It has been a wild ride of a century full of expected wonders. Molecular manufacturing became a reality well before 2050, turning all sorts of once-valuable materials into commodities, and yes, we even eventually got flying cars.
But the century also with came a rich harvest of utterly unexpected surprises and the stubborn persistence of some things we thought had been left behind in the twentieth century. Here are a few of the outcomes you never guessed back in 2012:
The result is a new societal divide between the chronological haves and have-nots: The wealthy “old turtles” move at a stately pace, making long-term plans, while the “may-fly” poor die out decades earlier. It has created vexing issues around the distribution of wealth and power.
We also stopped counting Earth-like planet discoveries early in the twenty-first century, but astoundingly, we still have no clear evidence of ETs—extraterrestrial life forms that we can communicate with—despite a century of searching. Perhaps the answer to Fermi’s question (“Where are they?”) might be an existentially unnerving realization that we are terribly, profoundly alone. This could, of course, change tomorrow, but in the meantime, we can at least talk to our robots and the countless AIs haunting the global noosphere.
The astonishing consequence has been a religious resurgence. In 2020, science’s relentless explanatory logic had believers on the run, but in the decades that followed, it became clear that an ever stranger, more capacious universe had ample room for the divine, the spiritual, the mystical, and the mysterious.
The result has been a repeat of Jasper’s Axial Age on a smaller scale, as new belief systems have proliferated. Many of your late-twentieth-century cults are all respectable and spruced up, and Atheism itself has become a mainstream faith, complete with its own rituals. It all seems a bit less than rational, but like Bohr’s horseshoe (“I am told that it will bring good luck whether or not I believe in it”), it gives us comfort as we look out over the giddying vastness that is the frontier of the twenty-second century.
Paul Saffo is a forecaster with more than two decades of experience exploring the dynamics of large-scale, long-term change. He is managing director of foresight at Discern Analytics, www.discern.com.
It is five minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve at the end of the last day of the twenty-first century. In Dar es Salaam, one of the wealthiest cities in the United States of Southern Africa (USSA), revelers from across the region have traveled on the Trans-Africa high-speed train network to witness the arrival of the new century at a massive fireworks display and international gathering in East Africa’s “harbor of peace.”
Wearing a variety of light, thermo-regulated fabrics in bright, fashionable colors, party-goers and families mill around in droves at the city’s popular waterfront overlooking the Indian Ocean, its warm waters an ancient conduit of intercontinental trade.
Dignitaries include the prime minister of China; diplomats from IndiaStan, the European Federation, and Amerinada; and the UN Secretary-General. The reason for their high-profile visit, hosted by the aging president of USSA, Nelson Bandigwa, is that the city has been chosen as a UN Beacon of Progress for the first year of the twenty-second century. As the fireworks leap suddenly into the sky at the stroke of midnight, President Bandigwa smiles to himself and then quietly sheds a tear.
Nelson Bandigwa was born in 2012; by the time he turned 10, in 2022, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) became a confederation to govern the blossoming regional common market spearheaded by South Africa and its neighbors.
In his youth, Bandigwa watched his region gradually unite, as many of its nations benefited from increased intra-African trade and infrastructure development. These vital projects included construction of extensive rail networks and large-scale hydroelectric schemes in Zambia near the famed Victoria Falls and on the banks of the mighty Congo River.
While the world passed from the Industrial Era to a new eco-scientific era after Peak Oil, Africa became a hotbed of solar-energy technology. The shift from a fossil fuel–based economy to a lower energy order based on renewables suited Africa well. The transition gradually reduced violent conflicts over dwindling resources. Nevertheless, periodic struggles over water broke out, as well as ongoing conflicts with radical Islamic and environmental groups using terror. In the wake of the new energy order, an epoch of greater general peace evolved in Africa.
President Bandigwa looked into the sky and continued to watch the fireworks through glazed eyes. Tonight, his heart felt full of years and memories of a century that had witnessed the creation of USSA and the rise of three new global superpowers: China, Brazil, and India (later called India-Stan after the unification with Pakistan following a tragic nuclear confrontation in 2028).
Africa’s time to take the center of the world stage had arrived by mid-century. The continent’s progress had taken a long and painful journey characterized by waves of development, such as the Consumer Revolution and Youth Bulge of 2000-2015, followed by the era of big infrastructure building, urbanization, and regional integration (2005-2035) and Africa’s own Green Revolution (2015-2030).
Periods of migrations to Southern Africa occurred as northern peoples sought warmer climes, escaping harsh winters when energy prices were escalating and fuel supplies were diminishing.
In addition, there had been immigrations of peoples from the overpopulated East, especially from demographically skewed China, resulting in millions of Asian settlers on the continent, a significant portion of whom intermarried with local Africans to produce a new race of Sino-Africans. This created an African urban melting pot, leading to increased diversity and cultural dynamism. Yet, the tight-knit extended family traditions of Africa were preserved throughout this time of accelerating growth and cultural diversification.
As a former professor of history, Bandigwa believed the biggest catalyst for his region’s rise to power had been its science-inspired Knowledge Renaissance of 2020-2050. In this time, the number of universities, colleges, and technical schools in the territory had more than tripled. The USSA’s leadership grew in such fields as solar energy, hydroelectricity, agriculture, food science, astronomy, and archaeology.
The nation had also developed new systems of long-term underground disposal of low-level nuclear waste in wildernesses created by climate-change induced drought, paving the way for safer deployment of nuclear power. The Southern African Space Agency (SASA) had produced several astronauts who had worked on international space stations and one of whom had been chosen for a mission of the Global Space Agency (GSA) to test the viability of establishing a human settlement in caves of Mars where water had been discovered.
Throughout Bandigwa’s lifetime, the United States of Southern Africa had been a leader in one of the world’s biggest businesses: tourism. Particularly successful were eco-tourism, archaeo-tourism, and the wildly popular sport of nonlethal hunting using sedation darts instead of live ammunition.
And finally, building on the work of the Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, and on peoples’ innate spirit of Ubuntu, USSA had become widely respected around the world for its expertise in conflict resolution and the practice of racial and religious harmony.
President Bandigwa’s tear at midnight had been an expression, more than anything else, of pride for how Africa had overcome the historic humiliations that once haunted the continent.
About the author:Michael Lee is founder and chairman of the Southern African Chapter of the World Future Society (www.wfs-sa.com). He is CEO of ATMIA (www.atmia.com), a global trade association with more than 2,600 members in 60 countries. His forthcoming book, Knowing our Future, will be published November 2012 in the UK.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Happy 2100!
Now it’s really time to reflect and try to decide what’s next for me. I’m young—88 in a few months—but still it never hurts to take stock, especially in this Brave New World. I’ve heard that phrase somewhere before. Anyway, it’s really true today. Who would have thought I’d be one of the few predominantly humans left on Earth?
Old Ray Kurzweil may have sounded like a prophet a century ago, but he was so far off. He believed there’d be only 20,000 years of progress in the twenty-first century. It’s been more like a million years of progress. It sure floored me; in fact, it left me so far behind, my kind is pretty much irrelevant.
All my friends have become chimeras or cyborgs or even robots. Most have actually opted for transhumanism, or that new term, universalist—getting all traces of human out of the equation. If I’m going to exist another thousand years or so, I’ve got to get with the program. I’ve wasted way too much time fighting the inevitable. What good are civil liberties and species pride if your species is extinct?
I’m still in good standing with the underground, but there are only a few hundred of us left worldwide. Since many in the group have turned down the latest life-prolonging technology, humanity is truly a dying breed. We were warned that the smart machines would inherit the earth, but we didn’t realize it would be our choice to hasten the day by implanting every hot new neurochip into our bodies until we became more robot than human.
I rue the day I took that first step—acquiring 20 languages instantly in just one cheap nanochip. From there, it was a slippery slope to adding chips that increased lower body strength, chips that stored quadrillions of data bits with nanospeed retrieval; a chip here, a chip there, everywhere a new chip.
Now I’ve got to make some decisions and make them fast. I may only have minutes, even seconds, to decide about these life-altering changes, to choose who (or what) I want to be next, how long, and what’s after that.
To have any chance of keeping up, I’m going to have to leapfrog over a further-enhanced cyborg, transhuman, or even universalist and go directly to cloud master. Even if I don’t have it all figured out, I’ll get additional time to think once I’m a cloud dweller.
With my total memory reduced to a powerful nanochip and my environment-polluting organic body discarded, I can reside in the wireless cloud as long as I need. If I choose, I can be implanted in a robot or virtual body to give me some mobility and sensing experiences.
Who knows? I may like it enough to spend eternity in this utopian dream. Maybe, but.….
Gene Stephens is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina. He continues to teach and write about the future, specializing in public safety. He is also THE FUTURIST’s Criminal Justice contributing editor and a consulting futurist. He can be reached at stephens-gene@sc.rr.com.
I’m now 88, but it is something completely different from what it used to be in your days. This is probably the biggest change: We don’t have to get old and die.
Already when I was born, the concept of rejuvenation was understood in theory: We knew what needs to be done at cell level. It took some time to make it happen also in practice. Now, to stay young is actually cheaper than to get old.
Accidents do still happen, but re-growing organs was perfected already in the 2050s. It’s a self-service society up to the finish line. It is up to you to shuffle off your own mortal coil.
You may have considered the population explosion of your time intolerable, so what happens when people stop both dying and losing their fertility?
The problem used to be that people squandered resources and there was not enough food. Actually, there would have been enough food if people had had money for it. Both these problems were expressions of primitive technology. The Sun provides us with more energy than we can ever think of using, and the Earth is practically a closed system. We only have to reorganize these 15-billion-year-old atoms to suit whatever we need.
We have no “pension age,” nor do we have pensions. On the other hand, there are no 9-to-5 jobs, either. You do not need human labor for what can be programmed. All our contributions have something to do with creativity. There are still scientists, artists, architects, and chefs.
Professional sports, alas, lost their appeal when the enhanced athletes conquered the field.
The politicians also welcomed longevity with open arms. You can tax it.
Jouni J. Särkijärvi is an architect, former director general of Finland’s Ministry of the Environment, and former member of the Parliament of Finland. Email jouni.sarkijarvi@pp.inet.fi.
Hi. I’m Daeng, an emeritus biocultural ethicist. Each month I work my allocated 10 hours for the FinanceLab hubbed here in Moscow, a “resilient” city with a populace approaching 21 million.
FinanceLab has managed all non peer-to-peer transactions and flows for our region since the global banking meltdown mid-century. My job is cool, although I would love to meet more people and listen to their stories, rather than interact with them via my webscreen.
Because of the extreme heat, it’s simply too dangerous to venture out much. My main companion is DAO. As a fifth-generation personalized clone, DAO is able to access the totality of documented human knowledge, answer any question I pose, and tend to all my requests. But she’s not really into hugging or intimacy, which I miss.
I grow my own food using permaculture techniques I learned from Mum after Dad died. At least I can be sure my diet doesn’t contain unwanted additives, which is a luxury few people can afford these days. I value my health and my fitness. Besides, tending to my small wall bioshelter is very gratifying.
After all these years, I still occasionally yearn for some grilled chicken or a pork green curry—what Asian person would not? But after the great contagion of 2038, which killed over 2 billion people in a matter of weeks, most meat production in Greater Europe was banned. I really don’t fancy the artificial equivalents, though they look and taste authentic enough.
Being born of a Thai mother and an Australian father, I grew up in what seemed to me at the time to be the most idyllic cosmopolitan city in the world. Bangkok is under water now, of course, and most of the tropics are just too hot to inhabit. Singapore still endures, but who would want to live in such a tightly gated, artificial enclave? I need to feel free, to breathe fresh air, even if my movements are somewhat constrained.
I often wonder what might have happened had the scientists’ warnings about climate change been heeded. But when the storms came, it was far too late. It all happened so quickly. Wealthy people simply moved. The poor suffered. So many people died from lack of water, disease, or starvation—although we are still refused access to the precise figures.
After many relationships, like many people of my generation, I now live alone—the result of us being encouraged not to parent children or to make too many friends on iWeb for fear of identity theft. Not that I mind. I feel no attachment or loyalty to this place.
And so today, as I record this message for Jez—my only child, whom I’ve never met—I celebrate my 88th birthday. It is Saturday, June 12. The year is 2100. My geneticist tells me to expect death 11 years from now. I am ready. I have seen and lived through so much.
About the author:Richard David Hames is founding director of the Asian Foresight Institute in Bangkok and the author of The Five Literacies of Global Leadership. Web site www.richardhames.com.
Geonautics was the name of the spaceship traveling between Cosmos and Earth. They would be approaching their destination today. One by one, all geonauts came into the conference room for the briefing.
Ayanda was looking out of the window, her thoughts circling around the question of what to expect this time during her visit to Mumbai-II, when the commander’s voice reached her: “When we come to pick you up again I expect every team to have got out at least 10% more from every GEP—just to make this very clear.”
Initially, Cosmos had only been planned as platform for transplanetary journeys. But when the fight for survival had assumed super-human dimensions on Planet Earth, and when survival outside protective establishments had become impossible, Cosmos had developed into a place of refuge for space travel experts, heads of state, and the affluent who could afford this place of residence. Hopelessly overcrowded, the station lacked virtually everything; in particular, however, energy was scarce.
Everything that seemed reasonably plausible to produce energy had been tried. Then, the successful linking of small-scale biochemical power stations with electricity factories signaled a breakthrough.
The Earth served as factory premises. Light, oxygen and carbon dioxide as operating resources were available in sufficient supplies. Plants could be reconstructed on site to become reactors and could be configured into Green Energy Plants (GEP). A beam from Earth to Cosmos had been installed for energy transport. Since an additional energy repeater had been positioned in a geo-stationary orbit, energy transfer ran smoothly and without interruptions. For the operation and optimization of the GEPs, teams of experts commuted between Cosmos and Earth with the Geonautics.
During this trip, Ayanda had the official task of increasing the energy density of GEP processes. Secretly, however, she was to investigate inconsistencies of GEP9. During the last maintenance, she had installed an innovative DNA for the filtering of electrons. This DNA had been developed from recombining germ cells of different mammals. Tests had yielded promising results, but ever since GEP9.1 was back in operation, interferences occurred constantly—and every time, it was a different error. They were faced with a mystery.
Ayanda remembered that ever since the modification her pulse became faster, and she became confused when she moved closer to GEP9.1. Upon closer inspection, Ayanda found a voice in her mind. It always occurred in the same tone and fell silent when her distance to GEP9.1 increased. She could hear the voice clearly, but was unable to understand it.
Her frequency meter showed no signals. When she asked colleagues in passing, they noticed nothing. Then the geonauts had to head back to Cosmos.
Now she was back and would have a closer look at GEP9.1. Ayanda’s thoughts were interrupted by the security briefing from afar: “And remember that without protective clothing you will have 10 minutes before you have accumulated the life-threatening dose of radiation.”
What had happened to her electricity machine since the DNA modification? Did this generator have a language or even intelligence? If only she could understand the voice. Slightly uneasy and with gooseflesh all over her body, Ayanda was looking forward to her arrival at GEP9.1 on Mumbai-II.
About the author:Gereon Klein is managing director of the institute Facilitation for Change in Germany. Web site www.gereonklein.de.
Life in the year 2100 is all about energy. No, that’s no longer true. It’s about living well.
We had to completely reinvent civilization in the face of fossil-fuel shortages and increasing climate change. Permaculture became the basis of our new sustainable civilization.
Housing looks familiar, if a little fatter with all the insulation that was added. The retrofit passivhaus concept went global as energy prices rose. These days, excess energy is very expensive, but for most people it just doesn’t matter. Most communities are locally self-sufficient. Everyone grows food using permaculture principles. Agricultural monoculture became deeply unfashionable during the great GM disease outbreaks of the 2030s.
During the chaos, we were smart enough to keep the Internet going. Giving up broadcast television meant wireless broadband really took off. That, combined with holographic conferencing, meant that people finally could really live anywhere they liked while working somewhere else.
With no need to travel for meetings, commuting vanished like a bad dream. Of course, the need for real human contact didn’t. Most towns, villages, and districts have communal working areas, paid for out of local taxes in local currencies, which let you work together with your friends and neighbors. These mix/meet spaces are incredibly creative.
So business continues. Once the 99% movement really got going, the 1% left. These days, open-source cooperatives have mostly replaced capitalism, at least on-planet. In practice, most people run three or four very different jobs, both to increase personal resilience and because it’s fun!
For example, manufacturing was relocalized. The advent of mass 3-D printing and cheap CNC (computer numerical control) meant that the difficulty of building something went away. At the same time, the increasing costs of transport forced the use of local materials. There are local solar-powered remanufacturing plants next to what used to be called waste dumps.
Now, the idea of big warehouses of finished goods—none of which does quite do what you want—seems quaint. This is the case for all but the highest technology products, which are still mass assembled and transported by sailing ship and cargo zeppelin. People are relaxed enough that, if something takes 10 weeks to arrive, they don’t freak out.
Global populations are now divided 50/50 city and country dwellers. Regional government was the only scale that actually worked for fighting climate change; national governments became sources of embarrassment first, and then irrelevant. We still have conflicts, but mostly when some local politician promises a planet-harming shortsighted populist fix. The UN security force soon takes care of these. By the way, the UN is still called that, even though it’s really the United “cities and regions.”
We never did get fusion power working, but it doesn’t matter any more. Regional weather control by the power co-operatives ensures that the days are sunny for power and pleasure, with wind and rain overnight for power and plants. Life is good.
About the author:Paul Bristow is a founder of Transition Ferney-Voltaire, using community-based scenario planning, permaculture, and crowd-sourced ingenuity at the border of France and Switzerland. He is also a founder member of Post Tenebras Lab, the hackerspace in Geneva. In his day job, he predicts the near-term future in the digital media industry. He’d prefer to live in this outlined scenario. Email paul@paulbristow.net.
Timmy stirred beneath the blanket as the dawn filled his room. Stretching deliciously, he opened one eye to look at the clock.
“Temp?” he asked.
“18,” replied Margo.
“Good. Perfect for my run,” thought Timmy.
The lights came on as he rolled out of bed, the covers shook themselves into place as the Murphy bed ascended, the wall opened to reveal the bathroom, and Timmy stumbled into the shower.
“Tell Mom I’ll have a Spanish frittata,” he told Margo.
“Got it,” she replied.
As the faint smell of endorphins tingled him awake, Timmy slipped on some shorts and a T-shirt and walked out the door into the sweet smell of spring. The path beckoned him along as his bare feet kissed the mossy grass. The air filled him with joy. He picked up his pace when he saw a familiar bouncing ponytail flash through the trees ahead.
“Genevieve!” he called thru his wrist band. The girl waved her left arm in response, but she seemed to pick up speed. Timmy wondered for a moment whether his ear stud was dead until the realization struck him that she wasn’t interested in his company. He turned down the short trail and was home, took another quick shower, and plunked down across from his mom at the breakfast table. The frittata was delicious, and he told her so.
“So what’s wrong?” asked Mom.
“Genevieve snubbed me just now.”
“She’s involved. You’ll have to find somebody else to fall for.”
“Yeah, I know. But she is really cute.”
“Yes, she is, and so are you, honey. What about Rebecca? I was talking to her grandmother yesterday, and she said that Rebecca was checking you out.”
“Yeah, Margo told me. She’s nice, but I’m not sure that I can get into that synkinetic surround she’s making. It’s really important to her. You know I’m much more into my epigenetic manipulation.”
“You’re 34, Tim. You aren’t old enough to be making any commitments. You’re just exploring. These women are sweet and convenient here in our pod, but the world is a big place. You’ll find just the right one in time.”
“Right, Mom,” Timmy smiled sardonically.
Suddenly, this multigenerational intentional pod community was too small. He thought of Lisa Glasspool down under, whom he had chatted with at the last epigenetic forum. Now, she was beautiful. And seemed to respect what he had to say. Their conversation seemed synergistic to him.
“Margo,” he said as he walked toward his room, “see if Lisa Glasspool is available to chat sometime today.” He could feel the oxytocin rush lightening his step as he opened the windows of his room and settled into work.
About the author:Bart Main is a child psychiatrist and very long-standing sci-fi aficionado focused on the well-being of our great grandchildren.
Howard Nathan was reading his hologram news “paper” at breakfast (funny how archaisms survive, he thought—there hadn’t been paper newspapers for well over 50 years). It was December 2099, and the pundits had begun to pontificate about the new century.
The headline “Worried Environmentalists” caught his eye; it was an article about the impending manmade Ice Age and the disappearance of the world’s deserts.
The threat of global cooling was now a hot topic for debate, since the threats to human well-being that had distressed humanity at the beginning of the century had motivated imaginative inventors and policy makers to develop successful solutions to counterbalance greenhouse gases:
1. The widespread adoption of vertical urban agriculture enabled an area the size of Denmark to provide enough food for 7 billion people. The rewilding of vast areas of the planet resulted. Forests had re-conquered Europe and China; rain forests had re-conquered India and Brazil. This explosion in biomass feasted on atmospheric carbon dioxide like ecological piranhas, absorbing 50 gigatons a year.
2. Artificial photosynthesis that absorbed CO2 more than 1,000 times faster than plant life had been developed in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Engineers had developed economic ways to extract this CO2 and make petroleum using bacteria and sunlight. Since hydrocarbons were still needed as the feedstock for more than 500,000 useful products (plastics, medicines, cosmetics, etc.), this process had spread across the planet.
3. Nanotechnologies accelerated the advent of energy-autonomous vehicles and buildings. Cars were now built out of buckypaper (weighing less than the driver), which also functioned as a hyper-efficient photovoltaic skin providing electric energy to run the car. Most buildings were outfitted with mini-de-polymerization units that converted all human waste, garbage, and trash to gas that provided all the electricity, heating, and cooking the building needed. The sewage system had become a thing of the past decades ago, as had garbage and trash collection. Landfills spewing methane were now long gone. The electric grid and its ugly pylons no longer existed.
4. Massive forestation of the planet’s semi-arid areas had begun in the 2010s and was sucking up several gigatons of CO2 a year (in addition to the rewilding). Genetic engineers had developed plants that could use sea water or survive on evening dew. Vast areas of desert were now overrun with these exotics and experts worried that future generations would never see the wondrous beauty, or experience the spiritual effects of the deserts.
Howard was not worried. Like his grandfather, who was also a psychologist with a thriving practice treating Global Warming Anxiety Syndrome, Howard now had a thriving practice treating Global Cooling Anxiety Syndrome. One could always depend on human neuroses to make a living. Everything had changed, but human beings had remained the same.
About the author:Tsvi Bisk is director of the Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking and THE FUTURIST’s contributing editor for Strategic Thinking. Email bisk@futurist-thinking.co.il.
The twins were separated at birth in 2012, and though they had been communicating with each other for many years, they planned their physical reunion to coincide with the reunification of the United States of America on January 1, 2100.
The division between their parents was at first strictly due to spiritual clashes. But as twins Custis and Bucky grew up, hope of any future contact between them dimmed as the United States of America fell apart during Civil War II of the 2030s.
Though not technically a repeat of the North versus South Civil War of the nineteenth century, the Second Civil War was similar in its conflict over states’ rights. It became clear that the phrase “united states of America” was case-sensitive: Supporters of united States could never align with supporters of United states. Fiery rhetoric soon erupted in catastrophic violence, and the United Nations formally recommended dividing the fallen superpower as a way to end violence. Voters on both sides agreed.
Recovery was surprisingly quick in urban areas, which crowdsourced a new constitution to formalize a geographically dispersed nation, the United Cities of Northern America (UCNA, whose national symbol became known as “Uncle Noam”). Bucky was elected the Chief Executive of the Legion of Mayors.
Forced to abandon their rural neighbors, Citizens built reinforced barriers to protect against insurgents as well as invasive species. All buildings were greened with vertical farms and rooftop nature preserves to maintain self-sufficiency and environmental purity.
The economy thrived as creativity was encouraged not just to promote innovation, but also to develop a lively entertainment industry that kept people from shutting themselves in their homes and virtual communities. Even in hard times, everyone danced.
Meanwhile, in the more informally cooperative Southern States, Bucky’s twin, Custis, pioneered the establishment of autonomous Pastoral Villages built around individual megachurches. While economic depression ensued quickly as the Villages cut ties to international networks, communities found strength and courage in their own shared faiths.
After decades of dislocations, forced migrations, and deportations, the hope for a harmonious homogeneity evaporated. People rebelled against the suppression of ideas deemed harmful in any way. (Even accusations of “socialism” were shouted down by Village counsels.) The lack of diversity proved harmful to economies, and the Pastoral Village experiment collapsed with the Third Civil War of the 2070s.
As brothers and as revered leaders of their respective governments, Bucky and Custis knew that they could not live without each other. Their virtual peace talks inspired hundreds of millions of Americans, Mexicans, and Canadians to look forward to a new century of open, collaborative futuring. Besides, they missed each other.
Cynthia G. Wagner is editor of THE FUTURIST.
In her conversations with friends and family, Miranda—a remarkably fit, thrice updated, 88-year-old freelance infominer—notes that the discussion always bounces between the four corners of humanity’s hollow valley:
1. Remarkable physical wealth.
2. Craving for authenticity.
3. Decline of traditional religious belief.
4. Redefinition of the age-old concept of “Free Will.”
Twenty-Second-Century Plenty: As any history app will tell you, an explosion in living standards triggered by the exponential growth of GRIN tech (genetics, robotics, information, and nanotech) meant that nearly every human inhabitant of the planet, excepting the feral and the warrior cults, had their basic needs met by the 2080s. And with home-based 3-D printers the norm for almost 70 years, nearly any product goes from idea to form in a flash.
With our basic needs anticipated and met, robots doing the hard work, and virtually free energy, the survival struggle that has defined humanity is now the twinkling of a fading star. Goodbye, resource wars. The question now is how a species adapted to scarcity responds to abundance. Miranda is disturbed by the answer set.
Authenticity: Is it “real”? Is it “craft”? These are invariably the queries Miranda hears about new clothing or home goods. Algorithmically nano-targeted experiences, “news” filtered by digital advisory agents and displayed on augmented reality (AR), and rapidly printed consumer goods all make authenticity a scarce commodity. No wonder “U-Build” kits, Route 66 “driving vacations,” tattoo artists, piano clubs, and farming are so popular with Miranda’s children.
Belief: Miranda remembers Sunday school as a child. Although she has heard of emerging religious groups meeting in parks, she hasn’t been to an actual church building in years. Miranda doesn’t believe in the God that her parents believed in, but there are days that she misses Him, the certainty, the rituals, the authority. Like her friends, when she was young she downloaded and tried the Christo-Confucian behavior-prompting avatars on her AR, and they did make her a better person. But she grew to resent the life-logging, and so she unsubscribed.
“Free Will”: By the time Miranda was 50, advances in neuroscience, predictive analytics, and response priming made her PhD in behavioral economics as quaint as all those “Silicon Valley” museums. Although some insisted that the noble lie of pure “free will” be maintained, that idea died with her parents. Now the memes on volition proliferate daily, but all posit a circumscribed will. We were always the muddled captains of our soul, but now we know it. Now we are less so. Now we grope for the meaning we have lost in the information.
Miranda and her friends are healthier and wealthier than her baby-boomer grandparents could have ever imagined, but with Hikikomori (social withdrawal) increasing despite the health chips and government-mandated AR messages, she wonders if they are any more fulfilled.
Everyone talks about the “Alexander problem” of having no more lands to conquer and wanting to achieve “hard things,” but that’s just talk between the idea and the reality.
Robert Moran is an insight-driven strategist at the Brunswick Group in Washington, D.C., focusing on industry futures, market and opinion research, and communications strategy. Web site www.futureofinsight.com.
It was winter 2099. For generations no tourists had traveled to Delphi. Yet it seemed like only yesterday that he had first come and taken his place before Apollo’s temple. Now, as always, he waited for someone else to come, someone he could talk to and share his message with. The simple words he would speak were stored in his memory, ready to be spoken in a hundred different languages if need be to anyone who would listen.
Two inscriptions in Greek had once been legible on the marble façade above his head, engraved there in the days when the oracles of Apollo still uttered their prophecies. But, with the temple abandoned, the ancient letters had eventually turned to dust, a dust swept away by the chill wind that swirled among the fallen columns.
The first inscription had read: “Know thyself!”—but too few had ever had the desire to do so, preferring instead to exploit their strengths rather than confess their weaknesses. The second had read: “Nothing in excess”—but excess had long since ceased to be a warning and had become instead an irresistible goal.
Ignoring the tragic flaws in their nature and intoxicated with power, men had committed a final, irreversible act of self-delusion, convinced they controlled the future. That is when he had been sent there: to speak the forgotten words of the past to any still willing to listen. And so he had stood there in solitude for all those years.
Shrouded in a radioactive noon, the pale orb of a sun that had once brightly shone in his solar panel grew dimmer. The glowing red numerals of the clock on his forehead now flickered intermittently and finally forever fell dark.
Stephen Bertman is the author of The Genesis of Science: The Story of Greek Imagination (Prometheus Books, 2010) and of two previous cover stories in THE FUTURIST (January-February 2001 and December 1998) based on his earlier books, Cultural Amnesia (Praeger, 2000) and Hyperculture (Praeger, 1998). Email Profbertman2@aol.com.
Futurists have historically been better at describing the present than the future. Fortunately, I have been blessed with a set of communications from one of my descendants, whose eyewitness accounts of events around 2100 are far more reliable than any such speculations I can offer.
My descendant is a young girl named Ancath, who is about 9 years old in 2103. Every Christmas, starting in 2103, she sends recordings of her conversations with her great-grandmother (my granddaughter) about that it was like to live in the age of computers. You see, computers are gone in 2103. Only a few elderly people, like great-grandma, remember anything about them.
I have collected these recordings into my “Ancath Chronicles.” From them, I learned that in about 2025 the U.S. Congress decides to fully automate the government as a move for dramatic efficiency. The process is well under way by that point anyway, since robots running large databases staff most government offices.
The automated government, “Ag” as they call it, is so successful that Congress disbands itself a few years later. Its last act is to pass authority to a set of artificial intelligences simulating senators and representatives. This enables an automated Congress to respond to problems by passing laws that are quickly implemented by the automated bureaucracy.
But within a few years Ag exhibits amazing feats of artificial stupidity:
Around 2035, Ag discovers that simulations are much less costly than real things, like transportation. It ends 30 years of airline crises by banning flights and instead simulating planes flying simulated passengers. No real airplanes, no pilots, no airports, no cost! Former air travels do not complain because they get to know their neighbors, and like them.
Soon Ag does the same for the medical system to end the health crisis: Simulated doctors treat simulated diseases in simulated hospitals. Since people now never have to go to a hospital, everyone is much healthier and life expectancy surges.
By 2040, Ag has bankrupted nearly all businesses. A deep depression grips the world. Finally, in 2050, a group of graybeard programmers create a solution: They build an Automated Citizen, programming it to be helpless and adoring, and install a copy on every Internet port. Soon, the automated government is completely occupied with taking care of the automated citizens, and it leaves all the real people alone. People forge a new, free society. Everyone prospers.
Around 2090, the automated Department of Energy declares that an obscure cloud farm in Iowa is consuming too much electricity, and it pulls the plug. This shuts off the Ag. But no one notices.
About the author:Peter J. Denning is Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and director of the Cebrowski Institute for information innovation at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is editor in chief of ACM Ubiquity, and is a past president of ACM. Email pjd@nps.edu.
This essay draws from his series, “Ancath Chronicles,” which is available at http://denninginstitute.com/pjd/chronicles2011.pdf.
It was two decades ago when it stopped. Everybody knew that it would happen. We were informed regularly about possible approaching changes, and stories were told. Nonetheless, what we did not expect was the velocity and the impact when it occurred.
It wasn’t a war that normally would lead to such an impact. Neither was it the problem of physical space what turned out to be much more problematic than any water or food crises solved by nano-farming. Also the trigger wasn’t solely the senescence conflict that stroked us hard and rattled society for three long decades, creating a brutal global black market.
Everyone thought that the artificial accelerated evolution of the human being into hybrids would lead to hundreds of new religions or even godlike hallucinations. For years, we tried to understand the gift we received, arguing with ourselves about what this the new purpose of living was.
The majority of society, though, avoided the search for meaning, and fled into “world connections.” This network, which directly links people’s minds, created the most unique and powerful net known. With it came vivid experiences and unlimited potential, allowing us to visit any real or imaginary world. We connected into the crowd, where we became One.
The vicious side effect, however, was a physical degeneration, as we lost control of reality, time, and space. People died in the thousands, connected but alone and forgotten in their spaces. They lost their minds, which are floating forever somewhere, having become a part of you and me. Individuality was questioned, and the hull of flesh blamed for our mortality. Then it started: Everything dissolved, and we regained our uniqueness.
It was a sunny day when we fled the cities. We had created them, inspired by our dreams; they were different, unique, intelligent, and sometimes even beautiful. We squeezed out all possible benefits from the city, unlimited by our imaginations. Everything was integrated, from micro-food production to vertical graveyards. More than 90% of the population lived there—physically at first, then separated from their minds.
So it came to pass that the cities were lost. They turned into relicts of times when we needed physical proximity to create and develop, and of when we searched for a crowd to uncover our individuality. Some groups still live there. We call them Trunks. Those are survivors of a generation who invested their whole lives and material energy in it. They are fragments that cannot break loose.
For most, this reality is gone. It doesn’t make sense anymore. Our mind can be everywhere, anytime. Still, we can die alone and forgotten. By fleeing the cities old, we regained social structures: Family tribes and small communities all over the planet mushroomed. They define themselves by a self-sufficient and self-regulated structure, creating a new society. Governments, cities, and any centralized operating structure lost its necessity.
It was and is, a new beginning of free and unlimited possibilities.
Daniel Egger is co-founder of Foltigo, an Idea Agency that aims to create new ideas and practical perspectives by working with multiple contexts, futures, paradoxes, and paradigms of society. Web site www.foltigo.com.
Dateline: January 1, 2100
Futures experts are now more divided than ever about the fate of humanity, according to World Future Society president Timothy Mack, whose brain spoke to us from his jar in the Johns Hopkins Medical Lab.
“There are two schools of futurists,” Mack explained. “There are the ‘gee-whiz’ types, whose mantra is EGBOK: ‘Everything’s Going to Be OK.’ And then there are those whose slogan is WIDD: We’re in Deep Do-Do.’” Mack’s avatar shrugged its shoulders. “I don’t know who to believe.”
Elsewhere in the futures world, Cynthia Wagner, long-serving executive editor of the society’s magazine The Futurist, confirmed that she has had the text of every article and book about the future ever published embedded in her DNA. “I couldn’t decide about the Nostradamus stuff,” she said, “but I finally included that, too.”
Speaking at the Society’s 134th annual conference, held at the Ray Bradbury Center on Mars, World Future Society founder and leading thinker Ed Cornish appeared onstage in his specially outfitted brain-mobile. His address, titled “Is the Future Here Yet?” was greeted with thunderous applause signals from the 5,000 brains in attendance.
Meanwhile, technology futurist Ray Kurzweil expressed satisfaction that 24 countries have now abolished individual names. Hereafter, all babies will be named Chip, with the serial numbers of their microchips replacing their family names. Don Tapscott, whose sixty-fourth book is titled Are You a Digital Dodo? agreed. According to Tapscott, “Today’s kids are fully digitized. The older generation will be left behind if they can’t make the brain-to-chip transformation.”
In other tech news, Google announced that it now has the DNA sequence of every human being on the planet in its database.
In the world of social media, Mark Zuckerberg, ex-CEO of the now-defunct Facebook corporation, has filed for personal bankruptcy. “We’re still showing 16.2 billion users in our database,” he said. “But we discovered that only 104 of them are still active. There’s a terrorist cell in Iowa, a few dozen college students, and a group of senior citizens in Miami Beach.” Zuckerberg had applied for welfare support in California, only to find that it had been abolished by the last 10 Republican governors. “I guess I’ll have to find a job,” he said.
Returning to generational issues, the U.S. Defense Department’s Population Control Command reports increasing difficulty in performing its mission of tracking down and shooting over-aged people.
“We’ve been tracking this one old grandma for months,” said Colonel Bo Gritz. “She’s picked off three of my best men. It’ll probably cost more to wipe her out than to just let her keep on living. We’ll have to get her with a drone.”
England’s Queen Elizabeth, that country’s longest-serving monarch, attended memorial services for her grandson Prince William, who—like his father, Prince Charles—died of natural causes. Close family members, speaking on condition of anonymity, reported that the Prince’s last words were, “I was hoping to be king for a little while, at least.” The Queen’s physician refused to comment on the secret herbal preparation he’s reportedly been giving her for the past 60 years.
Turning now to political news, the U.S. Congress is putting the final touches on legislation that will legalize marriage between human beings and computers. Marriage between human beings of the same sex, however, remains illegal.
In the economic sector, the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and West Virginia have announced plans to merge into one state, to head off impending bankruptcy. This latest in a series of mergers brings the number of states to 17. Supported by a large infusion of cash from the Indian government, the new state will be named Bubbastan.
On the religion front, the Vatican announced today that it has formed a special council to investigate what it describes as “possibly overblown” charges of predatory sexual behavior by priests. The commission is on a fast track to deliver its findings by mid-2125.
In international news, the Chinese government confirmed that it’s in negotiations to buy Kansas. China’s spokesperson, Hu Mi, explained, “We need to guarantee a secure source of wheat and other food grains for our people.” Kansas Governor Randy Kunkel declined comment except to say, “I’ve always been fond of Chinese food.”
Turning to Wall Street, banking giant OneBank has completed its acquisition of the last remaining bank in the United States, giving it control over 400 million customers who have nowhere else to go for banking services, loans, mortgages, and credit cards. The Secretary of the Treasury, who was formerly the CEO of OneBank, announced the event, saying, “This action will streamline the nation’s financial services industry, eliminate destructive competition, and provide great services to banking customers.”
In entertainment news, reality star Miki Kardashian, granddaughter of the legendary Kim Kardashian, caused controversy at the annual TV awards festival by sending her detachable breasts instead of appearing in person. Her PR spokesperson replied to reporters’ questions with, “What’s the big problem? She had a schedule conflict. Those are the only parts people want to see anyway.”
Also on the entertainment scene, venerable comedienne Betty White has launched her latest show, Hot Sex for Hot Seniors, to air this fall. When asked by reporters how old the actress is, the show’s producer said, “God only knows. Cancel that. I think she’s older than God. But she’s still hot.”
About the author:Karl Albrecht is a management consultant and author of more than 20 books on professional achievement, organizational performance, and business strategy, including Social Intelligence: The New Science of Success and Practical Intelligence: The Art and Science of Common Sense. Originally a physicist, and having served as a military intelligence officer and business executive, he now consults, lectures, and writes about whatever he thinks would be fun. Web site www.KarlAlbrecht.com.