morning Herald
Prediction: The International Space Station won’t continue past 2020. Sometime around then, its human conductors will de-orbit it and dump it into the ocean. A replacement space station might be built thereafter.
Who: Vitaly Davydov, deputy head of the Russian Space Agency
Background: Since its first modules commenced operations in the 1990s, the International Space Station has been a focal point for human operations in space. Crews from the United States, Europe, Russia, China, and other countries have shared its facilities and jointly conducted hundreds of on-board space research initiatives. Its developers had expected to keep it up and running until at least 2020, but its future beyond 2020 had always been uncertain. Davydov apparently sees no post-2020 future for the space station at all.
Why Great: If he’s right, it would be an anticlimactic end to an endeavor on which the world’s space agencies have jointly invested several decades, hundreds of billions of dollars, and myriad space-flight missions. It would also be a major setback for the near-term future of human space exploration. That space station is the only earth-orbiting docking point that space vessels with human crews currently have. Exploring space will be considerably harder once it is gone.
BUT… Will there be a successor station? Who will take the lead on it? Russia and China seem like the most probable candidates now, all things considered.
Bottom Line: Should the space station sink into the ocean, the onus will be on the world’s government’s to not let human space aspirations sink into the ocean along with it.
Source: http://en.rian.ru/science/20110727/165412055.html
Prediction: In another 10 years, home entertainment centers could be playing movies and television shows as 3-D holographs, no television screen involved.
Who: Pierre-Alexandre Blanche, University of Arizona physicist
Background: Still-life holographic images are with us today in visual displays across the globe. They function via lasers that project off a tiny film screen on which the laser’s light shines in some spots and cancels out in others to produce a complete image. Blanche and colleagues have been working on a projector that displays moving holographic images. Their prototype uses a screen that can create one image, automatically erase it, and then create another, thus generating an ongoing image sequence like the slides that make a cartoon. Their current model is currently too slow — only two frames per second — but could eventually become a working model with more fine-tuning.
Why Great: Who wouldn’t want to experience 3-D entertainment without the klunky 3-D glasses? Or view movie scenes in all their fully dimensional glory in ther living room, free of the confines of a TV screen?
BUT… Researchers need to come up with lasers that are more refined and film that is many times more sensitive in order for commercially usable products to emerge from this technology.
Bottom Line: High-def TV is about to get much, much higher-def.
Source: Discover, http://discovermagazine.com/2011/mar/10-future-tech-looking-forward-post-screen-era/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=
Background: Traffic on wireless services is already dominated by data, having surpassed voice traffic in 2010. Machines will increasingly communicate with each other automatically, without human intervention.
Why Great: Good news for efficient remote monitoring, such as in telemedicine and insurance companies that can monitor your driving habits and adjust your premiums accordingly.
BUT… Bad news for meter readers and anyone concerned about their machines tattling on them.
Bottom Line: M2M promises potential savings of billions of dollars in health care and other industries, and may be a boon for individuals with disabilities and other chronic conditions.
Source: Sprint M2M: http://m2m.sprint.com/news--resources/news-events/news/m2mnow.aspx Better 3
Prediction: “Voice interface systems will permit automation of about one-third of the current service sector jobs” [in the next 25-50 years]. “By 2040, robotlike machinery will inhabit the world alongside people, doing much of the work.”
Who: James H. Irvine and Sandra Schwarzbach of the Naval Air Warfare Center at China Lake, California
Background: Also, “robots could replace as much as 25% to 50% of the current, low-end labor force in the agricultural, industrial, and service sectors of the U.S. economy.”
Why Great: “This could mean vastly higher productivity for the remaining labor force.”
BUT… obviously this will disrupt the lives of many workers unprepared to move to higher-order occupations, with societal repercussions.
Bottom Line: The increased “infiltration” of robots in the workforce is not unlike immigrants taking over more and more service jobs in advanced economies. Conflicts will likely arise, but many of these jobs were not that desirable in the first place. Human–robot cultural understanding might be included in workplace diversity training to help ease some of the pain in the transition.
Source: the authors’ paper, “New Technologies and the World Ahead: The Top 20 Plus 5,” in Moving from Vision to Action (WFS, 2011)
Prediction: 50 billion machine-to-machine (M2M) devices — such as high-definition cameras, e-readers, remote sensors, and appliances — will be communicating with each other wirelessly by 2020.
Who: Sprint
Background: Traffic on wireless services is already dominated by data, having surpassed voice traffic in 2010. Machines will increasingly communicate with each other automatically, without human intervention.
Why Great: Good news for efficient remote monitoring, such as in telemedicine and insurance companies that can monitor your driving habits and adjust your premiums accordingly.
BUT… Bad news for meter readers and anyone concerned about their machines tattling on them.
Bottom Line: M2M promises potential savings of billions of dollars in health care and other industries, and may be a boon for individuals with disabilities and other chronic conditions.
Source: Sprint M2M: http://m2m.sprint.com/news--resources/news-events/news/m2mnow.aspx
Prediction: Soldiers will communicate telepathically. No longer relying on radio transmissions, microphones, or hand signals, they will relay their thoughts to each other through “thought helmets.”
Who: Gerwin Schalk, an Albany Medical College biomedical scientist, who is working with the U.S. army to develop the first functional thought helmets.
When: Soldiers outfitted with thought helmets could be deploying as soon as 2020.
Why It’s a Great Prediction: A combat area is by nature chaotic and unnerving. Soldiers operating in it could probably be a lot less overwhelmed and make far fewer mistakes if they are able to stay in touch telepathically and thereby understand each other perfectly no matter how much background noise they might be enduring. Also consider how it might cross-apply to gaining enemy intelligence. Torture will no longer have any excuse whatsoever (not that it is already hard to defend) — why go through the trouble of waterboarding or isolating a prisoner when all you have to do is strap a thought helmet onto his head and read any secret of his that you want?
BUT… How secure will it be? Enemy operatives could sow a lot of chaos if they learn how to infiltrate thought helmets and implant their own false thoughts.
Bottom Line: Technology that can read thoughts is bold, edgy, and to some a little frightening. We don’t know yet if it is feasible, much less what harms might result from its misuse. But it is an exciting — and to military personnel, potentially lifesaving — all the same.
Source: http://discovermagazine.com/2011/apr/15-armys-bold-plan-turn-soldiers-into-telepaths
Prediction: By 2030, doctors will be fitting amputees and persons who are missing limbs with “neuroprosthetics” that link to the body’s neurons and receive signals from the brain so as to move, feel, and operate just like real limbs.
Who: Will Rosellini, CEO and president of MicroTransponder (a medical device company)
Background: Machines that interface with the human nervous system are already here: Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS), an electrode therapy that uses electric impulses to reorder a patient’s neural circuits, has been successfully treating epilepsy and severe depression since the 1970s. Rosellini’s own company has been testing use of VNS to treat many other neurological disorders, such as tinnitus and phantom limb pain. Extrapolating from the current trajectory of development, Rossellini sees whole limbs that interface with neurons exiting labs in another two decades.
Why Great: Millions of people across the globe live without one or more limbs, either because of an amputation or because they were born that way. Any one of them would rejoice to have the kind of fully functional prosthetic that Rosellini describes. Its development would go far to expanding each person’s options in life and quality of living.
BUT… As the article points out, no electronic system today can interact seamlessly with nerves. So it’s unknown how we might make a neuroprosthetic that has all the mobility of a natural limb. And in any case, such limbs are bound to be expensive. Even if they are available by 2030, how many patients will be able to afford them? And will insurance policies cover them?
Bottom Line: We must all hope that the future prosthetic arm or leg will not only work as well as the real thing, but that it won’t cost a patient an arm and a leg to buy it.
Prediction: By 2020, the world could have a space ship capable of carrying human crews to other planets, says a NASA team. To build this ship, which the team dubs Nautilus-x, engineers would take the International Space Station and outfit it with artificial-gravity mechanisms, modules for supply storage, and hangars for landing vehicles. The whole project could be completed for a mere $4 billion.
Who: NASA’s Technology Applications Assessment Team
Why Great: Anything that could ferry human to other planets for less than $4 billion would be a momentous development for humankind. This is the kind of cost-effective infrastructure that we would need if we are to ever break free of Earth. As an added plus, it would ensure a future for the International Space Station, which the U.S. government does not plan to fund beyond 2015.
BUT… Nautilus-X’s short timetable and scant budget both sound incredibly optimistic. They may be correct, but we will never find out unless the proponents can win over a lot of skeptics within NASA’s leadership circles. The timing is anything but auspicious. Not only is there an ongoing budget crunch that would discourage bold ideas such as this, but NASA is also already planning for Orion 6, a more compact (and more expensive) vehicle for human flight into deep space.
Bottom Line: Nautilus-x represents several great ideas: recycling old space modules for new, more challenging missions; harnessing the resources of many partner nations, not just one; and cutting spacecraft construction costs by building and testing them in space. These ideas have staying power and will probably be guiding principles in many future space missions, whether Nautilus-x is constructed or not.
Source: Future in Space Operations Group, http://hobbyspace.com/nucleus/?itemid=26786
Prediction: Appliances will no longer need power cords, according to two Duke University researchers who say that laboratory-engineered “metamaterials” could be used to build outlets that would transmit energy to a device remotely, in the form of radio waves.
Who: Yaroslavl Urzhomov and David Smith, Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering
Why Great: This metamaterial method would be much more energy-efficient than wire transmission, which loses large quantities of energy as waste heat and friction. Besides, eliminating wires and cords from many household products would be a quick way to cut society’s consumption of plastics and metals. As an added plus, through further adapting this technology to broadcast media, engineers could achieve far more powerful and clearer communications transmissions, as well.
BUT… Metamaterials’ potential is so far only a theory. Urzhomov and Smith still need to build large-scale metamaterial applications and prove that it will work in real life.
Bottom Line: Cost savings, lower energy use, and getting to do away with pesky, tangle-prone extension cords are all great things to look forward to, but only time will tell if they come to pass.
Prediction: Online gambling is the future of the casino industry. Gambling venues will reap much bigger dividends if they expand into cyberspace than if they simply build more old-fashioned live casino halls.
Who: Two casino executives presenting at the 2011 East Coast Gaming Congress.
Why Great: This could spell a reshaping of many local economies throughout the world: Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, and other historic gambling meccas that have always staked their livelihoods on casino-going tourists would probably quiet down considerably, as more and more would-be tourists opt to save the airfare and travel time by squelching their gambling fixes at home on their laptops.
On a more ominous note, it might also imply a rising toll of victims: Online gambling breeds many gambling addicts, and also exposes users to malware, viruses, and identity theft. Depending on how many new online ventures emerge and how aggressively their founders market them, rates of gambling addictions and cybercrime may rise considerably.
BUT… The casinos will have to win a few rounds against lawmakers first. The U.S. federal government and many other national governments restrict online gambling activity, though some regional and local governments are more allowing. Enough casino lobbying could dilute the national laws, but even that is less than likely: Casino officials don’t rank highly in the court of public opinion.
Bottom Line: Humans have gambled for millennia and will continue to do so. The Internet just creates more opportunities for engaging in it, which also means it magnifies the societal harms. Lawmakers will need to anticipate increased pressure from gambling interests, as well as develop proactive policies for keeping online gambling in check. Individual consumers, on their end, will have to exercise their judgment as diligently as ever.
Prediction: In ten years, tablet PCs, netbooks, and laptops will be extinct, replaced by a a new device as-yet-to-be-conceived.
Who: Rama Skukia, vice president of Intel’s architecture group speaking at SEMICON (semiconductor conference) in San Francisco in July.
Why Great: The rapid evolution in the consumer technology space will affect chip makers like Intel profoundly. Skukia stood up in front of a room of Intel’s customers and said, in effect, “We’re going to have to innovate faster. You’re going to have to innovate faster, too.” (Bonus, he also forecast that graphics performance on chips for mobile devices will rise by a factor of 12 by 2015.)
BUT… Skukia would have been more convincing if he had offered a guess on the sort of device that will replace these other gizmos.
Bottom Line: Don’t fret about getting the latest consumer gadget. The platform will be passé before you download the first app.
Source: V3.Ko.UK http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2093423/intel-predicts-tablets-laptops-netbooks-history-decade
Prediction: In the future, people won’t care that sites like Facebook sell their personal data, because Facebook will pay them for the data they share.
Who: Jess Kimball, former speech writer for Faith Popcorn, on Twitter, May 13, 2011.
Why It’s Great: In May, Facebook was sued by two individuals in a California court for violating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Stored Communications Act, and California’s Computer Crime Law and Consumers Legal Remedies Act. What happened? A group of advertisers accessed the users’ personal information from Facebook. The lawsuit came on top of numerous public assurances by company founder Mark Zuckerberg that “We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.” Oops. Kimball’s remedy means fewer lawsuits.
BUT… For this to work, the company would have to make its privacy settings easier to use and become much more transparent.
Bottom Line: People should be able to sell their information to third-party advertisers if they want to; Facebook is in a great position to serve as a broker for that sort of exchange. If you understood your private data was worth money, you would probably keep better track of it. Kimball’s idea is a win-win-win.
Sources: TechCrunch, Guardian.
Also http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/may/24/facebook-revise-privacy-zuckerberg
Prediction: By 2015, there will be no more textbooks in South Korea’s schools. All learning material will be digitized.
Who: South Korean Ministry of Education
Background: Many South Korean schools have been phasing out their printed textbooks and replacing them with netbook computers — after all, anything you can publish in a book, you can run on a computer monitor. The South Korean Ministry of Education expects this to become the standard model for curricula in all of its schools. By 2015, it projects, all of the country’s students will glean their class notes and homework not from textbooks but from smartphones, netbooks, and tablets. The ministry recently announced that it is investing $2.4 billion specifically to make this happen.
Why Great: It is impressive that any country could digitize all learning content in every one of its schools, no matter how rich or poor the school’s community might be. Consider how widely textbook quality can vary from one school district to another: Wealthy districts outfit all their students with brand-new editions while poorer districts’ students make do with either outdated, worn-out textbook copies or no copies at all. Digitized learning could be a great equalizer if a country goes about it properly.
BUT… What if a country goes about it improperly? Poorer school districts that cannot afford new laptops or phones for every student risk falling even further behind. Besides, the jury is still out on whether kids learn better from computer screens or from printed material. All the more so when the screens happen to be on small mobile devices — since those screens are much more compact than typical textbook pages, they are not as easy to read. And then there’s the matter of eyestrain — what long-term wear and tear could kids’ eyes suffer from being transfixed to computer screens every moment of the school day? We’ve never encountered this before in human history, so we’ll have to wait and find out.
Bottom Line: Ditching the textbooks and bringing in the digital notebooks sounds like a nice idea, but there may yet be some bugs to work out.
Source: Technology Review, http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/26960/
Prediction: Offices will be ubiquitous computing environments by 2025.
Who: 360KID CEO Scott Traylor in a video interview with game designer Jesse Schell. The short video is part of Schell’s YouTube series called “The Crystal Ball Society,” which is described as “a place where people make concrete predictions about the future.”
Why Noteworthy: “Computers would exist in the walls and the floor — in the elements of architecture instead of in a big machine on your desktop,” says Traylor. They would form a context-aware system that could sense where a person is and automatically access (and capture) any relevant data. “We won’t necessarily be tethered to the larger hardware devices for computing. … It will just be in the cloud, it will be in the architecture, it will be in the spaces around us,” he explains, adding that a natural user interface could boast visual components as well as verbal. Traylor believes that businesses will be the early adapters, since ubiquitous computing offers the greatest advantages there, and that it will eventually extend to public spaces and homes as well as offices.
BUT… Hardware devices will not be obsolete. In fact, they will still be needed for more complex operations. However, for more basic computing and communications activities, people could just “speak it into the walls.” Also, Traylor wonders how great demand would be outside of businesses for such a system.
Bottom Line: This concept, which has been kicking around since at least the 1980s (and begins appearing in science fiction much earlier), seems to be moving increasingly closer to becoming a reality. Traylor sees ubiquitous computing as “another step in that evolutionary chain” that has taken us from home computers to laptops to smart phones and tablets.
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ER_bmBjvOE
Prediction: Auto safety will improve in a myriad of ways by 2020.
Who: Kiplinger.com.
Why Great: Vehicle-to-vehicle locating, pedestrian detection, night vision, collision-mitigation systems, and blind spot monitoring systems that utilize cameras and radar could become commonplace. According to the article, “rearview cameras are likely to become standard equipment, thanks to a proposal by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that would require all light passenger vehicles to have the technology by 2014.”
BUT… Cars won’t be driving themselves. Hopefully all these built-in features (not to mention the distraction that is in-car Wi-Fi) won’t cause drivers to pay less attention to the road.
Bottom Line: All of these technologies currently exist — but they are expensive and vehicles don’t come standard with them. However, this situation seems highly likely to change over the next decade.
Source: http://kiplinger.com/slideshow/car-features-in-2020/1.html
Prediction: If we don’t clear out the buildup of space junk now orbiting Earth, within a few decades, spacecraft won’t be able to leave Earth’s airspace — there will be too much floating debris crashing into them and wrecking their circuitry.
Who: National Research Council (NRC)
Background: With almost every mission that launches into space, some amount of scrap or garbage escapes and winds up drifting permanently in orbit around earth. Some space shuttles and space satellites have already suffered structural damage due to collisions with this space junk. Sometimes, the damage is severe enough to thwart the whole mission. Such accidents are about to become very common, according to a recent report by the NRC’s Committee for the Assessment of NASA’s Orbital Debris Programs. The report states that the debris already up there continually collides with each other and shatters into ever more floating pieces. The space surrounding earth will become increasingly inhospitable to space missions until we finally remove some of the junk.
Why Great: Needless to say, this space-junk dilemma makes future Moon and Mars missions just a little more impossible. But also consider everyday life on earth: GPS systems, weather forecasts, and telephone, television, and Internet connections on every continent rely on satellites in space relaying signals. They will all go out of service if we get to a point where we can no longer safely fly a satellite. The space-junk problem poses a major challenge for human life on earth and in space both.
BUT… NASA is exploring possible methods for capturing and removing the space junk. The report discusses some of them. They are expensive and not yet ready to deploy, but they do offer some hope.
Bottom Line: Littering is a bad habit anywhere — even in outer space.
Source: Discovery News, http://news.discovery.com/space/could-space-junk-leave-us-stranded-on-earth-110902.html
Prediction: There will be over 1000 embedded processors in your home by 2020.
Who: Rich LeGrand, president of robotics technology company Charmed Labs, speaking at SXSW Interactive in March (“Congratulations, Your Robot Just Accepted Your Friend Request”).
Why Great: Many smart devices in our homes will perform useful tasks, saving us time and making our lives more comfortable in the process.
BUT… Then there are those pesky privacy issues. Your home devices may know more about you than you’re comfortable with.
What to do about it: According to LeGrand, the key to making the technology feasible is ensuring that you can drive your devices (and that they can communicate with each other) on any network.
Source: www.charmedlabs.com, http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP8101
Predictions: Earth
Prediction: Stemming climate change at no more than 2° Celsius — the scientifically recognized threshold for dangerous warming — seems at this point practically impossible.
Who: Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency
When: 2040-2050
Background: Despite the global economic slump, greenhouse gas emissions still climbed to their highest recorded levels in history last year, according to International Energy Agency data. In this context, it defies imagining how human civilization could realistically reform itself toward true sustainability.
Why Great: As Birol pointed out, a 2-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures would spark massive disruptions that would affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
BUT… Birol added that it is still not too late. If the international community undertakes radical change right now, it could yet dodge the direst after-effects.
Bottom Line: Radical action on a global scale is an unlikely scenario no matter what the issue at hand may be, least of all climate change. Birol is sounding a bleak tone, but only because he is trying to be realistic.
Source: Harvey, Fiona. “Worst Ever Carbon Emissions Leave Climate on the Brink.” The Guardian. May 29, 2011 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/carbon-emissions-nuclearpower)
Prediction: The Maldives Islands may disappear into the Indian Ocean by the end of this century.
Who: President Mohamed Nasheed, in an interview with Utne Reader and Momentum magazine.
Background: Climate change threatens to raise sea levels by 1.5 meters during the twenty-first century, which causes President Nasheed alarm since that is his tourism-dependent island nation’s average altitude.
Why Great: The fact that a political leader has taken notice of a major threat should be heartening. Already, Nasheed notes, the Maldives suffer from other effects of climate change, such as coastal erosion. His government is looking for solutions that are appropriate to the economy (building huge sea walls is out, since it would spoil tourists’ views), and has announced a goal of becoming “carbon neutral” by 2020.
BUT… The Maldives is extremely energy insecure and heavily dependent on imported oil, making it economically vulnerable to fluctuations in global oil prices. A goal of transitioning rapidly to 80% renewable energy without increasing electricity prices is ambitious, to say the least.
Bottom Line: Global problems beg global solutions. Said Nasheed: “The Maldives will continue to plan for adaptation with the modest income that we have and we will work with reliable partners that have already provided us help, such as Denmark. If we are given further international assistance, then all well and good, but we are not holding our breath.”
Source: Mary Hoff on the Utne Blogs http://www.utne.com/Environment/President-of-Maldives-Keeps-His-Head-Above-Water.aspx
Prediction: Industrialized nations won’t really curb their carbon-dioxide emissions; they’ll just outsource the pollution to developing countries. George Monbiot notes that his native Great Britain sets emissions-reduction targets and technically meets them — because its businesses are moving more and more industrial-plant operations out to other countries, such as China, where regulations are weaker and they can pollute with relative impunity.
Who: George Monbiot, ecology writer and author
Why Great: Monbiot’s observations cast a cynical pall over most of the existing international accords on greenhouse-gas emissions. The implication is that decades from now, industrialized nations will tout on paper that they have achieved major reductions even while actual emissions continue to climb and the planet’s biosystem continues to alter.
BUT… None of this is a foregone conclusion. China and other developing nations are voicing greater environmental concern now than they did 10 or 15 years ago. If their new green consciousness really takes hold and translates to major action on curbing emissions — as it did in Europe and North America decades ago — than catastrophe can be averted, in reality and on paper both.
Bottom Line: Environmental conservationists may have to become a more effective political force at the international level, not just at the local or national level. Those who are concerned for the Earth’s well-being will need to hold public officials across the globe accountable for achieving tangible progress against climate change and other human-caused environmental ills.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/23/pollution-developing-world-emissions
Prediction: More than half of species protected in European sanctuaries could perish by 2080.
Who: Miguel B. Araújo et al., a team of European biodiversity and ecology researchers
Background: Sanctuaries are not preparing for climate change, according to a team of European biodiversity researchers. “The models predict that towards the end of the twenty-first century, some 58% of Europe’s terrestrial vertebrates and plants may no longer have suitable climatic conditions to survive in the protected areas of each country”, says Miguel B. Araújo, lead author and researcher in the department of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology at Spain’s National Natural History Museum.
Why Great: The researchers have learned that higher altitudes offer greater protection against climate change, while Europe’s Red Natura 2000 network is so vulnerable that it would lose more species than unprotected areas.
BUT… Even in higher altitudes such as in Scandinavia, species will become vulnerable. Climate change will bring warmer temperatures to the extreme north, shrinking the habitats of cold-tolerant species.
Bottom Line: The researchers urge conservationists to focus on making protective habitats more resilient to climate change and to integrate the protected and unprotected natural environments to make dispersion of local species easier when habitats become intolerable.
Source: Miguel B. Araújo, Diogo Alagador, Mar Cabeza,; David Nogués-Bravo, and Wilfried Thuiller, “Climate change threatens European conservation areas,” Ecology Letters 14(5): 484-492, May 2011. (via PlatformaSINC, a science and information news service based in Madrid)
Prediction: 80% of projected energy-related CO2 emissions in 2020 are “already locked in” and will originate from power plants either already in use or in the process of being constructed.
Who: The International Energy Agency
Why Great: The report is strikingly, if dismally, honest in its assessment. According to the IEA, there is little chance of achieving the ambitious goal set during the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2010 to limit the global increase in temperature to 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) or less over the next ten years. In order to meet that goal, the percent increase in emissions from now until 2020 must be less than the percent increase that occurred between 2009 and 2010.
BUT… Because the increase in emissions was directly linked to the global economy’s emergence from recession, a double dip would send emissions back down.
Bottom Line: Climate, meet change.
Source: http://www.iea.org/index_info.asp?id=1959
Prediction: The Sun will play it cool between now and 2022, or maybe longer. Recent measurements indicate an unexpected drop in solar activity, which will manifest itself as few or no sunspots, and reduced radiation reaching earth.
Who: National Solar Observatory and Air Force Research Laboratory
Why: So far in earth’s history, periods of reduced solar activity have almost always instigated prolonged cooling of earth’s climate. Some even brought on ice ages. This cooling could be a good thing if it is steep enough to offset some of earth’s global warming. Of course, if it is too strong, then it could introduce a whole new set of problems. At the very least, it will require space satellites and telecommunications systems to reconfigure many of their settings, since they are impacted by solar output.
BUT… The observation measurements could be wrong, and the cooling might not happen at all. Or it could happen but have minimal effects on earth’s climate.
Bottom Line: We are dealing with a lot of unknowns here. They will clear up soon enough, though.
Source: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-sun-major-solar.html
Prediction: The deadly triad of pollution, overfishing, and climate change are impacting the world’s oceans to greater extents than even the IPCC’s worst-case scenarios had predicted. By 2050, at the going rate, oceangoing plant and animal life will disappear on a scale equal to the five great global extinctions of the past 600 million years.
Who: International Programme on the State of the Ocean (a three-day workshop, convened by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. It brought together 27 researchers from 18 nations.)
Why Great: It would be a tragedy to lose so many species of fish, coral, aquatic mammals, and other cherished wildlife, not only for their sakes, but for humans who depend upon the oceans for their livelihoods, as well — as the report’s authors explicitly state, fishing and maritime industries, large and small, across the globe, could be driven out of business.
BUT… The world community can avert this massive loss of life, the report states, through concerted international action to mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions, rescue endangered oceanic ecosystems, and protect the oceans’ health on a global scale.
Bottom Line: Concerted international action has generated only lackluster progress so far on averting global warming. Why expect them to be any more effective at monitoring the earth’s oceans? The future may be bright for a few oceanic ecosystems, thanks to local conservationists who are pulling as much weight as they can, and certain individual nations that are making exemplary progress. But for the oceans as a whole, things will probably have to get much worse before they get better.
Source: http://www.stateoftheocean.org/pdfs/1906_IPSO-LONG.pdf
Prediction: Canada will become a climate wrecking ball. The carbon emitted during drilling of its tar sands will tip earth’s atmosphere past the threshold of irreparable climate damage by 2100.
Who: James Hansen, NASA climatologist
Background: Alberta’s soil holds reservoirs of bitumen, a hardened form of petroleum. With the prices of Middle East oil soaring, Canada and the United States have been rushing to build drills, pipelines, and other infrastructure to capture this oil alternative. All this activity bodes ill for global climate. Hansen warns that an atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration of 350 parts per million would alter the climate enough to significantly harm life across the planet. At present, we are at 390 parts per million. Canada has enough bitumen that, were it all burned in one day, it would raise the atmospheric concentration to 600 parts per million. Clearly, the burning will take place gradually, but that only means that that it will push humanity’s carbon footprint upward over the long term.
Why Great: Earth’s atmosphere suffers enough from China and the United States’ massive carbon footprints. It would be a disastrous development if Canada, too, became a globally significant carbon emitter.
BUT… There is always hope that environmental awareness will prevail. The Canadian and U.S. governments both make job creation their top priority, not conservation, but this may gradually change after the pangs of the economic recession fully subside. Also, as the article notes, Brazil has been making remarkable progress in reducing its carbon emissions, even as Canada and the United States have been increasing theirs. Perhaps aggressive conservation in other parts of the world could offset the climate recklessness of North America.
Bottom Line: By pursuing economic growth instead of environmental well-being, Canada and the United States may ultimately forfeit both.
Source: Reported on Climate Progress, http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/29/256025/brazil-rainforest-canada-tar-sands/#more-256025
Prediction: Tornadoes, heat waves, dry spells, and other extreme weather events are “the new normal”; we should expect to see plenty more of them month by month through 2100. Thank human activity, which is inducing global climate change.
Who: Gary McManus, associate state climatologist for Oklahoma government
Background: Extreme weather patterns of all kinds have been occurring more and more frequently since 1980, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. McManus’s home state has borne more than its share of it. In this year alone, Oklahoma has set more climate records than the climatologist would care to count (even though it’s his job): lowest-ever temperature (-31 degrees Fahrenheit), highest 24-hour snowfall (27 inches), and the most tornadoes in one month (50 in April 2011), to name just a few. Climatologists say that its human civilization’s indirect influence on earth’s climate patterns that is behind all this.
Why Great: Extreme weather kills people. Just ask the New Orleans residents who witnessed Hurricane Katrina. It devastates the livelihoods of others, as any farmer in monsoon-prone India will surely tell you. Deaths, famines, poor health, and homelessness will run rampant across the globe if climatologists’ warnings prove true.
BUT… This prevalence of harsh weather might be just the kick in the teeth that humanity needs to take aggressive action to stop polluting and climate-altering behavior. Climate deniers can quarrel with climate scientists all they want about the hypotheticals of tree rings, ice cores, and hockey sticks. But there is no denying the tornadoes that have obliterated your neighborhood, the monsoon that has destroyed your farm fields, or the cold spell that is claiming the lives of homeless people all across your city. People will realize the depth of the problem and demand that their leaders finally act.
Bottom Line: We’re in for nasty weather, no doubt about it. But the sun will shine again — in measured, manageable quantities, that is — if we act objectively and decisively in the face of the storms.
Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-extreme-weather-20110824,0,940647.story
Prediction: It will be possible to feed everyone in the world — all 9 billion of us — by 2050.
Who: Two French organizations, the National Institute for Agricultural Research and the Centre for International Cooperation in Agronomic Research for Development, in the joint report “Agrimonde1.”
Why Great: A report that finds there are viable ways to end world hunger is good news indeed. Also, the organizations report that Africa’s agricultural productivity doubled between 1961 and 2003. However, agricultural productivity ether doubled or tripled in other continents as well. Thus, agricultural productivity in Africa is still the lowest in the world.
BUT… Many looming questions remain as to how best to address food shortages in a way that is sustainable over the long term.
Bottom Line: The report examines two possible scenarios. The first emphasizes economic growth over environmental concerns and necessitates an 80% increase in agricultural production. The second takes global ecology into account, and requires only a 30% increase in agricultural production while necessitating a cutback in overall food consumption in developed countries. Subsequent reports will look more closely at other issues, such as changing standards of living, climate change, and land usage.
Source: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110112/full/news.2011.14.html
Prediction: Arctic ice will make a brief resurgence this decade, only to later melt away for good.
Who: National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
Background: NCAR’s computer climate models forecast that even if temperatures keep rising, Arctic summer sea ice will stop its shrinkage and might even expand over the next 10 years. After that, however, warming will gain the upper hand. The Arctic summers will be mostly ice-free by 2070.
Why Great: Wait until the climate-change deniers get hold of this. Arctic ice sheets holding steady and even growing — see for yourselves, the planet is doing just fine; nope, no warming problem here! More science-deficient consumers and their public officials will listen, and the already-sluggish global efforts against climate change will grow more sluggish still. Never mind that it is just a temporary blip and that disaster still looms at the end of it. Regular people will not see the problem, and environmental advocates will have an even harder time making it visible to them. Like they didn’t have a hard enough time already.
BUT… A more optimistic way to read this is that the temporary ice surge could buy the Arctic some time. If the world really gets its act together on curbing climate change in the next 10 years, then by the time the Arctic ice melting is supposed to resume, the worst of global warming will have already been averted. In that case, we and the Arctic will both be spared a lot of grief.
Bottom Line: Don’t let the widening ice sheet fool you. The long-term climate change outlook still looks pretty bad.
Source: Discovery News, http://news.discovery.com/earth/arctic-sea-ice-could-make-comeback-tour-110812.html
Predictions: Government
Prediction: Algeria will be the next country to undergo an “Arab Spring” revolution (i.e., some time before 2015).
Who: Bruce Riedel, senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution
Background: The conditions that bred uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya exist in full in Algeria: a surging youth demographic, dearth of jobs, and a political system that allows its citizens little voice and no chance of holding officials accountable in any serious way. Plus, Algerians have already been staging massive demonstrations against their government’s oppressive ways since late last year. If any Arab country seems ripe for an upheaval, Algeria would be it.
Why Great: Algeria means a lot of things to a lot of people. First, it is the largest country in both the Arab world and Africa, so the fall of its government might mean unusually large outpourings of refugees to neighboring African countries and to Europe. Second, the country holds some of the biggest reserves of oil and natural gas in the Middle East, so Western powers are bound to intervene: Future wars, like that in Libya, are sure to follow, and given Algeria’s centuries-old tradition of localized self-rule among clans that spat with each other frequently, could become very destructive. Third, Algeria is home to several militant Islamist movements, including a large branch of Al-Qaida, which makes any Algerian power vacuum all the more dangerous.
BUT… Many outcomes could follow, some better than others. If pro-democracy revolutionaries prevail, and they receive adequate support from donor countries after the revolution, then a stable and viable new Algeria could emerge.
Bottom Line: Northern Africa won’t be quieting down any time soon. Concerned nations across the Mediterranean had best stay attentive.
Source: National Interest, http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/algeria-will-be-next-fall-5782
Prediction: Military conflict in East Asia and the Western Pacific will be centered in the South China Sea throughout the next few decades.
Who: Robert D. Kaplan, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, national correspondent for The Atlantic, and a member of the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Policy Board
Why Noteworthy: According to Kaplan, the author of Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Random House, 2010), the South China Sea will be the site of Asian emerging economies’ territorial disputes and expansion attempts. Energy resources in particular are at stake. To that end, these countries are strengthening their naval and air forces (and in some cases may attempt to further rely on the United States Navy as well).
BUT… In the event of an actual conflict, the silver lining is that civilian casualties would be greatly reduced or altogether nonexistent. “We are dealing with a naval realm, in which civilians are not present,” Kaplan states. Also, he believes that, in all likelihood, “major warfare will not break out in the area and that instead countries will be content to jockey for position with their warships on the high seas, while making competing claims for natural resources and perhaps even agreeing to a fair distribution of them.”
Bottom Line: If war breaks out in the region, then it will be at sea.
Source: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/15/the_south_china_sea_is_the_future_of_conflict
Prediction: Thanks to the Internet and social media, the rich and powerful will be forced to share authority with formerly disempowered individuals and groups by 2020.
Who: Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist.org, in a guest editorial on Wired.com.
Why Great: Newmark predicts that by 2020, a “new equilibrium” will arise “between the traditional holders of power and unexpected influencers arising from the grassroots.” He explains, “This will be paralleled with major changes in the media landscape, as the formerly powerless exercise power influence via evolving media, which is undergoing simultaneous change with the political landscape.” Newmark points to recent examples of this trend to back up his claims.
BUT… Newmark is more than a little vague on where everything is heading. “The big changes are barely emerging, and will arise from unexpected quarters,” he writes. “It’ll involve centuries of change compressed to a few years.” But it appears to be anyone’s guess as to what those changes will be.
What to do about it: Either utilize Internet-mediated mass media and social media to affect real change or just sit back and watch leaderless grassroots groups self-organize spontaneously.
Bottom Line: “Mass media and politics evolve together, in inseparable ways,” writes Newmark.
Source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/column-singularity-newmark/
Prediction: The world will be more multilateral by 2025.
Who: Princeton University professor of politics and international affairs (and former director of policy planning for the United States Department of State) Anne-Marie Slaughter, in an article for Foreign Policy.
Why Great: According to Slaughter, the “increasingly global and regional nature of our problems” is the driving force behind this movement. As a result, regional organizations, such as the African Union and the recently created Mediterranean Union, will be more empowered. “By 2025 the U.N. Security Council will have expanded from the present 15 members to between 25 and 30,” she writes. On a slight side note, she points to Japan as the country that will be leading the way in terms of sustainable growth.
BUT… She writes, “The enormous changes on the horizon will require major crises, even cataclysm, before they can materialize.” This is a bit unnerving, to say the least — unless, like Slaughter, you purport to be a “big-picture” thinker who believes that, while this kind of tragedy may negatively impact a great deal of people in the short term, it ultimately acts as the necessary catalyst to spur positive change. In other words, if you want to make an omelette…. While she has a point that such enormous events can force systematic improvements on a global scale, it is debatable as to how integral to the process they actually are. That aside, Slaughter’s examples of potential global crises are perhaps the three most likely to sprint to anyone’s mind: climate change, large-scale terrorist actions, and global pandemics.
Bottom Line: “Multilateralization” may become one of the buzzwords of the decade. (Best not to get too annoyed with it yet.) Also, as Slaughter points out, a great deal of global change (expected and unexpected) can occur in just 15 years.
Predictions: Health
Prediction: Almost 50% of British men (and around 40% of British women) will be obese by 2030.
Who: A study published in the international medical journal The Lancet entitled “Health and Economic Burden of the Projected Obesity Trends in the USA and the UK” co-authored by Oxford University professor and National Heart Forum (UK) chair Klim McPherson.
Why Noteworthy: The study forecasts that an additional 11 million British adults are at risk for clinical obesity, which almost doubles the current number. The report’s summary states that the researchers used “a simulation model to project the probable health and economic consequences in the next two decades from a continued rise in obesity.” The results indicate that weight-related issues could contribute to around 668,000 more incidences of diabetes, 461,000 more incidences of cardiovascular disease, and 130,000 more incidences of cancer. This could cause health care costs to rise by £1.9 — 2 billion per year over the next two decades.
BUT… According to the study’s authors, taxing cheap processed “junk” food and regulating the ways that manufacturers market such products — to children especially — could help slow, stop, or even reverse this trend.
Bottom Line: Even a small reduction in obesity would make a huge difference in terms of overall quality of life, the authors note, and “effective policies to promote healthier weight also have economic benefits.” Also, the British can take some small measure of comfort in the fact that the United States continues to lead the way — according to the researchers’ projections, an additional 65 million American adults could suffer from clinical obesity by 2030, with associated medical costs increasing by tens of billion each year.
Sources: http://www.thelancet.com/series/obesity
Prediction: As many as 63% of children aged four or five in the United Kingdom will be obese in the year 2050.
Who: the United Kingdom’s National Health Service
Why Great: It might be just terrifying enough to effect a change in attitudes toward childhood obesity. The prediction accompanied the first ever exercise guidelines for children under five. (Also, since childhood obesity rates in the U.K. are comparable to those in the United States, the advice is applicable across continents.
BUT… It’s an extrapolation of current numbers, which will likely change if people adopt the recommendations.
Bottom Line: It’s never too early to be on guard against obesity.
Source: THE INDEPENDENT http://ht.ly/5BaAG
Prediction: Marijuana will not only be legalized; it will be recognized by the medical community as a “wonder drug.”
Who: Lester Greenspoon, MD, speaking to the 2011 NORML Conference.
When: 2040-2050
Background: The longstanding U.S. prohibition against marijuana is slowly chipping away. Medical applications of the drug are increasingly common, while more state legislatures seriously consider proposals to permit its medicinal use — and in a few cases, decriminalize its recreational use.
Why Great: Marijuana remains a forbidden fruit across most of the globe. Consequently it is the source of not large international black market activity, but also a large proportion of incarcerated populations throughout the world’s jails. If Greenspoon’s prediction comes to pass in the United States, and eventually other countries, also, then jail populations everywhere will dramatically shrink while the world’s law enforcement agencies will have far more officers freed up to patrolling other, more important beats. Meanwhile, hospital patients everywhere will have another low-cost and relatively safe herbal treatment at their disposal, and impoverished agricultural sectors will have a potent new cash crop to grow.
BUT… Drug laws take a long time to change. And while many countries have either decriminalized marijuana use or authorized its medicinal use — Canada, Finland, and Mexico among them — most others join with the United States in drawing a hard line against pot. This will take a long time to change.
Bottom Line: It is conceivable that marijuana could become more accepted over time, but it will probably take place slowly and over many decades.
Source: Greenspoon, Lester. “Why the Marijuana Renaissance is Here to Stay.” Alternet. May 31, 2011. (http://www.alternet.org/story/151151/why_the_marijuana_renaissance_is_here_to_stay/)
Prediction: The cost to achieve indefinite life extension technology (the so-called “Methuselarity”) will only be in the trillions of dollars.
Who: Aubrey de Grey, in an interview with Ben Goertzel for H+ Magazine.
The Good News: De Grey believes that developing indefinite life extension technology could cost less than expected, due to projected advances in artificial general intelligence (AGI), which “will cut the cost of those later stages as well as of the early stages.” Goertzel argues that the trillions-of-dollars price tag is actually not prohibitively expensive, but in fact “quite affordable by society, given the massive amount we [the United States] spend on healthcare.”
BUT… The cost to develop artificial general intelligence isn’t exactly cheap, either. Also, De Grey isn’t entirely convinced that it’s possible to achieve AGI or to make it “safe” anytime soon.
Bottom Line: Indefinite life extension remains a highly speculative area. Goertzel forecasts along two possible lines: that developed without AGI (the longer path) and that developed and enhanced by AGI (the shorter path). De Grey and Goertzel project that the “Methuselarity” could take anywhere from 20 to 50 years.
Source: http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/06/09/aubrey-de-grey-on-aging-and-ai/
Prediction: By 2018, a computer-brain interface will make it possible for a person in a medically vegetative state to fully communicate with the outside world.
Who: Adrian Owen, Medical Research Council of Cambridge, England
Background: Traumatic brain injury reduces some patients to persistent vegetative states. Activity goes on in isolated pockets of their brains, but normal functioning cannot emerge from it since the neural pathways that would connect them are severed. Presently, patients with moderate damage — i.e., impaired but not totally catatonic — can get some motion back with electronic implants that pick up lone neural signals and translate them into physical actions: controlling a computer cursor, moving a wheelchair, etc. These electronic aids will not work on patients who are severely damaged, however. Owen’s hope is that within five years, improved implants will restore function in even these latter “lost” cases.
Why Great: Around 250,000 to 300,000 persons in the United States alone are stuck in persistent vegetative states. It goes without saying how horrible an existence it is for them, as well as the loved ones who spend months, years, or longer waiting — usually in vain — for them to wake up. Bridging the gulfs that these patients’ damaged brains have erected and making possible some means for their friends and families to continue to communicate with them would be a true triumph of humanity over inhumanity. And an important corrollary: Research now shows that when vegetative patients engage in some interaction, it can jumpstart neural healing and make it more likely htat they will recover. So this technology could result in more vegetative patients waking up for real.
BUT… Brains are some of the most complex systems nature ever designed. We have a lot more learning about brain activity to do before this concept becomes practical medicine.
Bottom Line: Such an interface, if developed, would profoundly restore hope and dignity to hundreds of thousands of debilitated persons the world over.
Prediction: Physicians will more actively use social media, or they will lose patients, influence, and credibility. (The article says this will bear out “in the long run” without specifying a date range, but the trend would imaginably manifest itself in full between 2015 and 2020.)
Who: Kevin Pho, internal medicine physician
Why Great: Some medical centers discourage their medical staff from using Twitter, Facebook, and other social media, out of fear that they will post inappropriate messages and embarrass the institutions. Pho says that their concern is overblown and short-sighted: Many physicians today actually reach more patients, more effectively, and boost the public reputation of their institutions in the process, by launching professional Web sites and online profiles in which they dispense medical advice. Pho has a valid point about social media’s influence: Businesses, nonprofit advocacy groups, political movements, and musicians and artists all count on social-networking sites to help them gain more publicity in minimal time. It is a great development for public health when doctors follow suit.
BUT… Of course, no profile or Web site can substitute for in-person appointments. And just as patients who see doctors don’t always follow doctors’ orders, a large mass of people reading a doctor’s Web site aren’t necessarily putting the site’s suggestions into practice and living healthier lives.
Bottom Line: Social media is a great set of tools that doctors can put to use. But like any other tools, they are only as good as the humans who wield them.
Source: http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2011/06/hospitals-ban-physicians-social-media-long-term-losers.html
Prediction: New HIV infections among children could be eliminated or reduced by 90% by 2015.
Who: UNAIDS, launching a plan called “Countdown to Zero” at the 2011 United Nations High Level Meeting on AIDS to do just that. The plan was developed in conjunction with the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
Why it is Achievable: According to the UN, this goal is realistic: “Providing pregnant women living with HIV with antiretroviral prevention and treatment reduces the risk of a child being born with the virus to less than 5% — and keeps their mothers alive to raise them. Neither technical nor scientific barriers stand in the way of responding to this global call to action.”
BUT… The plan will require significant investment and the price tag is steep, although initial funding from public and private sectors is strong so far. According to the report, “The annual requirements in these 22 countries are estimated to increase from about $ 900 million in 2011to about $ 1.3 billion in 2015.” Citizens and legislators in recipient countries need to support and encourage this as well. The success of the plan also hinges on improvements with regards to women’s rights in lower- and middle-income countries (mostly in sub-Saharan Africa).
Bottom Line: It’s an ambitious plan in keeping with the UN Millennial Goals and a step in the right direction no matter what, but as with the UN Millennial Goals, at this point, a successful outcome is in no way guaranteed.(So much of what is achievable is rarely achieved.)
Prediction: LSD and Ecstasy could be available as legitimate prescriptions in another 10 years.
Who: Rick Doblin, executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
Background: A growing number of scientists attest that these hallucinogenic drugs, when administered in proper doses, are very effective and — believe it or not — safe treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and chronic pain. Their study findings suggest that drug laws should make exceptions for their medicinal use.
Why Great: Most people think of drug fests, raves, and hippies when they think of LSD and Ecstasy. It is profoundly counterintuitive to think of them as valid treatments for serious health conditions. But that is exactly what these scientists are saying that these drugs are.
BUT… Look at how difficult it is to get marijuana recognized as a legitimate medicine, hard scientific evidence in its favor notwithstanding. And its advocates have been making the case for it for decades. Could LSD and Ecstasy, both much more potentially dangerous than pot, allay all the skeptics and make the transition from forbidden street candy to federally recognized medicine in merely one decade?
Bottom Line: It could happen, but not in a mere 10 years.
Source: Reported on Alternet, http://www.alternet.org/drugs/151394/why_prescription_ecstasy_or_lsd_could_happen_much_sooner_than_you_think/
Prediction: Antibiotics will lose their potency due to overuse, leading to people succumbing en masse to new waves of evolved, antibiotic-resistant pathogens. By 2100, the worldwide rates of disease mortality rates will be close to those of the early, pre-Penicillin twentieth century.
Who: Margaret Mellon, Union of Concerned Scientists
Why: Agricultural sectors pump their livestock with antibiotics not to cure diseases, but just to make the animals grow faster, while humans use antibiotics for many infections that do not really warrant them. All the overuse spurs an aftereffect that doctors have been registering for the last four decades: more and more strains of resistant bacteria. Meanwhile, the rollout of new FDA-approved antibiotics has been slowing steadily year after year.
BUT… A lot can happen in the next few decades — and it must. Doctors need to curtail their prescriptions of antibiotics, and farmers need to stop giving antibiotics to healthy animals. And pharmaceutical companies need to ramp up their R&D into new drugs. For each of these changes to occur, it will require massive cultural shifts and re-education; and when that fails, new regulations, with working enforcement mechanisms.
Bottom Line: This is one health problem that will take many steps to solve. None of those steps will be easy, but our survival depends on us taking them.
Source: http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/return-our-old-enemies-untreatable-form?page=0,0
Eight Grand Challenges for Human Advancement
By Thomas Frey
The author’s keynote presentation at last year’s WorldFuture 2011 conference in Vancouver introduced a series of Eight Grand Challenges — incentivized competitions designed to push humanity to another level.
When there are so many immediate problems to deal with, the notion of tackling “grand challenges” that could advance humanity may seem impractical to most people. How can we possibly justify advancing humanity when the money might be far better spent solving today’s massive problems?
My response to this legitimate question is that, if we only focus on solving today’s problems, we become trapped in the past. Every solution leads to another set of problems. Much like the whack-a-mole game at video arcades, as one problem gets pounded down, another pokes its ugly head out.
The only real way out is to advance civilization. By advancing civilization we change the nature of the problems we’re dealing with, and that is exactly what the Eight Grand Challenges have been designed to do.
Before I describe these grand challenges, let me pose this thought question: In a nonreligious context, who is the world’s most famous person?
At WorldFuture 2011, the answers I got included Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, Gandhi, and even Michael Jackson and Oprah Winfrey. These are all good answers. But my assumption is that the world’s most famous person has not been born yet. Using that assumption, the logical next question is, “What is the accomplishment that will make that person so incredibly famous?”
Put another way, what are the big things that still need to be accomplished?
Answering this question is exactly what led the DaVinci Institute to develop the Eight Grand Challenges in the first place, as well as our work on the Museum of Future Inventions project a few years ago. While still a work in progress, the Museum serves as the long-term guiding vision of what we hope to accomplish in the years ahead.
Eight Grand Challenges for Advancing Humanity
The DaVinci Institute’s Eight Grand Challenges have been framed around incredibly difficult feats and at stake will be a combination of national pride, personal legacies, and laying claim to unprecedented achievements in science and industry.
Book Review: Why Businesses Must Own Their Futures
Communicating with the Future: How Re-Engineering Intentions Will Alter the Master Code of Our Future by Thomas Frey. DaVinci Institute. 2011. 115 pages. Paperback. $19.99.
A business that wants to survive and thrive must do more than simply plan for the future, says Thomas Frey, the DaVinci Institute’s executive director and senior futurist. He advises future-wary businesses everywhere to take personal ownership stakes in creating the future.
Trends do not simply appear out of nowhere, he writes in Communicating with the Future: Trends are made. The future will belong to leaders who create compelling visions that attract others to such a degree that they overcome change-resistance within the dominant human socioeconomic systems.
Frey encourages business leaders to publish their own visions for the future. They must do so, however, in light of the changing communications medium, characterized by the declining roles of television and print media and by increased interactivity and micro-specialization of markets.
They must also be mindful of the coming disappearance of the hiring and firing system that we have known for the last century. In the future, most work will be project-based, not permanent and full time, and the bulk of professionals will be free agents who move from office to office as needed. A particularly enterprising few will strap on recording gear and earn a steady living as “terabyters,” paid by companies to gather information about their day-to-day living environments [see Frey’s article “The Coming of the Terabyters: Lifelogging for a Living” in the January-February 2011 issue of THE FUTURIST].
No matter what their niche or line of work, the professionals who adapt to the project-based work paradigm will be an influential class—the “futurati.” Companies will revere them as not merely temporary workers, but as specialists who are integral to any business’s success.
Communicating with the Future is a punchy, to-the-point primer on how market pressures today are shaping a radically new business climate. Frey provides a cogent picture of what that yet-to-be-seen model may look like; forward-thinking entrepreneurs in any industry would do well to check it out.—Rick Docksai
Grand Challenge #1: Race to the Core
First team to build a probe that makes it all the way to the center of the earth with a communication system capable of sending real-time sensory data to the surface.
In 1970, a Soviet team on the Kola Peninsula near the coast of Finland started drilling a hole straight down, about 8 to 10 inches across. After 24 years of drilling, they ran into temperatures that were 350°F and higher. It started getting all gooey, and they couldn’t go any farther. So they capped it. After 24 years, they had only gotten 7.6 miles straight down. This is the deepest hole ever dug.
To put that in perspective, the center of the earth is 3,950 miles straight down. Everything we know about the center of the earth we’ve gained from indirect evidence. We know much more about the surface of Mars than we do about the center of the earth, and our ignorance is literally killing us. In 2010, more than 226,000 people died from earthquakes because we didn’t know enough to get them out of harm’s way.
This challenge is designed to enlighten us about what’s down there. The challenge is for the first team to build a probe that makes it all the way to the center of the earth. It must include a communications system capable of sending real-time sensory data to the surface.
This is a very difficult problem to solve, because there will be extreme temperatures that can range from freezing to molten lava. The probe will need to pass through air gaps, molten rock, solid ice, or hard substances that we don’t even know exist right now.
If somebody actually accomplishes this, we will need to explore how to use this information to create a safer place for us to live, as well as find other benefits for mankind (and prevent misuse of this technology and the information it generates).
Grand Challenge #2: Viewing the Past
Create a technology capable of replaying—in actual-size holographic form—an unrecorded event that happened no less than 20 years earlier.
When it comes to time travel, Hollywood makes it seem simple by just sending people across time. But there are two obvious first steps (if time travel is actually possible): One is communicating across time, and the other is viewing things across time. If we can’t do those two things, then why would we try to send people across time?
If we can view things across time, we can either view things in the future or we can view things in the past, though viewing the past would be easier. The challenge is thus to create a technology capable of replaying an unrecorded event in the past, at least 20 years ago, by setting up sensors around a room and actually replaying an event that happened—life-sized, in full holographic form.
If it’s possible to do something like that, how can a technology like this be used to improve things? Historical accuracy, human genealogy, biblical research, and criminal justice could improve—the O. J. Simpson trial might have been a whole lot shorter. There are lots of other issues that we could perhaps resolve if we had this type of technology, but you also have to ask what the unintended consequences would be and, most importantly, who gets to control it. We all make mistakes.
Grand Challenge #3: Elemental Deconstruction, or Disassembling Matter
First team to reduce a solid block of granite (2-foot cube) to particles no larger than molecules in less than 10 seconds, using less than 500 watts of power without causing an explosion or physical damage to objects more than 10 feet away.
Taking something apart right now is a lot of work. We melt stuff, we crush stuff, we grind stuff up; we use heat, explosions, or chemicals. So far, nothing has done a good job of disassembling matter, that actually breaks the bonds at the molecular level. We don’t have that technology yet.
If someone could meet this grand challenge, what kind of changes would that create in the world? The ability to deconstruct matter will undoubtedly alter the way things like mining, oil exploration, waste management, and a great many other things are done.
Grand Challenge #4: The Gravity Challenge
Demonstrate gravitational control over an object weighing no less than 2,000 pounds by doubling the force of gravity to 4,000 pounds, reducing the force of gravity by 50% to 1,000 pounds, and creating negative gravity by lifting the object 1,000 feet and returning it back to the original position with no explosions and in less than 10 minutes.
What do we know about gravity? Not much, though we can certainly describe it. Some very smart people have wrestled with the gravity problem but have gotten us pretty much nowhere. The challenge is thus to demonstrate gravitational control over an object weighing no less than 2,000 pounds.
We designed this challenge based on these three different vantage points:
- The idea of super-gravity. Can we double the force of gravity, so this 2,000-pound object suddenly weighs 4,000 pounds?
- Partial gravity. Can we reduce the force of gravity by 50%, so that 2,000-pound object suddenly weighs 1,000 pounds?
- Negative gravity. Can we lift that 2,000-pound object a thousand feet in the air and bring it back down to earth again?
Each of these gravity-control challenges must be accomplished using a small amount of energy, with no explosions, in less than 10 minutes, and without killing anybody.
Our ability to control gravity, even that tiny amount, would change virtually every aspect of life as we know it, from construction to transportation to disaster mitigation and prevention.
Grand Challenge #5: The Ultimate Small Storage Particle
Create an electron-based data storage system no larger than 10 millimeters cubed that can be manufactured for less than $1 per 100 terabytes and is capable of uploading, storing, and retrieving a volume of information equal to the U.S. Library of Congress in less than 10 minutes using less than 1 watt per TB/month.
With Moore’s law, everything is getting smaller, and someday we’re going to reach the ultimate small storage particle. Once we do that, then we can start setting standards. And when we set standards, people 200 years in the future will actually be able to read what we’ve created in the past without having to convert it into a different format.
Over the past few years I’ve had conversations with several experts in the nanotech industry. I like to ask them the question, “What, in your mind, is the smallest practical size for information storage?” Since our understanding of neutrinos and quarks is rather limited, they guessed it would probably be the electron, one of the larger subatomic particles. Using that assumption, I framed the question around, “How many iterations of Moore’s law do we have to go through to get to a storage particle the size of the electron?”
Using this approach, I asked Mark Dubin, a professor at the University of Colorado, to do the math. He concluded that, if Moore’s law continues down the same path, we will reach the size of the electron in 2133. That’s 122 years in the future.
There are lots of degrees of tininess that we’re not aware of. To be sure, we are a long way from reaching this goal, but once we do, we will need to start setting information standards. It will be easier for people in the future once we have a consistent form of information.
Grand Challenge #6: Travel at the Speed of Light
Create a scientific probe capable of traveling at the speed of light for a distance no less than the Earth to Saturn, with information sensors to capture stresses, impacts, and details along the way.
Humans have long pursued faster travel. Magellan’s crew circumnavigated the globe in a grueling exercise that took three years. In 1764, John Byron made it around the world in two years. He cut an entire year off the trip around the world. He made history. In 1924, the U.S. Army Air Service (the forerunner to the Air Force) made it in 175 days; in 1929, Hugo Eckener traveled around the world in a Graf Zeppelin in 21 days; then Wiley Post completed it a couple of years later in a little over eight and a half days, and then he broke his own record two years later, in seven and a half days. The Lady Luck II did it in 94 hours in 1949. In 1961, the world changed when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin flew his historic journey around the Earth in a record time of an hour and forty-eight minutes.
Finally, in 1969, Apollo 10 set the current world human speed record with its slingshot move around the Earth to get to the Moon—almost 25,000 miles an hour. For more than 42 years, we haven’t done anything to improve this record.
So, where do we go from here? This challenge has been formulated around a scientific probe capable of traveling at the speed of light, traveling a distance of no less than the Earth to Saturn, with information sensors on board to capture stresses, impacts, and details along the way.
How will this change the world? In what ways will speed-of-light travel change our view of virtually everything? Every time we increase the upper limit of transportation speed, it forces us to rethink our relationship to the universe and change our thinking about colonizing other planets.
As we learn more about the world around us, speed-of-light travel may not be the ultimate challenge. On September 21, 2011, scientists at CERN’s OPERA detector in Gran Sasso, Italy, announced a yet to be replicated “anomaly”—the intriguing possibility that they detected neutrinos exceeding the speed of light.
Grand Challenge #7: Swarm-Bots
Create a swarm of 10,000 synchronized micro drones no larger than 10 millimeters across (height, width, and depth) capable of lifting a 250-pound person to a height of 100 feet and gently returning him/her to the ground.
The idea of swarm-bots was captured in Michael Crighton’s book Prey. Swarm-bots, as they exist today, are fairly large and clunky. They don’t yet communicate well with others. Sometime in the future, they’ll be microscopic, infinitely more efficient, and will maneuver with great precision. Imagine walking out of your shower in the morning, and a swarm of microbots comes in and dries you off. This swarm will then reassemble to become your clothing, in a style of your choosing, and serve as your suit of armor, your health and medical monitor, and personal command center. In essence, it becomes a fully functional exoskeleton.
Is this a good idea? How will swarm-bots like this change the world? How will this kind of technology change human abilities and capabilities? We also need to consider what some of the unintended consequences of doing this may be.
Grand Challenge #8: The 10-Second Interface
Create a direct-to-the-mind interface that will allow 25 average people to answer a series of questions within 10 seconds with no harmful side effects to the user.
Once we master this challenge, all of the others will become infinitely more likely to happen. Just 20 years ago, a body of information such as the Library of Congress was the kind of place you would go if somebody asked you a bunch of tough questions. In that “information universe,” you might take 10 hours per question to get an answer, working your way through card catalogs and references, bouncing from one book to another.
Today, using a computer and search engine, that 10-hour experience has been reduced to 10 minutes. The next iteration is what I call the 10-second interface, where somebody can ask you the same questions and you can just instantly think your way through it. The interface between our brains and the information world is becoming seamless and invisible. That’s the direction we’re headed. So can we push it farther and faster, and make it happen sooner?
Clearly it will affect the education system. For instance, when we have instant access to information, we no longer have to teach the “who,” the “what,” the “when,” the “where”; we only have to teach the “why” and the “how.” And we will need to explore how this kind of evolution in literacy will affect businesses and how they distribute information.
Rules for the Grand Challenges
Here is an overview of how the Challenges will operate:
- Teams. Unique to these competitions, only countries will be allowed to enter teams, and each country will be limited to no more than two teams. All teams will be required to maintain accurate records of their personnel, research data, and stages of progress.
- The Prize. Similar to the Olympics, members of the winning team will each receive a gold medal. However, the true value will come from the accomplishment. Each has the potential to unlock vast new industries.
More importantly, the team that wins will have carved out their own legacy with a permanent place in the next generation of history books. - Entrance Fee. The cost of managing competitions of this nature will be significant. For this reason, the entrance fee for each team has been set at $1 million per team. The money will be used to fund an endowment to insure the long-term viability of each competition.
As the competitions ramp up, an entirely new organization will be created. The resulting organization will require a highly skilled management team and staff members who possess extraordinary technical expertise. The management team will need to be in place for many years, perhaps even decades.
The entrance fee represents a tiny fraction of a percent of the amount each team will need to budget for their efforts. Team budgets for each competition will likely be in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars. - Governing Bodies. Each competition will also require its own governing body. Since each will be a venture into the unknown, pushing the limits of science and technology, there will need to be an international governing body responsible for oversight and dealing with unforeseeable circumstances.
The exact makeup and responsibilities of the governing bodies will be determined over the coming months, but minimally they will include one representative per team from the countries they represent.
Grand Challenges and Future Dreams
Some competitions may not be completed in our lifetime, and each will be constructed around a framework that will allow it to evolve with our understanding of science.
They are designed to stretch human thinking and push the envelope. More than just a series of competitions, we view them as possible turning points in world history. Our hope is that they will stir the imagination of people around the world and incite a global conversation.
People make decisions today based on their interpretation of what the future holds. That’s why we say the future creates the present. This is just the opposite of what most people think—that what we’re doing today is going to create the future. In reality, the image that people have in their heads today of what the future holds will determine their actions. So if we change people’s visions of the future, we change the way they make decisions, today.
About the Author
Thomas Frey is executive director of the DaVinci Institute and author most recently of Communicating with the Future: How Re-engineering Intentions Will Alter the Master Code of Our Future (DaVinci Institute Press, 2011). He may be contacted at the DaVinci Institute, 511 E. South Boulder Road, Louisville, Colorado 80027. E-mail dr2tom@davinciinstitute.com; Web site www.davinciinstitute.com or www.ImpactLab.com.
This article draws from his closing plenary presentation at WorldFuture 2011 in Vancouver, an audio of which may be ordered from Intelliquest Media, www.intelliquestmedia.com (search Organizations: World Future Society or Events: WorldFuture 2011).
A Brief History of Prize Incentives: Why We Need to Compete
In the middle 1800s, one of the most popular sports in the United States was billiards. Restaurants and saloons were quick to pick up on the game’s popularity, using it to attract new customers. Soon after, the concept of a billiard parlor took hold, with many communities feeling left out if they didn’t have one.
One of the driving forces behind the sport was Michael Phelan, an Irish immigrant, who wrote one of the first American books on the game and was influential in setting rules and standards of behavior for the game. He founded the Phelan and Collender company, which developed new table and cushion designs and heavily promoted the sport. Later, in 1884, his company merged with the J. M. Brunswick & Balke Company.
However, billiards was a sport that created a huge demand for ivory, the only known substance at the time for manufacturing billiard balls. By 1860, the demand for ivory had grown so intense that industry experts estimated more than 100,000 elephants a year were being slaughtered to fill all the orders. To make matters worse, because of the imperfections in the ivory, they were only able to extract around eight billiard balls per elephant. A truly sad commentary on American consumerism.
Michael Phelan recognized the problem and in 1863 offered up the $10,000 Phelan and Collender prize for the best ivory substitute for making billiard balls. Six years later, in 1869, John Wesley Hyatt came forward with his invention of Celluloid, the world’s first practical synthetic plastic. Although he was never paid the prize money, he went on to found the Albany Billiard Ball Company, and the prize inspired a major milestone in the early days of the plastics industry.
Throughout history there are many examples of incentive prizes that produced amazing results.
- In 1714, the British Parliament offered a cash prize of £20,000 for reducing shipwrecks by creating a precise method for determining a ship’s longitude. The prize of £14,315 was won by John Harrison for a specialized precision clock: a chronometer. This story was captured by the NOVA team in their documentary for PBS, Lost at Sea: The Search for Longitude.
- In 1919, Raymond Orteig, a New York hotelier, announced a $25,000 prize for the first person to fly nonstop between New York and Paris. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh won that prize, opening the door to transoceanic air travel.
- In 1980, a $100,000 prize was created by computer science professor Edward Fredkin for the first computer to beat a reigning world chess champion. The prize was awarded to IBM’s inventors of the Deep Blue machine in 1997. Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game rematch in May 1997 (Kasparov had won their first match a year earlier). The Deep Blue inventors were Feng-hsiung Hsu, Murray Campbell, and Arthur Joseph Hoane.
- Launched in 1996, the Ansari X Prize was a space competition in which the X Prize Foundation offered a $10 million prize for the first nongovernmental organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. The prize was won on October 4, 2004—the 47th anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch—by the Tier One project designed by Burt Rutan and financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, using the experimental space plane called SpaceShipOne.
These are but a few of the many prize competitions used to shift public attention.
The Hamilton Project, an effort spearheaded by the Brookings Institution, endorses the use of prizes to stimulate technological innovation. It states that technology prizes are “an old idea whose time has come again.” The project went on to state, “Prizes can also generate public excitement and enthusiasm for science and technology, and encourage more young people to pursue careers in science, engineering, or technology-based entrepreneurship.”
The most famous prizes in the world today are the Nobel Prizes. However, those are backward-looking prizes intended to reward some of the world’s best and brightest for past accomplishments.
Incentive prizes are different. They serve a vastly different purpose: to incentivize people for future accomplishments.
Our need to compete is something that has been instilled in us at an early age. We compete with people physically in athletic competitions, and intellectually in academic competitions. But when it comes to science and math, the fundamental building blocks needed to advance civilization; we have very few finish lines.
—Thomas Frey
One Response to the Eight Grand Challenges
By Richard Yonck
Do Thomas Frey’s challenges defy the laws of physics? Are they too challenging to be accomplished within any one contender’s lifetime? One observer suggests that these criticisms do not detract from the Grand Challenges’ principal goal: to advance humanity.
The closing plenary session for WorldFuture 2011, held in July in Vancouver, was given by Thomas Frey of the DaVinci Institute. In his presentation, Frey offered up Eight Grand Challenges for humanity. It was a thought-provoking presentation, though not without its critics.
To recap, Frey stated that much of our time and resources are taken up dealing with the existing problems of the day. We are continually responding to the problems and conditions we’ve created in the past and, by doing so, we trap ourselves there. So why not establish a group of competitive challenges for the purpose of advancing humanity in the future?
Because of the scale of the challenges and the financial and physical resources needed, the competition would be limited to countries. The prize would be national prestige along with the creation of entirely new industries and markets. While the possible applications of the resulting technologies was considered very open-ended, the challenges themselves had set parameters. [The particulars of the Eight Challenges are described in Frey’s article.]
Some attendees took issue with several of the challenges, noting that they violated established laws of physics. Now, I’m only an armchair-physicist (that is, I’m as much a physicist as most football fans are professional quarterbacks), but I’m of the opinion that we need to be open to these ideas. At first glance, some of the challenges do appear to violate relativity and the First Law of Thermodynamics, but I think they’re actually open-ended enough to have some potential work-arounds.
For instance, disassembling matter would essentially involve breaking the covalent bonding between atoms. Though the limitation of 500 watts seems impossibly low, could a kind of cascade effect be initiated that would do the work without violating the law of conservation of energy?
Special relativity tells us that a massless particle can travel at light speed, but anything having mass cannot. (However, as I write, even this basic assumption is being called into question.) As an initial thought experiment: Would it ever be possible to isolate a chargeless particle, such as a neutron, in such a way that its mass wouldn’t be affected by acceleration? Using current technology, no, but I’m not sure this will always be the case.
Certain experiments with quantum entanglement—Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance”—suggest that information may be able to travel backward in time. This is far from proven, but offers potential worth exploring.
Many cosmologists believe that dark energy and repulsive gravity may drive the expansion of the universe. Could advances in our understanding of these forces one day give us the means of controlling gravity?
The impossible is always impossible until it’s not. This doesn’t mean we can expect to violate primary laws of physics, but we need to be open to the possibility of what can be achieved.
For me, the bigger issue is one of motivation. Some of these challenges could take a century or more to be realized. National prestige and the dream of potential markets and industries are all very good, but is this sufficient to sustain participants for the long haul? Could they weather the political and ideological swings that will occur during even a fraction of this timeframe?
Two of the largest, long-term, technically advanced projects ever undertaken were the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program. Both of these marshaled enormous physical and intellectual resources over many years. However, they weren’t launched to create new markets, but as a response to a perceived existential threat. For me, therein may lie the answer.
The world faces any number of known and unknown existential threats in the coming century and beyond. British Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees has put the probability of human extinction sometime during the twenty-first century at 50%. The risks are considerable. Some we can influence; others we have absolutely no control over. Bioterrorism. Nanotechnology run amok. Nuclear war. Extreme climate change. Asteroid collisions. Radiation from a nearby supernova. Any one of these could destroy millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of civilization.
The possible uses for technologies arising from the Eight Grand Challenges are vast. But within them I see the necessary ingredients for finally expanding humanity beyond this one small planet. Moving into space, both within and beyond this solar system, is our best chance of continuation as a species.
As physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking observed, “The long-term survival of the human race is at risk as long as it is confined to a single planet.”
So my interpretation of the Eight Great Challenges is this: We need to treat humanity the same way we treat any other irreplaceable, highly valued, absolutely critical system.
Let’s make a backup.
About the Author
Richard Yonck is a foresight analyst for Intelligent Future LLC and is the founder of FutureNovo.com, a site about emerging technologies. His previous article for THE FUTURIST, “Treading in the Sea of Data,” appeared in the July-August 2011 issue. Email ryonck@intelligent-future.com.
Crossing the Species Boundary: Genetic Engineering as Conscious Evolution
By Jeffrey Scott Coker
Genetic engineering is actually as natural as any process on Earth, and mastering it would enable us to do what microbes do trillions of times every day, but purposefully and with better results.
Gene mutation is far more common and more natural than some people may think. Although we tend to think of ourselves as genetically stable entities, the truth is that every one of us mutates multiple times every day. Every time one of our cells duplicates itself, a couple of hundred DNA mutations occur. Since the human body has more than 10 trillion cells, that adds up to trillions of mutations, per person, over the course of a human life.
Viruses and bacteria routinely shuttle DNA between organisms in nature, so much of our DNA is nonhuman in origin. Biologists refer to this as “lateral gene transfer.” Throughout evolutionary history, viruses and bacteria have been shuttling DNA between organisms of every sort. Most commonly, they deposit their own DNA (which they are also passing readily among themselves). For example, one finding of the Human Genome Project was that humans have a substantial amount of bacterial DNA that was passed into humans through lateral gene transfer. Lateral gene transfer is a pretty common occurrence in nature, leading to rapid spread of disease resistance genes among microorganisms and other evolutionary events.
Once you realize that DNA is not fixed, and is in fact constantly changing, the notion of genetic engineering seems quite innocent. Changing DNA within an organism and transferring DNA from one species to another is not unprecedented, or even unusual. Microbes in nature are carrying it out every second.
The only thing truly new about genetic engineering is that it transfers control from microorganisms to humans, from randomness to consciousness. It is pretty difficult to argue that we should give random chance trillions of opportunities to change our DNA, but we shouldn’t trust ourselves to do it even once. Humans have many faults, but we are not dumber or less trustworthy than random chance.
Backlashes against Genetic Engineering
The subject of genetic engineering often sparks an emotional reaction in many people. There is widespread support in some countries for banning genetic engineering, or at least imposing severe restrictions on it. Some activist groups have launched media campaigns and led mass protests against it. They express shock and outrage and denounce it as a “contaminant” and a “dangerous technology.” A few groups of more militant demonstrators have gone so far as to vandalize research labs and sabotage experimental field trials.
Scientists attempt to view the issues surrounding genetic engineering more objectively. They foresee the technologies greatly benefiting humanity and the environment—as long as we proceed with caution. The Ecological Society of America has stated:
Genetically engineered organisms have the potential to play a positive role in sustainable agriculture, aquaculture, bioremediation, and environmental management, both in developed and developing countries. However, deliberate or inadvertent releases of genetically engineered organisms into the environment could have negative ecological impacts under some circumstances.
The American Society of Plant Biologists firmly supports “responsible development and science-based oversight” of genetic engineering, and states further that, “with continued responsible regulation and oversight, genetic engineering will bring many significant health and environmental benefits to the world.”
The National Academies of Science (NAS), which advises the U.S. government under congressional charter, reviewed the body of existing literature on crop production throughout the United States. In its 2010 report, NAS concluded that genetic engineering might not enhance agriculture everywhere, but it does significantly improve agriculture in many places and sectors.
The simplistic debate about whether or not genetic engineering is “right” or “wrong” is very unfortunate because it has distracted the public from the truly important questions about the future: How can we use genetic engineering to improve the world? How should the regulatory process be designed to maintain safety while still allowing the timely release of life-saving therapies, improved crops, etc.? How can we utilize the benefits of genetic engineering without allowing a small number of corporations to dominate global agriculture? How can we use genetic engineering for humanitarian purposes? How can we use genetic engineering to cure cancer and other diseases? To what extent should genetic engineering be used for human enhancement?
Researchers in practically every major university and research institute are now thinking about these questions and using genetic engineering to help solve all sorts of global problems. It is no exaggeration to say that a revolution of innovation is taking place.
The Next Generation of Genetically Engineered Crops
In the United States and elsewhere, more than 90% of soybeans, cotton, corn, and certain other crops are already genetically engineered, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The most common genetic modifications involve increased defenses to insects and weeds. For example, “Roundup Ready” crops are immune to the herbicide glyphosate, allowing farmers to spray herbicide and kill weeds without harming the crop itself. (These crops are not without controversy, raising fears of corporate monopolization, indiscriminate spraying of toxic chemicals, etc.) Another example is “Bt” technology, which involves plants producing a protein from Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium that is toxic to most insects. Although these universal traits will persist, the next generation of genetically engineered crops will include traits for local adaptation, as well.
Many of the best applications for genetically engineered crops are local in nature—targeted solutions for specific problems. In Hawaii, for example, genetically engineered papaya trees have rescued the entire papaya industry. A ringspot virus was destroying all of Hawaii’s papayas in the 1980s and 1990s. Researchers from Cornell University engineered a resistant tree that was then bred with other varieties. Now, more than 80% of Hawaiian papaya trees are immune to ringspot.
Similarly, on farms throughout China, farmers gave been growing a cotton plant that is engineered to be resistant to the destructive pest cotton bollworm. Analysis has shown that these resistant cotton plants will even control the bollworm on nearby non-engineered plants.
Rice is a staple crop throughout the world, especially in poor areas. Researchers at University of California–Riverside and the International Rice Research Institute have created varieties of rice that can withstand being submerged under water for almost two weeks, which can save crops during years of flooding. At the University of California–Davis, rice has been engineered to have greater salt tolerance. Others are working on more nutritious rice that will be more resistant to drought, cold, iron toxicity, and other stresses. These new traits could have enormous humanitarian benefits.
Colorado State University researchers have created plants that can change color when certain pollutants or explosives are nearby. This could allow the plants to serve as a warning system during a terrorist attack or industrial accident, or when landmines are left behind after wars.
Partial solutions to the world’s energy needs are being addressed by genetic engineering, as well. At many universities, organisms are being engineered with improved characteristics for producing biofuels (e.g., tolerance to glucose and ethanol). Plants, bacteria, yeast, algae, and other organisms have been engineered for this purpose.
In Australia, field trials have been promising for insect-resistant cotton, drought-tolerant and salt-tolerant wheat, and boron-tolerant and fiber-enriched barley. They have also created bananas that are fungus-resistant and fortified with Vitamin A and iron.
In South Africa, researchers have engineered corn that is resistant to the maize streak virus. The virus, which is endemic to Africa, can destroy a farmer’s entire crop in a bad year. Since corn accounts for more than 50% of calories consumed in some African regions, the new corn could help Africa to become more stable and self-sufficient.
We could go on and on with examples of genetic engineering being used to solve specific problems and improve particular crops. Basically, if you can imagine it, then several research labs are working on it. Genetic engineering will allow crops of the future to be better tasting, more nutritious, more tolerant of environmental stresses, and less allergenic. Foods will also last longer before spoiling, allowing food to be distributed more easily. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there will be much more food grown per acre, meaning that we will need less land to grow crops. This creates the opportunity for millions of acres to remain wilderness instead of being leveled into farmland.
A common criticism of engineered crops is that they allow a small number of large corporations to control an agricultural system. If every farmer is using the same genetically modified crops—particularly if they’re from one manufacturer—then there will be less agricultural diversity, more corporate control, and little economic benefit for the farmers themselves.
In many situations, that has been partly true, but this is a problem that has to do with patenting and the regulatory system, not genetic engineering itself. As long as the regulatory environment is so biased against engineered crops, large companies will continue to dominate because most smaller players can’t afford to get products approved. As with golden rice, many of the best uses of genetic engineering, especially those with benefits for poor and developing nations, are having trouble moving from the laboratory to the field.
To be fair, genetic engineering is not a panacea for agriculture and food supply. Agriculture is taking a serious toll on the planet. Global population is growing, soils are being degraded, and water supplies are being depleted. Perhaps most important, climate is changing, making traditional agricultural methods obsolete in many regions. Although genetic engineering can help remedy all of these problems, it cannot be a complete solution by itself. We will also need to embrace sustainable practices that build soils, reduce unnecessary herbicides and pesticides, increase biodiversity, reduce water usage, and distribute food more efficiently.
If we are wise, we will stop pitting different agricultural systems against one another. For example, both modern scientific farming and traditional indigenous agricultural systems have their place in the world. In a world with rapidly changing environments and cultures, we will need the tools and techniques of every agricultural system at our disposal to help individual regions cope with their own unique circumstances. Yesterday’s techniques will not work when tomorrow’s climate is so different. Likewise, using a small handful of corporate methods all over the planet is unlikely to benefit such a wide diversity of peoples and environments.
In my opinion, a sustainable and equitable future looks like this: Crops and livestock are genetically engineered with specific regions and peoples in mind, so that the local cultures are empowered and crop biodiversity is maintained. It is a world where ordinary people control their technology instead of the technology controlling them. This is the best future we can hope to attain.
Genetic Engineering for Human Health
Genetic engineering holds great potential importance for human health care, as well. It can be used on other organisms to produce drugs, and it can also be used directly on humans to reverse harmful mutations.
The first drug produced by genetic engineering was insulin, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1982. Before then, people with insulin-dependent diabetes had to inject themselves with insulin from cows or pigs. Although effective, cow and pig insulin increased the chances of allergic reactions. The company Genentech genetically engineered the bacterium E. coli so that it would produce a human version of insulin. Since this first success, genetic engineering has yielded therapies for multiple sclerosis, strokes, dwarfism, cancer, and a wide range of other diseases. By moving medicine away from using chemicals and parts derived from other animals and cadavers, genetically engineered products have resulted in higher success rates and fewer allergic reactions.
Genetic engineering is also invaluable as a method of disease prevention. Human papillomavirus (HPV) causes genital warts and is the main cause of cervical cancer, which kills hundreds of thousands of women each year. The pharmaceutical company Merck produces a widely used vaccine for HPV, which was among the first products to actually prevent a form of cancer. It is little known by the public that the vaccine is produced using genetically engineered yeast (and that is, in fact, the only way it could ever have been produced).
All around the world, companies are developing new genetically engineered drugs to fight cancer. Some will prevent forms of cancer outright, while others will help keep cancerous growth in check. For example, injecting tumor suppressor genes can slow some tumors.
Genetic engineering can also be used to fix genetic diseases, birth defects, and a broad range of other harmful mutations that occur “naturally” within human DNA. Most people don’t like the sound of “engineering” humans. We don’t think of ourselves as mechanical products, and we would much rather be “cured” than “engineered” or “fixed.” With this in mind, many medical practitioners have adopted the gentler-sounding phrase “gene therapy,” which includes a broad array of methods for using genetics to treat disease. Call it whatever you like, genetically based approaches are saving lives and restoring health.
For example, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and University College London have corrected a gene defect in the eyes of people born with severe blindness and partly restored their sight. Only one injection of a liquid was needed to produce the dramatic results.
In another case, researchers at the National Institutes of Health genetically engineered the lymphocytes of cancer patients so that their cells would recognize and destroy cancerous cells. Several patients with rapidly advancing and deadly forms of cancer were cancer-free a few months later. Yet another example is the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Many research groups are giving HIV-infected patients new genes to help fight HIV by removing blood or bone marrow, introducing new genes to immune cells, and then reinfusing the cells back into patients.
There are several thousand genetic diseases that are caused by DNA mutations and a variety of infectious diseases that use mutations of their own to outsmart our drugs. With genetic engineering, it may be possible to negate the vast majority of these genetic diseases and to develop much more effective, adaptable cures to the most mutation-prone pathogens. Thus, genetic engineering may become more and more important as a health-care tool.
Extreme Forms of Genetic Engineering
It would be great fun to hop into a time machine and go back to witness the very first time that someone extracted and drank milk from a cow or goat. It must have seemed unthinkably disgusting to people at the time. Was it a caveman dare? Or a tribe who was desperately hungry? Or an early experimentalist?
Whatever the case, it goes to show that what seems extreme and unnatural to one generation or culture can be totally ordinary to the next. We eat and drink other organisms, even some that were once considered poisonous—tomatoes, for example. Likewise, ancient human cultures would have been shocked to hear that we now replace our organs with those from other animals, or graft plant species together to make them grow just as we like.
What are the more “extreme” genetic engineering projects of today that may seem ordinary tomorrow? Although genetically engineered animals are not yet a major part of agriculture, they are coming in a big way. They will be much more efficient—growing faster, requiring less food, and producing less waste. Eventually, they will also produce leaner, lower-fat meat.
If we choose, we could also grow meat in an industry setting that isn’t really from an “animal,” per se. The same cells that divide and grow to produce “meat” in an animal can be coaxed into growing synthetic meat in a laboratory. Some would argue that current meat production has become so miserable and unethical for animals that synthetic meat would be an ethical improvement. Public opinion will ultimately decide.
In the realm of human health, genetic engineering will go far beyond treating acute health problems. We will see human enhancements of all sorts. Among the first could be people engineered to be slimmer and more muscular, both of which have already been accomplished in mice and monkeys. Eyesight could be greatly improved, perhaps even allowing us to see wavelengths of light that are currently “invisible” to us—maybe to the point where we might lessen our need for lighting and electricity use. Intelligence is more complicated and more impacted by one’s environment, but it, too, could be genetically enhanced.
Undoubtedly, many people will protest vehemently at the notion of human enhancement, and some places will probably ban it. At the same time, though, the competitive pressures to use it will be enormous. Will the landscape of global power shift due to who embraces genetic technology and who doesn’t? It is possible that we are in for a sort of genetic arms race or, if you view it more positively, a global revolution in genetic innovation. No matter what you call it, it would be an evolutionary sprint.
Genetic engineering will also very likely alter future athletic events. Unlike the use of performance-enhancing drugs, which a medical exam can detect, it will be nearly impossible to prove that an athlete underwent some types of genetic enhancement. In fact, some professional sports may be forced to allow every competitor access to essentially the same gene-altering technology. That way, at least they will have a level playing field. It is possible that we have already seen the last Olympic Games that are 100% free of genetically engineered athletic performance.
Some argue that genetic enhancement could ruin sports, and in some cases they may be right. On the other hand, was it ever really “fair” that a few people are lucky enough to be able to hit a baseball 450 feet, run 100 meters in under 10 seconds, or jump from the free-throw line and dunk a basketball? Sports are already more dominated by genetics than we’d like to admit. The real decision is whether we prefer sports to be driven by genetic chance or genetic design.
Other Uses of Genetic Engineering
The advanced-research divisions of militaries around the world are applying genetic engineering to attempt to develop deadlier weapons and more-capable soldiers. If they succeed, future war zones might feature such phenomena as troops with superhuman metabolism, attack bees that follow orders, genetic programming with remote controls, rapid-healing stem cells, or living machinery.
Other, more benevolent uses of genetic engineering are also feasible. One of the more thought-provoking ideas for genetic engineering is the “open-source organism” concept. Today, open-source projects use the good will of the community to collectively design something: One designer makes a change, then another improves it, then another, and so forth. When an open-source project becomes popular, it is hard to beat since everyone together knows more than a small group. Wikipedia is a widely popular example.
Now imagine if the global community designed organisms collectively, just like it now collectively maintains Wikipedia. One group would contribute genetic information for superior sugar metabolism, then another would add DNA repair mechanisms, and so forth.
Some researchers, such as the BIOFAB group (BIOFAB International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology), are developing free standard DNA parts that could be used to create designer microbes. Eventually, it might be easy enough for novices to participate. You could choose the traits that you want instead of having to understand exactly how the genetics works—much as we buy a television or computer because of what they do, even though we can’t build one ourselves.
The open-source concept is revolutionary not only for the novel organisms it might produce, but also for the evolutionary process that it creates. Evolution would have expanded from a process of natural selection to include artificial selection, then independent design, and finally community design. Evolution could actually become a democratic process.
Finally, we might imagine more large-scale genetic shuffling between higher organisms. Mythologies and religions are full of fantastical creatures: centaurs (part human, part horse), chimeras (mix of lion, goat, and snake), sphinxes (mix of woman, lion, and bird), angels (humanlike creatures with wings), etc. Modern “superheroes” also embody imagined human–animal hybrids: Spiderman, Batman, Wolverine, and so forth. Many of these are ridiculous from the standpoint of what is possible. But some of their characteristics are absolutely achievable. It is our ethics, and not our science, that would keep some of these things from happening.
Conscious Evolution: Leaving Our Primitive Times Behind
Once upon a time, our ancient ancestors scratched lives from nature. When food presented itself, they ate. When it did not, they starved. In the real world, “leaving nature alone” really means subjecting ourselves and our families to merciless and random suffering. Eventually, humans took more control of animals and plants through agriculture, and then civilization took off. Today, we can hardly imagine how harsh the pre-agricultural existence must have been.
Fast forward to the future. Our descendants may look back at us in the same way that we look back at our ancestors. They will briefly consider what it was like for genetics to be random and uncontrolled, but they won’t really understand. They will see us as poor wretches who struggled to do the best that we could under harsh circumstances. Just imagine one of your descendants strolling through a museum, looking at artifacts of the “pre-genetic engineering era,” and wondering aloud, “What would it have been like to live during such a primitive time?” Just as today, some may not even believe that they evolved from us. “We couldn’t have come from those monkeys,” they may say.
About the Author
Jeffrey Scott Coker is an associate professor of biology and the director of general studies at Elon University in North Carolina. He is the author of the upcoming book Reinventing Life: A Guide to Our Evolutionary Future and will be presenting at WorldFuture 2012. E-mail jcoker@elon.edu.
Innovating the Future: From Ideas to Adoption
By Peter J. Denning
Futurists and innovators can teach each other lessons to help their ideas succeed.
Innovators and futurists ought to have a symbiotic relationship. Often, they do not.
The futurist aims to help us understand how trends and events will shape the future, so that we can chart our business and policy courses to bring us to a future that most appeals to us. The innovator, on the other hand, aims to realize a possible future by getting ideas (i.e., possibilities for the future) adopted as practice in our communities.
Many would-be innovators ask in frustration, Why do my own good ideas often go by the wayside and other people’s bad ideas get adopted? Why do I invest enormous time and resources to systematically generate new ideas, only to see much of my effort go to waste? Leaders in all fields fret and fume over these questions. They want to improve their innovation success rates.
Increasing success and reducing wasted effort on the path to innovation are very important goals. Many people believe innovation is the key to economic development, technological progress, competitiveness, and business survival. Policies that enhance a nation’s ability to be innovative are constantly in public discussion and are hot topics among politicians and business leaders. Futurists collaborating with innovators can contribute to these goals.
I have been investigating these questions for many years and have learned many things that I wish I knew when I was younger. Based on these investigations, my colleague, Robert Dunham, and I wrote a book, The Innovator’s Way (MIT Press, 2010, innovators-way.com). I will share here some excerpts from the book as a guide for innovators—and futurists—who are trying to get their ideas adopted.
The Work of Futurists
Most futurists see their mission as investigating how social, economic, and technological developments will shape the future. Futurists help others understand and respond to the coming changes. They also help apply anticipatory thinking to issues facing education, business, and government. They do this by a variety of methods, of which these three are the most common:
1. Revelation of current realities. Sometimes the prevailing common-sense interpretation of what is happening and how it will shape the future is not well grounded. It is a belief, but is not supported by data and observation. Futurists examine the data and propose new, well-grounded interpretations. They then examine how policy and action might change to align with the reality.
Peter Drucker was a master at this. His book The New Realities (HarperBusiness, 1989) is loaded with examples. My favorite was his chapter “When the Russian Empire Is Gone,” in which he analyzed economic data, conversations of politicians and the media, and moods of Russian citizens to conclude that the Soviet Union would soon fall. The collapse occurred within a year of when the book was published, much sooner than he expected.
2. Extrapolation of trends. When a trend can be detected in some measure of performance, futurists can calculate future values of that measure and draw conclusions about the consequences. In 1965, Gordon Moore noticed a trend in computer chips: Every year, the transistor count doubled for about the same price (“Cramming More Components into Integrated Circuits,” in Electronics Magazine 38, April 1965). Many people started using Moore’s law to gauge whether the computing power available in a few years would support their new technology offerings. Though not a law of nature, it became a guiding principle that has sustained the computer chip industry for nearly 50 years.
In The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking, 1999), Ray Kurzweil claimed that the same trend was evident in four previous generations of information technologies and would be present in technologies that supersede silicon. Based on that, he extrapolated 50 years into the future to predict a “singularity” around 2030, when he believes artificial brains will become intelligent.
In A Vision for 2012 (Fulcrum, 2008), John L. Petersen noticed deep trends in economic data that would lead to crushing public debt, unsustainable government programs, rising food prices, rising fuel prices, and social unrest. Many of his predictions have borne out.
On the other side, in The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business, 2000), John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid warn against overconfidence in trend extrapolation because social systems often resist and redirect changes in technology. They exposed a series of major predictions that never happened and led to the dot-com bust in 2002.
3. Scenarios. A scenario is a story that lays out in some detail what the future might look like under certain assumptions about trends and other factors. Futurists usually offer several scenarios under different assumptions. The method is useful to help people see how they might react to different futures, and then try to influence policies and trends so that the most attractive futures come to be. Futurists do not offer scenarios as predictions. They often evaluate the probabilities of the various futures they lay out.
Let’s take a look at the work of innovators for overlaps. Before we do that, we need to have a good definition of innovation.
In Search of the Meaning of Innovation
Innovation is one of the most studied subjects of all time, but there is considerable disagreement about what innovation is. The most common notions are that innovation is a mysterious talent, a disposition of some people’s DNA, a process that can be controlled by savvy managers, or a flash of genius. Less common notions about innovation involve adoption, diffusion, and new behaviors. Thus, the recommendations of different authors about how to achieve innovation lead in conflicting directions.
There is agreement that success of an innovation means adoption. However, successes are few and precious. Business surveys reveal that only about 4% of innovation initiatives meet their financial objectives. Patent office statistics show that only about 0.2% of patents make a return on the inventor’s investment. The National Research Council reported in 1986 that the U.S. government’s track record of promoting innovation through university research is not as good as is commonly believed: Fewer than 25% of innovations can be connected to published research ideas.
It appears that we collectively share a misunderstanding of innovation and therefore experience great difficulty in achieving it. No wonder our methods are ineffective.
The low success rate of innovation initiatives is often explained as an inevitable consequence of the uncertainty of the marketplace. We are often asked to rejoice that the prevailing 4% success rate is so high. If low success is certain, a company’s best strategy is to “take many shots on goal.” However, this strategy is available to only a few companies that can afford to let 96% of their research and development go to waste. For the rest of us, achieving innovation looks like a crapshoot.
In The Innovator’s Way, Bob Dunham and I concluded that the notions based on idea generation led to the fewest successes, whereas the notions based on adoption led to the most successes. Since we were interested in success and in the innovator skills that generate it, we used the second notion as our definition: Innovation is adoption of new practice in a community. There are three key words in this definition:
1. Community. The set of people who change. The community can be small, such as a family; medium, such as a business’s customers; or large, such as a nation or the world.
2. Practice. Habits, routines, and processes that people embody. Embody means that people engage with the practice skillfully and without conscious thought. The ability to perform is not the same is applying a mental concept.
3. Adoption. The members of the community make a commitment to learn and embody a new practice. They will make such a commitment only if they see sufficient value in the new practice and are willing to sacrifice the previous practice to get it.
Notice that this definition covers many types of innovation. The Internet is a set of technologies that support new practices, including browsing, searching, online shopping, social networking, blogging, and texting. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) inspired new practices backed by laws to take drunk drivers off the roads. Sustainable architects have introduced new construction practices that produce buildings with no carbon footprint. Heads of families have adopted small business practices to help them balance income and expense and pay off debt. The key to success is adoption of practices, not the invention of ideas.
Unfortunately, the notion that innovation comes from clever ideas is enshrined in popular mythology. It is certainly true that ideas are necessary for innovation, but, as we will discuss, ideas are never sufficient. Company or public policies aimed at stimulating creativity, producing more ideas, or encouraging inventors do a disservice by getting everyone to focus too much on ideas at the expense of adoption. We call this imbalance the invention myth—the belief that invention of new ideas is the driver of innovation. The invention myth has led many people down the path to failure in their innovation initiatives.
Then what is a balanced and holistic view of innovation? The Eight Ways framework is our answer.
The Work of Innovators
The eight ways are practices that innovators use to produce the eight essential outcomes for innovation. Their names are listed on the wheel of the figure on page 43. Taken together, these practices define what it means to be a skillful innovator.
The wheel diagram suggests that the practices are not performed sequentially in numerical order. Instead, the innovator moves constantly among them, refining the results of earlier actions after seeing their consequences. It is better to think of the practices being done in parallel. That is why they must be learned as skills. The innovator must be able to do them well without thinking about them.
| Structure of the Innovation Practices | |||
| The main work of invention | 1 | Sensing | Locate and articulate a new possibility, often in disharmonies or incongruous events. |
| 2 | Envisioning | Tell a compelling story about the world when the possibility is realized. | |
| The main work of adoption | 3 | Offering | Offer to produce the outcome; gain a commitment to consider it. |
| 4 | Adopting | Gain commitment to try it for the first time, and overcome resistance to the change. | |
| 5 | Sustaining | Gain commitment to stick with the new practice over time, integrating it into the environment. | |
| The environment for the other practices | 6 | Executing | Create environment for effectively managing all commitments to completion. |
| 7 | Leading | Proactively mobilize people to generate the outcomes of the other practices. | |
| 8 | Embodying | Instill the new practice into the practices of the community. | |
The “Structure of the Innovative Practices” table gives more detail. The first two practices are the main work of invention, and the next three are the main work of adoption. Although these five tend to be done sequentially, they are not strictly sequential. Each of the final three practices creates an environment for effective conduct of all the other practices. The environment is important: The innovator has to execute the innovation commitments, proactively promote the innovation, and be sensitive to how other people listen and react.
The specification of each practice has two parts. The anatomy describes the structure of the practice when it goes well and produces its outcome. The characteristic breakdowns are the most common obstacles that arise in trying to complete the practice. The innovator moves toward the desired outcome and copes with breakdowns as they arise. The breakdowns are not mere annoyances. Coping with them is a normal part of the process.
Example: The World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee is widely known for creating the World Wide Web, considered one of the great innovations of the twentieth century. His parents were both part of the Ferranti Atlas Project at the University of Manchester in England in the 1950s. After earning a graduate degree in physics in 1976 from Queen’s College, Oxford, he worked as a software engineer at Plessey Systems, a telecommunications company, and then at D. G. Nash Ltd., were he wrote text-processing software for intelligent printers and a multitasking operating system. He was fascinated by a question, first raised by his father, of whether computers could be used to link information rather than simply compute numbers. In 1980, he went to CERN, the European high energy physics research laboratory, with this question on his mind.
Berners-Lee saw a huge disharmony between the actual direction of the Internet and the information-sharing visions of its pioneers in the 1960s. He felt a burning desire to do something about it. Given his dream about information sharing through linking, the esoteric world of hypertext was an obvious place to look for a key to an information-sharing Internet.
In his spare time, he worked on a program called Enquire that could link information on any computer with any other. He began to envision CERN not as a network of separate computers, but as a single information space consolidated across many computers. In 1989, he wrote “Information Management: A Proposal” to create a hypertext system at CERN linking all its computers and documents into a single web from which information could be quickly retrieved from anywhere in CERN. At first his proposal was ignored, but with help from prominent computer engineer Robert Cailliau, he got the attention of CERN’s leadership. In 1990, they gave him the go-ahead to make a prototype, which he built on a NeXT computer.
The prototype included HTML, a new markup language for documents containing hyperlinks; HTTP, a new protocol for downloading an object designated by a hyperlink; URL, an Internet-compatible scheme for global names; and a graphical user interface. He drew on well-known ideas and practices, including Gopher (University of Minnesota’s file-fetching system), FRESS and ZOG (hypertext document management systems), SGML (the digital publishing markup language), TCP/IP and FTP (standard Internet protocols), operating systems (the global identifier concept of capability systems, which had been on the Plessey computers), and Usenet news and discussion groups.
He put up the first Web page at CERN in November 1990. He released and tested browser prototypes at CERN in 1991. He gave his first external demonstration at the Hypertext 1991 research conference, a natural audience for this idea. It was an immediate success and inspired others to build Web sites. The first non-CERN Web site went up at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) in December 1991. Web sites began to proliferate; there were 200 in 1993. With the universal free browser, Mosaic, released by Marc Andreesen at the University of Illinois in 1993, the World Wide Web took off exponentially. During the 1990s, many new industries formed including e-commerce (selling by online stores via Web interface), publishing, digital libraries, eBay, Google, Amazon.com, Yahoo, and the Internet business boom (and bust).
Berners-Lee had no master plan, business plan, or any other formal document outlining a strategy for the Web. Instead, he insisted that all programmers working on Web software adhere to a small set of simple core principles: openness to everyone, no single controlling authority, universal identifiers, a markup language HTML, and a protocol HTTP. He steadfastly maintained that these principles were the essence of the World Wide Web; all else would be a distraction. He analyzed all new proposals to make sure they were true to these principles.
Building political support for the Web while advancing the Web technology became his central passion. Cailliau helped him build support within CERN. In 1994, he worried that commercial companies might get into a competition over who owned the Web, in violation of his core principle of openness. Michael Dertouzos at MIT helped establish the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, modeled after the successful MIT X Windows consortium. This consortium eventually attracted over 400 companies, who collaborated on development of Web standards and tools; it became an engine of innovation for the Web. The W3C was an open-software, consensus-based organization that issued nonbinding recommendations, which become de facto standards once consortium members adopted them.
Berners-Lee himself refused to set up a private company so that he could benefit financially from his technology. It belongs to the world, he said.
Here is a summary of how Berners-Lee engaged the eight innovation practices.
- Sensing: In the 1980s, he saw a disharmony between the actual direction of the Internet (e-mail and file transfer) and its promise (semantic web of all human knowledge). This bothered him. It moved him to do something about it.
- Envisioning: He envisioned a system of hypertext-linked documents; any one could link to any other. Mouse-clicking a link would cause the system to retrieve the target document. The system architecture would consist of HTTP, HTML, URLs, and a browser. Common tasks such as scheduling meetings, looking up citations, and getting mail and news would be easy in this system.
- Offering: In 1989, he offered to build such a system at CERN. At first his offer was spurned, but with advice from colleagues he reformulated his offer around CERN document retrieval needs and got permission to build a prototype on a NeXT machine. He demonstrated the prototype at the 1991 Hypertext research conference, got strong positive responses, and solicited implementations of Web servers.
- Adopting: He visited many sites and attended many conferences to tell people about his system, always soliciting new servers, software, and browsers. Mark Andreesen, a student at University of Illinois, in 1993 made Mosaic, the first universal, easy-install graphical browser. After that, users adopted the Web like wildfire.
- Sustaining. In 1994, he founded the World Wide Web Consortium, hosted by MIT and CERN, to preserve the Web in the public domain by creating open software and standards for the Web. Over 400 organizations eventually joined W3C; it became an engine of innovation for the Web.
- Executing: He put together programming teams and solicited others to do the same, so that good Web software was developed and made available for anyone to use. He set clear principles for design and implementation of all Web software.
- Leading: At every opportunity, he recruited ever-larger numbers of followers and Web supporters. He articulated a small set of guiding principles for Web development and stuck with them. He refused to let the Web “go private” or to become wealthy from his own invention. He said the cause was too important and too big for his personal considerations to influence.
- Embodying: He embodied his set of core principles for the Web and practiced them everywhere he went. Through well-designed software and later through tutorials in the W3C, he helped Web users embody the new practices of linking, clicking, and browsing.
Extension to Teams, Networks, And Organizations
The Eight Ways of Innovation have been presented as personal skills. They are the skills of serial innovators, who are good at all eight.
But what happens if you are strong at several but not all? For example, you could be a good inventor and storyteller, but you dislike anything having to do with offering or adopting. The obvious thing to do is team up with others who are good at the practices you are not good at. With good coordination, the team as a whole can do all eight practices and be positioned for success at its innovations.
The same is true at a larger scale for organizations. A well-designed organization can, through good internal coordination, take individuals skilled in some of the practices and produce teams good at all of them. Those organizations can become very successful at innovation.
Networks can also be very good at innovation, if they have people who are good at each of the practices and use the network as a means to find each other and coordinate. Open source software communities, such as the W3C, illustrate this.
In all cases, the eight practices are embodied in the innovative individual, team, organization, or network. The eight practices must always be present in order for individuals or collectives to be successful at innovation.
Collaborations with Futurists
The work of futurists and innovators most closely aligns in the Sensing and Envisioning practices. Futurists are good at turning up new possibilities and formulating stories about what the world would be like if the possibility were made real. Innovators can use their help.
The standard futurist scenario is not necessarily a compelling vision story. A visioning story is not the same as a vision, which is a committed declaration about a future. A visioning story is a compelling narrative that connects a vision to the concerns of the people and provokes their care and commitment. A good vision story inspires your audience to:
- Believe that there is a better future, well worth sacrificing what they now do to gain it.
- See that a blind spot has kept them from seeing this future sooner.
- Trust in your ability and commitment to make it happen.
- Ask for more conversation about this future.
Futurists collaborating with innovators can convert scenarios into vision stories.
There are two other places in the innovation process where futurists can help innovators. One is in the Offering practice. Even if listeners are attracted by an innovator’s vision of an attractive future, they are often reluctant to sign on because the innovator has not shown them a credible, risk-managing path from the present to the future. Many futurists have well-honed skills at finding paths from the present to the desired future.
Futurists can also help innovators in the Adopting and Sustaining practices. In both cases, innovators are quite likely to encounter resistance from some subset of the community that feels threatened by the change. Resistance is a major impediment to adoption. Many futurists are skilled at examining communities as social systems and noticing where support for and resistance to change are most likely to come from.
Achieving Adoption
Innovation is the adoption of new practice in a community. It is not a mysterious talent, a product of good DNA, a management process, or a flash of genius. It is the outcome of an innovator—individual or team—skillfully performing the eight practices. The eight practices share four main features:
1. They are fundamentally conversations. Innovators perform them by engaging in the right conversations.
2. They are universal. Every innovator, and every innovative organization, engages in all of them in some way.
3. They are essential. If any practice fails to produce its outcome, the entire process of innovation fails.
4. They are embodied. They manifest in bodily habits and performance patterns that require no thought or reflection to perform.
These practices are consistent with the notion that the future is malleable. We are innovators when we shape it and influence how it evolves. The eight practices tell us how to go about doing that successfully. We as futurists can collaborate with innovators to help them improve success, especially in the Sensing, Envisioning, Offering, Adopting, and Sustaining practices.
About the Author
Peter J. Denning is Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and director of the Cebrowski Institute for information innovation at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is editor of ACM Ubiquity, an online magazine about the future, and is a past president of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). E-mail pjd@nps.edu.
Future View: Welcome to the Future Cloud: Five Bets for 2025
By Marcel Bullinga
What will life be like when we are free of paper, petroleum, and waste? The author’s five public bets offer scenarios for this more nonmaterial future.
In the summer of 2025, you live in the Cloud—a world with no paper and no oil. The Game Generation has turned learning and working into a game, and every office or school into a gaming zone. They have created new Circles of Trust, since the old institutions failed to deliver pensions, energy, and life insurance. Social robots have conquered the streets, doing the dirty jobs. All of this has reduced traffic jams and caused an economic boom. No more crises!
The Cloud is the new face of the twenty-first century. It is the global brain, the next wave of innovation. It is the world of our children—fun, fast, fascinating. The Cloud is the hyperrealistic mix of real life and virtual life, like Alice in Wonderland but very much real.
The Cloud tackles most of the current crises. Upcoming raw materials shortage? We create super materials out of local mud. Energy crisis? We collect local earth heat, tap the energy we create ourselves by walking around, and harvest every spot of Sun. Financial crisis? We create new local currencies.
Do It Yourself is the motto of the Cloud. You produce your own energy and print products at home. You manage your finances and you keep your secrets in your own personal dashboard. You check everything on the spot with your wizard mobile. You are in control!
Here are a few of my best bets for life in the Cloud:
Bet 1: The Last Newspaper and Book Will Have Been Printed in 2020.
Paper has disappeared completely in the 3-D mobile media cloud. “Slow Screens” encourage monotasking and focus and have replaced all current paper media, as well as digital information carriers like DVDs and CDs. We will rent information, not own it. Newspapers and magazines are available on screen only. Libraries and bookshops have turned bookless. They are either bankrupt or will have eventually turned into community centers and congress halls.
Bet 2: Social Robots Solve the Labor Shortage in Western Europe and Japan.
Competition among countries and companies is increasing. Graying societies like Japan and western Europe face labor shortage. In the future, social robots, 3-D product printers, and smart software will have taken over the dirty and boring tasks. Robots are our new colleagues. Directing robots is much easier than directing people.
Bet 3: Seniors, Children, and People with Disabilities Are the Winners of the Digital Revolution.
Whereas nowadays vulnerable groups have problems leading an independent life, the future is different. The Eyewriter will enable handicapped people to communicate. Every factory, house, and office will become a games room. Your body is the key to the Cloud. There is less difference between what is real and unreal.
Bet 4: An Inexpensive, Green, and Intelligent Car Is for Sale in 2025.
Prices of oil and raw materials go up and down like crazy these days, causing mass anxiety. In the future, new materials will have been created from scratch out of local materials like sand and water. This ends our dependency on oil for fuel and plastic. Local energy sources reduce the battle for scarce resources and the potential for war. The disappearance of paper greatly reduces the need for mobility and transport.
Bet 5: Your Mobile Phone Is the Remote Control of Your Life.
Your mobile phone is quickly becoming the modern Swiss Army knife, but even better! It is your own personal bodyguard. It has an embedded traffic light that can warn you if the cucumber you’re about to eat has E. coli and let you know if your doctor is on a surgery blacklist. This prevents sickness and averts many deaths and millions of dollars of economic damage.
So what are the consequences of the Cloud for ordinary people like you and me? What are the seeds of the future? These are my bets; I invite you to rate them online. Vote for the future now at: www.futurecheck.com/allbets.
About the Author
Marcel Bullinga is a futurist and keynote speaker. He is the author most recently of Welcome to the Future Cloud: The World in 2025 in 100 Predictions, www.futurecheck.com/book. Follow him on Twitter @futurecheck.
Connectivity and Accountability in Africa
Mobile phones aren’t just for talking: They are tools for political reform.
By Matthias Mordi
Internet access has exploded across Africa in the past decade. Web-accessible mobile phones, Internet cafés, and Internet-connected laptops all see steady and solid increases in numbers of users year by year. We at Accender Africa welcome this growth: In it, we see the continent’s best hope for reforming its political systems and elevating its people’s standards of living.
How might Internet access improve living standards? The key is governance. To help reduce poverty in Africa—that’s the ultimate goal. And the best route to achieve it is by improving governance.
Our idea is to use new media to promote transparency, which we hope will encourage good governance. The technologies will serve as resources for building better government policies.
Our organization is today working extensively in Nigeria, where the number of citizens with Internet access has grown 300-fold—from 80,000 in 2000 to 24 million in 2008. Mobile-phone usage’s growth is even more impressive: Today there are more than 63 million mobile-phone subscribers across Nigeria.
Text messaging is one of the most common uses of mobile phones in Nigeria. Services are not like those you’ll find in the United States, where 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, thanks to more economical financing models and the form of use.
While U.S. mobile phones may provide more services, they are more expensive and thus less accessible. In Nigeria and many other African countries, the BlackBerry has a feature called the BBM messaging service, which is free.
Computer-based Web access for the average African remains costly, but you are seeing increasing use of cybercafés. It’s one of the most common ways for low-income people to access e-mail and text messaging.
With their comparatively greater share of Internet access, middle-class populations in many African countries are in a strong position to watch their governments and governmental expenditures. They will be the ones who would be most likely to lead changes in these societies.
By using the Web, they can harness the power of social media to work for transparency, accountability, and better governance—to access records on public spending projects on infrastructure and development, to find out how public money is being spent in their communities, to hold their government accountable, and to advocate for better governance and more responsible spending. Better government infrastructure and development projects will ultimately lead to substantial reductions in abject poverty.
Mobile phones can play a critical role in this objective, too. Text messaging will further link advocates for transparency with a larger network to spread crucial information.
Model for Access in the United States
The United States could learn from Africa. I think the United States faces challenges that are not quite present in African economies, where we are seeing exponential growth. The first challenge is that of being the first mover. The United States already had the existing technology and infrastructure. It’s like the man who already has train tracks versus the man trying to build new train tracks. The first man is constrained by the tracks he already has.
In America, many communities have the old infrastructure, such as copper cables, as opposed to optic fiber. These communities 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, communications systems are 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 United States because it had a uniform standard. Where African countries have rules, regulation pushes expansion to areas lacking service.
By contrast, the United States lacks one common standard, so providers are running in different directions. The private sector doesn’t invest in areas that are not profitable, and the laissez-faire government does not encourage them to make investments.
The United States could learn also from the Asian countries, such as 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. This commitment has encouraged the telecoms to provide access to users across every sector. It’s worked nicely. There is something to learn from that.
Matthias Mordi is executive director of Accender Africa, www.accenderafrica.org. This article is based on an interview conducted by FUTURIST assistant editor Rick Docksai.
Taking Stock in Teaching Forecasting
Bringing business case studies to life helps students explore technology’s impacts.
By Byron C. Anderson
Foresight, a common ingredient in many success stories, may be a skill set that eludes today’s information-inundated young adults. This story describes a simple effort to incorporate foresight thought processes into a college classroom using an exercise in forecasting—in this case, the class was a general education course titled Exploring Technology.
Further Reading: A Syllabus for Teaching Forecasting
“The Art of Foresight,” THE FUTURIST, May-June 2004 (updated versions available from www.wfs.org/specialreports).
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (Little, Brown and Company, 2005).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2007).
John H. Vanston, “Better Forecasts, Better Plans, Better Results,” in Research-Technology Management, January-February 2003. The article contains a detailed description of Technology Futures Inc.’s signature Five Views of the Future forecasting framework. Available on TFI’s Web site, www.tfi.com/white-papers-articles.html.
John H. Vanston and Lawrence K. Vanston, “Testing the Tea Leaves: Evaluating the Validity of Forecasts,” in Research-Technology Management, September-October 2004. An updated white paper version is also available on TFI’s Web site.
General education courses often comprise students from a diverse set of majors and typically examine an array of topics. The study of impacts, trends, and forecasting is a reoccurring theme that can be applied to many subject areas. Exploring Technology examined the role of technology across society, political and economic systems, our environment, and the human condition. The course covered the concept of impacts, followed by technology-transfer processes and attributes of trends, then concluded with forecasting. This exercise sought to complement an objective that strives to have students apply forecasting techniques.
Working in small groups, students selected an industry of interest (e.g., apparel, finance, software, transportation) and identified a leading publicly traded company from the industry for further study. They were directed to assemble facts about the industry, including the cost of doing business, challenges for competitors seeking to enter the industry, the likelihood of the industry being replaced, and other contexts for understanding the industry as a whole.
After gaining this overarching understanding, students investigated their selected leading company with an eye for indicators of growth, competition, or contraction. They were exposed to tools and resources used by various investors in screening and evaluating publicly traded companies.
The framing for the exercise was linked to two ideas. First, forecasting is a real, authentic, and potentially powerful practice that is available to every adult, every business day, in the form of investing—the buying, selling, and use of other stock-leveraging tools. Second, forecasting can be systematic, including the use of tools and processes.
Using the Five Views of the Future framework developed by John H. Vanston, chairman of Technology Futures Inc., students acquire useful conceptual views of the future and discover sample methods for presenting both quantitative and qualitative information. Other resources offered by Technology Futures Inc. equip the students for making connections between the types of stock and company data encountered and a conceptual forecasting view.
Vanston’s Five Views of the Future framework provides a lens for students to consider variables on the future direction of an industry, demand for a product line, and potential influences on revenue stream. Each view includes a philosophical perspective, along with tools or sample methods that users might need to interpret available data. The views range from heavily quantitative to more qualitative forecasting approaches. Students were asked to exhibit methods samples that align with two of the five views:
Extrapolators presume that past patterns indicate future direction. They use straight-forward logic that draws largely on existing data, which informs a quantitatively driven forecast. Pattern Analysts draw upon historic trends and cycles to examine analogous situations under the presumption that history repeats itself. Understanding driving forces becomes important. Goal Analysts believe that key leaders and innovators will seize opportunities to identify or create a “human-need” vacuum, thereby creating a trend. They also acknowledge the multifaceted impact potential of “black swan” or unpredictable wild-card events. Counter Punchers thrive under chaos. Their actions and impacts are unplanned and unknown, and their best planning is moment-by-moment monitoring with an agile response strategy. Intuitors rely on “thin-slicing” to decipher a host of complex and often unrelated dynamics. In his 2005 book on the topic, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell describes how humans are capable of making quick decisions with very little data. An intuitor may be uniquely gifted toward thin-slicing.To further anchor the concepts to authentic, tangible outcomes, the students selected a company in competition with the lead company they chose to study. The leader and competitor are from within the same industry and sector, thus allowing the students to make comparisons that are based on business realities common among both candidates, at least within the scope of the exercise.
Each team receives the following assignment: Recommend how an investment in a Roth-IRA of $5,000 should be distributed across the two companies. This IRA lens is added to underscore a longer view; by contrast, focusing on relative price movement would be less likely to promote an emphasis on forecasting, though indeed the use of technical indicators are a tool of the trading industry.
The students must present two exhibits of sample methods, which include two different “views of the future,” an example of company or industry data that reflects each view, and a rationale for the level of importance implied in the exhibit as it relates to informing their forecast. This strategy keeps the students engaged.
The exercise is not intended for analyst training or economic modeling, but rather to nurture a welcoming context for students to understand that forecasting is a combination of both science and intuition. If futuring were only based on science, statisticians would be wealthy and market movements would be little more than mathematical equations. However, the factors informing a forecast, whether it is a stock purchase or the decision to sign up for a mobile-phone plan, can be diverse and unique to each individual.
The outcomes noted in the students’ presentations suggest strengths and weaknesses in the endeavor. Many reported that using Vanston’s Five Views of the Future framework caused them to question prior assumptions, helped them examine a situation from a new perspective, and provided an organized approach for categorizing and valuing information. Sample methods exhibited most often included multi-month price trends and historic financials.
While those data have value, it was interesting to see some presenters using more subtle, indirect indicators, such as leadership vulnerabilities, spokesperson faux pas, consumer tendencies, environmental dynamics, and shifts in technology. Clearly, some students recognized that past patterns only in part inform a forecast, and that sound foresight should consider outlier variables and indirect influences. As with most forecasts, the opportunity to affirm accuracy or future truths will have to wait.
In the coming iterations of this exercise, I will emphasize the linkages between Vanston’s Five Views framework and the sample methods that students offer as exhibits. The attraction of using stocks over other avenues for learning about forecasting is that it enables customization, accommodating the individual interests and academic studies of diverse students. Additionally, information about publicly traded companies is quite freely available, widespread with an array of opinions, and rich with messages that suggest each investor do his or her own study.
In short, this exercise offers a dynamic library of opportunities to foster forecasting in a systematic approach, and in a setting that invites the student to think about the future—their future.
Byron C. Anderson is an associate professor of information and communication technologies at the University of Wisconsin–Stout, Menomonie, Wisconsin. He also serves a program director for an online degree program, the BS-ICT. E-mail andersonby@uwstout.edu.
Visualizing Human Intention
Neuroscientists may predict what you will do before you do it.
Scientists have verified that it’s possible to predict a person’s actions (specifically, a range of hand movements) before those actions take place. The researchers from the University of Western Ontario sought to reveal how planning activity in the areas of the brain that are associated with reaching and grasping (the superior parietal cortex, middle intraparietal sulcus, and dorsal premotor cortex) indicated future movement.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which reveals blood flow within the brain, the researchers discovered that the brain’s grasping areas do indeed take more blood flow not only when acting, but also when considering whether or not to pick up an object. Interestingly, the blood-flow pattern changes depending on whether the subject intends to grasp the object by the top or bottom and whether she intends to turn it.
“It now seems clear that fMRI pattern analysis in humans can provide a new tool for capturing neural representations only previously detected with invasive electrode recordings in monkeys,” the researchers write.
“Neuroimaging allows us to look at how action planning unfolds within human brain areas without having to insert electrodes directly into the human brain. This is obviously far less intrusive,” says psychology professor Jody Culham, one of the study’s authors.
The finding follows previous studies on the relationship between planning and action in the brain. In a 2009 paper published in the journal Psychological Science, Washington University researcher Nicole 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.” Specifically, when people read about a character grasping and holding an object, the area of the reader’s brain associated with those actions draws more blood. The brain regions that are activated “closely mirror those involved when people perform or imagine or observe similar real-world activities.”
These and similar breakthroughs could one day aid in the creation of better prosthetic devices that respond to and return signals to the brain more like actual limbs.
—Patrick Tucker
Source: “Decoding Action Intentions from Preparatory Brain Activity in Human Parieto-Frontal Networks” by Jason P. Gallivan et al. The Journal of Neuroscience (June 29, 2011).
More -topias
In the September-October 2011 issue, we introduced you to protopia as a vision of an actionable better world. The suffix –topia (derived from Thomas More’s Utopia) may not be a word in itself, but it is frequently used to create new terms designating an ideal future for some specific area of interest.
Examples include technotopia (a world made better through accelerating technological progress) and Edutopia (a world improved through enhanced education), which is also the name of an organization founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas.
The –topia appendage may be used informally in a somewhat mocking tone, but the human impulse to fix things to benefit one particular constituency is widespread: Foodtopia, Ecotopia, Agritopia, Kidtopia, Youtopia, Mytopia, and even Futuretopia, all of which have domain names already spoken for.
Read, study, and discuss the original Utopia at www.online-literature.com/more/utopia/.
Tools for Foresight, With a French Twist
By Rick Docksai
“Prospective” as developed by French futurists is a huge toolbox to help organizations build better futures.
Strategic Foresight for Corporate and Regional Development by Michel Godet and Philippe Durance. DUNOD. 2011. Includes the original French text (171 pages) and its English translation (171 pages). Paperback. Download from http://laprospective.fr.
As the epicenter of the United Nations’ global welfare initiatives, UNESCO must oversee a dizzying array of programs. To make sense of the huge workload, it uses a French foresight tradition called “strategic prospective.” Most English-speaking readers might not have heard of prospective, but in Strategic Foresight for Corporate and Regional Development, Michel Godet and Philippe Durance —both economists and futurists at the Paris-based research institution Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers—thoroughly introduce this method and the ways in which organizations inside and outside of France use it to integrate long-range strategy into all their day-to-day management processes.
Prospective’s roots trace back to the 1950s, when France was caught up in waves of rapidly accelerating social and cultural changes, coupled with deep apprehension about the future. Economic growth was momentous and technology was advancing; however, the prospects of nuclear war loomed large, and the carnage of World War II was still fresh in people’s memories. In this milieu, French thinker Gaston Berger outlined prospective as a method for discerning social change and the factors that drive it in order to craft optimal public policy. Together with colleagues, he undertook the first prospective studies in 1959 and 1960.
In the decades since, according to the authors, prospective has been adopted by public and private organizations throughout the world. It’s proven to be particularly effective for business strategy and regional planning. The name has changed at times—in some circles, it’s called “strategic prospective”—but the practice itself has remained almost entirely the same.
Prospective’s core ideas are similar to those of most of the futuring schools of thought with which English-speaking readers might already be acquainted. It illuminates the impacts that present actions will have over the long term, extrapolates the futures that may result, and helps participants determine how to bring about the futures that they hope will result.
Where prospective differs is in the unique tools that it brings to the endeavor. Scenarios, one of the favorite tools in most futurists’ toolkits, do go into use in strategic prospective exercises, but they are not required. Practitioners use them along with other tools. For example:
- The Tree of Competencies maps the organization and all factors relevant to it in a treelike diagram: The staff and personnel’s skills, talents, and knowledge are the tree’s roots; the organization’s productive capacity is the trunk; and the product lines and markets are the branches. This visual depiction clearly presents the organization’s strengths, and once you know your organization’s strengths, you’ll have a better sense of how to direct strategy. But not every organization can be accurately represented in a tree shape, the authors caution. Also, the method is not good at depicting uncertainties.
- Structural analysis identifies and distributes across a matrix all the individual elements that make up the larger environment in which the organization works. Participants study the matrix to discern which elements relate to or influence others. Afterward, they rank elements in terms of their importance to the system’s evolution. Structural analysis is a potent generator of thought and discussion, but it can be time consuming. Moreover, its analyses are often highly subjective and can be tainted by participant biases.
- Morphological analysis especially comes in handy in technological forecasting. It breaks the system down into its components, projects several possible states for each component, and then mixes and matches component states to produce cohesive scenarios. While it is useful for exploring elements within the larger system, thereby helping to illuminate the whole field of possibilities and to reduce uncertainties, it can be challenging: Users need to take care not to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of possible combinations, nor to skew their scenarios by failing to incorporate enough combinations.
- Régnier’s Abacus is a polling method. A ballot lists yes-or-no questions, with an array of colored boxes following each question. For each question, respondents mark off a box to signify if they agree or disagree and, either way, how strongly. Respondents are free to change their answers at any time. Godet and Durance praise this method as a fast and fairly simple way to track the range of opinions of a large group of people and compare them with other groups. What it cannot do, unfortunately, is help to reconcile diverging opinions.
There are actually so many tools within strategic prospective that most organizations that use it will not have time to deploy all of them. Savvy practitioners who know the tools well will pick and choose which ones will help their clients the most in the given situation.
“However useful these tools might be, they are not ends in themselves, and should be applied according to the needs of the organization, the problems confronted, the constraints of time, and the means available,” the authors write.
After they describe each tool in detail, Godet and Durance share case studies of real-life organizations that used combinations of them with great success. Among them are the French Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces, which used strategic prospective in the 1980s to accurately predict some weapons systems breakthroughs that would occur by 2010. Also, French insurer Axa carried out a prospective study in 1994 and, using it as a guide, undertook a successful companywide restructuring in 1996-2000. And France’s National Aviation Administration relies on prospective when it is deciding the best locations for new airport space.
The volume closes with a dialogue between the two authors in an appendix: Godet poses questions to Durance about why he took interest initially in prospective, what he has achieved in the field, and how he expects the discipline to continue to develop in the future. Durance points out a number of areas where prospective might benefit from further research, such as how to better link history with prospective, as well as links between prospective and psychoanalysis.
Michel Godet and Philippe Durance blend enthusiasm and expertise as they illuminate what strategic prospective is, where it has come from, and what it can do. They don’t try to hide what it cannot do, however. Readers will learn where users can go wrong if they are not careful when they are using prospective, and in addition where the methodology has some room for improvement and growth.
The authors do a commendable job of not selling the method, but explaining it so as to ensure that more organizations will not only use prospective, but use it right. For future-minded researchers and organization leaders, Strategic Foresight for Corporate and Regional Development is an informative and authoritative guide to a rich French futurist tradition.
About the Reviewer
Rick Docksai is assistant editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review. Email rdocksai@wfs.org.
The World’s Destiny Is Modernity
By Rick Docksai
A new era of global affluence and equity is on its way, according to Max Singer of the Hudson Institute.
History of the Future: The Shape of the World to Come Is Visible Today by Max Singer. Lexington. 2011. 178 pages. Paperback. $24.95.
Freedom and progress are contagious, and societies that have them in abundance are role models to those that do not. In History of the Future, Hudson Institute co-founder and senior fellow Max Singer forecasts that modern civilization—as Japan, the United States, and other industrialized countries know it—will take root in every country around the world.
“Modernity is not a choice. It is coming whether we like it or not, whether the price is too high or not,” he writes.
Singer sees a new era ahead: high life expectancies, universal education, comfortable living conditions, gender equality, information-based economies, small families, and people living in personal freedom and safety from severe weather, diseases and pestilence, and other harsh elements of nature.
The industrialized democracies are already in that era. By the time that it has completely emerged—which should occur within three centuries, Singer predicts—every other country will be, as well.
“It is difficult to imagine that any country would choose to remain traditional and poor for generations while watching other similar societies become free, urban, and wealthy,” he writes.
There will be some additional improvements upon today’s industrialized world. First, glaring income disparities will not exist. Living conditions will be similar country to country, and the richest people in any country will be no more than three to four times as wealthy as the poorest.
Also, democracy will be the universal form of government. An authoritarian country cannot maintain a prosperous, information-based, modern economy indefinitely. The entrepreneurs and inventors who create that economy exercise great degrees of freedom in their personal lives and inevitably demand it in their political lives.
Nor does China disprove this rule, according to Singer: China is not a modern country. Life expectancy and education levels are too low, and agriculture still constitutes 40% of its economy. China will need to fundamentally reshape its political system if it wants to keep its economic growth going.
“China is likely to become modern and democratic before it is wealthy enough to equal U.S. military power,” he writes.
And war will disappear, Singer avers. The global community might still experience crime and terrorism, but people will recognize war as counterproductive and will set it aside to pursue peaceful wealth creation.
“International conflict, and aggressive instincts, will be expressed by other means than the threat or use of military force, just as in domestic life aggression and conflict are expressed largely non-violently,” he writes.
The Middle East has lagged behind the rest of the world in productivity, living standards, and human rights, Singer notes, due to the sway of religious fundamentalism. The masses of Muslim people will tire of systemic poverty, however, and increasingly aspire to the developed world’s comparative wealth. They will reconcile their Muslim faith and identity with modernity.
“Some Muslims will continue to regard the modern world as corrupt and Godless, but experience suggests that for the majority of Muslims this attitude will not withstand the appeal of modern freedoms and economic opportunities,” Singer writes.
The author bases his hope for modernity’s triumph in globalization. With commerce and communication becoming ever-more international, he argues, it is easier for developing countries to cultivate new industries. Also, it is easier for countries to find modernized role models: Faster information sharing offers better views of modernized countries and the higher qualities of life that those countries’ peoples enjoy.
“Globalization makes it harder for islands of inefficiency to survive,” he writes. “As globalization advances, the menu of opportunities for people everywhere expands.”
Singer is no less stolidly optimistic on the issue of climate change. Humanity has the know-how and the adaptability to prevent excessive warming without unduly compromising progress toward modernity. He does not believe that science has unequivocally proven human activity to be the primary cause of today’s warming trends, and he goes so far as to caution against overreacting to the warming threat.
“The main question is, how many resources will be wasted by unwise responses to the potential danger?” he writes.
On geopolitics, economics, the environment, and most other topics, Singer is more hopeful than many readers themselves might be. Some might even consider him too hopeful. Can we really hope that in another three centuries Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti, and North Korea will all be basking in the sunlight of modernity and peace? Or that the oncoming catastrophe of climate change will happily be resolved without drastic worldwide action?
Singer is also looking much further into the future than most commentators would: 300 years. Most futurists consider looking even 50 years ahead to be venturing into speculation.
But in troubled times like ours, powerful hope and deep vision can be welcoming things. History of the Future will be an inspiring read to anyone who wonders how the world might move beyond present difficulties.
Books in Brief
Edited by Rick Docksai
The Pros and Cons of Ultra-Long Life Spans
100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, from Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith by Sonia Arrison. Basic. 2011. 235 pages. Paperback. $25.99.
How would life be different if life expectancy topped 150 years? We could find out within our lifetimes, according to Sonia Arrison, a Pacific Research Institute senior fellow, in 100 Plus. She charts scores of medical advances that could add decades, maybe even centuries, to the human life span and make childbirth possible for women in their 60s and 70s. These “life extension” treatments include:
- Regeneration procedures to regrow lost body parts.
- Organ-printing techniques that manufacture new organs from scratch.
- The rejuvenation compound that will make a person look and feel 30 to 40 years younger.
It is a dream people have shared throughout human history, she notes, and realizing it would relieve the suffering of tens of millions of aging adults, plus ease the strains that growing populations of senior citizens might place on public services. But it could complicate life, too. How will siblings who are 40 years apart in age relate to each other as they grow up? How will younger workers move up in their career fields when those above them never retire? How much more frequently will generational misunderstandings and values clashes erupt within workplaces? And might a population with extended life spans over-consume the earth’s resources at accelerated rates?
Arrison offers few conclusive answers to these and other questions, but she does express overall confidence that human ingenuity can resolve all of the steepest challenges. She is certainly more optimistic than many commentators who have spoken on the subject, even though she remains realistic about life extension’s potential to make life both better and worse. Audiences of all kinds will find 100 Plus to be a thoughtful and stimulating discussion.
The Race to Energy Sustainability
But Will the Planet Notice? How Smart Economics Can Save the World by Gernot Wagner. Hill and Wang. 2011. 244 pages. $27.
Many European nations rank far ahead of the United States in renewable energy, pollution control, and energy conservation, according to Environmental Defense Fund economist Gernot Wagner. He attributes this lead to one factor: market incentives. European governments instituted policies that made clean energy development more cost-effective to use than status-quo fossil-fuel energy.
In But Will the Planet Notice?, Wagner calls on officials in every country to emulate Europe and work with its markets to enact “smart” regulations that guide market forces in the direction of clean energy and resource conservation.
Wagner spells out many examples of such regulations, such as cap-and-trade systems and taxes on gasoline and airline flights. The key is to reward innovation while making unsustainable practices more costly. Governments that carry out such programs effectively will not only cut pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions, but they will also, more fundamentally, create market environments where companies compete to be more sustainable, energy industries race to offer the most-productive renewable-energy systems, and countries vie with each other to be the leading exporters of clean, renewable electricity.
Officials will have to decide carefully what standards to set and how quickly to push industries to meet them. Moreover, they will have to set a careful balance between development and environmental conservation, the author advises. Time is of the essence: We have, at most, 10 years to cut carbon-dioxide emissions to sustainable levels before disastrous climate change sets in.
Wagner’s But Will the Planet Notice? sets an ambitious conservation agenda for the public and business sectors to team up to achieve. The potential payoff of success is clearly vast. Earnest professionals in both government and industry will find stimulating ideas to consider and maybe carry out.
New Leaders for New Communities
Community Leadership 4.0: Impacting a World Gone Wiki by Carolyn Corbin. Center for the 21st Century. 2011. 243 pages. Paperback. $15.99.
As society changes, so must leadership practices, says Carolyn Corbin, president of the think tank Center for the 21st Century, in Community Leadership 4.0. She describes the skills that a twenty-first-century leader must have to navigate globalization and nonstop technological change.
According to Corbin, cities and towns in the nineteenth century existed in a Community 2.0 phase, in which community life was static and travel was limited. With the rise of railroads, automobiles, and airplanes, Community 3.0 set in: People took to visiting other places frequently.
On the horizon is yet another paradigm shift: Community 4.0, in which technology erases geographic distance altogether and raises social and intellectual capital to all-time highs. People can live where they choose and telecommute for employers near or far, while quality of life surpasses that of any prior era. No community on earth has yet reached Community 4.0, but almost any can if it adopts a global mind-set that embraces diversity, risk, inclusiveness, and innovation.
For communities that have long operated within the comfort zones of established authority and the status quo, such a mind-set represents a transformation. Community leaders must help usher it in by exercising Community 4.0 Leadership. Corbin describes this leadership style as the ability to anticipate tomorrow, to think problems through, to thrive amid chaos, to understand people, and to promote collaboration. She then presents a process that any leader can use to determine if his or her own leadership style is sufficiently 4.0 and how to improve it if it is not.
Corbin wrote Community Leadership 4.0 with aspiring leaders of all kinds in mind. Whether they are heading up businesses, nonprofit groups, cities, regions, or countries, they will likely find much helpful coaching on how they and those whom they lead can stay ahead of the curve.
War on Climate Change
The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World by Paul Gilding. Bloomsbury. 2011. 292 pages. $25.
In World War II, the United States and its Allies rallied their citizens to labor, sacrifice, and produce like never before to defeat fascism. Ecologist Paul Gilding expresses hope in The Great Disruption that, as the depth of the climate crisis hits, the world will in like fashion launch into wartime-like mobilization to avert ecological and socioeconomic catastrophe.
Resource depletion and altered climate patterns will universally wreck economies, threaten public health, and spark violent social tensions, Gilding argues. The world community will face system stresses severe enough to end civilization as we know it.
And the world will respond in force. People will unite to transform economic life, erase carbon pollution, and tackle consumerism, poverty, and conflict. As previous generations did during World War II, they will accept new taxes and rationing of electricity and gasoline. They will also participate in some never-before-seen changes: shutdowns of fossil-fuel industries and their replacements with renewable-energy alternatives.
There is no sense passively waiting for all of this to happen, however, Gilding warns: We can spare future civilization much pain by taking the initiative now. He calls for a groundswell of action to cut carbon-dioxide emissions in half by 2023, move to net-zero emissions worldwide by 2038, and rebuild a new economy over the decades that follow while deploying geoengineering to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. He foresees that these efforts could limit warming to a manageable 1°C by 2100.
The home front in World War II is a real memory to many of today’s senior citizens. In The Great Disruption, Gilding takes a unique approach to the climate-change dilemma, one that applies this older generation’s historical perspective, and in so doing makes an eloquent call to global action toward sustainability that readers of any age can appreciate.
A Future Beyond Belief
The Precarious Human Role in a Mechanistic Universe by John F. Brinster. Xlibris. 2011. 511 pages. Paperback. $23.99.
Religion’s influence upon society has waned in the past century, and it will continue to wane in the years to come, forecasts John F. Brinster, retired Princeton physicist and psychologist. In The Precarious Human Role in a Mechanistic Universe, he looks forward to secularism gaining progressively more ground over the next few generations.
More and more people will practice spirituality, but fewer and fewer will practice religion. Human thought itself is evolving as people base life decisions less on faith and more on imagination, critical thought, and reason. This could especially be so if, as many commentators anticipate, artificial brain enhancements boost brain power worldwide and accentuate analytical logic in human thinking—i.e., human brains will be aided by computers and thus think more like computers.
Established religious traditions will labor to block secularism’s growth at every turn, Brinster says. Secularists will need to build strong, organized civic movements and education reform initiatives if they want to succeed. If they do, the consequences for the world will be vast, the author believes: We would see the blossoming of science and education, the universal affirmation of women’s rights, and the emergence of a peaceful global society freed from ancient sectarian feuds.
Brinster dives into some highly sensitive and controversial topics, but treats them with deep thoughtfulness and respect. While some readers may strongly disagree with some of his premises, almost any honest reader will be impressed.
Tomorrow in Brief
iGrammar: Mobile Language Lessons
Proper English will no longer be a secret between he and I. Thanks to a new iPhone app developed at University College London, we’ll all know it’s a secret between him and me, and it won’t be a secret.
The iGE (interactive Grammar of English) application allows students and other users to download lessons and exercises to learn at their own pace. Instructors can change examples used in the apps to keep lessons more current or customized to the user’s locality.
The developers see a potential global market worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year and are working on similar apps for punctuation and spelling instruction.
Source: University College London, www.ucl.ac.uk.
Robotic Aides for Children with Autism
Personal-assistant robots may help children across the autism spectrum to cope better in social situations.
Acting as a social mediator, KASPAR (Kinesics and Synchronization in Personal Assistant Robotics) robots have flexible arms that can produce realistic gestures, and can play drumming and computer games using Wii game remote controls. Their faces can show expression via robotic skin with sensors and blinking eyes.
Field tests by University of Hertfordshire researchers show that children with autism will make eye contact or mimic actions while playing with the KASPAR robots—behaviors that represent major breakthroughs for the children.
Source: University of Hertfordshire, www.herts.ac.uk.
Glass as Waste Cleaner
Discarded glass bottles may one day help clean up contaminated rivers.
University of Greenwich chemist Nichola Coleman has developed a method of pulverizing colored glass and mixing it with lime and caustic soda to create tobermorite, a mineral that can absorb toxic heavy metals in water.
The technique also creates a demand for brown and green glass bottles, which are typically less desirable to recyclers.
“The novelty of the research is that the glass can be recycled into something useful,” says Coleman. “Nobody has previously thought to use waste glass in this way.”
Source: University of Greenwich, www.gre.ac.uk.
Building Stronger Skyscrapers, Faster
Future skyscrapers could be built faster and made safer using a new construction process championed by Purdue University civil engineering professors Mark Bowman and Michael Kreger.
The technique involves building around a core wall, or vertical spine, which also enhances structural resistance to earthquakes and high winds.
Traditional core walls are made from reinforced concrete and are produced one floor at a time. The new technique sandwiches concrete between steel plates; the hollow structure is strong enough to allow the surrounding construction to proceed on several floors at once.
On a 40- to 50-story building, the core wall system could save three to four months of construction time—and, hence, offer significant dollar savings, according to Bowman.
Source: Purdue University, www.purdue.edu.
Remote-Controlled Telescopes for Citizen Astronomers
A worldwide network of Internet-connected robotic telescopes will help citizen astronomers do research and contribute their data and discoveries to the rest of the world.
Dubbed Gloria (GLObal Robotic telescopes Intelligent Array), the project is managed by the Computer Faculty of the Polytechnic University of Madrid and uses the Montegancedo Observatory’s remote-controlled telescope, camera, and dome.
The project will offer citizen astronomers access to the organization’s public databases to facilitate analysis and scenario building.
Source: Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, www.fi.upm.es.
Future Scope
Cancer Survivors Will Survive Longer
The population of U.S. cancer survivors aged 65 and older will increase by 42% between 2010 and 2020. The rise is due not only to increasing longevity overall, but also to improved treatments and survival rates among all patients once cancer is diagnosed.
Cancer is largely a disease of old age, as more than half of all new diagnoses occur in individuals who are 65 or older, according to a report released by the U.S. National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health.
While the aging U.S. population is healthier than ever, an increase in elderly cancer survivors will challenge health-care systems that are simultaneously seeing declines in oncologists and geriatric specialists, the report warns.
Source: National Cancer Institute, www.cancer.gov.
Farming for the Future
Growing populations will put ever-increasing demands on the croplands that provide food, fuel, fiber, soil protection, wildlife habitats, and other vital services.
The National Wildlife Federation’s new report on “Future Friendly Farming” describes agricultural techniques that could potentially benefit the planet as well as farmers’ bottom lines. For instance:
- The use of cover crops will reduce erosion and nutrient loss.
- Organic farming will eliminate chemical use and increase soil fertility.
- Anaerobic digesters protect water quality and provide renewable electric and thermal energy.
- Returning land to native ecosystems increases biodiversity.
Source: “Future Friendly Farming: Seven Agricultural Practices to Sustain People and the Environment,” National Wildlife Federation, www.nwf.org.
Boys Will Be Boys—Earlier
Boys are reaching physical and sexual maturity earlier than ever, report researchers at Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. A similar trend has already been identified among girls.
The age of male sexual maturity has decreased by 2.5 months per decade since the mid-1700s, due largely to changes in nutrition and environmental factors. Meanwhile, the gap between sexual and social maturity is expanding, as these youngsters are not yet socially considered adults.
The researchers discovered this trend among boys by tracking the age at which the probability of dying spikes due to peak hormone production (the so-called “accident hump”). As boys mature physically, they tend to take more risks.
While the “high-risk” phase of adolescence may be increasing, this may not result in a more dangerous environment for boys, since parents tend to supervise children more closely when they’re younger, says the Institute director, demographer Josh Goldstein.
Source: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, www.demogr.mpg.de.
Targeted Policing
Budgets cuts are forcing some public services to become more resourceful. A recent review of targeted policing programs in Britain—which focus on crime “hot spots”—has shown reductions in crime not only in the hot spots, but also in nearby areas.
Contrary to fears that such targeted efforts would simply move criminal activity “around the corner,” the findings by University College London researcher Kate Bowers suggest that criminals are less likely to commit crimes if they cannot do so in familiar territory.
Source: University College London, www.ucl.ac.uk.
The “Internet of Things” as Energy Saver
Creating networks between everything that uses energy could yield significant efficiencies by monitoring and controlling the grid, according to industry and university researchers at Vienna University of Technology.
Intelligent software systems could alter heating and air conditioning systems in an office, for instance, by monitoring devices in use to determine how many workers are staying late and which offices they’re using.
The same strategy could be scaled up to make whole cities and transport systems more energy efficient, the researchers believe.
Source: Vienna University of Technology, www.tuwien.ac.at.
Future Active
Planet Engineering: A Technology Assessment
Geoengineering—the concept of planetary-scale engineering projects that can counter the manmade effects of climate change—is typically viewed as a last-resort option. Like something out of a Hollywood blockbuster, such deliberate actions could potentially stave off ecological cataclysm at the last minute, reverse the effects of global warming, or provide a window of time for a more sustainable long-term solution to be developed.
However, their side effects could produce unintended negative consequences of their own. Proposed technologies generally focus either on removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or offsetting solar radiation. At this point, however, they are largely speculative.
To study these issues, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a technology assessment report, “Climate Engineering: Technical Status, Future Directions, and Potential Responses.” The report examines what stages of development various climate-engineering technologies have reached and whether any of them can become viable in the next 20 years. It also considers the potential repercussions of unleashing them.
The GAO asked 45 experts from different fields to present their views, projecting ahead to 2030. Most of the experts surveyed were in favor of researching potential methods to engineer the Earth and its climate, believing that greater preparation in advance could lead to avoidance of negative outcomes later.
The process began with the development of four scenarios by “a group of six experts in climate engineering and related fields who met with me,” says GAO chief scientist Timothy M. Persons. He adds, “Clem Bezold of the Institute for Alternative Futures facilitated the scenario-building meeting.” Individuals from a wide range of disciplines were then asked for their opinions on climate engineering, taking into account the possible scenarios.
Potential technologies were rated on a scale of 1 to 9, with 9 representing a proven technology ready for deployment. All except for one were assigned Level 1 or 2. The direct air capture of carbon dioxide via chemicals was assigned Level 3, indicating that it has reached the beginning of the active research and development stage.
However, the report states, “direct air capture is believed to be decades away from large-scale commercialization.” It further points out that large-scale implementation of all proposed carbon dioxide removal technologies would need to overcome a variety of challenges in order to become viable, and that even the research stage poses risks. The same caveat also applied to solar radiation management technologies.
The bottom line, according to the assessment, is that “climate engineering technologies are not now an option for addressing global climate change, given our assessment of their maturity, potential effectiveness, cost factors, and potential consequences.” Nevertheless, the majority of those surveyed believed that further research, including risk assessment and management, is imperative.
Experts also advocated for international research and collaboration between nations, in order to prevent a situation where “a single nation might unilaterally deploy a technology with transboundary effects.” In other words, the potential for international conflict also needs to be addressed.
The report concludes with a call for more “foresight activities to help anticipate emerging research developments, key trends, and their implications for climate engineering research—notably, the new or emerging opportunities and risks that such changes might bring.” While it makes it clear that climate-engineering technologies have a long way to go before they become viable options, it emphasizes the need for a “coordinated strategy for climate engineering research.”
The full report is available to the public on GAO’s Web site, along with several earlier publications on the topic. Among the futurists who contributed to the report are Jamais Cascio, a research fellow at the Institute for the Future and author of Hacking the Earth: Understanding the Consequences of Geoengineering (2009), and World Future Society board chairman Kenneth Hunter.
Source: “Climate Engineering: Technical Status, Future Directions, and Potential Responses,” published by U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov.
Sustainable Arctic Development
A new Arctic research institute based in Norway will focus on commercial development projects that are achieved through sustainable technological approaches.
The Centre for Research-based Innovation on Sustainable Arctic Marine and Coastal Technology (SAMCoT) aims to balance economic and environmental values in the development of this critical region. Energy resources, particularly in the Barents Sea, will be developed using the same principles that have enabled successful exploitation of oil in the North Sea, according to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, which is hosting the new Institute.
SAMCoT will receive support from the Norwegian Research Council as well as partners such as Aker Solutions, Shell, Statoil, and Kongsberg Maritime.
Source: Norwegian University of Science and Technology, www.ntu.edu/samcot.
January-February 2012 Futurist photo one
January-February 2012 Futurist photo two
January-February 2012 Futurist photo three
