The Abundance Builders

J. Craig Venter

portrait of Vint Cerf

portrait of Koshnevis

portrait of Bass

portrait of Anita Goel

By Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

Progress occurs when inventive people solve problems and create opportunities. Here are just a few of the breakthroughs that offer the brightest prospects for a future that leaves austerity and deprivation behind.

In 1990, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health jointly launched the Human Genome Project, a 15-year program whose goal was to sequence the 3 billion base pairs that make up the human genome. Some thought the project impossible. Others felt it would take a half century to complete. Everyone agreed it would be expensive. A budget of $10 billion was set aside, but many felt it wasn’t enough. They might still be feeling this way, too, except that, in 2000, J. Craig Venter decided to get into the race.

It wasn’t even much of a race. Building on work that had come before, Venter and his company, Celera, delivered a fully sequenced human genome in less than one year for just under $100 million.

As an encore, in May 2010, Venter announced his next success: the creation of a synthetic life-form. He described it as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.” In less than 10 years, Venter both unlocked the human genome and created the world’s first synthetic life-form—genius with repeat success.

Venter’s actual goal is the creation of a very specific kind of synthetic life: the kind that can manufacture ultra-low-cost fuels. Rather than drilling into the earth to extract oil, Venter is working on novel algae, whose molecular machinery can take carbon dioxide and water and create oil or any other kind of fuel. Interested in pure octane? Aviation gasoline? Diesel? No problem. Give your designer the proper DNA instructions and let biology do the rest.

To further this dream, Venter has also spent the past five years sailing his research yacht, Sorcerer II, around the globe, scooping up algae along the way. The algae is then run through a DNA sequencing machine. Using this technique, Venter has built a library of more than 40 million different genes, which he can now call upon for designing his future biofuels.

Venter wants to use similar methods to design human vaccines within 24 hours rather than the two to three months currently required. He’s thinking about engineering food crops with a 50-fold production improvement over today’s agriculture. Low-cost fuels, high-performing vaccines, and ultra-yield agriculture are just three of the reasons that the exponential growth of biotechnology is critical to creating a world of abundance. Let’s turn to the next category on our list.

Networks and Sensors: The Connectors

During his graduate student years, Vint Cerf, chief Internet evangelist for Google, worked in the networking group that connected the first two nodes of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (Arpanet). Next, he became a program manager for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), funding various groups to develop Internet protocol technology. During the late 1980s, when the Internet began its transition to a commercial opportunity, Cerf moved to the long-distance telephone company MCI, where he engineered the first commercial email service. He then joined ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the key U.S. governance organization for the Web, and served as chairman for more than a decade. For all these reasons, Cerf is considered one of the “fathers of the Internet.”

These days, Cerf is excited about the future of his creation—that is, the future of networks and sensors. A network is any interconnection of signals and information, of which the Internet is the most significant example. A sensor is a device that detects information—temperature, vibration, radiation, and such—that, when hooked up to a network, can also transmit this information. Taken together, the future of networks and sensors is sometimes called the “Internet of things,” often imagined as a self-configuring, wireless network of sensors interconnecting, well, all things.

Now imagine its future: trillions of devices—thermometers, cars, light switches, whatever—all connected through a gargantuan network of sensors, each with its own IP addresses, each accessible through the Internet. Suddenly, Google can help you find your car keys. Stolen property becomes a thing of the past. When your house is running out of toilet paper or cleaning products or espresso beans, it can automatically reorder supplies. If prosperity is really saved time, then the Internet of things is a big pot of gold.

As powerful as it will be, the impact that the Internet of things will have on our personal lives is dwarfed by its business potential. Soon, companies will be able to perfectly match product demand to raw materials orders, streamlining supply chains and minimizing waste to an extraordinary degree. Efficiency goes through the roof. With critical appliances activated only when needed (lights that flick on as someone approaches a building), the energy-saving potential alone would be world changing. And world saving. A few years ago, Cisco teamed up with NASA to put sensors all over the planet to provide real-time information about climate change.

“The Internet of things,” says Cerf, “holds the promise for reinventing almost every industry. How we manufacture, how we control our environment, and how we distribute, use, and recycle resources. When the world around us becomes plugged in and effectively self-aware, it will drive efficiencies like never before. It’s a big step toward a world of abundance.”

Digital Manufacturing and Infinite Computing: The Makers

The 3-D printing that Carl Bass is pursuing at his company Autodesk (which makes software for 3-D printers) is the first step toward Star Trek’s replicators. Today’s machines aren’t powered by dilithium crystals, but they can precisely manufacture extremely intricate three-dimensional objects far cheaper and faster than ever before. This technology is the newest form of digital manufacturing (or digital fabrication), a field that has been around for decades. Traditional digital manufacturers utilize computer-controlled routers, lasers, and other cutting tools to precisely shape a new piece of metal, wood, or plastic by a subtractive process—slicing and dicing until the desired form is all that’s left. Today’s 3-D printers do the opposite. They utilize a form of additive manufacturing, where a three-dimensional object is created by laying down successive layers of material.

While early machines were simple and slow, today’s versions are quick, nimble, and able to print an exceptionally wide range of materials—plastic, glass, steel, even titanium. Industrial designers use 3-D printers to make everything from lampshades and eyeglasses to custom-fitted prosthetic limbs. Hobbyists are producing functioning robots and flying autonomous aircraft. Biotechnology firms are experimenting with the 3-D printing of organs, while inventor and University of Southern California engineering professor Behrokh Khoshnevis has developed a large-scale 3-D printer that extrudes concrete for building ultra-low-cost, multi-room housing in the developing world. The technology is also poised to leave our world. Made In Space, a Singularity University spinout, has demonstrated a 3-D printer that works in zero gravity, so astronauts aboard the space station can print spare parts whenever the need arises.

“What gets me most excited,” says Bass, “is the idea that every person will soon have access to one of these 3-D printers, just like we have inkjet printers today. And once that happens, it will change everything. See something on Amazon you like? Instead of placing an order and waiting 24 hours for your FedEx package, just hit print and get it in minutes.”

A 3-D printer would allow anyone anywhere to create physical items from digital blueprints. Right now, the emphasis is on novel geometric shapes, but soon we’ll be altering the physical properties of the material themselves.

“Forget the traditional limitations posed by conventional manufacturing, in which each part is made of a single material,” explains Cornell University robotics engineer Hod Lipson in an article for New Scientist. “We are making materials within materials, and embedding and weaving multiple materials into complex patterns. We can print hard and soft materials in patterns that create bizarre and new structural behaviors.”

This technology holds the potential of dropping manufacturing costs and making the design-to-prototype process much faster (a phenomenon called rapid prototyping). The process will be vastly amplified when coupled to what Carl Bass calls “infinite computing.”

He explains: “For most of my life, computing has been treated as a scarce resource. We continue to think about it that way, though it’s no longer necessary. My home computer, including electricity, costs less than two-tenths of a penny per CPU per hour. Computing is not only cheap, but it’s getting cheaper; we can easily extrapolate this trend to where we come to think of computing as virtually free. In fact, today, it’s the least expensive resource we can throw at a problem. Another dramatic improvement is the scalability now accessible through the cloud. Regardless of the size of the problem, I can deploy hundreds, even thousands, of computers to help solve it. While not quite as cheap as computing at home, renting a CPU core hour at Amazon costs less than a nickel.”

Perhaps most impressive is the ability of infinite computing to find optimal solutions to complex and abstract questions that were previously unanswerable or too expensive to even consider. Questions such as how to design a nuclear plant able to withstand a Richter 10 earthquake or how to monitor global disease patterns and detect pandemics in their critical early stages, while still not easy, are answerable.

Ultimately, though, the most exciting development will be when infinite computing is coupled with 3-D printing. This revolutionary combination thoroughly democratizes design and manufacturing. Suddenly, an invention developed in China can be perfected in India, then printed and utilized in Brazil on the same day—giving the developing world a poverty-fighting mechanism unlike anything it has ever seen.

Medicine: The Healers

In 2008, the World Health Organization announced that a lack of trained physicians in Africa will threaten the continent’s future by 2015. In 2010, the U.S. Association of American Medical Colleges reported that America’s aging baby-boomer population will create a massive shortage of 62,900 doctors by 2015, which will rise to 91,500 by 2020. The scarcity of nurses could be even worse. And these are just a few of the reasons why our dream of health-care abundance cannot come from traditional wellness professionals.

How do we fill this gap? For starters, we are counting on Lab-on-a-Chip (LOC) technologies. Harvard professor George M. Whitesides, a leader in this emerging field, explains why: “We now have drugs to treat many diseases, from AIDS and malaria to tuberculosis. What we desperately need is accurate, low-cost, easy-to-use, point-of-care diagnostics designed specifically for the 60% of the developing world that lives beyond the reach of urban hospitals and medical infrastructures. This is what Lab-on-a-Chip technology can deliver.”

Because LOC technology will likely be part of a wireless device, the data it collects for diagnostic purposes can be uploaded to a cloud and analyzed for deeper patterns. “For the first time,” says Anita Goel, a professor at MIT whose company Nanobiosym is working hard to commercialize LOC technology, “we’ll have the ability to provide real-time, worldwide disease information that can be uploaded to the cloud and used for detecting and combating the early phase of pandemics.”

Combining AI, cloud computing, and LOC technology will offer the greatest benefit. Now your cell-phone-sized device can not only analyze blood or sputum, but it can also have a conversation with you about your symptoms, offering a far more robust diagnosis than was ever before possible and potentially making up for our coming shortage of doctors and nurses. Since patients will be able to use this technology in their own homes, it will also free up time and space in overcrowded emergency rooms. Epidemiologists will have access to incredibly rich data sets, allowing them to make incredibly robust predictions. But the real benefit is that the medicine will be transformed from reactive and generic to predictive and personalized.

Nanomaterials and Nanotechnology: The Transformers

Most historians date nanotechnology—the manipulation of matter at the atomic scale—to physicist Richard Feynman’s 1959 speech “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” But it was K. Eric Drexler’s 1986 book, Engines of Creation, that really put the idea on the map. The basic notion is simple: Build things one atom at a time.

What sort of things? Well, for starters, assemblers—little nanomachines that build other nanomachines (or self-replicate). Since these replicators are also programmable, after one has built a billion copies of itself, you can direct those billion to build whatever you want. Even better, because building takes place on an atomic scale, these nanobots (as they are called) can start with whatever materials are on hand—soil, water, air, etc.—pull them apart atom by atom, and use those atoms to construct, well, just about anything you desire.

At first glance this seems a bit like science fiction, but almost everything we’re asking nanobots to do has already been mastered by the simplest life-forms. Duplicate itself a billion times? No problem; the bacteria in your gut will do that in just 10 hours. Extract carbon and oxygen out of the air and turn it into a sugar? The scum on top of any pond has been at it for a billion years. And if Ray Kurzweil’s exponential charts are even close to accurate, then it won’t be long now before our technology surpasses this biology.

Of course, a number of experts feel that, once nanotechnology reaches this point, we may lose our ability to properly control it. Drexler himself described a “gray goo” scenario, wherein self-replicating nanobots get free and consume everything in their path. This is not a trivial concern. Nanotechnology is one of a number of exponentially growing fields (also biotechnology, AI, and robotics) with the potential to pose grave dangers. It would be a significant oversight to pass these dangers by unmentioned.

While concerns about nanobots and gray goo are decades away, nanoscience is already giving us incredible returns. Nano-composites are now considerably stronger than steel and can be created for a fraction of the cost. Single-walled carbon nanotubes exhibit very high electron mobility and are being used to boost power conversion efficiency in solar cells. And Buckminsterfullerenes (C60), or buckyballs, are soccer-ball-shaped molecules containing 60 carbon atoms, with potential uses ranging from superconductor materials to drug-delivery systems.

All told, as a recent National Science Foundation report on the subject pointed out, “nanotechnology has the potential to enhance human performance, to bring sustainable development for materials, water, energy, and food, to protect against unknown bacteria and viruses, and even to diminish the reasons for breaking the peace [by creating universal abundance].”

Building Abundance for All

Two decades ago, most well-off citizens owned a camera, a video camera, a CD player, a stereo, a video-game console, a cell phone, a watch, an alarm clock, a set of encyclopedias, a world atlas, a Thomas Guide, and a whole bunch of other assets that would easily add up to more than $10,000. All of these come standard on today’s smartphones, or are available for purchase at the app store for less than a cup of coffee. In this, our exponentially enabled world, that’s how quickly $10,000 worth of expenses can vanish. More importantly, these things vanish without too much outside intervention. No one set out to zero the costs of two dozen products. They set out to make better cell phones, and the path of the adjacent possible did the rest.

But this time around we can squeeze a bit of randomness out of the equation. We don’t have to wait for history to help our cause; we can help it ourselves. We have our hard targets for abundance, we know which technologies need further development, and—if we can improve our appetite for risk and utilize the leverage of incentive prizes—we know how to go from A to B much faster than ever before.

Unlike earlier eras, we don’t have to wait for corporations to get interested in solutions, or governments to get around to our problems. We can take matters into our own hands. Today’s technophilanthropist crowd seems determined to provide the necessary seed capital (and often much more than that) and today’s DIY innovators have proven themselves more than capable of getting the job done. Meanwhile, the one-quarter of humanity that has forever been on the sidelines—the rising billion—has finally gotten into the game.

Most importantly, the game itself is no longer zero-sum. For the first time ever, we don’t need to figure out how to divide our pie into more slices, because we now know how to bake more pies. Everyone can win.

Because of the exponential growth rate of technology, this progress will continue at a rate unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before. What all this means is that—if the hole we’re in isn’t even a hole, the gap between poor and rich is not much of a gap, and the current rate of technological progress is moving more than fast enough to meet the challenges we now face—then the three most common criticisms against abundance should trouble us no more.

About the Authors

Peter H. Diamandis (left) is chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, co-founder and chairman of Singularity University, and co-founder of the International Space University. Web site www.diamandis.com or www.xprize.org.

Steven Kotler is a best-selling author and journalist whose work has appeared in Wired, Discover, Popular Science, National Geographic, and other publications.

This article was excerpted from their new book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, with permission of the publisher, Free Press.

The Secret Life of Data in the Year 2020

By Brian David Johnson

A futurist for Intel shows how geotags, sensor outputs, and big data are changing the future. He argues that we need a better understanding of our relationship with the data we produce in order to build the future we want.

My job as Intel’s futurist is to look 10 to 15 years out and model how people will act and interact with devices in the future. I explore a vision for all computational devices. Basically if it has a chip in it, it’s within my view. The driving force behind this work is incredibly pragmatic. The process of designing, developing, manufacturing, and deploying our platforms takes around 10 years. It’s of vital business importance today for Intel to understand the landscape a decade from now. That’s why in 2010 we started work on 2020.

When you look to 2020 and beyond, you can’t escape big data. Big data—extremely large sets of data related to consumer behavior, social network posts, geotagging, sensor outputs, and more—is a big problem. Intel is at the forefront of the big data revolution and all the challenges therein. Our processors are how data gets from one place to another. If anyone should have insight into how to make data do things we want it to do, make it work for the future, it should be Intel.

That’s where I come in. I model what it will feel like to be a human 10 years from now. I build models that explore what it will feel like to experience big data as an average person. An integral part of this work is collaborating with Genevieve Bell. She’s an Intel fellow, a cultural anthropologist by training, and one of the best minds working in this area. Together, we’ve been exploring 2020 through the lens of what we call ”the Secret Life of Data.”

For most people in 2020, it will feel like data has a life of its own. With the massive amount of sensors we have littering our lives and landscapes, we’ll have information spewing from everywhere. Our cars, our buildings, and even our bodies will expel an exhaust of data, information, and 1s and 0s at an incredible volume.

Why will most people think that their data has a life of its own? Well, because it’s true. We will have algorithms talking to algorithms, machines talking to machines, machines talking to algorithms, sensors and cameras gathering data, and computational power crunching through that data, then handing it off to more algorithms and machines. It will be a rich and secret life separate from us and for me incredibly fascinating.

But as we begin to build the Secret Life of Data, we must always remember that data is meaningless all by itself. The 1s and 0s are useless and meaningless on their own. Data is only useful and indeed powerful when it comes into contact with people.

This brings up some interesting questions and fascinating problems to be solved from an engineering standpoint. When we are architecting these algorithms, when we are designing these systems, how do we make sure they have an understanding of what it means to be human? The people writing these algorithms must have an understanding of what people will do with that data. How will it fit into their lives? How will it affect their daily routine? How will it make their lives better?

The Mysterious Resident of Glencoe and Wren Roads

The intersection of Glencoe and Wren

At Intel, solving the problem of how data will interact with other data in the future is not an esoteric pursuit. When I talk about making people’s lives better and having a deep understanding of how data will make their lives better, I’m not speaking in the abstract. I work with the people who are writing those algorithms and the people building the systems. Take Rita, for instance, who just had a baby last year. Rita did an experiment recently that will show you exactly what I mean when I say that algorithms need to understand people.

To test out this approach, Rita developed a prototype and programmed a personal tracking system. She allowed her smartphone to track and record all of her movements throughout her day. She wanted to test how the software understood who she was and what she did with her day.

After allowing her device and the software to track her every movement for a month, she checked out the report. The initial findings of the sensors and algorithms had learned some very specific information about her. The system told her that she “lived” in three primary places. The first location was spot on. It showed that she lived in her own home. It even showed the location on a map. Okay, that was right.

Second, it reported that she lived on the Jones Farm Campus of Intel. Okay, that was correct, as well. Rita spends most of her time at work when she’s not at home. But the third data point really enraged Rita.

The third data point showed that Rita lived at the intersection of Glencoe and Wren roads. This really made her mad. I didn’t completely understand. I asked why. She showed me on the map.

“There’s nothing at Glencoe and Wren,” she said. It’s a stop sign in the middle of nowhere. All it had to do is look at any mapping program and it would show nothing there. How could I live there if there is no building there? It’s ridiculous. We need to program these things to understand what it really means to be human. Just because I stopped in this place twice a day on my way to and from work doesn’t mean I live there. It’s so simple to fix. We just have to understand how people really live and not base it on just data points. People are the most important data points.”

That really is my challenge: How do we come up with the requirements and problems to build into the 2020 platform? The Secret Life of Data research and development work I’ve been doing with Genevieve Bell tells us that one approach is to start looking at data as if it were a person.

The Algorithm: More Human than a Human?

In the era of big data, how do we make sense of all this massive amount of information? We need new ways of conceptualizing and thinking about data that is not the traditional binary view that we have taken for the last 50 years.

If we begin to think of data as having a life of its own, and we are programming systems to enable them to have this life, then ultimately we are designing this data and the algorithms that process it to be human. One approach is to think about data as having responsibilities.

When I say responsibilities, I’m not just talking about the responsibility to keep the data safe and secure, but also a responsibility to deliver the data in the right context—to tell the story right. It’s akin to making sure that a person understands your family history, the subtle nuances of your father and grandmother and great-grandmother. It is the responsibility of history, and it cannot be taken lightly.

The research and development that Bell and I have been doing explores what is the only way to make sense of all this complex information—by viewing data, massive data sets, and the algorithms that really utilize big data as being human. Data doesn’t spring full formed from nowhere. Data is created, generated, and recorded. And the unifying principle behind all of this data is that it was all created by humans. We create the data, so essentially our data is an extension of ourselves, an extension of our humanity.

Ultimately in these systems, our data will need to start interacting with other data and devices. There will be so much data and so many devices that our data will need to take on a life of its own just to be efficient and not drive us crazy. But how do these systems understand and examine who we and our data are in the complex reality of big data that is basically too big for us to understand? This is where science fiction, androids, and Philip K. Dick and William Gibson come in.

Science Fiction and the Literary Origins of Android Data

In 1969, Philip K. Dick wrote the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The book is a meditation on what it means to be human and how the lines between that humanity and machines can become hazy—if not completely impossible to determine. The book eventually was developed into the science-fiction movie masterpiece Blade Runner by director Ridley Scott.

Just a few years after writing Androids, Dick further developed his ideas about humanity and the constructs that we build. He gave a speech called “The Android and the Human” at the University of British Columbia in February 1972, where he explored his new way of thinking: “I have, in some of my stories and novels, written about androids or robots or simulacra—the name doesn’t matter; what is meant is artificial constructs masquerading as humans.… Now, to me, that theme seems obsolete. The constructs do not mimic humans; they are, in many deep ways, actually human already.”

Thirty-six years later, another science-fiction legend, William Gibson, gave a speech at the Vancouver Institute called “Googling the Cyborg.” Gibson is best known for popularizing the cyberpunk movement in books like Neuromancer (Ace, 1984) and Pattern Recognition (Putnam, 2003). In his speech, Gibson contemplated what it means to be a cyborg. He had a good time poking fun at popular culture’s images of the man–machine hybrid with its carnal jacks, and he challenged his audience to think of the cyborg in a different way.

Gibson said he believes that the human and machine union has already happened, and it is called the Internet. He sees the Internet as “the largest man-made object on the planet” and says that the “real-deal cyborg will be deeper and more subtle and exist increasingly at the particle level.”

Gibson’s coupling of our humanity and the humanity of our data gives us another image of our constructs. We produce data and we write algorithms, and when we do this at the increasing scale (which will be coming in the next decade), we will need to begin to imagine who we are and who our data and our algorithms might be in a very different light.

The Android Is Your Data

Using these science-fiction visions, we can begin to develop a way to conceptualize the data. From the view of this narrative, our data—the data we created—becomes a kind of simulacrum of ourselves. Like Philip K. Dick’s androids and William Gibson’s cyborgs, data becomes a way to embody who we are, but at the same time it remains external. It allows us to examine who we are and also what we want to do with these systems. As we begin to architect these systems, often the reality is too hard to handle: It’s too complex for us to make any meaningful design decisions. We need these representations, these androids, to be our proxies.

Intel futurist Brian David Johnson

By thinking about data, large data sets, and the algorithms that make use of this information as human—or, in Dick’s language, androids—we are giving these complex systems a kind of narrative and characteristics that help programmers, system architects, and even regular folks to understand data’s “bigness.”

To understand what we want from the algorithms, these systems become less complex because we can understand them not only as an extension of ourselves but also a collection of human entities. If we understand them as human, then we know how to talk to them. We know how to ask for things. We know what to expect. We can hold them responsible, and we can even have an understanding for how far we can trust them.

But this humanness doesn’t really look like the humanness of Dick or even Gibson. This humanness is not trying to trick us into thinking that it is human like us, and it doesn’t exist on the particle level. Today, our understanding of humanity and intelligence is being challenged. Every year we get new products with increasing intelligence. These range from the amazing to the downright funny, but the reality of these systems looks more like a Furby toy having a conversation with the iPhone’s Siri service than two superhuman androids having a chat.

This concept of humanity is more about our relationships to other people, other pieces of data, and the complex web of relationships that make up our very culture. Humanity shouldn’t really be defined by Alan Turing’s test (designed to fool a person into thinking an AI was a human over teletype) or even Dick’s Voight-Kampff empathy test. How we define humanity is by our relationship to others—the connections we have to other people and their data.

And one day, humanity may be defined by how our personal data interacts with and is connected to other people’s data. We have to come to grips with the idea that this interconnected humanness that moves from data to data, algorithm to algorithm, might happen without us knowing anything about it. It very well could happen in the Secret Life of Data.

Do Algorithms Dream of Electric Sheep?

I think that there is something lovely about the idea that our data could have a life of its own. For too long, computers, computational power, and even software have been thought of as cold mathematical pursuits. In reality, the digital world is simply an extension of our world. Data and computational power are, at their core, human. With Genevieve Bell, these new models have given us a way to architect a future that is both more efficient and more human. And I think that’s awesome.

To answer the question “Do algorithms dream of electric sheep?” becomes complicated. First we can say “Yes,” because we programmed them to do so. Next we could say “No,” because the complex neurological structures of the human dream state will not be modeled in algorithms or software anytime soon. But finally, we might need to say “Maybe,” and we will just have to wait and ask them.

These questions of how we interact with data, and how data interacts with itself, may seem removed from our daily experience right now. That’s only because we’ve already come to expect our relationship with information to be a seamless exchange of signals that brings us closer to what we want. When we swipe a fare card to enter a subway, we expect the metal turnstile to turn for us. When we check in on Facebook, we expect our status update to change instantly. When we enter our credit-card numbers into a Web site like Amazon, we expect that the product we purchased is on its way, that our account has already been debited, and that a record of the transaction has already been stored in a database to provide us with more recommendations at a later date. We only truly notice how much we interact with data when something goes wrong, when the metal subway turnstile doesn’t spin.

But this current state of affairs can’t last. Data is becoming too big. We need to start paying attention to the data we create and what we want it to do for us.

What I find incredibly exciting about this vision for the future is that it is real. Big data is coming, and in many instances it’s already here. So it’s not a matter of if this will happen; it’s not even a question of when. For me, the real question is how. How do we want this to happen? What do we want it to do for us? How will it make the lives of every person on the planet better?

In 2010, Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner said, “Science and technology have progressed to the point where what we build is only constrained by the limits of our own imaginations.” Imagining what the secret life of data could be is the real challenge; once we’ve done that, then all we have to do is go and build it.

That’s just engineering. The difficult part is changing the story we tell ourselves about the future we’re going to live in. If we can do that, then we can change the future.

About the Author

Brian David Johnson is a futurist at Intel Corporation, where he is developing an actionable vision for computing in 2020. He speaks and writes extensively about future technologies in articles and scientific papers as well as science-fiction short stories and novels (Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices We Love, Fake Plastic Love, and Nebulous Mechanisms: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories).

You can meet Johnson WorldFuture 2012, the annual conference of the World Future Society taking place in Toronto this July.

The Individual in a Networked World: Two Scenarios

By Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman

Collaborative agent bots? A walled world under constant surveillance? Two information technology experts parse the future of human–network interaction.

One of the most useful and formal futurism exercises in recent years was the work in 2006–2007 of the Metaverse Roadmap project. It was driven by John Smart, Jamais Cascio, and Jerry Paffendorf, and originally conceived of as a brief for the future of the World Wide Web as it became three-dimensional.

Once the leaders of the effort began to hear from several dozen thinkers, their own views branched in other directions. They had started their inquiries with the notion of a “Metaverse” that was first conceived by the influential science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his 1982 classic, Snow Crash. To Stephenson, the Metaverse was an immersive, virtual space with 3-D technologies.

Yet, the Metaverse Roadmap thinkers went beyond seeing the Metaverse as a virtual domain. They saw it as the “convergence of (1) virtually enhanced physical reality and (2) physically persistent virtual space. It is a fusion of both, while allowing users to experience it as either.” In other words, it is the connection of the physical and virtual worlds. Although we do not foresee people living mostly in virtual space, the technological directions suggested by the Metaverse Roadmap provide guides for how networked individualism may proceed.

This is a future that has already come to pass in many respects. There is already a mad rush in Silicon Valley to create products to embed social interplay in most kinds of information and media encounters, and it will likely accelerate going forward. Moreover, in coming years a wider Metaverse will emerge as relatively ordinary objects—as well as computers and phones—will become ubiquitously networked with each other, and networked individuals will be able to augment their information through direct contact with databases and objects that have become smarter and more communicative.

Increased computing power may make people’s involvements in virtual worlds more immersive and compelling, although experiences to date suggest that people are more apt to use computer networks that integrate with real life rather than becoming totally immersed in virtual worlds—with virtual game players the exception.

Ubiquitous computing, sometimes called “the Internet of things” (or “everyware”), describes human–computer interaction that goes beyond personal computing to an environment of objects processing information and networking with each other and humans. Objects would share information: appliances, utility grids, clothing and jewelry, cars, books, household and workplace furnishings, as well as buildings and landscapes. They would learn additional information and preferred methods of use by gathering data about people who are in their environment. For example, cars could tell each other not to be in the same lane at the same time, and bicycles could tell car doors not to open suddenly when the bikes pass by.

With all these trends rolling along into the future, there is still reason to be uncertain about how the environment of networked individuals will evolve. We offer two different scenarios that seem credible.

Scenario 1: Collaborative Agents In Augmented Reality

Waking up in a networked future, his digital agent’s soft voice slowly grows into Harry Sanchez’s hearing range. It’s been monitoring his sleep rhythms and cross-referencing them with data from his ongoing brain scans to see when it’s most appropriate to wake him. After stretching and rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Harry suddenly and happily recalls yesterday’s purchase.

He found a collaborative coupon on the Web the other day for a deal on a new pair of augmented reality (AR) contact lenses and the haptic feedback implant that everyone’s been raving about. The implantation was a simple and quick outpatient procedure that reminded him more of getting his ears pierced than of surgery. It was performed remotely by a doctor whose robot mimicked his every move. It was not as though Harry could really tell, however, since his AR glasses had “skinned” (covered) the robot with the doctor’s virtual image. In this way, the doctor efficiently treats dozens of patients a day, projecting in from his home.

Now that he is awake, Harry eagerly slips in his new AR contact lenses for the first time. They instantly network with his microcomputer, smartphone, and the Internet. His personalized augmented overlay appears in his field of vision: the time and date, the weather and air quality, a few applications he left open from the previous night minimized into his peripheral vision, a faintly blinking icon notifying him of some messages he missed overnight, an icon notifying him of information updates on news stories aggregated for him by his agent, and an InterFace lifelog update showing what his friends did last night that is cross-referenced with the media they consumed and the tagged conversations they had. He sees a call for participating in a political smart mob in the virtual world, but he tells his agent to disregard it.

His agent also warns him about his health.

Harry hasn’t been sleeping well, as his late-night virtual meetings with colleagues in China have taken a toll on his system. Yet, he’s happy to not have to fly there ever since they’ve been able to collaborate long-distance by using the Cavecat productivity system with active walls and tables holding spreadsheets, texts, drawings, and videos.

As Harry settles in at the kitchen table, the surface notices that he’s put down his morning cup of coffee. Finally, the news displays as manipulable augmented reality overlays of Harry’s social network, with pictures of each network member blinking when she or he posts messages, videos, or lifelog entries.

The new haptic implant gives him a sensory understanding of the news: He can feel the continuing battle in Kabul, experiencing its sounds and vibrations as if he were at the scene. And it now feels as if the computer icons of his various applications have weight and texture. Having not found any urgent messages, Harry’s agent organizes his correspondence by topic and relevance. Noticing a conversation he had that he does not want many network members to see, Harry has his agent make the information private across his entire InterFace network. His agent also sends out a quick update to his entire network, letting them know his plans for the day.

Harry is distracted by a knocking sound. His agent informs him that his best friend, Neal, is projecting in for their regular weekend virtual breakfast.

Though Harry and Neal only live 50 kilometers apart, this is a nice way for them to check in on one another and spend some time together. Harry hasn’t shaved, and so he puts on his shiny-face skin before he opens the virtual door. He uses his new haptic chip to get the sensation of shaking his friend’s hand. It’s a little strange at first, since there’s nothing actually present to shake, but his nervous system responds as though he had reached out and touched someone.

Harry and Neal chat about how everyone who was at the pub’s avatar party last night has shared recordings of the evening with friends. Their agents have already automatically tagged these recordings with relevant information about people and location. Avatar parties have become popular these days. Everyone dresses like their favorite game character; some even come looking like one another. It can be a lot of fun role playing like this, and the collected and tagged videos are highly amusing as people’s voices, looks, and even smells can be altered in the virtual world.

After visualizing and flipping through these tags for mentions of his name, Harry updates the conversation file with some witty things he thought of after the fact, and his agent forwards the updates to the relevant people. He also tells his agent to delete information about last night’s embarrassing ice-cube escapade at the avatar party, and to ask his friends to delete their versions.

Harry’s agent softly chimes in just as he’s saying goodbye to Neal, reminding him that he has to meet his sister Merril today. The agents settle on a place downtown. Harry projects himself into the restaurant’s virtual space. The restaurant keeps a good online presence, with a nice menu, list of ingredients, health report, and real-time webcam view. It’s local and the tables there get automatically reserved.

As Harry gets ready for the day, his agent presents him with a few clothing options. He decides to wear the new trousers suggested by his girlfriend, but calls up another app to make sure his sister would also approve. Harry’s girlfriend had tagged the info to the trousers while doing some virtual window shopping and had a pair in his size set aside after asking his belt how big it was.

Not wanting to be late, Harry has his agent arrange a car for him through a collaborative consumption app that recognizes his high trust score. He rarely uses a car, as his fridge automatically schedules grocery deliveries. Slipping his microcomputer into his pocket, Harry goes to the car, has his agent set the restaurant’s coordinates, and leans back to check his messages as the car pulls out.

Scenario 2: A Walled and Surveilled World

As Will Li rouses himself from sleep, he walks over to “his” computer to see what he’s missed overnight. Truthfully, the computer isn’t really his: He owns rights to its usage but isn’t allowed to change its hardware or software, or else he’d void his warranty or break the law. His computer is really only an access point, as all his data is in the cloud, yet another thing that’s owned—with all the data in it—by a big corporation. Before Will can reach for the cloud, the system completes its mandatory scan of his computer for viruses and copyright infringement.

The price of media access has also spawned its own subculture of media pirates. They usually meet in person, sharing miniature portable terabyte flash drives packed with music, TV shows, movies, e-books, and more. The pirates often get their “warez” from people who collected old computers from trash heaps, recycling centers, and garage sales. They’ve even developed a code language to arrange meet-ups, but Will hardly keeps up with the ever-evolving lingo.

Leaning over his morning coffee, Will dreams of how nice it would be to have a personal agent, but he’s heard most are double agents that also report back to the authorities and sell information to corporations. And he doesn’t like the way FaceWall is collecting all the information on him whenever he uses it. He also can’t afford to hire the technician it would require to help him set up the devices and access all the fragmented networks of media sites, search engines, and social applications online. Each has a tricky “right to information” form to sign. So he’s reduced his online presence to a minimum, trying to limit himself to good old-fashioned e-mails and avoid social media.

However, Will needs to use FaceWall today to find something. He’s forced to wait thirty seconds to let the mandatory ad play. It has his picture in it. CoffeeCo must have bought a recent photo that tagged him on a friend’s wall. Will notices that his system slows down as the massive data file from the advertisement clogs up his bandwidth, but since the corporations pay more to guarantee themselves fast access, he endures the wait.

It’s almost ironic to see a return to the days of loading screens since the amount of available bandwidth has only increased, but all that bandwidth is auctioned at sky-high prices or owned by a few companies. Finally finding the photo, Will learns he cannot delete it because CoffeeCo now owns it. Perhaps he should make sure no one ever uploads anything about him again, though that would be difficult. Most people seem to put up with these situations because they want to keep going online. Will assumes that from now on he’ll get peppered with ads geared to the tastes that FaceWall has observed online—both for him and for all those other 40-year-olds who became unemployed when countries set up their own walled-off Internets, claiming that morality and national security demanded it.

Giving the situation further thought, Will starts to browse his friends’ profiles, and finds that his sister Lorelei is earning extra money by selling her personal information to FaceWall, including links to his profile. Maybe that’s how CoffeeCo found his photo. He’ll ask her when they meet today to never do it again. You can never be quite sure of who’s informing on you, only in this case it’s not only the state but data-aggregating organizations.

Will remembers from history class how, in the 1960s, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had used his dossiers on the Kennedys to keep power. Now, FaceWall has even more comprehensive dossiers on everyone. Doing what he knows he shouldn’t, Will reaches for a doughnut. Maybe he can sneak one without his insurance company’s sensors registering it. At least Will made the right decision by paying extra for their privacy clause. Otherwise, his health data might have just been sold off to the highest bidder at an info auction. But, since he’s not able to see the information himself, he can’t be sure.

Will and his best friend, Spider, prefer to meet in person: There is less chance for any number of things happening. They remember how Spider was once duped by someone passing himself off as an online insurance representative to steal private information. The latest scam is reverse-identity theft. The thieves pose as old friends, using detailed avatars whose digital image and voice have been reconstructed from public profiles. Too bad the government killed the trusted identities program. Will shuts off the computer monitor, grabs his phone and his travel pass, and goes out past the security scanner.

After a wait, Lorelei pulls up, giggling about the whole-body security scan at the gate. “Hope they got a better picture this time.” She’s also worried that maybe the guards had found the incriminating photo of her online. She’s already lost one job because of it, even though it was taken without her permission and out of context. They head off for their meal, but arrive just in time to see the last open table become occupied.

The Possible Futures of Networked Individuals

Although present technologies are still far from realizing either scenario in its entirety, each represents a potential evolution from current trajectories. The first scenario assumes a move toward more networked individualism based on continued technological progress and trust in computer and human networks—including the withering of boundaries.

The second scenario assumes more boundaries, more costs, more corporate concentration, and more surveillance. At present, the Western world is trending in the direction of the first scenario, but we would be naïve to think that the second scenario could not happen.

What we call the Triple Revolution—in social networks, in the Internet, and in mobile connectedness—will change but never end in the ongoing turn to a networked operating system. The foreseeable future holds the prospect that individuals will be able to act more independently with greater power to shape their lives, if they choose to do so and if the circumstances will enable them to do so.

Yet, the foreseeable future also contains the burden of knowing that people will have to work harder on their own to get their needs met. Tightly knit, permanent groups will continue to be stable cores for some, and social networks will play greater roles in all human activities. The work of networked individuals is never quite done—and the satisfactions of netweaving are always available.

About the Authors

Lee Rainie is the director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan “fact tank” that studies the social impact of the Internet. Prior to that he was the managing editor for U.S. News & World Report. He is delivering the opening plenary keynote at WorldFuture 2012, the annual conference of the World Future Society, in Toronto, Canada, July 27-29.

Barry Wellman directs the University of Toronto’s NetLab, is a member of the Cities Centre and the Knowledge Media Design Institute, and is a cross-appointed member of the Faculty of Information. Wellman is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, chair-emeritus of both the Community and Information Technologies section and the Community and Urban Sociology section of the American Sociological Association, and a fellow of IBM Toronto’s Centre for Advanced Studies.

Excerpted from Networked: The New Social Operating System by Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman, published in May 2012 by The MIT Press. © 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved. Christian Beermann and Tsahi Hayat co-authored the chapter.

From Smart House to Networked Home

By Chris Carbone and Kristin Nauth

Two foresight specialists describe how tomorrow’s integrated, networked, and aware home systems may change your family life.

In the last decade, a range of digital technologies and services have hit the market and moved quickly from niche use to the mainstream. Consider that just seven years after being founded, Facebook is used by more than 50% of the online population in the United States and India, and much higher percentages in global markets from Chile to South Africa to Indonesia. And flat-panel TVs, e-readers, smartphones, and even augmented-reality apps—all largely missing from the consumer landscape just a few years ago—continue to be eagerly adopted even in the face of economic uncertainty.

As we look toward the next decade, it’s clear that we are in for even more dramatic changes in the roles that technology will play in daily life. But what technologies are poised to move from niche toward the mainstream in the next 10 years? And how will these technologies change everyday activities?

To bring this into sharper focus, Innovaro Inc.’s futures consulting group identified 10 key themes that it feels will help define the tech experience in the coming decade. These 10 “technology trajectories” will give people a powerful new “toolkit”—new devices, services, and capabilities—that will forever alter the way that we go about everyday activities, from dating and shopping to learning and working.

This glimpse of Innovaro’s 10 Technology Trajectories presents several forecasts for how these new capabilities could reshape family and home life in the next decade. And although these themes were identified with the United States and other advanced economies in mind, the Technology Trajectories have global potential to reshape life in emerging economies as they’re adopted and explored there as well.

10 Technology Trajectories

1. Adaptive Environments. Advances in materials will make the home and work environment “smart.” Everyday objects, surfaces, and coatings will gain the ability to adapt to changing conditions or people’s needs—e.g., becoming self-cleaning, self-insulating, or protective. The built environment will no longer be simply structural and passive; it will become adaptive, functional, and smart.

2. Cloud Intelligence. The cloud will evolve from being a static repository of data into an active resource that people rely on throughout their daily lives. With new capabilities for accessing online expert systems and applications, we’ll tap into information, analysis, and contextual advice in more integrated ways. Virtual agents will migrate from being an automated form of phone-based customer service to a personalized form of support and assistance that provides information and—more importantly—performs useful tasks. For example, such agents might design a weekly menu based on a family’s health profile, fitness goals, and eating preferences, and automatically order ingredients.

3. Collaboration Economy. The power of collective intelligence will enable us to accomplish cognitive tasks not easily handled by virtual agents and machines in the cloud. We’ll get advice and recommendations and solve problems by tapping into the social graph, and this cognitive outsourcing will be applied to both business issues and personal and lifestyle questions (e.g., “Which diet will work best for me?”).

4. Contextual Reality. People will navigate through their daily activities thanks to multiple layers of real-time and location-specific information. This contextual overlay for everyday life will give us a new way to see our surroundings and provide new forms of decision support. We will move from a world where information and connections are hidden to one where real-time, contextual information generates ambient awareness.

5. Cutting the Cable. Personal devices will be largely untethered from wired power and data connections. Access to the Internet will be ubiquitous, and the tech infrastructure—from electronics to sensors to cars—will be powered by a more diverse set of technologies, including micro-generation, wireless power transmission, and advanced power storage. We will move beyond plugging in, and even beyond the “plug and play” model, to a world where data, power, and inter-networking are ubiquitous.

6. Information Fusion. It will become possible for people to generate useful insights about their own habits and behaviors by fusing personal data (e.g., social media profiles, tweets, location data, purchasing histories, health sensor data). But these insights will only be as good as a user’s ability to understand and act on them. Personal data will become comprehensible through visualization and other services.

7. Interface Anywhere, Any Way. Intuitive interfaces will become the dominant form of interaction with personal electronics and computing devices. We’ll be freed from the rigidity of conventional input devices (e.g., keyboard, mouse, screen, remotes) and able to interact with the digital world anywhere—and any way—using a combination of gesture, touch, verbal commands, and targeted use of traditional interfaces.

8. Manufacturing 3.0. Manufacturing will be reconceived—from a far-flung, global activity to more of a human-scale and re-localized endeavor. As consumers continue to call for both personalization and attention to environmental pressures, demand will grow for a more local manufacturing infrastructure where product schematics in certain categories are digitized and distributed to commercial fabbing services (or in-home 3-D printers) for final fabrication.

9. Personal Analytics. Data analytics will increasingly become a consumer tool as much as a business tool. This will open up analytics to a wide variety of personal and lifestyle applications. We’ll collect, store, interpret, and apply the vast amounts of data being created by and about ourselves during our everyday activities.

10. Socially Networked Stuff. Many of our possessions will interact with each other and with the broader digital infrastructure. This will create a world of socially networked stuff, where things can actively sense, communicate, and share data. Rather than owning a fragmented set of possessions and devices, passively sitting next to each other, we’ll manage a dynamic ecosystem of belongings that interact and work in concert for our benefit.

Societal Drivers Influence Technological Advancements

So, how will the new capabilities described in the 10 Technology Trajectories change home and family life? What will our homes look and feel like? How will they support our activities and lifestyles?

Technology is not the only driver at play here, and the Technology Trajectories are not emerging in a vacuum. There are numerous social, generational, and values drivers at play as well. Of the many drivers that our team at Innovaro considered while generating these forecasts, we especially noted the impact of digital natives on adoption of technology in the home, shifting demographics, and economic considerations.

• The maturing of the digital natives. Digital natives—people who have grown up never knowing a world without the Internet, smartphones, Facebook, etc.—have far different attitudes toward technology than do older generations. There are now two distinct generations of digital natives in the United States: millennials (born 1979–1998) and Gen Z (born 1999 and after). The technology behaviors of these groups will affect adoption of technologies that impact family and home life in coming years, as more millennials become parents and as members of Gen Z hit their tween (10–12) and teen years.
• Shifting demography. Delayed marriage and parenthood is shrinking family size. At the same time, the strong connection between millennials and their baby-boomer parents has led to a rise in multigenerational households in the United States, a trend that has been further intensified by the Great Recession. The changes in the form and function of the home will happen within the larger context of these continued demographic shifts.
• Digital DIY. Digital natives grew up in a world where building, modifying, and hacking consumer technology is taken for granted (think MAKE magazine and sites like Instructables and even YouTube). The participatory and DIY proclivities of younger generations could drive a move to more customizable home technology and help weave advanced technologies deeply into home life.
• New family dynamics. Social media and mobile devices are altering family relationships. Studies have found high ratios of Americans saying Internet use has reduced time spent with family members. Conversely, technologies can increase family connectedness over distance—e.g., by enabling nearly continuous parental oversight via Facebook or weekly Skype conversations with far-flung relatives.
• Constrained family finances. It’s likely that families’ heightened focus on value will persist for years to come. Some people will invest only in home technologies that either directly save money or offer exceptionally compelling new functionality or experience, such as immersive entertainment systems. A two-tier market could emerge in which well-off families adopt smart-home technology while less-well-off households stick to twentieth-century-style home systems.

In the decade ahead, a confluence of these sorts of social factors with the Technology Trajectories will begin to change the very nature and function of homes, give family members new roles, and further alter family dynamics.

Homes Will Become Aware and Adaptive

Homes and home systems could become far more aware, adaptive, and responsive to their residents. New interfaces, for instance, will make home technology more ubiquitous, as flexible displays finally reach commercialization. Nearly any home surface could become a touchscreen, providing fingertip control of home electronics, as well as access to “cloud intelligence.” Interfaces will also be more intuitive, with voice control, eye-tracking, and even emotion analysis that monitors facial expressions to help determine what the user wants.

For example, a house or apartment might monitor you walking through the door at the end of the day and look for clues on how to best serve your needs. It might remotely sense body temperature or interpret body language; compare these with past arrivals, known schedule for the day, etc.; and “know” if you were likely returning from a workout at the gym or a 15-hour workday.

With this information, the system might adjust lights, music, and temperature in the house or display different information based on cues that it picked up from you. It might automatically pull up exercise tracking stats and healthy recipes after a workout, or carry-out food options when it senses that you might have just worked overtime. While this future may sound far-off, vending kiosks in Japan are already using sensors to detect age, gender, and emotional state in order to offer shoppers a more targeted selection of products.

New materials and power technologies may also change the way homes look and feel. LED wall coatings will change colors or designs to match the season or holiday—or show a movie or ballgame during dinner. A wave of the hand might turn any part of a kitchen counter into an induction cook top. Counters could also be self-sterilizing, using ultraviolet light, and have built-in touch-screen controls. And advances in short-range wireless electricity transmission may eliminate plugs and cords entirely for our electronic devices.

Digital Natives Will Drive Home-Tech Adoption

More millennials are buying homes and starting families, and Gen Z is moving into its tween and teen years. These groups will spur adoption of next-generation home technology. It’s well known that teens rely on their constant connectedness to friends via texting and social media to process their feelings: As MIT researcher Sherry Turkle noted in her book Alone Together, “They need to be connected in order to feel like themselves.”

This intense need for a connected lifestyle will shape the kinds of home products that kids—and their parents—buy, and younger family members will become the de facto DIY mavens for their households: staying current on new technologies, knowing how to customize them, and guiding family purchases. Digital natives of 2020 could be the family experts at customizing household technology—just as in the 2000s they were the social networking experts, with parents often asking their kids to help them set up Facebook pages.

Digital natives may also drive greater personalization of the home. They have grown up with the ability to personalize the look of their Wii character, cobble together personal media feeds, and express themselves visually on sites like Pinterest. Based on the control they’ve grown accustomed to in the digital world, they may expect to customize and modify their families’ home systems to a greater degree than previous generations. This could be especially true of entertainment systems, but could also apply to adaptive walls or other smart infrastructures in the home.

Much of the demand for virtual products—i.e., digital possessions that exist locally on their devices or in the cloud—will be from digital natives as well. It will be increasingly possible to render the artifacts of our digital lives in the real world, and millennials could be big adopters of 3-D printing. People may print household and hobby items they design or modify themselves. Imagine, for example, a crafter taking a 3-D scan of a sea shell, modifying the shape and texture using design software, and then 3-D printing her digital creation as a piece of art or jewelry. Already, a prototype 3-D printer called Origo is being developed for the tween market. Children who grow up with toys like Origo will be proficient in the technology—and as young adults in 2020, they may expect to be able to fabricate things at home to personalize and customize their home environment.

Technological Advances Will Change Society and the Home

The Technology Trajectories outlined above will alter the home and its physical artifacts, as well as the families that adopt them. These family and home environment alterations may have repercussions well beyond the household into daily life and society at large.

• Living in “glass houses.” Levels of transparency in the home will rise. Home systems and processes that have been opaque to homeowners, such as energy consumption or the off-gassing of paint, will become transparent. For people who are interested in the “quantified self” movement, smart homes will make it easier to measure and track one’s own behavior. For example, your home could help record and analyze your activities to uncover insights about your behavior over time—e.g., that you tend to argue with your spouse more on days that you don’t exercise, or that you sleep poorly when you eat dinner after 8 p.m.
• House layouts will change. Houses will change to accommodate the new technologies and the behaviors they enable. As the need for wired power and data access falls away—and new interfaces emerge—more-flexible home designs may come into vogue. Rather than dedicated media rooms or home offices, spaces may be more flexible and adaptive; residents may be able to work or play in any room that suits their preferences.
• Homes could become even more central to daily life. Homes will be more personalized, responsive, and attuned to residents’ preferences. As this becomes the case, people may find that the experiences that they have in their homes will be superior to what they can have in public spaces for certain activities. For example, productivity levels working at home in a space personalized for one’s physical, mood/emotional, and practical needs will likely exceed what can be achieved with a rented desk at the local telecommuting space. Homes could become the preferred location for core activities such as work, education, and entertainment. People could become more dependent on their homes and home systems.
• Creating new divisions. With so much more control available over home devices and systems, issues of who controls what will go far beyond tugs-of-war over the remote. Being granted access to or control over certain home systems—such as refrigerator-mediated food ordering or immersive multimedia systems—could become a new rite of passage for younger family members, just as getting your own set of house keys has been in the past.
• Family impacts could have pros and cons. With all of these new capabilities at hand, home life could be more engaging, convenient, and fun. On the flip side, learning curves could be steep, especially for generations who are not digital natives. To sidestep this problem, some families may simply outsource management of these next-generation home systems—creating a new business opportunity. Others, feeling stressed out by tech complexity and the prospect of another monthly bill, may choose to opt out.
• A new digital divide? Cost will be an issue, and not all families will be able to afford emerging home technologies. Whereas the digital divide used to be about access to PCs and broadband Internet, in the future it could be about access to adaptive and aware living spaces.

A final outcome of these changes is that the market for advanced home technology will grow much larger, more complex, and more competitive than today. Rather than having a few key technology nodes in the home (e.g., PC, tablet, Internet-enabled TV, and smartphones), all key home systems might well become networked devices—from water and electric meters to electrochromic windows.

This will open up myriad opportunities for new home products and the potential for exciting collaborations across previously unrelated industries—from consumer electronics and computing to home furnishing, décor, and home improvement. As the Technology Trajectories are realized, tomorrow’s families could be far more connected with each other and with their communities than ever before. And when you call home, your home will answer.

About the Authors

Chris Carbone is a director with Innovaro’s foresight group, where he oversees the Global Lifestyles and Technology Foresight projects and contributes to the firm’s custom futures research projects. Email chris.carbone@innovaro.com.

Kristin Nauth is a founding partner of Foresight Alliance and has 15 years of experience as a foresight professional, including six with Innovaro. Follow her on Twitter, @knauth2015.

This article draws from Innovaro’s Global Lifestyles Research Series; visit www.innovaro.com for details. Innovaro, The Innovation Solutions Company, provides the intelligence, software, and consulting services that companies need to innovate and grow. Innovaro’s foresight group operates two subscription-based futures research services: Global Lifestyles and Technology Foresight. It also conducts custom trend and futures research projects for a wide range of corporate and government clients.

Building and Connecting Communities for the Future

By Center for Communities of the Future

The economic development profession can be a positive force for change in communities as we transition from a materialistic economy to a transformational society.

The global economy has changed fundamentally in recent decades, and the ways that we have traditionally approached economic development no longer work.

We are in a transition from an Industrial Society to a new, more organic society and economy. Fundamental principles of thinking and organization are not just reforming, but transforming. Reformation is about improving ideas and methods that have existed for many years. Transformational change redefines institutional structures and challenges their undergirding principles.

The weak signals of the next iteration of an economic system are beginning to emerge. Economic developers—individuals and organizations who are generally responsible for promoting and sustaining their communities’ prosperity (good jobs, good homes, good schools, good infrastructure)—must be able to juggle multiple and rapidly changing priorities, accommodating both short-term and long-term perspectives. They’re responsible for attracting and expanding business, developing a workforce capable of continuous innovation, and facilitating collaborations, among other interrelated challenges and opportunities.

The goal of economic development in this new environment is to help new knowledge emerge. The connection of new knowledge to new resources in the creation of transformational projects will seed what we call a Creative Molecular Economy. It is molecular in the sense of working with the smallest units of organization; it is organic in the sense of mimicking biological systems and processes.

How Economies Have Changed

As we emerge from the recent recession, it is clear that we must endow our communities with greater economic resiliency. We must prepare them for a different kind of economy that will require the ability to adapt to constantly changing conditions. And this resiliency cannot be achieved through just reforming the current practice of economic development. In other words, we can’t just tinker at the margins.

Adding to the complexity of community development over the next 20 years are three different types of economies that are now in churn and mixed together:

The first is the very last stages of the old Industrial Age economy based on hierarchies, economies of scale, mechanization, and predictability.

The second is a transitional economic phase called the Knowledge Economy, which was recognized a decade or so ago and is based on knowledge creation and diffusion.

Finally, this transition phase is reaching its maturity and will quickly shift within the next 10 to 15 years to an emerging Creative Molecular Economy. Biological principles—such as interdependence, systems thinking, and designing parallel processes—will form the framework for how this new economy will be organized and operate.

Preparing for success in this new economy will require leaders who are open to new ideas and who understand the challenges of transforming their approach to the future. Economic development must become comprehensive community transformation in order to address the following questions:

• How do you connect ideas, people, processes, and methods?
• How do you develop a culture in support of continuous innovation?
• How do you build new capacities for a new type of economic development involving as many citizens as possible with distributive intelligence?
• How do you create an environment for individualized, autonomous education and learning?
• How do you use mobile technologies to shift paradigms of governance?

And the list goes on.

Addressing these challenges is no small task for economic developers in collaboration with other community leaders. It will not be easy. There is no template, model, or standard operating procedure to guide the journey.

Since the profession first developed in the late nineteenth century, economic developers have primarily been focused on two functions: (1) attracting and expanding business and industry, and (2) more recently, business creation.

The Industrial Society brought with it the term jobs, so attracting jobs into the local community, region, state, or specific geographic boundary became the key focus of the economic developer. And thus it has been until more recently.

The profession rocked along for years until the weak signals of change in jobs provided per business relocation began to occur in the 1980s. Over the last 20 years, the number of jobs created per recruited business has declined.

Impacting this is the projection that, by 2015, only 4%–8% of all the jobs in the United States will be in manufacturing. Both the number of start-ups established per year and the number of jobs provided per start-up have fallen over the past 20 years, according to a 2011 Kauffman Foundation study, “Starting Smaller; Staying Smaller: America’s Slow Leak in Job Creation.”

The confluence of these and other trends and weak signals reflects a continuous shift to a more digital, entrepreneurial economy driven by collaborative networks. This Creative Molecular Economy will be defined by the following:

• New ways to access capital for start-ups.
• What we call a Future Forward Workforce, which is able to adapt to any of the three types of economies—Industrial, Knowledge, and Creative Molecular.
• An ability to identify weak signals about what the future holds.
• A broadband infrastructure capable of uploading and downloading massive amounts of data and streaming video.
• A new approach to learning that supports transformational thinking and action.
• The formation of interlocking networks to build momentum for new ideas, whether related to economics, education, or governance.
• Crowd-sourced innovation.

Reinventing Economic Development

The economic-development profession now has an opportunity to transform itself to meet the changing requirements of a Creative Molecular Economy.

The last 30 years in business and industry has focused on increasing productivity, lowering costs, and pushing for more consumption to drive economic growth. In that environment, economic developers could focus on competing with other places to attract, retain, and expand business within their specific geographic areas. This is done primarily through offering incentives to lower costs, providing necessary infrastructure, finding access to financing, and expanding worker training.

It was a natural fit for the special expertise needed in an economic system where specialization was the norm.

We are now moving into an age of dynamic connections and disconnections: The economic vitality and sustainability of any economic-development jurisdiction—be it a local area, region, or state—will be based on the agility and effectiveness of decision-making processes affecting the workforce, capital availability, and the educational system.

Hierarchies will give way to interlocking networks; standardized processes will give way to multiple methods; and the need for predictability will give way to finding comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty, allowing us to identify newly emerging patterns from apparent chaos.

Economic development will increasingly be about building parallel processes where different people and organizations work in deep collaboration to help each other succeed—not just in individual communities, but across the globe as well. True transformation will not occur unless many projects, programs, processes, and people are involved in a totally new system of dynamic, adaptive planning and execution.

This emerging context of a new society and economy offers—perhaps requires—economic developers who realize that only a system with processes of community transformation will provide a healthy economy, and that their local communities, by themselves, may not yet have the types of leaders who are able to build “capacities for transformation.”

It also requires economic developers who are truly visionaries. This means individuals who can move from a commercial culture centered on economic materialism to a transformational culture that fosters a healthy economy and society based on continuous innovation, openness, and collaborative interlocking networks.

So economic developers will now need to expand their focus beyond creating jobs to building better places in which to live, work, play, and run a business. And it means developing their citizens into a Future Forward Workforce—i.e., agile workers who can take advantage of opportunities anywhere in the world without abandoning their communities, and who can move in and out of the three types of economies at will.

From Place Marketing to Community Building

This Future Forward Workforce will be critical to sustainable economic health in future communities. Within the next 20 years, the largest corporation in the world may employ no more than 1,500 people, whose roles will be to facilitate networks of free agents and start-ups. By 2040, up to half of the workforce may be working from their homes for employers who may be on the other side of the world.

But these workers will still be shopping, playing, and raising their families in communities that depend on their individual vitality and viability.

Economic development will thus be as much about developing citizens, workers, and institutional structures that are able to adapt to constant change as it has been about the physical or cultural amenities that lure new factories or corporate headquarters away from other places. Instead, the goal will be to ensure that individuals develop the capacities they need to be involved with and adapt to a constantly changing economy based on creativity, deep collaboration, and connectivity.

Individuals in the Future Forward Workforce will become responsible for their own economic capacities, including:

• Committing to lifelong learning that is based on transformational ideas. This includes developing a personalized curriculum, asking appropriate questions, and connecting disparate ideas.
• Developing the ability to spot weak signals (becoming futurists).
• Innovating constantly and cultivating their imagination, intuition, and insight.

Communities can promote this Future Forward Workforce by promoting collaboration: Self-interest and community interest are one, because self-adaptive systems need to have individuals working together. The culture must promote continuous innovation—and foresight skills in recognizing and adapting to change.

Transformational Learning

A Future Forward Workforce needs to be able to adapt to constant change, so developing that capacity will require moving education systems beyond traditional educational theory and practices to transformational thinking and action. Community colleges will become even more important in creating a culture of continuous innovation in local communities.

Key ideas of Transformational Learning are:

• Identifying future trends and understanding their impact.
• Understanding the importance of being able to challenge traditional assumptions.
• Developing the skills of “and/both,” connective thinking to ensure the capacity for continuous innovation.
• Being open to new ideas and qualitative ways of thinking.
• Creating an environment for individualized, reciprocal learning.
• Knowing how to ask appropriate questions.
• Knowing how to see patterns and connections in apparently disparate ideas and factors.
• Knowing how to build transformative learning webs and networks capable of collaboration and innovation.
• Understanding how systems interconnect and how they create the need for individuals to help each other succeed.
• Developing the ability to listen differently to find value in what others are saying and knowing how to connect any idea to other knowledge in effective ways.
• Emphasizing how multiple learning styles can be utilized for continuous innovation.
• Creating a new system of evaluation that goes beyond standardized testing.

Mobile Networked Governance for the Creative Molecular Economy

Many local leaders are unfamiliar with trends and weak signals. As a result, they are not able to develop effective strategies for dealing with emerging issues.

Now, with the advent of smartphones, GPS systems, cloud computing, and more, citizens can instantly access and share knowledge and opinions with each other and with their governments—a phenomenon that will reshape how our society operates.

This eventually will lead to a new concept, “mobile networked governance.” Community leaders will develop knowledge-connection processes that harness the vast resources of disparate community members. We’ll soon see a shift from radical individualism to many new levels of deep collaboration. Ultimately, this mobile networked governance will be transformational, creating a new decision-making structure that engages as many people in the community as are interested.

Master Capacity Builders

Change is scary for many people, and something to be avoided if possible. As a result, leadership by economic developers is an absolute necessity to help communities understand the need to build capacities for a Creative Molecular Economy using the concepts and methods of comprehensive community transformation.

Growing beyond the context of our current economic development system, three levels of interlocking networks will emerge: regional, state/provincial, and national.

Within each are community-level collaborations. These areas can work both individually and in collaboration with others to promote systemic community transformation. As important, they can create interlocking networks of interested economic developers who are willing to become Master Capacity Builders, or Transformational Leaders.

Master Capacity Builders complement traditional leadership. Traditional leaders focus on concrete outcomes in the short run. Master Capacity Builders learn how to build capacities for transformation in people, groups, and communities, enabling them to adapt to constant change over the longer run.

Traditional leaders focus on projects, linear processes, and quantitative measurement. Master Capacity Builders focus on helping people learn how to shift their thinking, consider issues within a futures context, and build parallel processes so that true transformational change can emerge.

Looking Ahead

Economic developers who are a part of developing a culture of continuous innovation must be simultaneously involved in multiple concepts of economic development (including traditional business and industry attraction) as they learn this new approach to preparing local communities for a different kind of future.

There is no magic wand that will move us from old-school transactional economic development to the new world of never-ending transformation. Linking the two is a necessary transitional process. Economic developers have a critical opportunity and responsibility to make this happen.

The role of an economic developer is, itself, in transformation. No longer merely a recruiter of business and industry, a twenty-first-century economic developer will need to become a futurist as well as a facilitator of connections of ideas, people, and processes in comprehensive community transformation. As Christopher Meyer and Stan Davis argued in It’s Alive (Crown Business, 2003):

Connectivity in the environment has accelerated change and increased the volatility in the business environment. Business must respond with more rapid and varied adaptation, and will experience fewer periods of stability in which efficiency is the dominant source of economic health.

About Center for Communities of the Future

Founded by futurist Rick Smyre and based in North Carolina, the Center for Communities of the Future is a global network of individuals and community organizations collaborating to develop new tools for governance, economic development, education and learning, and leadership to improve citizens’ ability to cope with a rapidly changing world. For more information, visit www.communitiesofthefuture.org.

Contributors to this article include:

LaDene Bowen, associate director, Institute for Decision Making, Northern Iowa University, Cedar Falls, Iowa.

Ronnie Bryant, president, Charlotte Regional Partnership, Charlotte, North Carolina.

Jim Damicis, senior vice president, Camoin Associates, Scarborough, Maine.

Scott Gibbs, president, Economic Development Foundation of Rhode Island, Cumberland, Rhode Island.

Norma Owen, president, Avadon LLC, The Colony, Texas.

Rick Smyre, president, Center for Communities of the Future, Gastonia, North Carolina.

Mark Waterhouse, president, Garnet Consulting, Woodbury, Connecticut.

Creative Molecular Economy Innovation Model: McAllen, Texas

McAllen Chamber of Commerce Creative Molecular Economy Model

By Steve Ahlenius

Communities face numerous challenges when it comes to creating and attracting jobs, producing wealth, and fostering economic opportunity. Too many communities are caught in the trap of focusing on job relocation or industrial recruiting as the cornerstone for economic development.

McAllen, Texas, is taking a different approach based on the emergence of a Creative Molecular Economy (CME), a term and concept pioneered by the Center for Communities of the Future. The figure at right shows how the McAllen Chamber has transformed its approach for creating wealth and economic opportunity by developing a “bio system” of innovation. This new approach connects multiple ideas and programs to create small business economic development opportunities and a flywheel effect of momentum for the development of entrepreneurs, innovation, and small business start-ups able to compete in a global economy.

Of key importance is the creative use of networks, including a unique community called Inventors and Entrepreneur Network (I&E Network). A monthly meeting brings together inventors and business creators to connect and start “stuff.” Ideas that emerge from the I&E Network can be funded in two ways: through the chamber’s Innovation Grant Program (providing up to five $10,000 grants per year) and through the community’s business plan competition. These two sources fund start-up needs such as patent search, prototype development, market research, testing, and other services that can move an idea to a pre-launch stage.

The McAllen CME Innovation Model is unique in several ways. Prospective innovation applications and business plan competitors are required to complete two different phases of “venture ready” software that help the entrepreneurs assess their readiness for market. Once the assessment is complete, the ideas are ready for competition and selection. The process is competitive and based on viability and prospects for success. As products or ideas move forward, other funding sources are identified through crowd funding or local angel investor networks. The goal is to have ideas or products that have been polished and have a realistic chance to succeed or to get serious consideration for funding.

Another key part of the CME Innovation Model utilizes a business accelerator concept designed to get an idea developed or dropped quickly, before too much time and energy is spent. Entrepreneurs see this part of the process as critical for the chamber’s and program’s credibility. A Makers Faire will be added to this CME Innovation Model in 2012 to connect entrepreneurs, ideas, and emerging products more quickly.

Clients are encouraged to become comfortable with uncertainty, ambiguity, and nonlinear activities. Stops, starts, and changes in ideas and direction are central to this innovative process. Old rules are no longer applicable in today’s volatile global economy. In the future, economic success will be measured by how fast new opportunities can emerge from connecting and disconnecting people, ideas, and processes. If one looks beyond the horizon to find economic innovations for a Creative Molecular Economy, the leaders of McAllen, Texas, will be found.

Steve Ahlenius

is president of the McAllen, Texas, Chamber of Commerce, www.mcallenchamber.com.

Integrated and Innovative: The Future of Regions

By John M. Eger

Challenges facing city and regional governments today may spur a movement toward improving the creative resources of tomorrow’s citizens. Investing in the arts may help communities capitalize on shifting paradigms.

Creating a city of the future, for the future, is about organizing one’s community to reinvent itself for a knowledge-based economy and society. Citizens must be prepared to take ownership of their community, and the next generation of leaders and workers must be prepared to meet global challenges.

It will not be easy.

Now more than ever, business and industry are dependent upon an economic system that rewards innovation. Thus, at the heart of this effort to build more-creative communities is the recognition of the vital role that art and culture play in enhancing economic development.

A creative and innovative community is one that exploits the vital links among art, culture, and commerce. It consciously invests the human and financial resources necessary to prepare its citizens to meet the challenges of the rapidly evolving, postindustrial knowledge economy and society.

Almost 20 years ago, the city of San Diego put together a committee to launch a “city of the future” initiative. The committee members really didn’t know what a city of the future looked like, but they knew that fiber optics and having lots of bandwidth in the ground were key ingredients. So fiber optics and bandwidth were the foundation of the effort.

Today, with greater understanding of the challenges of the new global economy and knowledge of what it takes to succeed in the workplace of the future, we know it is not bandwidth in the ground that matters most. In fact, it is not technology at all, but the bandwidth in people’s heads that is important.

We also know now that, to have a creative community, cities and regions must have creative people. To have creative people, a city needs to nurture its youth and create a system of education that engenders the new thinking skills that business is now demanding. And it must provide the vibrant culture that is essential for attracting and retaining that innovative workforce.

In San Diego, arts and cultural organizations are credited with making it a “vibrant city,” according to a recently released city report. The 68 arts and culture organizations that received $5.8 million in funding stimulated the economy with more than $170 million in expenditures in 2011.

Regional Goals and Government Roles

Government has a vital role in building creative communities: It can promote affordable, accessible broadband, and it can enact land-use policies to develop creative economic clusters that include art districts, public art, museums, and other cultural institutions. Government can also embrace green initiatives, encouraging private-sector investments in enterprises that exemplify and foster the concept of sustainability.

Every region must make its community highly livable to attract, nurture, and retain the best and brightest. But a truly regional innovation community understands that:

• Globalization has changed life and work as we know it. Technology—particularly the Internet and the pervasive spread and influence of new media—has led to the emergence of a world where every nation is inextricably tied to every other, and where manufacturing and service-sector jobs are being outsourced or off-shored.
• Economies based on creativity and innovation also promote freedom, free enterprise, and entrepreneurship.
• Education must be reinvented to ensure that workforces are capable of succeeding in this new economy.
• Efficient, affordable, effective broadband infrastructures available to citizens, businesses, governments, schools, and the entire nonprofit sector are essential for economic survival and success.
• Metropolitan regions are the new centers of commerce. Cities and counties within regions must work together to compete in the global economy. Governmental planning and development, as well as the provision of vital public services, must be regional.

The Rise of Regions

Most people live in one jurisdiction, work in another, and play or dine in a third. They have no idea that the cost to them is enormous because of the duplication and waste, or that consolidating these activities in one place can save money. But more is at stake to communities than simply dollars or turf.

Most of the issues that communities now deal with are not just local: Reducing crime, energy consumption, water use, waste, and toxic emissions, while also making it easier for people to get around, are not the concerns of individual cities but of the whole region. Indeed, communities in metropolitan regions should be aggregating demand for such services and striking agreements with one another, and then negotiating with one of several providers to better serve the citizens of the entire region.

Technologies such as geographic information systems allow regions to strategically manage data and to consolidate and streamline all departmental operations, bringing new ways for people to do business and get more services online. In the future, citizens may never have to physically wait in line again.

By pushing the limits of electronic services, the government lays the foundation for a more robust private sector. “Green” initiatives, too, can set the stage for more sustainable community-wide services.

The new global knowledge economy, not to mention the current fiscal crisis, demands that governments rethink how to organize themselves to be most competitive. At a minimum, it means cities within a region (including the counties) ought to be jointly pursuing opportunities to operate services together. Fragmented governments struggle to provide even the most basic services.

Larger cities are experiencing the same problems, but the real loss is not simply municipal deficits; it is the loss of the metropolitan region to brand itself and create a forward-thinking economic development strategy.

Integrated regional economies will foster quality locales—vibrant downtowns, attractive town centers, and historic, older suburbs—that nurture creative human capital and robust financial capital and that contribute to sustainable, resource-efficient growth.

Not merging municipalities or certain basic services puts the prowess of a region at risk.

Developing Creative Regions

Involvement by the entire community—and region—will be needed to make meaningful and lasting changes. Engagement and collaboration of all citizens and institutions is critical. Public art, art integration, graffiti parks, art districts, museums, regional collaboration, civic engagement, and robust information infrastructures—all are important to the region of the future.

Today, understanding the challenges of the new global economy is critical. It demands that we renew and reinvent the places where we live, learn, and work. There is no alternative short of letting our communities atrophy and die.

A creative and innovative community can nurture, attract, and retain the talent we need to succeed in the new economy. Therefore, parents, politicians, policy makers, and businesses need to better understand the powerful role of the arts in nurturing creativity overall.

Does all creativity come from the arts? Of course not, but clearly we can improve the chances of nurturing creativity by investing in arts-based training. This is why STE(A)M​—adding arts to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—is so important. It is also why cities and regions must nurture creativity in young people by reinventing a system of education that values and promotes innovation and critical thinking.

“Arts learning experiences play a vital role in developing students’ capacities for critical thinking, creativity, imagination, and innovation,” observes Sandra Ruppert, president of Art Education Partnership. “These capacities are increasingly recognized as core skills and competencies all students need as part of a high-quality and complete 21st-century education.”

About the Author

John M. Eger holds the Van Deerlin Chair in Communications and Public Policy and is director of the Creative Economy Initiative at San Diego State University. His last article for THE FUTURIST, “Pleasure, Beauty, and Wonder: Educating for the Knowledge Age,” was published in the January-February 2011 issue. E-mail jeger@mail.sdsu.edu.

Revolutionary Health: Local Solutions for Global Health Problems

By Rick Docksai

Better health care doesn’t have to be costlier, as a number of innovative health practitioners are showing. In India, Venezuela, and elsewhere, the strategic use of technology, community involvement, and resource reallocations are enabling health-care providers to treat more patients more effectively, all while spending less money.

Health-care cost hikes and soaring demands for services loom worldwide. Countries everywhere grapple with how to provide more care with fewer resources. Glimpses of hope are around us, however. At the community level, innovative health practitioners are finding ways to extend treatment to unprecedented new numbers of patients. Even better, they are doing so without raising their costs of care.

Pay-What-You-Can Medicine In India

In 1976, Indian surgeon Govindappa Venkataswamy resolved to make eye surgery affordable for even the poorest Indians. Toward that end, he opened an eye clinic that year, which he dubbed Aravind. One monumental trait set this clinic apart from any other eye clinic in India or, for that matter, the world: It did not require patients to pay.

Since then, Venkataswamy has expanded his one clinic into five and built a 3,200-person cadre of clinicians and nurses to run them. Like the first Aravind clinic, they make their services available to all who need them, regardless of income. Each clinic has separate wings—some wings for the middle-class patients who can pay in full, and others for the lower-income and destitute patients who cannot. The same doctors work in both. Patients may pay what they are able to, or not pay at all, if necessary. Roughly one-third pay nothing at all. Because about half of the patients pay in full, however, Aravind has money to set aside to provide free services for those who cannot.

To this network of clinics, Aravind later added a manufacturing facility. It is internationally certified and distributes transplant lenses to millions of patients in 120 countries. The lens price is about $10, a tiny fraction of the $150 that a typical lens would cost.

Despite charging so little for its products and services, Aravind exhibits remarkable fiscal solvency. Not one Aravind hospital receives even a rupee of private charity, public aid, or foreign funding. In 2009-2010, according to Forbes magazine, Aravind accumulated $29 million in revenues and ran a surplus of $13 million.

Its clinics thrive by constantly identifying the most-efficient means to perform every last task. A surgeon’s salary is delinked from patient load—pay is based on results, not on procedures. Also, management routinely reviews every doctor’s clinical protocols and any tests or medications that he or she has prescribed, in order to make sure that no doctor is ordering more tests or treatments than necessary. As a corollary, Aravind’s physicians accept lower earnings than most practitioners in their fields. They receive fixed salaries with no bonuses for seeing extra patients or performing extra tests. On the other hand, they also carry far fewer debts: 90% of them complete their training at Aravind itself, not at medical schools.

That is not to say that Aravind doctors are less capable than their formally trained counterparts. Their patients on average fare even better, post-treatment, than patients who obtain similar services in Britain’s hospital system, according to the charity-rating service Givewell. Some of this success may be attributable to positive peer pressure. The Aravind clinics compile weekly spreadsheets detailing each practitioner’s patient case, actions taken, and outcome. All personnel review each other’s data to learn lessons wherever possible, identify and solve any problems, and spur each other to do better.

The Aravind clinics also do not permit cost cutting to be a pretext for denying services or curbing time spent with patients. An Aravind surgeon conducts an average of 2,000 cataract surgeries a year, far above the typical Indian surgeon’s average of 400 and the typical U.S. surgeon’s average of 200. “Assembly-line” processes help to expedite patient intake by cutting the lag time between operations: Whereas a typical surgeon in India takes 15 minutes to shift from concluding an operation on one patient to commencing an operation on another, most Aravind surgeons move from the first patient to the next in just one to three minutes. Venkatesh Rangaraj, one of Aravind’s higher-volume surgeons, completes 100 cataract operations a day, averaging 3.5 minutes per case.

“Health care delivery in much of the world is fundamentally driven by the notion of limitation—an underlying assumption that there is simply not enough to go around for everybody’s needs. That its model defied this notion (even in the years when its own resources were scarce) is perhaps Aravind’s most potent and paradoxical quality,” write Pavithra K. Mehta and Suchitra Shenoy in their book, Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the World’s Greatest Business Case for Compassion (Berrett-Koehler, 2011).

Health professionals throughout India have taken note. Over the last decade, hundreds of Indian hospitals have personally consulted with Aravind and made efforts to emulate the Aravind mission. It is a far more admirable model, for sure, than U.S. hospitals, where patients on Medicaid and Medicare are being turned away because the doctors will not accept the programs’ low reimbursement rates. Discounted services are not yet an accepted course of action in the U.S. system. They are now in India, thanks to Aravind pointing the way.

A Larger-Scale Hospital Model

One Aravind-like model is now bringing low-cost cardiac treatment to India’s poor. The first Narayana Hrudayalaya hospital, founded in Bangalore, India, in 2001 by Devi Shetty, ramped up patient intake to levels unheard of in most of the industrialized world. Whereas the average U.S. hospital has 160 beds, this hospital has 1,000. In 2008, its team of 42 surgeons completed 3,174 cardiac bypass surgeries, more than twice the 1,367 that the prestigious U.S. hospital Cleveland Clinic did that same year. And whereas the Children’s Hospital in Boston operated on 1,026 children patients in 2008, the surgeons at Narayana Hrudayalaya operated on 2,777.

Like those at Aravind, the Narayana Hrudatalaya physicians work more hours than any of their counterparts in the United States. Shetty’s surgeons perform two to three procedures daily, six days a week, and work 60 to 70 hours a week, compared with a typical U.S. surgeon’s workload of one or two procedures a day, five days a week, and 60 hours a week.

Some skeptics might expect Shetty’s surgeons to suffer exhaustion from these huge case loads, and for their work quality to consequently drop. Yet this is not the case. The mortality rate for the first 30 days following coronary artery bypass surgery at Narayana Hrudayalaya was 1.4%, compared with 1.9% in the United States, according to the Society of Thoracic Surgeons. Jack Lewin, chief executive of the American College of Cardiology, who visited the facility in 2009, argues that the Indian hospital’s rate is all the more impressive, since its patient population has generally far less basic care than an American population and typically arrive at the hospital with their cardiac conditions at more severe and acute stages.

Lewin stated further that the high volumes at which the hospital sees patients are actually a great way to improve quality of care. Any given surgeon there operates on far more patients, so he or she naturally acquires more skill and expertise. Also, as Lewin noted, the high patient traffic leads to each of the hospital’s doctors focusing on one or two specific types of cardiac surgeries and becoming masters at those particular treatments. By contrast, according to Lewin, an average U.S. or Indian hospital does not see enough patients per day for any one surgeon to focus exclusively on any one or two types of heart procedures. Narayana Hrudayalaya now performs more heart surgeries than any hospital on Earth.

Shetty’s bulk-production method also substantially cuts costs. Building-maintenance expenses are lower, after all, given that more patients and personnel consolidate under one roof. Also, they require less equipment: Each machine that Shetty buys goes into use 15 to 20 times a day, versus the three or four times a day that is the norm in most U.S. hospitals.

The cost savings go directly to the patients. A cardiac bypass operation costs around $2,000 at Shetty’s facility, for instance, compared with $5,000 at an average private Indian hospital and between $20,000 and $40,000 at a U.S. hospital. This puts Narayana Hrudayalaya’s services within reach of struggling low-income Indian families.

Since $2,000 is still a large sum for most low-income families, Shetty helped the Indian state Karnataka organize a farmers’ insurance plan several years ago. The plan, one that now enrolls a third of his patients, costs each enrollee $3 a year and reimburses the hospital $1,200 for every cardiac surgery. The break-even cost per operation is $1,500, but the hospital makes up the $300 difference by charging slightly more to the patients not enrolled in the plan: 40% of the nonenrolled patients in the general ward pay $2,400 each; an additional 30% of wealthier patients who choose private or semi-private rooms pay as much as $5,000.

Shetty has since expanded Narayana Hrudayalaya into a network of 12 hospitals located throughout India, and he has plans for five more upcoming, including one for the Cayman Islands. This latter location will likely attract high numbers of U.S. patients, stated a November 2009 Wall Street Journal feature that approvingly called Shetty “the Henry Ford of heart surgery.” The article lauded his record-breaking productivity, which it said “offers insights for countries worldwide that are struggling with soaring medical costs, including the U.S. as it debates major health-care overhaul.” The article noted that the Cayman Islands site is a one-hour plane ride from Miami, Florida, and its procedures would be half the price or less of the same services at U.S. hospitals.

Shetty’s hospitals are reaching out to volumes of patients beyond India, or even the Cayman Islands, by way of another huge cost-saving medical trend: telemedicine. Narayana Hrudayalaya sets yet another medical record as the world’s largest telemedicine provider, courtesy of its array of 800 satellite centers, distributed throughout Malaysia, Pakistan, and 24 other countries. Shetty’s telemedicine outreach began with videoconference facilities through which he would interface with residents of remote towns and villages in rural India. Mobile teams could travel to patients who needed work done in person and then relay the results—both electrocardiograms (electric monitoring of heart activity) and angiograms (imaging of blood vessels and organs) could be transmitted over fiber-optic and satellite links.

“In a country where a bus ticket to the nearest hospital can cost a month’s wages, tele-consultations provide a low-cost solution for Indians who do not have access to medical specialists,” writes the Economist magazine’s Economist Intelligence Unit, adding that satellite link-ups have been enabling Narayana Hrudayalaya to serve many patients in sub-Saharan Africa since February 2009.

The hospital has conducted more than 30,000 tele-consultations so far. Yet Shetty has more progress to make: He intends to take on mobile telemedicine in years to come.

Community-Centered Medicine in Latin America

As journalist Steve Brouwer observes in Revolutionary Doctors (Monthly Review Press, 2011), quality medical care had been far too costly for working-class and lower-income Venezuelans in the twentieth century, and overly concentrated in major urban centers.

In 1998, President-elect Hugo Chávez set out to close the accessibility gap. In 2003, with extensive financial and personnel support from Cuba, he unfurled Misión Barrio Adentro (“Mission Within the Neighborhood”), a long-term plan to construct clinics, pharmacies, and other types of medical centers in communities across Venezuela for citizens to receive free health services from doctors living in their own neighborhoods. Visitors at any one could receive checkups, a variety of basic treatments, and advice on healthy living. Another array of diagnostic centers, also distributed throughout at-need communities, would offer surgeries, 24-hour diagnostics, and intensive care, all free of charge.

To open clinics, Cuban envoys visited the Venezuelan neighborhoods and conferred with the community groups on places to house the doctors and to operate dispensaries. All arrangements took place in open-forum meetings, with townspeople actively involved. Community people would continue to be active participants in the clinics’ administration and operations. They would also be a large segment of its workforce. As clinics opened up, residents took up training to be “health supporters” who would assist the doctors and nurses with their daily workloads.

In each community, a health committee—a popularly elected board that coordinates on community health matters—would advise and assist the clinic each step of the way. Thus the clinics operated with strong support from local leaders. Clinics also enjoyed staunch support from the residents themselves, and understandably so: The doctors made themselves available 24 hours a day and routinely made house calls, efforts unheard of among traditional health workers. Anecdotes even tell of high-crime communities where police presence was generally lacking, but clinics were able to work in safety, thanks to community groups volunteering to protect them.

Further clinic–community interaction would take place during the “health parties”—community social events, including sports and cultural events, that promote health. All parties take place with heavy participation from groups within the communities, such as youth groups, groups of grandparents, and addiction-recovery support groups.

“Because the existence of Barrio Adentro relies on community organization, it is undeniable that the program has created a new space for political participation and activism that has forcefully extended throughout Venezuela. … The lives of many have taken paths that will be hard to reverse,” wrote Arachu Castro, assistant professor of social medicine at Harvard University, in a paper for ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America.

The emphasis on preventive care also makes Barrio Adentro significant. The clinics act as a first line of care that tackles multiple health risk factors before they morph into acute conditions that require costly hospitalizations.

Barrio Adentro has borne its share of setbacks. Staff shortages set in, due in part to the established doctors’ associations shunning it. For political reasons—some traditional doctors viewed Barrio Adentro as a rival, and many were suspicious of communist Cuba’s involvement in the project—numerous doctors’ associations went so far as to forbid their members from applying for jobs at its clinics. Economic setbacks before and during the 2008 global financial crisis likewise cut hard into the Barrio Adentro bottom line. Approximately half of the clinics initially built were shut down, and many more laid off staff and cut back hours of operation.

But the mission continued. In 2004-2005, the program conducted more than 150 million consultations—four times as many as did Venezuela’s conventional outpatient services. And in 2008, Venezuela achieved universal vaccination for the first time, affirmed Mirta Rosas, director of the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), during a visit to Caracas. Today, nearly 900 clinics are still running and are continuing an expansion of health-care availability that is nothing less than historic: Nearly 100% of the Venezuelan public now has access to health care.

In 2006, PAHO reported the significant improvement Venezuela made in 2004-2005 on diagnosing hypertension, ischemic heart disease, diabetes, cerebrovascular disease, and bronchial asthma—all thanks to Barrio Adentro, as Venezuela’s conventional health systems showed no improvement on diagnosing these five conditions during this time period. More importantly, the report found much progress on provision of post-diagnosis monitoring and follow-up for these five conditions.

UNICEF, meanwhile, reports progress on a range of key health indicators. Between 2000 and 2009, Venezuela’s infant mortality rate fell from 27 per 1,000 births to 15 (beating Brazil and Colombia). The mortality rate among children under age 5 fell from 32 to 17 per 1,000 (trumping Brazil, Colombia, and Peru), and the adult mortality rate fell from 148 to 146 (edging out both Brazil and Colombia).

Nor is the program prohibitively expensive. Venezuela’s health expenditures now stand at 9% of the government budget, which is low for Latin America. Even Henrique Capriles Radonski, Chávez’s conservative rival in the 2012 Venezuelan presidential election, has stated that he will keep the mission in place because it “belongs to the people.”

Cost-Savvier Consumers in North America

Consumers in the United States can lower their medical bills if they bargain for it, according to John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis. In a February 2012 Health Care Blog article, he describes the online service Medibid, on which visitors who need specific medical procedures can search for hospitals that offer them and then contact the hospitals to request price bids and estimates. The hospitals retrieve the individuals’ medical records and have them fill out medical questionnaires. Any one visitor can receive as many bids as he or she pleases and then select one.

Medibid’s users can cut their health-care costs in half through such bidding processes, according to Goodman. The site arranged for more than 50 knee replacements in 2011. Each replacement averaged around $12,000; that is a third of what a private insurance company would normally pay and half of what Medicare would pay. Medibid also led to 66 colonoscopies in 2011, running at an average of $500 to $800 each—about half of what a patient would ordinarily pay. Other Medibid transactions in 2011 included 45 knee and shoulder arthroscopic surgeries, averaging $4,000 to $5,000, and 33 hernia repairs at an average of $3,500 each.

One does not have to log onto Medibid to strike a better deal, however. Goodman notes that virtually any patient who is willing to travel to another city or state can locate a hospital that is willing to perform a procedure at a discount rate. There are even companies that connect patients with bargain procedures in medical facilities outside their immediate geographic areas. For example, North American Surgery, whose clientele include many Canadians looking for surgical procedures in U.S. facilities, negotiates the price of knee replacements down to $16,000–$19,000.

“The implications of all this are staggering. The United States is supposed to have the most expensive medical care found anywhere. Yet many U.S. hospitals are able to offer traveling patients package prices that are competitive with the prices charged by top-rated medical tourist facilities in such places as India, Thailand and Singapore,” Goodman writes.

Prospects for Resuscitating Health Care around the World

These success stories show local health teams learning to do more while using less. They run against the grain of health-care policy making at the national levels in their respective countries. Throughout the democratic world, national lawmakers’ general track records on health care entail doing the same (or less) while using more and more. The result is an upward trajectory of costs that experts across the globe warn is unsustainable.

Debate abounds over how Europe’s democracies will keep their health initiatives funded. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development projects that, whereas the European Union’s member nations spent 8% of GDP on health in 2000, they will spend 14% in 2030, with further percent increases in the decades that follow. Aging populations, combined with the rising costs of new medical technologies and medical R&D, keep pushing the price of care upwards. Germany’s health system alone ran a $6 billion deficit in 2011. Great Britain’s National Health Service is so strained to rein in its budget deficits, according to the Guardian, that British hospitals have been laying off personnel and reducing the numbers of surgeries, much to the grief of patients.

The U.S. health-care system is in even worse shape. It spends more than any nation on health and has a ballooning health budget crisis to show for it: Health spending eats up 16% of U.S. GDP and grows an estimated 3% a year. Not that the United States gets excellent health results in return—the country lags most of the industrialized world in life expectancy, infant and child mortality, and incidence of cancer and heart disease, as the World Health Organization and other international research bodies have duly recorded.

The correlation of a country’s health expenditures to health outcomes is actually pretty weak. Many countries that spend comparatively paltry sums on health care turn out to have some of the healthiest populations on the planet, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit. Compare Russia, which has above-average numbers of doctors and hospital beds, with Chile, where doctors and hospital beds are both scarce. Chileans are, on average, immensely healthier in every key respect.

It’s often said that throwing money at a problem doesn’t solve it. That holds profoundly true in the health-care arena. As Aravind, Medibid, and other innovative models amply show, better health does not hinge upon societies pouring ever-larger sums of capital into health care, but rather, upon societies making best use of the health-care resources that they already have.

About the Author

Rick Docksai is assistant editor of THE FUTURIST and World Future Review. Email rdocksai@wfs.org.

Preview of Future Inventions—Futurists: BetaLaunch 2012

By Kenneth J. Moore

The World Future Society’s second annual innovation competition will allow WorldFuture 2012 attendees to preview a few of the life-changing and society-altering artifacts of the future.

The future is open to infinite possibilities for innovative thinkers. Those who have been selected to showcase their work at the World Future Society’s annual conference, WorldFuture 2012: Dream. Design. Develop. Deliver, have put their creative efforts into solving a wide range of problems, from accelerating the gene-sequencing process to comforting sick children during life-saving treatments.

The technologies and social innovations featured below are winners of the second Futurists: BetaLaunch (F:BL) invention expo, a “petting zoo” where WorldFuture attendees can interact with artifacts from the future and engage with the exhibitors.

• Senstore. Senstore is taking advantage of exponential developments in sensors, wireless connectivity, and artificial intelligence to provide access to health care from anywhere. Senstore is developing a home diagnostic device—a medical tricorder—with intuitive AI interactions and continuous monitoring of biometric data.
• The Cyberhero League by Evolutionary Guidance Media R&D. Most children want to help other people, animals, and the environment—but they don’t know where or how to begin. The Cyberhero League is a social platform that will enable children to act digitally to help others around the world.
  A child earns points through games and other activities, and uses those points for charitable gifts that supply emergency relief supplies (food, water, and medicine), support wildlife conservation, and protect the environment. As Cyberheroes, kids will have the power to change the world while learning about environmental stewardship and social responsibility.
• The BiliSuit by i3 BioDesigns. The birth of a new child is a joyous occasion—but millions of babies each year are born with a common but serious jaundice condition, requiring extended hospital stays in an isolette tank for the child or mobility-constraining home treatments.
  The BiliSuit is a form-fitting garment that delivers life-saving treatment through an LED and fiber-optic delivery system. The suit is reusable and its battery can be recharged with solar energy, so it can be used in remote locations with limited access to electricity—such as rural areas in Asia.
• ZED.TO by The Mission Business. The Mission Business has developed an immersive, cross-platform entertainment strategy that combines foresight and education with transmedia events, fiction, and theatrical panache to thrill audiences. The first event, ZED.TO, will play out in real life and online over the course of months to explore critical uncertainties in technology and social values.

• Filabot by Rocknail Specialties. A tool designed to make home 3-D printing cheaper and more environmentally friendly, Filabot (pictured left) is a desktop extruding system that grinds various plastics to make spools of filament for 3-D printers. Filabot can process milk jugs, soda bottles, and other types of plastics—as well as bad prints, turning what would be waste into usable filament for future prints.

• ComposeTheFuture. This free, integrated social network focuses on futurist members’ interests in future predictions, goal setting, scenario planning, and impact analysis. The network will enable futurists around the world to collaborate on issues and work toward achieving goals. Check out the interview with Compose The Future founder Brian Merritt here.
• Strategic Foresight & Innovation program at OCAD University. This program trains students to address complex, socially important issues through designing for creative social futures. The program instills the spirit of technological foresight and long-horizon innovation into new foresight thinkers through a combination of innovation practice, systems thinking, design leadership, and social research.
• Ion Proton Sequencer by Life Technologies. The Ion Proton Sequencer, featured in the May-June 2012 issue of THE FUTURIST as a Consumer Electronics Show pick and pictured here, offers affordable whole-human-genome sequencing in just hours instead of days or weeks. The Ion Proton Sequencer sequences DNA on a small semiconductor chip rather than using standard large, expensive optical-based instrumentation.
• B-TEMIA. To get people on their feet, B-TEMIA has developed a wearable dermoskeleton that restores, maintains, or enhances mobility. With military and medical applications, the dermoskeleton increases a person’s biomechanical capabilities and assists movement without impeding natural walking patterns.

For more information about WorldFuture 2012 and links to all of the Futurists: BetaLaunch exhibitors, visit www.wfs.org/worldfuture-2012.

About the Author

Kenneth J. Moore is a contributing writer for THE FUTURIST and communications assistant for the World Future Society.

Tomorrow in Brief

Bullets That Change Direction on the Fly

When fired from a rifle, most bullets spiral through the air like a football, thus making it impossible to adjust their trajectory. Now, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed a bullet that can be fired without the spin, allowing it to change directions in mid-flight.

The bullets include an optical sensor in the nose that guides the projectiles to their laser-targeted destination. Tiny fins enable the bullet to fly without spinning, like a dart, and actuators allow the fins to alter the bullet’s trajectory to hit its target.

Potential markets for the “self-guided bullets” include the military, law enforcement, and recreational shooters, according to Sandia.

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

Licorice Root May Combat Diabetes

picture of licorice root

Already highly regarded as a medicinal plant, licorice root may soon add anti-diabetic effects to its repertoire of healing powers.

Licorice root contains amorfrutins, which reduce blood sugar, are anti-inflammatory, and are well tolerated by users, according to researchers at Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. In addition, the substances help prevent fatty liver, a common disease caused by excessively fat-rich diets.

While adding licorice to one’s diet may be a sweet temptation, researchers caution that this is not a cure for diabetes; rather, the amorfrutins must be extracted and produced in appropriate concentrations in order to be beneficial.

Source: Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, www.mpg.de.

WordBuzz: Upcycling

photo of upcycling entrepreneurs ­Alejandro Velez (left) and Nikhil Arora

Upcycling is recycling’s more creative, enterprising, and upscale cousin—a phenomenon that represents a confluence of entrepreneurship, environmentalism, and the DIY or “maker” trend.

Per Wikipedia, the term has been around since the early 1990s to describe the process of recycling used stuff into better stuff. (Downcycling, by contrast, also recycles used or wasted materials, but the resulting products do not have high commercial value.)

The concept gained popularity with the 2011 publication of craft master Danny Seo’s how-to book Upcycling: Create Beautiful Things with the Stuff You Already Have (Running Press). But the potential for entrepreneurial opportunities in upcycling are limited only by imagination, as Good magazine notes in a recent story about urban farmers growing gourmet mushrooms out of used coffee grounds.

Future Scope

Progress against E-Waste

photo of facility for recycling electronic products

Recycling of consumer electronics products increased by 53% from 2010 to 2011, netting 460 million pounds of discarded gadgets, reports the Consumer Electronics Association. The number of electronics drop-off sites across the United States also increased, from 5,000 to 7,500.

The average U.S. household owns about 25 different consumer electronics devices, but a pervasive desire for the next new thing results in a rapid turnover of products—and a potential landfill nightmare.

The association’s eCycling Leadership Initiative has set a goal of recycling 1 billion pounds of electronics by 2016—the equivalent of an NFL football stadium full of material. The goal is to increase collection options and improve consumer awareness of the availability of eCycling collection sites.

Source: Consumer Electronics Association, www.ce.org.

Futurists and Their Ideas—Change Masters: Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.

By Edward Cornish

Pioneering business futurists explain how they have developed the art and science of trend analysis.

Under the leadership of Arnold Brown and Edie Weiner, the futurist consulting firm of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., has been a pioneer in identifying and analyzing the changes that affect business and other aspects of human life. This article explains how they developed trend analysis as a business tool.

Back in the 1960s, insurance companies in North America became alarmed at the turmoil and violence then shaking the world. Young people were rioting. War raged in Vietnam and elsewhere. Several nations threatened each other with atomic bombs. And in the midst of the uncertainty, assassins killed U.S. President John F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

The insurance companies recognized that they faced colossal liabilities to their policy holders. (The liability for a single death typically runs into many thousands of dollars.) The companies also feared that the U.S. government might institute a nationwide insurance program financed by taxpayers. If that were to happen, it could wipe out the traditional insurance business overnight.

Faced with this uncertainty, the Institute of Life Insurance in New York City assigned Arnold Brown, a recent graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, to collect and disseminate information about what was happening in the world that might affect the insurance business.

Brown knew little about life insurance, but he quickly set out to discover what was happening in the world that might affect the insurers.

“I knew that large insurance companies already had a lot of information about social change, thanks to the extensive public-opinion research they did,” says Brown. “So it seemed to me that the problem was not a lack of information. It was not knowing how to use the information that was available.”

At about this time, Brown came across a book on “environmental scanning” by Harvard Business School professor Frank Aguilar. Intrigued, Brown went to see Aguilar and explored with him how his concept could be implemented. He put together an advisory committee of insurance executives and social scientists to help create what would become the insurance industry’s Trend Analysis Program.

“I started with some specific ideas,” says Brown. “The work should be objective, avoiding bias; it should be linked to action—not just an academic exercise—and it should involve the people in the life insurance business at all levels, because I knew that the only way to get people to act on information about change is to have them develop the information themselves!”

The committee then decided to monitor publications in a systematic manner and prepare abstracts of relevant items. The abstracts would then be analyzed by a group that would identify specific implications for the life insurance business and report the findings to a more senior group, which would develop recommendations for action.

A Major Innovation

When Brown and his colleagues launched the Trend Analysis Program in 1969, it was the first systematic environmental scanning effort in American business, and it was an immediate success!

The following year, Edie Weiner, who had just graduated from the City College of New York, came to work for the Institute in its research department under Hal Edrich.

“Edie joined the team I had put together,” Brown recalls, “and it was immediately apparent that she was exceptionally talented and had an amazing gift for futurism. I moved her up to the analysis group very quickly. A couple of years later, when I became a senior executive and could not devote the necessary time to the Trend Analysis Program, it was turned over to Edie, who was then only 23.”

Early on, the Trend Analysis Program began to get attention beyond the insurance business. Brown and Ian Wilson, a futurist at General Electric’s New York headquarters, formed a small group of business futurists who met periodically to discuss methods and problems.

“We were written up in publications such as the Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review,” Brown recalls. “People from many companies wanted our information and came to visit us.”

In 1977, the Institute of Life Insurance decided to move to Washington, D.C. Says Brown: “Edie, Hal Edrich, and I did not want to go, so we decided to start a consulting firm to help organizations do scanning, using the Trend Analysis Program, which had, by then, become widely accepted.”

Since then, Weiner and Brown have also collaborated on several insightful and popular business trend books: Supermanaging: How to Harness Change for Personal and Organization Success (McGraw-Hill, 1984), Office Biology or Why Tuesday Is Your Most Productive Day and Other Relevant Facts for Survival in the Workplace (Master Media, 1994), Insider’s Guide to the Future (Bottom Line, 1997), and FutureThink: How to Think Clearly in a Time of Change (Pearson-Prentice Hall, 2006).

Today, bolstered by the talents of Jared Weiner (Edie’s son and a World Future Society board member) and Erica Orange as vice presidents, the Weiner, Edrich, Brown consultancy serves businesses of all types. All four principals have become enormously popular as speakers at World Future Society conferences and will be presenting at WorldFuture 2012 in Toronto this July.

About the Author

Edward Cornish is the founding editor of THE FUTURIST and futurist-in-residence for the World Future Society. E-mail ecornish@wfs.org.

Knowledge of Evolution Is Power

Evolving: The Human Effect and Why It Matters

Evolution did not just take place in humanity’s past, according to Utah Valley University geneticist Daniel Fairbanks. He argues that it is occurring and shaping human life now, and that it will continue to do so.

Fairbanks summarizes the existing knowledge of human evolution and the evidence for it, including discoveries about the human genome. We obtain a wealth of information about our evolutionary past from our DNA, he says, and he expects medicine to consult DNA all the more in the future. The costs of DNA testing are dropping precipitously, and they may become nearly universal, thus allowing for early detection and treatment or prevention of a wide range of disorders.

Fairbanks also describes how evolution continues. Species all around us mutate all the time, especially at the microbial level. We still evolve, too. New chromosome arrangements frequently appear in humans.

Fairbanks strongly hopes that our knowledge of evolutionary processes will continue to expand. Knowledge of evolution has already led to many beneficial innovations. For example, observation of microbes’ evolution aided the creation of vaccines for swine flu and other new diseases. Also, by studying the evolution of plant species, one research group created a synthetic version of an anti-cancer chemical that is found within a certain plant.

Humanity faces many challenges to its own evolutionary future: population growth, limited food and water supplies, and the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and viruses, as well as crop-killing pests and weeds that withstand pesticides. The more we know of evolution, the more adept we will be to counter the challenges.

Fairbanks discusses immensely complex areas of science in remarkably approachable, reader-friendly prose. All readers who value science and human welfare will likely enjoy this primer on evolution and future research thereof.

The Leaders Who Make The Future

Managing the Future: A Guide to Forecasting and Strategic Planning in the 21st Century

The market for futurists is strong and will grow stronger, according to Futuring Associates LLC founder Stephen Millett. He looks forward to more companies hiring more specialists in trend tracking, analysis, and strategic foresight to help them avoid repeats of the 2007-2008 recession. Demand will be especially great for predictive analytics—i.e., large-scale data mining, modeling and simulation, pattern recognition, and game theory—and in qualitative trend analyses and alternative futures, which convey stories about the possible and likely futures.

Companies will not necessarily hire more futurist consultants, however. Rather, they will expect their staff to possess the skills of foresight and visioning. Managers will increasingly need to be their own futurists, adept at forming sound expectations, anticipating new developments, and managing the future. They will need to be “visionary leaders,” who identify and actively create their own futures.

Role models of visionary leadership already exist, according to Millett: Bill Gates is a visionary leader, as were the two brothers-in-law who launched Procter & Gamble. Millett outlines the characteristics that set visionary leaders apart and that aspiring managers should emulate if they, too, want to take command of their and their organizations’ futures. He also describes activities and exercises that they can use to engage all organizational members in the vision and change processes.

Millett describes many of the future changes that may greatly impact both organizational leaders and futurists. Each camp will find much to discuss, ponder, and possibly act upon in Managing the Future.

Alternatives to Alternative Energy

Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism (Our Sustainable Future)

Pursuing new alternative-energy technologies is fine and good, but society will not resolve its energy troubles unless it changes the underlying problem of energy and resource overuse, argues University of California–Berkeley visiting scholar Ozzie Zehner.

He suspects that heavy investment into solar energy, wind energy, and other renewable systems may actually set us back, since it leaves us with less capital and lower motivation to pursue other energy strategies that work better.

Zehner examines all the best-known alternative-energy sources—solar, wind, nuclear, hydrogen, hydro power, geothermal, and clean coal—and explains why each one is demonstrably incapable of displacing fossil fuels. He notes further that many of them emit greenhouse gases of their own, drain exorbitant amounts of natural resources, and drive up society’s overall demand for more energy.

If our goal is to cut back on fossil-fuel use, then we cannot rely on renewable energy to achieve it, he concludes. His advice: Get rid of public subsidies for renewable energy, and focus on reducing energy use. Installing more energy-efficient lighting and construction, for example, or building “walkable” communities in which people live close enough to retail and services that they do not need to drive to them, would all benefit human society and the Earth more than new arrays of photovoltaic solar panels or wind farms. So would controlling population growth and mass consumerism, he adds, two major drivers of increased energy demand.

Green Illusions is a somewhat iconoclastic look at the global energy crisis. Renewable-energy advocates and critics both will find much to debate and discuss.

[Editor’s note: Ozzie Zehner’s article “Nuclear Power’s Unsettled Future” was published in the March-April 2012 issue of THE FUTURIST.]

A Future-Driven Life Adventure

Memories of the Future

From troubled youth to pioneering futures scholar, acclaimed futurist Wendell Bell takes readers through his life’s highs and lows in this candid new memoir.

What do growing up in an alcoholism-plagued household, laboring for minimum wage in a warehouse, and flying an airplane through tropical storms have to do with the future? A lot, according to Wendell Bell, a Yale University sociologist and futurist whose life story incorporates many such tales. What some people would see as rough patches, he sees as lessons in planning ahead, and as opportunities to envision and create better outcomes.

“I achieved many of my hopes and failed to achieve some others, and I avoided many of my fears (such as becoming a severely injured or dead navy pilot; a life-long warehouseman, agricultural worker, or insurance salesman; or a drunkard or a university president),” he writes.

Bell is renowned for establishing futures studies at Yale and for writing a collection of books and articles on humanity’s long-term outlook, including the two-volume Foundations of Futures Studies. In this autobiography, Bell recounts the life journey that brought him into academia and foresight. He relates the adversities that challenged him, the people and places that inspired him, and the special significance that “images of the future”—notions of what might come to pass, and what one might do about it—hold for him and, truly, for all of us.

“Such images are dynamic determinants and motivators of our actions,” he writes. “Although most images of the future may fall like the dead leaves of autumn, some fall like seeds on fertile ground and grow into the tall trees of the future.”

Bell’s beginning was not auspicious. Alcohol abuse afflicted his family, and his memories of childhood are checkered with scenes of spousal abuse, police interventions, and the spring afternoon when his mother and grandmother took him with them across the country to start a new life without his binge-drinking father and grandfather.

But there were positives among the negatives. Books and ideas inspired him, and so did the kind stepfather, Sharkey, who sat and listened to the young Wendell rattle off at length about Buddhism, individualism, and the other concepts that he was discovering through reading.

The first few years after high school offered less in the way of inspiration. Having enlisted in the Navy but waiting to be called up for active duty, he took up stints clearing warehouse floors for United Grocers. It was drab work that wore down those who made their living by it, and Bell’s brief sojourn in it stiffened his resolve to attain a better life.

The Navy did call him up, and he became a pilot assigned to patrols in the Philippine Sea. Squadron command would have him fly planes into typhoons to observe their trajectories and intensity, so to alert ships and bases in their paths. Bell attributes his later futurist work, in part, to these missions.

“I had witnessed the importance of foresight and early warning—in this case, to prevent damage and loss of life by knowing some small aspect of the probable future,” he writes.

He returned ashore to attend Fresno State College, where he also met his wife, Lora-Lee Edwards. A doctorate in sociology at UCLA followed. Bell then proceeded to teach classes at UCLA, Stanford, and Northwestern universities and to work as a visiting fellow at Australian National University in Canberra.

He also lived in Jamaica during its early-1960s transition to independence from Great Britain. His experiences there were a springboard for his launch of the UCLA West Indies Study Program, which he served as director while extensively researching Jamaica and training students from the United States and the Caribbean islands to do the same. His studies were respected enough that CIA agents periodically consulted him on his findings.

Yale was another professional high point for Wendell Bell. He was the chair of sociology, and in this position, he introduced futures-studies courses. He also launched an African American Studies Program and helped transform the all-male and culturally White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant institution into an internationally minded one with women and minority students and faculty.

Bell also fondly remembers the 1980 “First Global Conference on the Future,” which the World Future Society co-hosted in Toronto with the Canadian Association for Futures Studies. He devotes several pages to this conference, at which he delivered two presentations, and writes of the luminaries who attended and of the zeitgeist of intellectual enthusiasm that permeated the event.

“People excitedly talked to one another, agreeing, disagreeing, or taking off together in flights of imagination,” he writes. “Some, as I had done some years earlier, came out and said it, ‘I am a futurist!’”

Bell details all of these career highlights, and most readers will find them impressive. His narrations of braving danger and hardships in the Navy and of surviving an often-rocky childhood likewise command admiration.

However, other details of Bell’s memoir put him in a less-flattering light. Readers may be surprised, for instance, by Bell’s admissions of alcohol abuse, which he only in later years curbed to moderate consumption.

“I remember being amused by some of the supercilious, antiestablishment, countercultural things people, including me, said or did under its [alcohol’s] influence,” he writes. “Later in life, I realized how unhealthy drinking to excess was and what asinine behavior it could cause.”

Bell speaks unreservedly about many episodes that other memoir writers might leave out for vanity’s sake: among them, rowdy after-hours get-togethers with warehouse workers, which included visits to a brothel, and casual romantic flings in young adulthood, one of which produced an out-of-wedlock child with whom he lost contact.

Readers get the full story of Bell’s life. He presents his strengths of character alongside his shortcomings; his triumphs are backlit by his setbacks.

Most people appreciate a great life story that brims with meaning and purpose. Such is the life of Wendell Bell as he relates it, unsparingly and, at times, even unflatteringly, in Memories of the Future.

About the Reviewer

Rick Docksai is an assistant editor of THE FUTURIST and of World Future Review.

Shakeups in the "C Suite": Hail to the New Chiefs

portrait of Geoffrey Colon

By Geoffrey Colon

How technology is altering corporate jobs and creating new community relationships.

When Facebook announced its new timeline for brands format, one of my friends in advertising commented, “Wow, if you think about it, in one fell swoop, Facebook has basically elevated the Community Manager role as the most important job function at any agency, large or small.”

I thought about it for a second and realized that what my friend was saying was correct. Technological innovation has empowered corporate community managers—who were once the servants of creative directors, strategists, and planners—to become true brand gurus. The masters of Facebook realized that the power in a brand page had always been driven by the community manager. No longer simply a Web page to maintain, an organization’s Facebook presence creates a narrative, an advertisement that is also a relatable story.

Businesses 35 years ago barely had marketing departments. Most relied on sales departments to do that job. The title of chief marketing officer (CMO) is relatively new; it became necessary when companies needed a “voice of the consumer” working internally. So now as social communities grow and flourish, the role of community manager will become commonplace.

New job title creation happens every few years as technological shifts force changes in work functions. Here are a few more additions to the “C Suite” that we might anticipate as technological and economic trends shape the corporate future.

• Earned Media Officer, or EMO, will be one new role. We’ve been hearing a lot in recent years about the “Paid, Owned, Earned” model of marketing. (Examples: magazine ads are “paid,” Web sites are “owned,” and word-of-mouth buzz is “earned.”) Many companies want to move away from the “paid” silo and strictly operate in the “owned” and “earned” areas. Buying a TV commercial based on impressions (how many viewers might be watching—but also might be ignoring) makes little sense when a company can get customer engagement for half the price in an earned environment. Example: having a home-made video contest for the company’s Facebook fans and featuring the winner on its official Web site.
  This is why Procter & Gamble cut several thousand traditional marketing jobs recently. Its attitude is, why pay for something that we can get free? However, it is still an illusion that earned media is a free channel. Once companies realize that earned media is the dominant business model moving forward, the EMO will be in charge of exploiting this fact and pushing earned media impressions and engagement.
• Chief Content Officer, or CCO, will emerge as marketing moves from the creation of 60-second television spots to the development of rich content for various social channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Tumblr. The CCO will work hand-in-hand with community managers to see that they are getting the right type of content for the brand they oversee for all the channels in which they need to publish. I see many former film producers, magazine publishers, and photographers fitting nicely into this role, as long as they have a handle on the emerging media landscape.
• Open-Source Manager, or OSM, would collaborate and share best practices with outside companies. In the future, the title and role of CEO will have much less credibility as Wall Street is drained of its power. As a result, an executive who works both internally and externally with open-source talent to find the best solutions will become a key player. Future companies will all be open sourced and focused on building a better standard of living. As a result, a CEO whose primary focus is to earn capital and return investment to shareholders won’t be necessary.
• Chief Linguist may be a new role that doesn’t replace anyone but is necessary to interpret how people speak within the world of social networks. We’re used to interpreting shorthand expressions like LOL, BRB, IDK, and BTW (laughing out loud; be right back; I don’t know; by the way). As future generations only learn to type within a 140-character limit, new slang will emerge, and it will be up to the linguist to configure the best way to communicate with the company’s audience.
• Chief Data Scientist will replace the chief marketing officer or the chief digital officer. Neither CMOs nor CDOs have enough analytical skill to understand what to do with the emergence of big data. As a result, mathematicians who can crunch data to make sense of human behavior will replace C-suite titles that have less grasp of math or simply build digital strategies. In the future, it will be more important to interpret behavior that will be measured via analytics. It won’t be enough to simply plot a digital course of action. One must execute the action, code it, create it, and interpret its impacts.

Even if we see these job titles emerge, how long will they last in the shifting workplace? As we move away from military-style hierarchies toward flattened, cooperative systems, the collaborative, open source, work-from-anywhere landscape could put even these titles out of commission. Only the future can tell.

Geoffrey Colon is vice president of Social@Ogilvy (http://social.ogilvy.com) and editor of the Futurist Lab on Tumblr (http://futuristlab.tumblr.com).

Harvesting Vehicles’ Waste Heat

An innovative car-exhaust mechanism could raise cars’ energy efficiency by 20%.

Most of gasoline’s stored energy never actually powers a single car, according to General Motors (GM) researchers. Half to three-fourths of gas energy is lost as waste heat spilling out of the cars’ tailpipes. But GM and competitors BMW and Ford are all separately working on ways to capture that heat energy before it leaves the tailpipe and convert it back into mechanical energy that the cars can use.

“You’ve got a lot of this waste heat. Let’s try to turn it into a mechanical heat and put it to work,” says Jeffrey Brown, vice president of Dynalloy Inc.

Dynalloy is helping GM design a thermal recovery system that would be installed near a car’s exhaust system and use the escaping heat to generate enough electricity to fully power the car’s radio or air-conditioning. The system consists of a thin belt of nickel-titanium alloy that loops around three pulleys to form a triangle. One corner of the triangle lies close to the thermal exhaust system, where it is very hot; another corner is farther away, where it is cooler.

The belt automatically expands and contracts in response to changes in temperature: Heat makes it tighten up, while cold causes it to loosen. So as the different areas of the belt are exposed alternately to blasts of hot and cool air, the belt moves along and turns the three pulleys, which in turn move a shaft that drives a generator. The more heat that strikes the belt, the more electricity the generator creates.

“It uses low-grade waste heat that can’t be used in a conventional motor,” says Alan L. Browne, a GM Technical Fellow and one of the project’s leading team members. “We’re just harvesting this stuff that is otherwise being dumped into the environment.”

The U.S. Department of Energy awarded GM an $8 million contract for waste-heat recovery R&D this year. Ford and BMW are working separately with partner firm BSST.

“This is one of many [waste-heat recovery concepts] that are being explored, but it’s also the newest boy on the block. And right now, we are now producing some outputs that are looking very competitive,” says Browne.

So far, a 10-gram strand yields 2 watts, enough to power a small nightlight. That would amount to harvesting 4% or 5% more energy. Since the typical combustion engine’s energy yield is now just 25%, that would constitute a 20% overall energy-efficiency increase.

“It’s not tremendous, but the impact is huge, because it’s all for free, because it’s heat that’s currently lost,” Browne notes, adding that further refinements could bring up the energy yield even more.

Diesel trucks are also prime candidates for waste-heat recovery systems, according to Browne. He also foresees the systems going into use in farm vehicles such as tractors.

“In farm areas or other rural areas where fuel is hard to bring out there, you could potentially make a pump out of it,” he says. “It’s hard to bring power to anyplace out in the bush.”

Browne sees even bigger opportunities in public mass transit. Subway trains get much more use than cars, after all, with the miles of rail line that they pass back and forth every day. Every mile of rail could go to generating heat that could be turned into mechanical energy.

Cars are driven sporadically—perhaps an hour or two a day—but it would be better to have the heat engine continuously; trains would get more output. “Your cost factor for the waste-heat recovery system goes down if it’s on a train,” says Browne. “You’d be getting much more life cycle energy out of them than out of a car.”

Other mechanical structures besides vehicles might eventually deploy waste-heat recovery mechanisms, too, according to Jan Aase, director of GM’s Vehicle Development Research Lab. He speculates that oil pipelines or fuel stations, for instance, could use them to collect some of their machines’ waste heat.

“That’s more of an aspirational concept,” says Aase, who estimates that any application of the technology will be at least another five to 10 years in the making. The energy output will have to significantly increase, and the production costs lowered, before GM and other companies will want to use it. They are working toward a near-term goal of 200 milliwatts per gram of material.

“We’re hopeful but cautious at this point. The economics has to work, and the packaging has to work,” says Aase.—Rick Docksai

Sources: Interviews with Jeffrey Brown, Dynalloy Inc., www.dynalloy.com; Jan Aase, Vehicle Development Research Laboratory, GM, www.gm.com; Alan L. Browne, Technical Fellow, GM R&D, www.gm.com/ design-technology.

Whose Economy Is It, Anyway?

Power, Inc.: The Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government- —and the Reckoning That Lies Ahead

Public-sector versus private-sector interests—it’s a power struggle that has been waged through history, only to enter a whole new stage in recent years, according to Carnegie Endowment for International Peace scholar David Rothkopf.

The earliest nation-states gave rise to commercial markets and then strove over centuries to nurture them while restraining entrepreneurial greed. Over the centuries since, Rothkopf notes, governments erred by going either too far or not far enough in their oversight of markets. By the same token, societies suffered when government and business leaders became too close and protected each other instead of the public good.

The stakes have been rising since the 1970s, Rothkopf argues. The power of private interests has grown while that of governments has shrunk to smaller than ever before. Corporations effectively shape lawmaking through lobbyists or evade national laws altogether by going multinational.

Meanwhile, major corporations hold bigger financial reserves than most countries’ GDPs. In fact, government-issued currencies now hold only marginal value: The combined value of all of the world’s currencies is only a small fraction of the cumulative value of the world’s securities and derivatives, market instruments that are scarcely regulated or even understood.

As the private sectors have gained clout, income inequalities have widened worldwide. Rothkopf expects that the disparities will grow, and that more social tensions and business–government squabbles will likely follow.

Businesses and governments must both evolve, he concludes. We will need new attitudes and ideas, ever-greater collaboration among nations, stronger mechanisms of global governance, and better business–government partnerships. The private and public sectors need each other, and a healthy society needs both.

Rothkopf extensively portrays where the world’s political and economic systems have come from and where they are going. Readers with an interest in the dynamics of public and private sector interactions will find Power, Inc. a worthy read.

Biofuels Miss the Mark—So Far

portrait of Wallace Tyner

Meeting U.S. goals for biofuels will require new land-use and incentive policies.

To securely meet its future energy needs, the United States passed in 2007 the Energy Independence & Security Act (EISA), setting benchmarks for sustainable, renewable energy production through biofuels development. But biofuels benchmarks are flying past unmet, and bioenergy’s development is being delayed by sticker shock. Meeting those targets and securing the energy supply in the United States will require rethinking of the current energy market.

“America’s addiction to foreign oil has had a significant impact on our economy and our national security,” says Bob Dinneen, president and chief executive officer of the Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol fuel trade group. “The only effective strategy for improving U.S. energy security has been the Renewable Fuels Standard” of 2005, which was updated by EISA. Since the RFS was enacted, Dinneen says, the long-term trend of increasing dependence on oil imports has reversed in the United States.

Ethanol fuel has made headway in establishing better energy security for the nation, but it still must be blended with conventional oil fuels. So other home-grown fuel options are needed to help secure the energy future.

EISA has set a goal for U.S. biofuels production at 36 billion gallons by 2022, two-thirds of which should be non-cornstarch-derived biofuels made primarily from cellulosic materials such as harvest residue. But, five years after the policy was put into place, there are no commercially viable biorefineries to convert cellulosic feedstock into fuel, which will make it challenging to meet EISA’s 2012 production benchmark of 500 million gallons. The production goal of 250 million gallons in 2011 similarly slipped by unmet.

A recent article in the American Chemical Society’s journal Environmental Science & Technology looked at the goals set by EISA to determine the amount of harvestable land that would realistically be needed to meet those biofuels production goals.

“Most previous studies have overestimated the bioenergy potential of the U.S. by using only a handful of field-measured yield values to calculate average yield potential, which is then applied over large regions,” says William Smith of the University of Montana, the article’s lead author. The EISA benchmarks are based on assumptions of maximum yield potential over all land considered to be available for bioenergy production.

Smith and his colleagues analyzed satellite data that integrates climate and vegetation dynamics to quantify terrestrial biomass growth capacity—land’s ability to grow plants—of the contiguous United States. They took a best-case-scenario approach, conservatively accounting for unavailable land such as protected land and wetland to maximize their estimate of land available for biofuels production.

Even with that best-case-scenario approach, the researchers determined that potential yields are much lower than the estimates used by EISA. To meet the policy’s bioenergy goals, extensive redistribution of currently managed land or massive expansion of farmland would be needed: 80% of current agricultural land would have to be directed toward biofuels, or 60% of current rangeland would have to be converted for biofuel agriculture. That conversion would incur significant fossil-fuel inputs, reduced productivity and greenhouse-gas-sequestering abilities of the land, and additional strain on already stressed waterways and aquifers used for irrigation.

Even if land were converted for use in biofuels production to meet EISA targets, “large-scale cellulosic ethanol production remains unavailable due to the difficulties associated with converting cellulose to a usable form,” Smith says. “This removes a very large pool of biomass from consideration—for example, crop and forestry residues—and places the entire EISA biofuel target on starch ethanol, which is mainly derived from corn grains in the United States.”

To succeed, the cellulosic biofuels industry needs incentives to cover the gap between what biorefineries can afford and what biomass suppliers can accept, suggests the 2011 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report “Renewable Fuel Standard: Potential Economic and Environmental Effects of U.S. Biofuel Policy.” Until a barrel of oil reaches almost $200, the cellulosic market won’t be economically feasible without subsidies or other government support, the report says. And without that economic incentive to build a market, the technological advances needed will be slow in coming.

“The major barrier to biofuels is that the uncertainty is too high for most investors,” says Purdue University agricultural economist Wallace E. Tyner, co-chair of the committee that wrote the NAS report. The government can play a role in mitigating that economic uncertainty through certain incentives, but “biofuels alone will not provide energy security,” he says. “We can be independent of OPEC oil if we want, but we will have to pay the price. Renewables, at least in the medium term, will be more expensive than crude oil.”—Kenneth J. Moore

Sources: Bob Dinneen, Renewable Fuels Association, www.ethanolrfa.org.

William Smith, University of Montana, www.umt.edu. The paper “Bioenergy Potential of the United States Constrained by Satellite Observations of Existing Productivity” was published in Environmental Science & Technology, 46, 2012.

Wallace E. Tyner, Purdue University, Department of Agricultural Economics, www.ag.purdue.edu.

Defusing the Megacity "Bomb"

The Real Population Bomb: Megacities, Global Security & the Map of the Future

The most urban growth this century will take place in countries that are least prepared for it, warn defense experts P. H. Liotta and James F. Miskel. The authors foresee serious implications for the whole globe.

By 2025, the world will have 27 megacities with populations exceeding 10 million. A great number will lie within northern Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, China, and Indochina—a zone where urban poverty and squalor already run rampant. As these megacities continue expanding, they will inflict severe environmental pollution and become havens for terrorism and organized crime. Those dangerous elements will eventually spread outwards, potentially destabilizing entire states and regions.

The authors note that, in 1968, biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, in which he predicted that mass starvation would befall cities later in the twentieth century as a consequence of overpopulation. Although the century ended without Ehrlich’s predictions coming to pass, Liotta and Miskel expect that the twenty-first century might see him vindicated as cities drain their resource bases. The problem is not world population growth per se, but nonstop migration into megacities. This urbanization is the “real population bomb.”

The authors call on world leaders, nonprofit activists, and businesses to dispense more aid—under strict oversight—to the developing world’s megacities, and to assist their development of law enforcement and civil institutions. All aid mechanisms should undergo reforms to make them more targeted and more responsive to conditions on the ground, and, when necessary, the UN or other development organizations might temporarily take over a megacity’s administration to oversee critical fixes.

The Real Population Bomb is a persuasive and powerfully written call to action. Urban planners, antipoverty specialists, and anyone concerned about the state of the world will find it informative and instructive.

Waterways to Connect Communities

A program to develop rivers and lakes will promote local stewardship and tourism.

A new National Water Trails System aims to increase community access to water-based outdoor recreation. At the same time, the restoration of local waterways will promote tourism and economic development through encouraging an ethic of stewardship, according to U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

Like what the national trail systems have done for hikers, bikers, and other outdoor enthusiasts, national water trails would provide more recreational opportunities for water lovers such as kayakers, rafters, and anglers.

“Rivers, lakes, and other waterways are the lifeblood of our communities, connecting us to our environment, our culture, our economy, and our way of life,” Salazar said in announcing the first national water trail, Georgia’s Chattahoochee River. The river provides most of Atlanta’s drinking water, and the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area provides more than 65% of the Atlanta metro area’s public greenspace.

Designating waterways as part of the National Water Trail could be hindered by the costs associated with developing recreational facilities, notes Dan Foster, the National Park Service superintendent in charge of the Niobrara National Scenic River in Nebraska. He told the Lincoln Journal Star that a national water trail designation could benefit the local economy but also tax it “if people are not ready to take care of visitations.”

Land ownership issues in the areas designated as part of the water trail also concern Foster. The required public access points will mean negotiating contracts of at least 10 years with landowners. He points out that landowners themselves could simply create their own access to the river and charge fees to the public.

The National Water Trails System joins other initiatives of the National Trails System act of 1968, which includes the National Recreation Trails, National Scenic Trails, and National Historic Trails.

Waterways that are designated will be provided signage, technical assistance, and resources required to develop the trails, according to the Interior Department, and the Army Corps for Civil Works will team with local partners in development projects.—Cynthia G. Wagner

Sources: U.S. Department of the Interior, www.doi.gov. National Trails System, www.nps.gov/nts/.

“Scenic Niobrara River Could Be Candidate for National Water Trails System” by Algis J. Laukaitis, Lincoln Journal Star (April 7, 2012).

Doing Right By Robots

Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents series)

The rise of intelligent robots is inevitable, but we must not rush it, caution this volume’s 27 authors, whose areas of expertise range from philosophy and global affairs to cybernetics and computer programming. The authors call for serious societal discussion into how to ensure that thinking robots will not harm us and that, likewise, we will not misuse them.

For instance, militaries around the world are developing armed vehicles that will kill human targets without human instruction. Many military leaders worry that such robots will have a hard time distinguishing combatants from innocent civilians. Also, a country that has these machines might be more inclined to go to war.

On the civilian side, who is liable when a self-driving vehicle causes a traffic accident, or when a self-propelled lawnmower drives over someone’s foot? The manufacturer might claim no fault, in either case: It was the robot’s “mistake.”

Will “intelligent” robots know right from wrong? We will need to program morality into them and educate them on everyday nuances.

There is also the matter of robot companions. Consumers could buy personal robots to be their caregivers, pets, servants, and even sexual partners. How will we feel when people befriend these machines, or even fall in love with them? Also, what rights would personal robots possess?

The authors encourage us to think over these questions while robotic intelligence is still in development. We can make sure that intelligent robots do more help and less harm if we form social mores, professional codes, and regulations in advance.

Robot Ethics combines technology, philosophy, and sociology into one deep and varied discussion. Enthusiasts of any of these fields, and anyone else who is just curious about where artificial intelligence is heading, will find much to like.

Sensing Brain Injuries

Smarter helmets could lead to rapid detection of concussions.

The year is 2015; the new quarterback for the Clairmont High School Gladiators is about to attempt a 20-yard pass. He arches his arm, but before he can throw he’s sacked by a 300-pound defensive lineman from the opposing Washington Tigers. There’s a hush in the stands as the QB lies immobile on the 30-yard line. It was a hard hit. Finally, he rises to his feet, and the crowd erupts in applause. He prepares for the next snap, but he stops as the coach and a team of paramedics rush the field.

Unbeknownst to the quarterback, a sensor in his helmet has detected an abnormality in his brain-wave activity, indicating a concussion. He is led from the field. The Gladiators lose the game, but the young quarterback is spared a far worse injury and is able to play again later (much against his mother’s wishes).

Hashem Ashrafiuon, an engineering professor at Villanova University, is working on a sensor headset system to make the above scenario a reality. The system he’s developing—with colleagues from Brain Computer Interface Inc. and Wisconsin University—uses a single electrode to measure electromagnetic brain waves, or EEG. The data is transmitted via Bluetooth.

Ashrafiuon hopes this system will soon replace the conventional impact tests that high-school sports programs use to determine head injury. In these tests, players are asked a series of memory questions before they’re allowed to play sports. This establishes a baseline. When a player receives a brutal hit, he or she is asked a similar set of memory questions. A change in responses can indicate concussion.

“Not very scientific, in my opinion,” Ashrafiuon says of the test.

Getting actual brain-wave readings immediately after impact is essential to detecting brain damage because concussion symptoms can vanish quickly. “The sooner we can get an EEG recording, the better our estimate of [the impact’s] severity should be,” he tells THE FUTURIST.

Ashrafiuon expresses optimism that the headset will be used to diagnose concussion soon. The system has already been used for early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.

“Brain EEG is simply a signal,” he says. “It has frequency content or wavelength just like radio waves. Alzheimer’s disease patients generally start losing ‘power’ in some of the higher frequency bands and have instead more ‘power’ in lower frequency bands.”

Other potential uses for the headset monitor include early detection of posttraumatic stress disorder and autism.

—Patrick Tucker

Source: Hashem Ashrafiuon, Villanova University, www.villanova.edu.