May-June 2008
Volume 42, No. 3
Order a print edition of the May-June 2008 Futurist.
Cover Story
by Lester R. Brown
Global demand for water has tripled in the past half century. Water is a food, energy, and political issue as well as a resource issue. Since most of the water we consume comes in the form of food (70% of water use is for agricultural irrigation), the competition for water between rural and urban areas will impact future food supplies. Moreover, as water tables fall, more energy is required to dig deeper and pump it out; meanwhile, diversion of water for hydroelectric power is draining many rivers dry. The basic strategy for solving these problems involves both stabilizing population growth to reduce demand and improving water efficiency to increase supply. PDF Available
Plus
by McKinley Conway on the growing need to increase freshwater resources locally through desalination projects.
PDF Available.
by Barry Kellman
The nuclear threat has been the nightmare scenario for more than a half century, but an even more frightening possibility is the deliberate spread of fatal diseases such as Ebola, smallpox, or anthrax. Bioviolence is about the destruction of living organisms, and, unlike nuclear or even traditional bombs, its destruction can be executed quietly and anonymously, making its prevention even more challenging. As yet there is no single international authority tracking or preventing the use of bioweapons, and this "nobody-in-charge" situation could prove disastrous to humanity. The author, director of the International Weapons Control Center at DePaul University, offers several strategies, including the establishment of an international Bioviolence Prevention Office.
PDF Available.
interview with Jeanne Guillemin, author of Biological Weapons, on what governments should do to reduce the worldwide threat of bioviolence.
by research scientists Antonietta Gatti and Stefano Montanari , on the environmental and health impacts of nanodust resulting from the use of high-tech weaponry.
PDF Available.
Discovering the Future
by Paul Crabtree The author of future-oriented fiction works like The Time Machine and nonfiction works like Anticipations was uniquely able to draw trends together from across a spectrum of human activity and imagine scenarios that are both vivid and plausible. And uncannily accurate. What were the building blocks of Wells's predictive technique? He explained the basic principles behind his methodology in an address to the Royal Society in 1902.
by Marvin J. Cetron and Owen Davies
This special report (second of two parts) updates the major trends that have been tracked in a four-decade research project by Forecasting International. Trends covered in part 2 include the ongoing dominant role that technological change plays in the economy and society; the continuing rapid growth of the service sector; the disappearance of "retirement," or at least a meaningful "retirement age"; the growth of entrepreneurialism; the loss of multiple management levels; and the growing risk of exposure to terrorism among increasingly international organizations. The authors summarize the implications of each trend.
PDF Available.
Cutting Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Discrimination Against Women
Playing Your Own Tune
Demography
The Daughter Also Rises
Technology
New Clocks: It's About Time
U.S. Forecasts for the Labor-Market of 2016
By Paul Crabtree
For good reason, H.G. Wells is often considered to be the “father” of futurism. In the September-October 2007 edition of THE FUTURIST, I discussed some of the amazingly accurate predictions of Wells in his nonfiction book Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought, published in 1901. In that seminal volume, Wells attempted to analyze and describe the probable sequence of developments over the course of the twentieth century in a number of pivotal areas, such as transportation, cities, societal relations, government, education, and warfare. He achieved an overall predictive success rate of 60%–80%. Many of these predictions were specific and detailed enough to preclude guesswork and luck as explanations for his success. Though he had a few misses, mostly in terms of predicting social and demographic changes, his accomplishment must nonetheless be judged as an amazing achievement and one that begs for further investigation into how he managed it. His 1902 address to the Royal Society of England provides some startling clues. Among the tools in the Victorian futurist’s arsenal:
• Clockwork universe assumption.
One pillar of Wells’s argument in his speech to the Royal Society, “The Discovery of the Future,” is the nineteenth- century concept that all future events are predetermined by past events. If we knew all that happened in the past, strict cause and effect principles would allow us to predict the future, like a fall of dominoes.
Quantum physics and chaos theory would later invalidate this theory of an absolutely knowable correspondence between past and future events, but in 1901, Wells’s postulate that the past and the future were determined was an orthodox scientific view.
• Inductive thinking.
Wells argues that inductive thinking allows one to build up an understanding of the broad outlines of future history in the same way that archaeologists slowly build up an understanding of the history of previously unknown societies of the past—i.e., by “the comparison and criticism of suggestive facts.” Instead of looking at an array of archaeological facts and relationships and inferring what the past must have been like, Wells suggests using existing or researched information to infer a future state of affairs. Aside from really unknowable large-scale events—an asteroid impact being one of his examples—Wells proposes that such inferences can be reasonably accurate.
• Law of large numbers.
Forecasting the future can make use of statistical probability. While discrete human actions and very detailed events may not be individually predictable because we do not know all about the present or past, on a large scale involving many people and events, a broad trend becomes more apparent and historical aberrations tend to even out. As Wells scholar Patrick Parrinder says of Wells’s use of this idea, “We are concerned with something like the ‘actuarial principle’ used by insurance companies in determining their premiums. Though individual outcomes are wholly unpredictable, certain sorts of average outcomes in human affairs can be predicted with fair accuracy.”
In arguing for the law of large numbers and broad historical forces, Wells is careful to add that he doesn’t believe in the “Great Man” theory of history. He believes that even individuals in authority react to events more than drive them. Humanity, Wells believes, can influence the details of history but rarely if ever alter major historical trends.
• Science as a predictive discipline.
Scientific procedures, principles, and results provide a basis for prediction, says Wells, pointing out that scientific knowledge is inherently predictive. He argues that science is not science unless it al lows one to successfully predict phenomena— the course and timing of planetary movements, the diagnostic course of disease, the result of chemical combinations, etc. In “Discovery of the Future,” he advocates a general expansion, codification, and joining together of predictions from the various scientific disciplines.
• Future-oriented mind-set.
Wells rejects a logical divide between the past, present, and future as a mistaken product of our personal experience. For Wells, a futurist mind-set means having a mind that “thinks constantly and by preference of things to come, and of present things mainly in relation to the results which must arise from them.” The opposite way of thinking, says Wells, uses the past (rather than calculated future results) as a guide to future action. This mind-set tends to assume that conditions in the past will apply to the future rather than anticipating changes. Change cannot be ignored, cautions Wells, citing both the grand timescale of evolution and the pace of human change in his own time.
• Change drivers.
Not mentioned in his “Discovery of the Future” presentation, but arguably a key assumption in addition to the predictive methodological components enumerated above, is the proposition that scientific and technical progress is both inexorable and a principal driver of changes in the human condition. This, of course, is the central theme of Wells’s Anticipations. Curiously enough, the driving role of science and technology in human affairs is not covered in the “Discovery” talk. Instead, Wells invokes a more encompassing agent of change in the form of a universal, almost teleological need to change and evolve:
We look back through countless millions of years and see the will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime, struggling from shape to shape.… We watch it draw nearer and more akin to us ... its being beats through our brains and arteries ... thunders in our battleships, roars through our cities....
• Disciplined web of implications.
Later in life, Wells tended to be less optimistic than he was in 1902 about the possibility of making successful predictions. Evidently Wells’s work on the screenplay and 1936 film Things to Come had humbled him somewhat. In a subsequent radio broadcast entitled “Fiction about the Future” he details the difficulty he had imparting a realistic feel to the scenes showing the distant future on the motion picture screen. He says the difficulties of depicting the small details of everyday life—hairstyles, clothing, and furniture—defeated the best efforts of his research and imagination. Despite his belief that the film had not been convincing enough, the successful predictions about the future included in Things to Come as well as the book it was based on represent a tour-de-force somewhat comparable to the predictions made in Anticipations.
An approach that Wells used in writing successful future-oriented fiction, which he discussed in the
“Fiction about the Future,” broadcast no doubt applies to his predictions in general. This is to create a web of detailed, plausible implications “by rigorous adherence to the hypothesis” and by excluding “extra fantasy outside the cardinal assumption.”
Wells’s Predictive Building Blocks As a System
At first glance, the elements outlined above look more like discrete considerations than parts of an ordered whole:
• Clockwork universe assumption.
• Inductive thinking.
• Law of large numbers.
• Science as a predictive discipline.
• Future-oriented mind-set.
• Change drivers.
• Disciplined web of implications.
When these principles are expressed in an active voice, relationships can be seen among them. Assume prediction is possible (clockwork universe); gather data and relationships and see what you learn (inductive thinking); identify central tendencies (law of large numbers); rely on logic, math, and science (science as a predictive discipline); identify areas to be evaluated for change impacts (future-oriented mind-set; identify key trends and forces (change drivers); and pursue central tendency causal impacts as far as possible while assuming other things unchanged (disciplined web of implications).
These actions can be reordered and H.G. Wells’s fiction writing expertise no doubt provided him with an ability to create scenarios. Together with the forecasting steps diagrammed above, Wells’s predictive process can be seen to be highly systematic, not merely inspired guesswork. It has, in fact, similarities with the development and use of a modern iterative computer-based forecasting model. But it isn’t mechanical. Rather, in its inventiveness and its reasonability, it speaks to the very best of humanity. ❑
About the Author
Paul Crabtree retired from the U.S. federal government after serving in a number of analytical and managerial positions. He now devotes much of his time to research and writing on technological innovation, forecasting, and related issues.
Join WFS Example of subscriber content. Join for $59 per year and receive THE FUTURIST, Futurist Update, and many other benefits.
May-June 2008 Vol. 42, No. 3
What time is it?” is more than a casual question to physicists, engineers, and other specialists whose work depends on ultra-precise measurements of time.
At present, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures located outside of Paris calculates global time by averaging data received from 300 atomic clocks at laboratories round the world. But this system of telling time may soon be out of date as researchers pursue ever more accurate time measurement.
Separate teams of researchers in Germany and the United States have succeeded in developing optical clocks that use lasers to capture strontium atoms and measure their frequencies. The new clocks can measure oscillation (pendulum swings) at higher ranges of frequency than the standard atomic clocks used today. As a result, future clocks may measure time far more precisely than today’s clocks.
Current atomic clocks measure the oscillation of the movement of cesium atoms. “Optical” clocks refer to the use of lasers to capture the atoms and measure their frequencies; the German and U.S. teams have both developed optical clocks using strontium rather than cesium atoms. The result could be clocks that measure time in intervals thousands of times smaller than now possible with cesium clocks, according to the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA), a partnership of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado–Boulder. JILA’s strontium clock has already surpassed the accuracy of NIST’s cesium clock, currently used for the U.S. time standard. The strontium clock would neither gain nor lose a second in more than 200 million years, compared with NIST’ s 80-million-year accuracy claim.
Researchers at Germany’s national metrology institute, Physikalisch- Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), have also achieved success with their strontium-based optical atomic clock. Both the JILA and PTB methods use laser beams to capture strontium atoms that are supercooled and held for measurement. The laser excites some of the atoms, and then another laser forces the unexcited atoms to emit a light, which is then detected and measured in a “comb” of laser frequencies to accurately count the clock’s “ticks.”
In addition to strontium, other optical clocks are being designed based on calcium, mercury, aluminum, and ytterbium, each offering different advantages, according to JILA researchers. The pursuit of ever more precise time measurements is vital for synchronizing telecommunication networks and for deep-space communication.
It is not yet clear which specific optical clock that the world’s precision timing labs are designing will prove most effective—and thus win the race to become the future international time standard.—Cynthia G. Wagner
Sources: NIST, 100 Bureau Drive, Stop 1070, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899-170. Web site www.nist.gov/public_affairs/clock/clock.html . JILA, University of Colorado, 440 UCB, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0440. Web site http://jilawww.colorado.edu/research/metrology.html . PTB, Bundesalle, 100, Braunschweig 38116, Germany. Web site www.ptb.de .
Join WFS Example of subscriber content. Join for $59 per year and receive THE FUTURIST, Futurist Update, and many other benefits.
Technology
May-June 2008 Vol. 42, No. 3
Review by Patrick Tucker
The Design of Future Things by Donald A. Norman. Basic Books. 2007. 231 pages. $27.50.
“Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, simple or direct than does Nature. In her inventions, nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous,” Renaissance painter Leonardo da Vinci once remarked. Former Apple vice president Donald Norman’s Design of Future Things is very much rooted in this Leonardesque sentiment. The short, conversational book serves as both a meditation on the nature of human–machine interaction and a warning: invention that ignores the human, the artful, and the natural will fail both conspicuously and disastrously. “We are confronting a new breed of machine with intelligence and autonomy, machines that can indeed take over for us in many situations,” Norman writes. “In many cases, they will make our lives more effective, more fun, and safer. In others, however, they will frustrate us, get in our way, and even increase danger. For the first time, we have machines that are attempting to interact with us socially.”
We spend ever more time conversing with machinery. In the obvious sense, this means more interfacing (the technologist’s preferred term) with a wider variety of devices: selecting from an assortment of rinse cycles on our washer; setting lighting systems, motion detectors, and security devices as we leave the house; starting up the car; programming the MP3 player, GPS computer, and even the cruise control before actually hitting the gas.
As our interfacing opportunities increase, so does the potential for human–object miscommunication.
Machines may work like clockwork, but they handle surprises like robots— which is to say, poorly. We rely on them when we shouldn’t and find ourselves (ironically) lost after following the directions of a computer that can neither see nor drive, mopping up after a stubborn washer that refuses to stop when we open the lid midcycle, apologizing to the police on our doorstep for our well-intentioned but overly vigilant security systems.
What’s missing from the human– machine relationship, says Norman, is a sense of respectful partnership. His book is full of examples of what a better tête-à-tête might look like. A Microsoft Cambridge “smart” home actually seeks to make its occupants smarter, allowing family members to leave messages on digital surfaces viewable anywhere throughout—or outside—the house. It’s a vision of home as digital administrative assistant rather than as butler. A Georgia Tech smart home can watch you cook and—if you have to break away to answer the phone—remind you where you left off. Bad memory? The house also monitors your prescriptions and can let your family do the same. After all, who knows you best?
“Both groups of researchers could have tried to make the devices intelligent,” Norman points out. “Instead, both groups devised systems t h a t would f it smoothly into people’s life styles. Both systems rely upon powerful, advanced technology, but the guiding philosophy for each group is augmentation, not automation.”
Automobiles are another example of machines that could become less automatic and more “social.” Radio frequency identification and similar technologies already allow cars to communicate with tollbooths, so why not with other cars? It will be a long time before such car-to-car collaboration eliminates the need for traffic lights and speed limits. In the meantime, cars that could better negotiate their position, speed, and distance with one another would most certainly prevent wrecks.
What’s most important, says Norman, is that the inventors of the future transcend the binary distinction between the practice of art and the science of engineering and move toward a comprehensive “science of design.” The notion harkens back to sixteenth-century Florence, a time and place where broad knowledge and boundless curiosity were considered as valuable as narrow expertise or a declared major. If a more generalist approach yields objects that better reflect the coherence of nature— rather than the whim of marketers—then the objects of tomorrow will be unquestionably smarter. ❑
About the Reviewer
Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST and director of communications for the World Future Society. E‑mail ptucker@wfs.org .
Join WFS Example of subscriber content. Join for $59 per year and receive THE FUTURIST, Futurist Update, and many other benefits.
Book Review
May-June 2008 Vol. 42, No. 3
Tradition-minded economists may not have much respect for the arts as an agent of growth, but creative industries—music, books, painting, and galleries—do earn a lot of money, especially for cities.
A recent report from the U.K.- based Future Laboratory showed that some 625,000 Londoners worked in a creative organization such as record companies, dance companies, museums, and orchestras, and that these arts industries contributed some £21 billion (about $41 billion) to the London economy. And a 2007 report from Americans for the Arts (findings announced May 2007) showed that the nonprofit arts and culture industries generate a yearly average of $166 billion in economic activity for the United States.
“Most Americans understand that the arts improve our quality of life,” says the organization’s president and CEO, Robert L. Lynch. “This study demonstrates that the arts are an industry that stimulates the economy in cities and towns across the country. A vibrant arts and culture industry helps local businesses thrive.”
The Future Lab report (which includes both nonprofit and for-profit arts) reveals that the arts are the fastest- growing segment of the U.K. economy. But some economists contend that the arts aren’t a monetary driver so much as a beneficiary of economic growth that occurs elsewhere.
“There has to be some prosperity in order for the arts to flourish,” says Dutch economist and artist Hans
Abbing, author of Why Are Artists Poor? (University of Amsterdam Press, 2002). Abbing concedes that the arts can bring in a great deal of money and help already high-earning businesses earn more, but he insists that creative industries don’t serve as a catalyst for economic growth so much as they reflect growth taking place nearby. “Somewhere where everyone is poor, there’s no money to support the arts. But as soon as you get the poor people next to the rich people, there’s something happening.”
London, in many ways, provides a case in point. In addition to hosting a large number of artists, London is also experiencing an explosion of wealth, suggesting that the two trends might be linked. The financial services provider Barclay’s Group forecasts that approximately 8 million U.K. households (one in four) will be dollar millionaires by the year 2016.
Abbing is skeptical of any report that claims to measure the economic value of something as intangible as the arts. He insists that some such reports overlook or downplay the relationship between private wealth and the arts in order to advocate arts subsidies that aren’t as effective in producing either wealth or art. However, he does admit that mainstream economists are increasingly recognizing the value of the arts, particularly for cities.
“The economists I know, cultural economists, are beginning to understand how important arts can be, particularly for municipal governments, and also how important it is that governments be competitive in attracting the arts,” says Abbing. “If all the artists go to Amsterdam, the rest of Europe will suffer, yes?”
—Patrick Tucker
Sources: The Future Laboratory. Web site www.thefuturelaboratory.com . Americans for the Arts. Web site www.americansforthearts.org .Plus author interviews.
Join WFS Example of subscriber content. Join for $59 per year and receive THE FUTURIST, Futurist Update, and many other benefits.
Economics
May-June 2008 Vol. 42, No. 3
The combination of a centuries old preference for male children, new sex-screening technologies, and better opportunities for women in the workplace are playing out in some surprising ways throughout Asia.
Researchers with the United Nations Population Fund report that the use of ultrasound equipment and amniocentesis, unleashed on the market 30 years ago, has led to the selective abortion of so many female fetuses that the male-to-female ratio in many Asian nations has skewed toward a greater number of men. An average of 120 males were born for every 100 females in China and India in 2005, a trend that could worsen as these technologies become more widespread. Meanwhile, more women in Asia are gaining access to education, entering the workforce, and delaying marriage. As a result, the pressure on women to bear a son is decreasing.
In many Asian countries, sons traditionally take on the role of supporting their parents in old age, but daughters become part of their husbands’ families and support their birth parents less and less as they mature and marry. Having a son has thus served as a sort of social insurance policy; not so with daughters.
The cost of marrying off a daughter can also be high. In parts of India, the bride’s family is responsible for paying a dowry to the husband, and in South Korea—as in many other parts of the globe—the bride’s family is expected to pay for the wedding ceremony and celebration, which can be quite lavish. Son preference has historically led to high death rates for female infants. Neglect of female infants in households where there is more than one child, and especially in those with more than one female child, remains a tremendous problem in many developing Asian nations. But demographers assert that, with family sizes falling, the use of ultrasound or amniocentesis to determine the sex of fetuses and abort unwanted ones has grown more rapidly.
French demographer Christophe Guilmoto, writing for the United Nations Population Fund, has warned that a dearth of women will affect “the stability of the entire marriage system.” Many men at the bottom end of the economic ladder, he says, will likely be unable to marry, which could translate into an increase in violence against women. Other demographers see the issue differently. “Approaching this issue as a concern about future marriage markets simply misses the point. And it’s based on bad math,” says Sidney B. Westley of the East-West Center.
“The evidence from South Korea suggests that son preference diminishes with economic development, but do we want to wait that long?” Westley and co-author Minja Kim Choe, writing in the journal Asia Pacific Issues, note that rapid fertility decline and changing marriage preferences have a greater effect on the number of women in the marriage market than does sex-selective abortion.
The fact that most Asian men prefer to marry younger women is one factor in the perceived lack of marriageable women. Westley and Choe see this as a surmountable obstacle. “By 2020, if a Chinese man in his late 20s is looking for a bride in her early 20s,” they write, “he will be facing odds of 119 men for every 100 women. In South Korea, the odds will be even worse—at 123 men ages 25–29 for every 100 women ages 20–24.… If aggregate numbers are the only thing that matters in a marriage market, then the solution for Asia’s bachelors is simple: Marry an older woman.”
Another factor is that women in Asia, as in the rest of the world, are gaining better access to education making more money, and taking on additional financial burdens. When women are forced to quit their jobs, they risk losing the investment they made in their education and being shut out of management positions later on. As a result, the financial incentive to marry and have children is diminishing.
Demographers are in agreement that son preference can have a devastating impact on a nation’s economic and social welfare—often resulting in the systematic neglect and even starvation of young girls. Some governments are finally catching on to the problem. China and India have instituted aggressive programs to counteract the social and economic pressures leading to son preference.
In January 2007, China announced that it would crack down on sex-selective abortions and put in place increased protections for baby girls. The government also began paying a small allowance to elderly, rural parents with no living children, only one child, or two daughters.
In India, the Directorate of Family Welfare in Delhi has launched a nationalistic ad campaign encouraging families to value their daughters. In 2003, India began a welfare program to help homeless women care for their children with stipends that were twice as high for girls as for boys.
But not all governments are taking such proactive steps. For instance, the UN researchers recommend that Nepal and Vietnam move quickly to adopt policies similar to those in place in China. The government of more-developed South Korea has been reluctant to put pro-girl policies in place. According to Westley and Choe. “This contrast suggests that China and India may achieve morebalanced birthrates and better survival statistics for girls well before they reach the high level of economic development that South Korea currently enjoys.” —Patrick Tucker
Sources: “How Does Son Preference Affect Population in Asia,” by Sidney B. Westley and Minja Kim Choe, Asia Pacific Issues (September 2007), plus author interviews.
“Asian Son Preference Will Have Severe Social Consequences, New Studies Warn,” United Nations Population Fund, October 29, 2007. Web site www.unfpa.org .
Join WFS Example of subscriber content. Join for $59 per year and receive THE FUTURIST, Futurist Update, and many other benefits.
Demography
May-June 2008 Vol. 42, No. 3