Food, Fuel, and the Global Land Grab

By Lester R. Brown

Growing demand for food and fuel has put pressure on the world’s agricultural lands to produce more. Now, a trend in “land grabbing” has emerged, as wealthy countries lease or buy farms and agribusiness in poorer countries to ensure their own future supplies. The result may be further economic disparities and even “food wars.”

World grain and soybean prices more than doubled between 2007 and mid-2008. As food prices climbed everywhere, some exporting countries began to restrict grain shipments in an effort to limit food price inflation at home. Importing countries panicked. Some tried to negotiate long-term grain supply agreements with exporting countries, but in a seller’s market, few were successful. Seemingly overnight, importing countries realized that one of their few options was to find land in other countries on which to produce food for themselves.

And the land rush was on.

Looking for land abroad is not entirely new. Empires expanded through territorial acquisitions, colonial powers set up plantations, and agribusiness firms try to expand their reach. Agricultural analyst Derek Byerlee tracks market-driven investments in foreign land back to the mid-nineteenth century. During the last 150 years, large-scale agricultural investments from industrial countries concentrated primarily on tropical products such as sugarcane, tea, rubber, and bananas.

What is new now is the scramble to secure land abroad for more basic food and feed crops—including wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans—and for biofuels. These land acquisitions of the last several years, or “land grabs” as they are sometimes called, represent a new stage in the emerging geopolitics of food scarcity. They are occurring on a scale and at a pace not seen before.

The “Grabbers”: Searching for Stable Food Supplies

Saudi Arabia, South Korea, China, and India are among the countries that are leading the charge to buy or lease land abroad, either through government entities or through domestically based agribusiness firms. Saudi Arabia’s population has simply outrun its land and water resources. The country is fast losing its irrigation water and will soon be totally dependent on imports from the world market or overseas farming projects for its grain.

South Korea imports more than 70% of its grain, and it has become a major land investor in several countries. In an attempt to acquire 940,000 acres of farmland abroad by 2018 for corn, wheat, and soybean production, the Korean government will reportedly help domestic companies lease farmland or buy stakes in agribusiness firms in countries such as Cambodia, Indonesia, and Ukraine.

China is also nervous about its future food supply, as it faces aquifer depletion and the heavy loss of cropland to urbanization and industrial development. Although it was essentially self-sufficient in grain from 1995 onward, within the last few years China has become a leading grain importer. It is by far the top importer of soybeans, bringing in more than all other countries combined.

India has also become a major player in land acquisitions, with its huge and growing population to feed. Irrigation wells are starting to go dry, so with the projected addition of 450 million people by mid-century and the prospect of growing climate instability, India, too, is worried about future food security.

Among the other countries jumping in to secure land abroad are Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). For example, in early 2012 Al Ghurair Foods, a company based in the UAE, announced it would lease 250,000 acres in Sudan for 99 years on which to grow wheat, other grains, and soybeans. The plan is that the resulting harvests will go to the UAE and other Gulf countries.

Tracking the Trends

Accurate information has been difficult to find for those tracking this worldwide land-grab surge. Perhaps because of the politically sensitive nature of land grabs, separating rumor from reality remains a challenge.

At the outset, the increasing frequency of news reports mentioning deals seemed to indicate that the phenomenon was growing, but no one was systematically aggregating and verifying data on this major agricultural development. Many groups have relied on GRAIN (www.grain.org), a small nongovernmental organization with a shoestring budget, and its compilations of media reports on land grabs. A much-anticipated World Bank report, first released in September 2010 and updated in January 2011, used GRAIN’s online collection to aggregate land-grab information, noting that GRAIN’s was the only tracking effort that was global in scope.

In its report, the World Bank identified 464 land acquisitions that were in various stages of development between October 2008 and August 2009. It reported that production had begun on only one-fifth of the announced projects, partly because many deals were made by land speculators. The report offered several other reasons for the slow start, including “unrealistic objectives, price changes, and inadequate infrastructure, technology, and institutions.”

The amount of land involved was known for only 203 of the 464 projects, yet it still came to some 140 million acres—more than is planted in corn and wheat combined in the United States. Particularly noteworthy is that, of the 405 projects for which commodity information was available, 21% were slated to produce biofuels and another 21% were for industrial or cash crops, such as rubber and timber. Only 37% of the projects involved food crops.

Nearly half of these land deals, and some two-thirds of the land area, were in sub-Saharan Africa—partly because land is so cheap there compared with land in Asia. In a careful evidence-based analysis of land grabs in sub-Saharan Africa between 2005 and 2011, George Schoneveld from the Center for International Forestry Research reported that two-thirds of the area acquired there was in just seven countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Sudan, and Zambia. In Ethiopia, for example, an acre of land can be leased for less than $1 a year, whereas in land-scarce Asia it can easily cost $100 or more.

The second most-targeted region for land grabs was Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Countries have also sought land in Latin America, especially in Brazil and Argentina. The state-owned Chinese firm Chongqing Grain Group, for example, has reportedly begun harvesting soybeans on some 500,000 acres in Brazil’s Bahia state for export to China. The company announced in early 2011 that, as part of a multibillion-dollar investment package in Bahia, it would develop a soybean industrial park with facilities capable of crushing 1.5 million tons of soybeans a year.

Unfortunately, the countries selling or leasing their land for the production of agricultural commodities to be shipped abroad are typically poor and, more often than not, those where hunger is chronic, such as Ethiopia and South Sudan. Both of these countries are leading recipients of food from the UN World Food Programme. Some of these land acquisitions are outright purchases of land, but the overwhelming majority are long-term leases, typically 25 to 99 years.

Food and Fuel Compete for Agricultural Land

In response to rising oil prices and a growing sense of oil insecurity, energy policies encouraging the production and use of biofuels are also driving land acquisitions. This results in either clearing new cropland or making existing cropland unavailable for food production.

The European Union’s renewable energy law requires 10% of transport energy to come from renewable sources by 2020. This law is encouraging agribusiness firms to invest in land to produce biofuels for the European market. In sub-Saharan Africa, many investors have planted jatropha (an oilseed-bearing shrub) and oil palm trees, both sources for biodiesel.

One company, U.K.-based GEM BioFuels, has leased 1.1 million acres in 18 communities in Madagascar on which to grow jatropha. At the end of 2010 it had planted 140,000 acres with this shrub. But by April 2012 it was reevaluating its Madagascar operations due to poor project performance. Numerous other firms planning to produce biodiesel from jatropha have not fared much better. The initial enthusiasm for jatropha is fading as yields are lower than projected and the economics just do not work out.

Sime Darby, a Malaysia-based company that is a big player in the world palm oil economy, has leased 540,000 acres in Liberia to develop oil palm and rubber plantations. It planted its first oil palm seedling on the acquired land in May 2011, and the company plans to have it all in production by 2030.

Thus, we are witnessing an unprecedented scramble for land that crosses national boundaries. Driven by both food and energy insecurity, land acquisitions are now also seen as a lucrative investment opportunity. Fatou Mbaye of Action Aid in Senegal observes, “Land is quickly becoming the new gold and right now the rush is on.”

Investing—or Speculating—in Land

Investment capital is coming from many sources, including investment banks, pension funds, university endowments, and wealthy individuals. Many large investment funds are incorporating farmland into their portfolios. In addition, there are now many funds dedicated exclusively to farm investments. These farmland funds generated a rate of return from 1991 to 2010 that was roughly double that from investing in gold or the S&P 500 stock index and seven times that from investing in housing. Most of the rise in farmland earnings has come since 2003.

Many investors are planning to use the land acquired, but there is also a large group of investors speculating in land who have neither the intention nor the capacity to produce crops. They sense that the recent rises in food prices will likely continue, making land even more valuable over the longer term. Indeed, land prices are on the rise almost everywhere.

Land acquisitions are also water acquisitions. Whether the land is irrigated or rainfed, a claim on the land represents a claim on the water resources in the host country. This means land acquisition agreements are a particularly sensitive issue in water-stressed countries.

In an article in Water Alternatives, Deborah Bossio and colleagues analyze the effect of land acquisition in Ethiopia on the demand for irrigation water and, in turn, its effect on the flow of the Nile River. Compiling data on 12 confirmed projects with a combined area of 343,000 acres, they calculate that if this land is all irrigated, as seems likely, the irrigated area in the region would increase sevenfold. This would reduce the average annual flow of the Blue Nile by approximately 4%.

Acquisitions in Ethiopia, where most of the Nile’s headwaters begin, or in the Sudans, which also tap water from the Nile, mean that Egypt will get less water, thus shrinking its wheat harvest and pushing its already heavy dependence on imported wheat even higher.

Land Grabs and Human Rights

Massive land acquisitions raise many questions. Since productive land is not often idle in the countries where the land is being acquired, the agreements mean that many local farmers and herders will simply be displaced. Their land may be confiscated, or it may be bought from them at a price over which they have little say, leading to the public hostility that often arises in host countries.

In addition, the agreements are almost always negotiated in secret. Typically only a few high-ranking officials are involved, and the terms are often kept confidential. Not only are key stakeholders such as local farmers not at the negotiating table, they often do not even learn about the agreements until after the papers are signed and they are being evicted. Unfortunately, it is often the case in developing countries that the state, not the farmer, has formal ownership of the land. Against this backdrop, the poor can easily be forced off the land by the government.

The displaced villagers will be left without land or livelihoods in a situation where agriculture has become highly mechanized and employs few people. The principal social effect of these massive land acquisitions may well be an increase in the ranks of the world’s hungry.

The Oakland Institute, a California-based think tank, reports that Ethiopia’s huge land leases to foreign firms have led to “human rights violations and the forced relocation of over a million Ethiopians.” Unfortunately, since the Ethiopian government is pressing ahead with its land lease program, many more villagers are likely to be forcibly displaced.

In a landmark article on African land grabs in the Observer, John Vidal quotes Nyikaw Ochalla, an Ethiopian from the Gambella region: “The foreign companies are arriving in large numbers, depriving people of land they have used for centuries. There is no consultation with the indigenous population. The deals are done secretly. The only thing the local people see is people coming with lots of tractors to invade their lands.” Referring to his own village, where an Indian corporation is taking over, Ochalla says, “Their land has been compulsorily taken and they have been given no compensation. People cannot believe what is happening.”

Hostility of local people to land grabs is the rule, not the exception. China, for example, signed an agreement with the Philippine government in 2007 to lease 2.5 million acres of land on which to produce crops that would be shipped home. Once word leaked out, the public outcry—much of it from Filipino farmers—forced the government to suspend the agreement. A similar situation developed in Madagascar, where a South Korean firm, Daewoo Logistics, had pursued rights to more than 3 million acres of land, an area half the size of Belgium. This helped stoke a political furor that led to a change in government and cancellation of the agreement.

Impacts of “Long-Distance Farming”

How productive will the land be that actually ends up being farmed? Given the level of agricultural skills and technologies likely to be used, in most cases robust gains in yields could be expected. As demonstrated in Malawi, simply applying fertilizer to nutrient-depleted soils where rainfall is adequate and using improved seed can easily double grain yields.

Perhaps the more important question is, What will be the effects on the local people? The Malawi program’s approach of directly helping local farmers can dramatically expand food production, raise the income of villagers, reduce hunger, and earn foreign exchange—a win-win-win-win situation. This contrasts sharply with the lose-lose-lose situation accompanying land grabs—villagers lose their land, their food supply, and their livelihoods.

There will be some spectacular production gains in some countries; there will undoubtedly also be failures. Some projects have already been abandoned. Many more will be abandoned simply because the economics do not pan out. Long-distance farming, with the transportation and travel involved, can be costly, particularly when oil prices are high.

Overall, while announcements of new land acquisitions have been popping up with alarming frequency, the actual development of acquired land has been slow. Investors tend to focus on the costs of producing the crops without sufficiently considering the cost of building the modern agricultural infrastructure needed to support successful development of the tracts of acquired land. In most sub-Saharan African countries, there is little of this infrastructure, which means the cost to an investor of developing it can be overwhelming.

In some countries, it will take years to build the roads needed to both bring in agricultural inputs, such as fertilizer, and move the farm products out. Beyond this, there is a need for a local supply of either electric power or diesel fuel to operate irrigation pumps. A full-fledged farm equipment maintenance support system is needed, lest equipment is left idle while waiting for repair people and parts to come from afar. Maintaining a fleet of tractors, for example, requires not only trained mechanics but also an on-site inventory of things like tires and batteries. Grain elevators and grain dryers are essential for storing grain. Fertilizer and fuel storage facilities have to be constructed.

Another complicating factor is navigating the various governmental regulations and procedures. For example, as almost all the equipment and inputs needed in a modern farming operation have to be imported, this requires a familiarity with customs procedures. In addition, various permits may be required for such things as drilling irrigation wells, building irrigation canals, or tapping into the local electrical grid if one exists.

When Saudi Arabia decided to invest in cropland, it created King Abdullah’s Initiative for Saudi Agricultural Investment Abroad, a program to facilitate land acquisitions and farming in other countries, including Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Turkey, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Brazil. The Saudi Ministry of Commerce and Industry recently launched an inquiry to find out why things were moving at such a glacial pace. What it learned was that simply acquiring tracts of land abroad is only the first step. Modern agriculture depends on heavy investment in a supporting infrastructure, something that is costly even for the oil-rich Saudis.

There is also a huge knowledge deficit associated with launching new farming projects in countries where soils, climate, rainfall, insect pests, and crop diseases are far different from those in the investor country. There almost certainly will be unforeseen outbreaks of plant disease and insect infestations as new crops are introduced, particularly since so many of the land deals are in tropical and subtropical regions.

A lack of familiarity with the local environment brings with it a wide range of risks. The Indian firm Karuturi Global is the world’s largest producer of cut roses, which it grows in Ethiopia, Kenya, and India for high-income markets. The company has recently entered the land rush, jumping at an offer in 2008 to farm up to 740,000 acres of land in Ethiopia’s Gambella region. In 2011, the company planted its first corn crop in fertile land along the Baro River. Recognizing the possibility of flooding, Karuturi invested heavily in building dikes along the river. Unfortunately the dikes were not sufficient, and 50,000 tons of corn were lost to flash flooding. Fortunately for Karuturi, the company was large enough to survive this heavy loss.

The bottom line is that investors face steep cost curves in bringing this land into production. Even though the land itself may be relatively inexpensive, the food grown under these conditions and shipped to home countries will be some of the most costly food ever produced.

The flurry of large-scale land acquisitions that began in 2008, yielded only a few relatively small harvests as of 2012. The Saudis harvested their first rice crop in Ethiopia, albeit a very small one, in late 2008.

In 2009, South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries harvested some 4,500 tons of soybeans and 2,000 tons of corn on a 25,000-acre farm it took over from Russian owners, roughly 100 miles north of Vladivostok. Hyundai had planned to expand production rapidly to 100,000 tons of corn and soybeans by 2015. But in 2012 it anticipated producing only 9,000 tons of crops, putting it far behind schedule for reaching its 2015 goal. The advantage for Hyundai was that this was already a functioning farm. The supporting infrastructure was already in place. Yet even if Hyundai reaches its 100,000-ton goal, this will cover just 1% of South Korea’s consumption of these commodities.

Another of the acquisitions that appears to be progressing is in South Sudan, where Citadel Capital, an Egyptian private equity company, has leased 260,000 acres for agriculture. In 2011 it began production with a 1,500-acre trial of chickpeas. The plan is to scale the area in chickpeas up to 130,000 acres in five years. The overall goal is to grow crops, eventually including corn and sorghum as well, for which there is a large local market and to produce them at well under the price of imports. This particular project is apparently intended to produce for local consumption. Unfortunately, this is not the case for the great majority of foreign acquisitions.

Will Foreign Land Grabbers Spark Local Revolts?

Land acquisitions, whether to produce food, biofuels, or other crops, raise questions about who will benefit. Even if some of these projects can dramatically boost land productivity, will local people gain from this? When virtually all the inputs—the farm equipment, the fertilizer, the pesticides, the seeds—are brought in from abroad and all the output is shipped out of the country, this contributes little to the local economy and nothing to the local food supply. These land grabs are benefiting the rich at the expense of the poor.

One of the most difficult variables to evaluate is political stability in the countries where land acquisitions are occurring. If opposition political parties come into office, they may cancel the agreements, arguing that they were secretly negotiated without public participation or support. Land acquisitions in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, both among the top failing states, are particularly risky. Few things are more likely to fuel insurgencies than taking land away from people. Agricultural equipment is easily sabotaged. If ripe fields of grain are torched, they burn quickly.

In Ethiopia, local opposition to land grabs appears to be escalating from protest to violence. In late April 2012, gunmen in the Gambella region attacked workers on land acquired by Saudi billionaire Mohammed al-Amoudi for rice production. They reportedly killed five workers and wounded nine others. Al-Amoudi’s firm Saudi Star Agricultural Development was growing rice on just 860 acres of its 24,700-acre lease as of mid-2012, but it intends eventually to obtain another 716,000 acres in the region, with much of the rice harvest to be exported to Saudi Arabia.

Formulating Strategies for Global Food Security

The World Bank, working with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and other related agencies, has formulated a set of principles governing land acquisitions. These guiding principles are well conceived, but unfortunately, as critics like GRAIN point out, there is no mechanism to enforce them. The Bank does not seem willing to challenge the basic argument of those acquiring land, who continue to insist that it will benefit the people who live in the host countries.

Land acquisitions are being fundamentally challenged by a coalition of more than one hundred NGOs, some national and others international. These groups argue that the world does not need big corporations bringing large-scale, heavily mechanized, capital-intensive agriculture into developing countries. Instead, these countries need international support for local village-level farming centered on labor-intensive family farms that produce for local and regional markets and that create desperately needed jobs.

One important strategy would be to improve information collection on these international deals. A highly anticipated effort to compile information on large-scale land acquisitions, called the Land Matrix, was launched in April 2012. Its goal is to make data and descriptions of verified foreign land deals more accessible to research organizations, academics, and the general public. Unfortunately, while the project launch generated heavy media coverage, it soon became clear that the database had some of the same drawbacks as previous attempts. For example, certain large deals known for some time to have been canceled were still listed. The Land Matrix is an ongoing effort, accepting user feedback and submissions of new land acquisition examples, so it may prove a valuable tool as it is improved.

Energy policies could also have a great impact on ensuring food security. For instance, canceling biofuel mandates could quickly lower food prices by avoiding the massive conversion of food into fuel for cars.

It is becoming increasingly clear that future food security is integral to the future of global security as it is more broadly defined. As land and water become scarce, as the earth’s temperature rises, and as world food security deteriorates, a dangerous geopolitics of food scarcity is emerging. The conditions giving rise to this have been in the making for several decades, but the situation has come into sharp focus only in the last few years. The land acquisitions discussed here are an integral part of a global power struggle for control of the earth’s land and water resources.

About the Author

Lester R. Brown is president of Earth Policy Institute (www.earth-policy.org), a nonprofit, interdisciplinary research organization based in Washington, D.C.

This article is adapted with permission from his latest book, Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity (W. W. Norton & Company, 2012).

Building the Global Innovation Economy

By Robert D. Atkinson and Stephen J. Ezell

By kickstarting innovation around the world, pressing economic challenges could be solved in ways that benefit both individual nations and the world as a whole. Obstacles to overcome include outdated and unfair policies, special-interest pandering, and fear of the future.

To a rational observer, we should be in the midst of a Golden Age for innovation.

Nations around the world are establishing national innovation strategies, restructuring their tax and regulatory systems to become more competitive, expanding support for science and technology, improving their education systems, spurring investments in broadband and other information technology (IT) areas, and taking a myriad of other pro-innovation steps. But unlike the old competition between the U.S. states, where they generally played by national rules established in the Constitution, a new approach, “innovation mercantilism,” is emerging.

What is innovation mercantilism? These are national policies that seek to attract or to grow high-wage industries and jobs at the expense of other nations. They are zero-sum, beggar-thy-neighbor policies in violation of the spirit and/or letter of the law of the global trading system. They can entail stealing intellectual property, discriminating against foreign technology firms, requiring foreign firms to transfer technology for market access, or manipulating currency. While innovative mercantilist policies can protect or serve certain short-term national business interests, they make the global economy less prosperous and more fragile.

Given how important innovation policy is, it is perhaps surprising how many nations get it wrong. As nations struggle for innovation advantage, a growing number, led by China, have adopted innovation mercantilism as their policy. As a result, the world produces significantly less innovation than is possible and is needed. The major challenge for the community of nations, therefore, is to create a robust global innovation system with considerably higher rates of win-win innovation and considerably lower rates of win-lose innovation.

We envision the global race for innovation advantage as one in which virtually all nations win, with higher productivity and per-capita incomes, new and better products and services, and a better quality of life for all. We picture a world in which potentially catastrophic problems of hunger, disease, and environmental degradation are effectively tackled, reducing the risks of wars over scarce resources. In our vision, transformative technological and scientific advances help unite nations and people in common pursuits.

And finally, we see old global institutions upgraded and redesigned for a global marketplace characterized by cooperation and fair play. The old-age Washington Consensus, designed sixty years ago for a postwar world, would be replaced with a newly minted Innovation Consensus designed for today’s geopolitical and economic arrangements. It sounds too good to be true. But it doesn’t have to be.

While it’s not clear that we can achieve this vision, there is really no compelling reason why not. Even if there is an inherent “speed limit” for innovation that we can’t exceed, we are not anywhere close to approaching it. Maximizing innovation requires the will and the resources to do the right thing.

Unfortunately, too few nations are organized in ways to maximize innovation. Nations underinvest in innovation because many of its benefits spill over to the rest of the world. Too many nations are focused on innovation mercantilism, which sometimes boosts innovation within their borders, but reduces innovation elsewhere. And the de facto system of global governance is not designed to spur nations to do the right thing or to deter nations from doing the wrong thing.

In this article, we propose three steps to address those obstacles and kick global innovation into high gear.

A Bretton Woods for the Innovation Economy

In 1945, representatives from 44 nations met in the small resort town of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, during the height of World War II to make financial arrangements for the postwar world after the expected defeat of Germany and Japan. It was then that the plans for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were created, with the General Agreements on Trade and Tariffs, precursor to the World Trade Organization, created two years later. The global trading system more or less worked for about forty years. But as the commodity-based manufacturing system evolved into the specialized global innovation economy, the strains on the Bretton Woods framework have become ever more pronounced.

If we are to create a robust global innovation economy, the most important place to start is with the recognition that we need an international innovation policy framework. Instead, the consensus of global governance institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and others today (sometimes called the Geneva Consensus) is based on a 200-year-old economic theory. This is the theory of comparative advantage.

Comparative advantage theory says that each nation has a “comparative,” not absolute, advantage in some things. Even if one country is superior to another in the production of two different goods, if that country focuses production on the good for which it has the highest relative advantage, and the other country focuses on the second good, both countries will benefit from trade. For example, England may produce cloth 40% more efficiently and wine 20% more efficiently than Portugal, but if England specializes in cloth production and Portugal on wine, average output will be higher and both countries will benefit.

This has become economic religion for the holders of the Geneva Consensus. Removing trade barriers, usually seen as tariffs in the name of free trade, is a top priority. To be sure, reducing barriers to free trade would help boost global GDP, but actually not by that much, especially compared with policies that would boost innovation. Put another way, the problem with the Geneva Consensus is not so much that free-trade theory is necessarily wrong, but that fighting for the removal of tariffs and trade barriers isn’t as important a priority as promoting global innovation. Dynamic efficiency (innovation) and productive efficiency (productivity) are much more important, domestically and globally.

Step One: Develop a New Geneva Consensus around Innovation

As such, the first and central task of global economic policy should be to encourage all nations to make boosting innovation and productivity their top economic priority. Doing this means working to develop a new Geneva Consensus that puts the promotion of sustainable innovation at the top of the list. And by “sustainable innovation” we mean innovation focused on boosting productivity and adding to the global stock of knowledge. This means focusing more on issues of IP protection; enactment of voluntary, industry-led global standards; reduction of discriminatory indigenous innovation policies; and other similar actions.

Step Two: Reform International Institutions

The second step is to revamp the mission of existing international bodies, not only to better support sustainable global innovation but also to fight against innovation mercantilism. This means stronger enforcement by global bodies like the WTO against beggar-thy-neighbor mercantilist strategies. It means no longer promoting export-led growth as a key solution to development. It means tying assistance to steps taken by developing nations to move away from such negative-sum mercantilist policies. It means rewarding countries whose policies are focused on spurring domestic productivity instead of protecting the status quo or growing solely by exporting (or limiting imports).

• Reforming the International Monetary Fund for Innovation. The IMF should start by calling out nations that are chronic currency manipulators. The fact that it has not yet formally declared China a currency manipulator suggests that the IMF is a paper tiger. After getting tough with currency manipulators like China, the IMF should tie any future financial assistance not to whether governments cut spending to get budgets under control (the current practice), but to whether they are putting in place policies to drive domestic innovation and productivity.

Enacting these true innovation policies risks the opposition of powerful interests: unions and workers who may be displaced; domestic producers, including small businesses, who enjoy cozy relationships and low levels of competition; able-bodied individuals who are paid for not working; and government bureaucrats whose top-down control is challenged.

It is only by spurring competition, allowing new business models to take hold (e.g., allowing big-box retailers to displace inefficient mom-and-pop retailers), and deploying the best production tools—often by increasing the use of information technology (IT)—that these nations will see fast increases in standard of living. But without carrots and sticks to move in this direction, these nations will continue to take the easy way out: innovation mercantilism. Nations that work in the direction of sustainable innovation should be rewarded with IMF support; nations that do not should be left to fend for themselves.

• Reforming the World Bank. For its part, the World Bank should make a firm commitment that it will stop encouraging policies designed to support countries’ export-led growth strategies. Indeed, it should place a moratorium on all such policies. If countries insist on pursuing innovation mercantilist practices, the World Bank should cut off support. At the same time, the World Bank sorely needs institutional innovation to begin seeing its mandate as achieving a more globally balanced international economic system. The G20 countries, as the primary sponsors of the World Bank, must tackle this issue head-on. Specifically, the G20 should demand from the World Bank, within a year, a new strategic plan for completely revamping its approach with a focus on win-win innovation policy.

To be sure, the innovation strategy that the World Bank crafts for truly lagging developing countries, notably in Africa, should be distinct from those for other developing nations. And exports are certainly part of any nation’s economic growth strategy. But an exports-only strategy must be revised to reflect today’s world. Innovation-based growth in Africa will be much more about adopting and leveraging information technologies, such as by improving access to broadband Internet and improving education, health care, and public infrastructure.

Indeed, IT has played a vital role in raising productivity and contributing to more-efficient markets in many developing countries. For example, a 10% increase in broadband penetration increases per capita GDP growth in low- to middle-income countries by 1.38% Likewise, a 10% increase in mobile phone penetration in low- and middle-income economies adds 0.81% to annual per capita GDP growth. And a survey of 20,000 businesses in low- and middle-income countries found that firms using IT have faster sales and employment growth and also higher productivity.

Accordingly, a recent World Bank study urged nations to adopt more balanced policies regarding IT adoption and use, arguing that doing so could lead to stronger economic growth. These are the ways the global community should be supporting economic growth in developing countries, not by encouraging businesses to decamp from the developed world to relocate to the developing world.

• Reforming the World Trade Organization. For its part, the WTO needs to worry less about preserving the myth that the current global trading system is based on free trade, and more about aggressively attacking innovation mercantilism. In addition, the opaque, Geneva-based WTO is long overdue to become more transparent and open. For example, the WTO routinely classifies certain documents as internal rather than official WTO documents, allowing them to remain hidden to the public.

Step 3: Foreign Aid and Development Funds for Innovation

The third step toward an innovation-oriented global economic policy is for developed countries to work alongside international development organizations to reformulate foreign-aid policies. Both “carrot” and “stick” tools are needed to draw and prod countries toward the right kinds of innovation policies. Two economic principles should guide developed countries’ foreign-aid policies.

First, foreign aid should be geared toward enhancing the productivity of developing countries’ domestic, nontraded sectors, not toward helping their export sectors become more competitive in global markets.

Second, countries that impose significant barriers to trade and blatantly engage in IP theft, currency manipulation, and other mercantilist policies should have their foreign-aid privileges withdrawn. Countries running up huge trade surpluses should simply not be receiving any foreign aid, regardless of how poor they are. The message to these countries should be that, if they want to engage the global community for development assistance, then mercantilist practices cannot constitute the “dominant logic” of their innovation and economic growth strategies.

One astounding example is the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, which pools countries’ donations to fight these pernicious diseases into one coordinated fund. Resource-strapped countries receive grants to purchase medicines, build health programs, and prevent these diseases from spreading. The Fund’s founders envisioned the resources going to places like Lesotho, Haiti, and Uganda, where these diseases have reached crisis levels. But during the eight years since the Fund was launched, China—a country with more than $3 trillion in foreign currency reserves—has become the fourth-largest recipient of funds, having been awarded nearly $1 billion, or almost three times more than South Africa, one of the countries most affected by these diseases.

Developed nations also need to stop directly enabling innovation mercantilism on the part of the nations they assist. There are many examples of this. For instance, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a U.S. governmental corporation whose mission is to help American companies invest overseas, funded a venture investment bank that made high-tech investments in India in technology companies that were competing directly against U.S. companies.

A Rising Tide Doesn’t Lift Leaky Boats

The notion of a rising tide lifting all boats has merit, and we do not suggest that international efforts to boost economic development are inherently bad or are part of a zero-sum game. To the contrary, developed nations should be doing more, not less. But economic development policies should not reward and encourage mercantilist and distorting policies.

Just as the United States exerted leadership to reshape the postwar global manufacturing economy, it will need to exert leadership, along with key allies, to reshape the twenty-first-century innovation economy. To do this, America must work with the Australians, Canadians, Europeans, and whomever else will come aboard to lay out a renewed vision for globalization grounded in the perspective that markets should drive global trade; that countries should adhere to their trade agreements; that genuine, value-added innovation drives economic growth; and that fair competition forces countries to ratchet up their game by putting in place constructive innovation policies that leave all countries better off.

This task won’t be easy, but it should be the top foreign economic policy goal of these nations. But even if these nations will not join with the United States, America can’t afford not to act on its own.

For the United States, the tendency will be to let global political and national security concerns trump concerns about economic competitiveness. All that has to happen is for North Korea or Iran to threaten making a nuclear weapon, and the United States will likely cease to place any economic pressure on China. But the attitude that the United States has had since World War II—that it can afford to put economic competitiveness second—is no longer tenable, especially because a weak U.S. economy increasingly imperils both its defense industrial base and its national security and foreign policy priorities.

As for Europe, both the European Union (EU) and its individual states have been loath to stand up to innovation mercantilists for the simple reason that they hope to benefit from their practices. Perversely, by playing “the good cop” against America’s “bad cop,” European leaders hope that the mercantilists will punish American companies, not theirs, and that for once Europe will be on top of the innovation economy.

The United States is lagging behind many European countries in several measurements of innovation progress, but Europe still sees the United States as a formidable competitor that needs to be checked. As one British scholar explained to us, “We Europeans would like to see you Yanks taken down a notch. Then we could be the innovation leaders.” But there is no reason to think that mercantilists won’t turn their sights on European leadership, just as they have done on American supremacy. Countries like China play the “divide and conquer” game all too well.

Finally, innovation mercantilist nations like China, Brazil, and others will likely oppose any efforts to create a new global innovation framework. China will likely claim that what they do in their own economy is no one’s business but theirs. That claim is completely without justification when their activity affects the global economy unfairly and violates the spirit if not the letter of the WTO. If they want to be left alone, they should pull out of the WTO and all other international economic agreements—and stop receiving any and all foreign aid, including from the World Bank.

Brazil and its fellow travelers in the developing world will likely rely on guilt to make their case: We’re just a poor Southern Hemisphere nation oppressed by you Northern developed nation imperialists. In fact, the North–South divide that was a central theme for many years has begun to give way to a more complex system marked by the arrival of advanced developing countries and global supply chains that transcend the geographic location of a country.

The reality is that, without innovations like computers, the Internet, and biotechnology—which were introduced by developed nations that invested hundreds of billions of dollars to create them—developing nations would be significantly worse off. Even leaving this aside, the fact that nations are developing simply does not give them the moral standing to steal intellectual property or engage in a host of other mercantilist practices.

If developed countries can muster the will and the ability to cooperate, a first priority should be to reformulate their trade and aid agendas. One of the biggest challenges for the United States and European nations is that their trade policies are structured to play “whack a mole.” They expend enormous resources to identify, respond to, and combat particular instances of foreign countries’ contravening international trade agreements to the detriment of their businesses (the actual harms from which must also be legally established). U.S. or European trade policy rarely rises to the level of broader principles, such as insisting that other countries “desist with this generalized practice.” Because U.S. and European trade policies are organized in a legalistic framework to combat unfair trade practices on a case-by-case basis, it becomes difficult for them to put in place a comprehensive trade strategy designed to stimulate competitiveness and innovation.

At the end of the day, developed countries are going to have to abandon the notion that unrepentant mercantilist nations are somehow going to play by the rules if we just play nice with them. Accordingly, the United States, Europe, the Commonwealth nations, and perhaps Japan should create a new global trade zone, involving those countries genuinely committed to adhering to the principles of open, free, and fair trade. Countries that insist on pursuing mercantilist strategies would not be welcomed into this new arrangement.

Toward U.S. Innovation Policy Leadership

In the 65 years following World War II, most nations looked to the United States to lead the process of global economic governance. And given that the United States renounces innovation mercantilism, it should also play a leadership role in ensuring that the global economy is structured in a way that maximizes innovation. But as discussed above, this means developing a new understanding that global action should be designed not to maximize flows of goods across borders, as important as that is, but to maximize global innovation.

In the end, the race for innovation advantage will only get more intense and heated. It’s therefore critical that the United States and its free-trade allies take the needed steps now to contain and roll back the rampant innovation mercantilism being practiced by countries like China. They must ensure that the global economy evolves in a way that favors free trade and competition based on good innovation practices, especially as an increasing number of nations develop and expand their own innovation and competitiveness policies.

As George Kennan stated in his long telegram (1946) about the rise of the Soviet Union being a test of America’s greatness, we can also hope that the new race for global innovation advantage will spur America out of its slumber and divisiveness to again become the global innovation leader—not just as a front-runner in the race, but as a referee to ensure that the race is fair and that everyone benefits from the competition.

About the Authors

Robert D. Atkinson is the founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a technology policy think tank based in Washington, D.C. He is also author of the book, The Past and Future of America’s Economy: Long Waves of Innovation That Power Cycles of Growth (Edward Elgar, 2005), and the State New Economy Index series.

Stephen J. Ezell is a senior analyst with ITIF. His focus is innovation policy, science and technology policy, international competitiveness, and trade, manufacturing, and services issues.

This essay was adapted from their book Innovation Economics: The Race for Global Advantage (Yale University Press, 2012).

Crime in the Year 2030

By Gene Stephens

Emerging technologies have always had effects on criminal activity as well as on crime detection and prevention. A futurist specializing in criminal justice assesses his previous predictions about crime in the year 2000 and looks ahead to potential outcomes in the decades ahead.

Boy, was I ever wrong about some of my predictions for “Crime in the Year 2000,” published in the April 1981 issue of THE FUTURIST.

Almost all of the biomedical and communications advances I forecast have arrived (some a little later than 2000), but many of their predicted uses to thwart crime have not materialized. As usual in visioning, the human variable had been the most difficult to grasp.

While correctly predicting that better methods of fertility and birth control would be available, my subsequent extrapolation that genetic scanning and other tools would allow some couples to produce “super babies” who then might be reared by other couples especially suited to provide “love and compassion”—thus leading to better child development and less inclination to crime—hasn’t occurred. It seems that society, at least in the United States, is not ready for my conclusion that “child breeding and rearing, then, may be considered too important to be left to chance.”

I predicted that more terrorism would occur in the latter part of the twentieth century, but would subside by 2000 as genetic scanning and engineering, plus other technological advances, would be used to identify and change “budding terrorists.” One problem here was my optimism that the major causes of economic inequalities would be alleviated, reducing a major motive for terrorism.

But I was also right in some predictions:

Traditional crime would decrease (now at its lowest point since the FBI began keeping crime statistics) while cybercrime and other high-tech crimes would increase.

Crime would increasingly be recognized by some as a means of reaching a socially “legitimate” goal (e.g., material success). Officials of some banks, mortgage companies, stockbrokers, and others willfully violated numerous laws and regulations to gain huge monetary rewards, sometimes paying millions of dollars in fines and penalties to reap billions of dollars in profits.

New laws and enforcement methods would be required to cope with the evolving “cashless society” (e.g., illegal programming of computers and misuse of automatic transfer-of-funds machines).

Data from many different agencies and systems would be computerized and cross-referenced and then used to identify suspects in criminal events.

I also forecast in the 1981 article that “advances in communications will make it possible to keep people under constant audio and visual surveillance. Thus the extent to which people will allow infringement of their privacy, even for the purpose of controlling crime, will be a major philosophical and legal issue.”

At least a couple of forecasts are behind schedule, but remain in my future facts file:

Most “crimes without victims,” such as gambling, drug use, public drunkenness, and prostitution, will be decriminalized and handled outside the criminal justice system.

Cooperation “between the criminal justice system and other systems in society will likely be much greater,” as society recognizes that schools, teachers, community leaders, and others are vital to preventing crime and disorder. Economic hard times are also leading to this cost-saving approach.

So this is an opportunity to see if I can do better after 30 additional years of studying the future and trends impacting the world of public safety. In this article, I look at the major issues evolving or likely to arrive between now and the year 2030, their impact on public safety, and the alternatives likely to be taken by offenders and public safety protectors. This time I have more information and more experience, plus guidance from my colleagues in the Futures Working Group (FWG), composed of police futurists, academics, and FBI officials.

The Evolving 21st Century

Having taught in leadership programs for the brightest and best in the public safety arena for more than four decades, I have seen a major shift in the last decade. Once dominated by officers, agents, and officials steeped in tradition and highly resistant to change, the field of public safety is now populated by a generation raised on instant access to information, fast-changing communications, and recreational technologies (computer games, puzzles) that encourage them to seek answers (e.g., via Google) immediately to all issues. They demand access to evolving technologies as soon as possible. They do not feel threatened by change; they relish it and become bored in its absence.

The challenges to effective public safety and law enforcement are enormous, and the only path through this future will demand the type of cooperation and dedication to public service that has been in short supply in recent years. Deliberation and due process considered necessary to ensure safety and justice will have to be delivered at a pace not seen before in the systems developed to provide public safety. Years, months, or even weeks of consideration normally required to enact a policy change or react to a new threat simply will not be available; the evolving system must include the capacity for hyperdrive.

Again, evolution may come to the rescue, or at least provide a partial solution, as Ray Kurzweil and others posit that the “Singularity”—the melding of humans and machines with advanced intelligence and capacities—will arrive in this century, probably well on its way by the 2030 target of this forecast. A post-Singularity public safety officer may well be capable of hyperdrive and of juggling hundreds or more developments at the same time. We can only hope. Meanwhile, we humans must muddle through, as the following twenty-first-century change drivers continue to evolve or begin to arrive.

The Technology Conundrum: Balancing Security and Civil Liberties

An avalanche of emerging technology is transforming crime and crime control worldwide and will launch snowball effects in the lives of all. Technology is amoral; it will be put to good use and to evil use. Technology will provide means to commit crimes, to thwart crimes, to cover up crimes, and to detect crimes. The offender can surveil targets and prey from afar with high-tech gadgetry, just as a detective can surveil the suspect (or the area in general), full time and in real time. And this is technology that is improving exponentially.

As a surveillance technology, microscopic cameras will soon give way to nanoscopic body implants. GPS will be replaced or supplemented with internal tracking systems, making it possible that every living creature will be “findable” anytime, anywhere.

Body odors and essences will join fluids as difficult-to-refute evidence of culpability for any personal crime, and digital forensics will provide scientific proof in cybercrime cases.

All types of transportation—from driverless cars to flying vehicles to public-access moving sidewalks and roadways—will require identification of all users via chip-augmented cards (and eventually implanted chips). This technology will add to our ability to account for all movement of all individuals. Being “off the grid” will be seen as deviant behavior and likely will become a criminal offense.

As chips replace personal computers and even mobile devices for receiving, processing, and disseminating data, the intrusion into personal space will increase, especially after the chips become organic and are implanted into the individual’s neurosystem. Again, the opportunistic offender will find hacking into these chips to be both challenging and profitable (e.g., “I’ll scramble your data and drive you crazy if you don’t do what I say”). Public safety officials will use the same chips to collect and use massive amounts of data to identify, track, arrest, and convict these offenders and to uncover plots and deter others from similar threatening behavior.

Eventually, trillions of unseen nanochips may be unleashed to permeate every cubic inch of airspace worldwide, providing a constant and lasting record of all activity on earth. Already, it is unwise to assume that any action—whether in public or in supposedly private space—is unnoticed or even unrecorded.

The overriding challenge for the next decade and beyond is how to balance safety and civil liberties in the face of this omnipresent surveillance. Is there a level of usage where sufficient safety is assured while a modicum of privacy and freedom of thought and action is preserved?

In the United States and the European Union, the courts have already begun to struggle with this dilemma; so far, the tendency has been to allow law enforcement officers to use new technologies, sometimes without specific evidence of a crime. The conundrum can be expected to swirl indefinitely; some observers believe that the result will be “the death of privacy” as we know it.

Acquiring Sustainable, Affordable Energy

How is energy an issue in the future of crime? The control of energy sources and the possible theft of energy are major emerging dilemmas, due to the increasing cost of energy, as well as to the fear that major sources are either in short supply or in danger of being priced out of reach of most consumers.

Until abundant, affordable alternative sources of energy are further developed, the world will continue to depend primarily on fossil fuel; yet, oil, natural gas, and coal are not equally available and distributed worldwide. Have and have-not energy source nations are often quite different from have and have-not wealth nations, creating a worldwide scramble for dominance. Joining governments in this scramble will be syndicates and cartels, as well as renters and homeowners, all determined to share in the energy wealth via whatever means deemed necessary.

Bypassing or tampering with power supplier meters is a growing problem, costing an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide and accounting for 10% to 40% of all energy use in various countries. Theft of gasoline by “drive offs” at the pumps and siphoning from trucks and storage tanks increases as the prices rise. Domestic and international pipelines to carry oil and gas can be expected to face more breaks and diversions by thieves and sabotage by terrorists seeking to spread panic or gain leverage in the coming energy wars.

Again, technology will aid both offenders and protectors. Low-cost and almost undetectable explosives will emerge, along with devices providing constant surveillance and detection. This is a war that will be fought at macro and micro levels, requiring multinational task forces and international partnerships as well as local public safety agencies.

By 2030, many alternative fuels will be further developed (e.g., solar, thermal, wind, wave), along with some new possibilities (e.g., compressed air, pneumatic). The struggle for control of these energy sources, and the methods of theft and of protection, will evolve in ways that are difficult to envision today.

Water Wars Erupt as Supply of Essential Element Dwindles

As with energy, control over water supply has the potential to attract criminal or terrorist activity. Potable water is in short supply worldwide, and acquiring it and controlling it has already become both a business and a criminal enterprise around the globe. Taken for granted by most Americans, water is going to become even more costly in the future, more valuable and more essential than oil, gold, or any other precious mineral.

Blue Planet Network reports that 1.1 billion people today have no access to potable water, that 2.2 million people a year die from waterborne diseases, that half of the world’s hospital beds are filled with patients suffering water-related maladies, and that, in the developing world, 80% of all disease results from contaminated water.

In the developing world, individuals use an average of 2.64 gallons of water a day for drinking, washing, and cooking, while in the United States, daily use averages 100–175 gallons.

Meanwhile, 90% of freshwater (including that which is polluted) goes to support agriculture (e.g., 1,000 liters for a kilogram of potatoes, 1,450 for wheat, and 3,450 for rice). More than 97% of the world’s supply is salt water, but current desalination costs are out of reach for most of the world’s citizens.

Water theft has preceded water wars in many locations worldwide, and as attention turns to protecting this commodity, new laws and new enforcement emphasis will begin to emerge. In the United States, many cite the Owens Valley–City of Los Angeles water deal of the early twentieth century as the first major theft of water—a story dramatized in the 1974 movie, Chinatown. Australia has had numerous types of water theft and enforcement campaigns in the face of sustained drought. Crimes have included making unauthorized connections to public water supplies, siphoning from dams, tapping rainwater containers, emptying water tanks on ranches, and diverting streams and rivers. Fines of up to $1.1 million for farmers and $2.2 million for corporations have been levied, along with prison sentences of two years.

Some even cite international conspiracies to acquire and control water, such as an alleged attempt by the World Bank and major multinational corporations—known as the Water Resources Group—to place “governance” of water into private hands worldwide. In Blue Gold (Earthscan, 2002), authors Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke posit that bottled-water companies are trying to corner freshwater rights to dry up outlets and control supply.

Turkey is under pressure to ensure that its dams still allow sufficient water from Asian rivers to reach Middle Eastern countries. Similar conditions exist in many other countries, such as the United States, where the Colorado River becomes depleted before it flows into Mexico. As the water supply becomes even scarcer, these conflicts likely will erupt into regional battles, possibly even armed conflict, as well as entrepreneurial theft. Control of water will replace control of oil as the world’s biggest prize.

Again, emerging technology could provide both the means to commit these thefts and the means to protect supplies of water. Soon, altering the directions of rivers or emptying pipelines or containers could be accomplished with explosives so small that they cannot be seen with the naked eye and possibly cannot be detected by any machine. Thus, prevention of such attacks will be increasingly difficult; however, developers of technology usually rise to the occasion, and countermeasures are likely to emerge.

Possibly the best hope is that lower-cost desalination technology will provide much-needed freshwater. A possible threat here is that converting the salt water may alter the world’s ecosystem in unanticipated ways.

Global Economics and Future Crime

As markets become interdependent worldwide and operate on a 24-hour-a-day real-time cycle, it will become difficult for many cultures to isolate themselves and live by their own customs without interference from the outside world.

With this high-speed, high-tech market economy, new types of crime and crime prevention will also emerge. Problems such as price fixing, market manipulation, insider trading, and other types of fraud and deception will be magnified as they affect people across the globe. Since laws are enacted in a political environment, the first crisis may well be deciding what types of activities (including those that are culturally accepted in some locations but taboo elsewhere) should be allowed and what should be illegal in this new economy.

Methods of committing these economic crimes will continue to center around the Web and its increasing access to every nook and cranny of the globe. The Nigerian bank and lottery winner scams of today are being joined by hundreds of new ventures each week, burdening lawmakers to define these approaches as criminal and then find ways to enforce the new laws.

Since the harm of a local, regional, national, or international breakdown in any part of the world economy could put millions or even billions of people at risk, preventing and mitigating such crimes will take on new importance. It will require a type of law enforcement specialist in short supply today and likely will change the standards for entry into the field as well as for training and deployment. One option would be to continue privatization, hiring experts in economic fields to work within the public safety agency or to become part of a partnership arrangement.

Promises and Threats of Omnipresent Media

Transparency is an increasingly important issue in public safety. More rather than fewer eyes will be on the field in the near future.

The 24-hour news cycle of cable and satellite television has been joined by the same cycle of blogging and social networking on the Internet. And information dissemination has become more immediate and intimate with the cameras and listening devices on almost all handheld electronic devices (plus GPS to pinpoint location), creating the omnipresent media. The definition of media has been expanded from people employed by media companies to anyone and everyone. Increasingly there will be no hiding from the public eye.

This plethora of surveillance of public safety officers (and everyone else for that matter) will multiply exponentially as the micro and then nano dots saturate every square inch of air in urban and later all areas of earth. These self-contained spyware recording devices—when networked by emerging supercomputer systems—could provide an unbroken record of all activity worldwide, the ultimate in omnipresent media.

These technologies and their use hold the promise of deterring crime, detecting crime, and providing evidence to prosecute and convict offenders. They also threaten privacy and all other civil liberties of all living persons. For the falsely accused, this “permanent record” can provide exoneration, or at least compelling evidence for the defense. For the tech savvy would-be offender, elaborate disguises (such as appearing to be another known person) may beat the system until more sophisticated identification systems are acquired. Having a co-conspirator within the system to “edit” the record may also be an adaptation.

Public safety officials already are beginning to wear tiny cameras on their person to record all interaction with the public in an attempt to protect themselves—or at least have their own version to report—when cell phone cameras and other devices record their public actions (e.g., an arrest accompanied by fighting between police and suspect). In the future, with the automatic recording and storing of all movement, public safety (indeed, all officials) will be required to answer for all actions.

Thus, the omnipresent media should reduce both crime and overzealous public safety responses, but at a high cost to freedom of the individual in daily life.

Searching for a Meaningful Life

How will humans and later transhumans (humans with enhanced abilities via genetic manipulation and/or bionic implants) find meaning and worth in a world where constant surveillance reduces criminal activity while also capturing and preserving all individual faults?

It may well be that privacy and similar civil liberties will not be as valued by coming generations as they were by our forefathers and elders. There is some evidence that current young people are more willing to share intimate details of their lives with others (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and less protective of their privacy—to the extent that many public safety agencies (police, parole, probation included) daily scan these sites for self-proclaimed evidence of criminal activity or violations of regulations.

Still, the very belief in free will—a basic concept in support of capitalism and justice—is called into question by the nature of the emerging society. If free will is a driving force, we can expect massive revolts against anticipated use of these technologies; whether the rebelling is by large groups across the economic and social spectrum of society or restricted to fringe elements, such as survivalists and counterculture advocates, will determine the impact this future has on public safety activity. It could range from all-out citizen-versus-police warfare to simply a blip on the screen (such as recent Occupy movements).

In advance of the Singularity (when humans become one with smart machines), increasing numbers of individuals will join the ranks of those who already have become bionic—the millions with body implants (e.g., knees, hips, arms, legs, and increasingly lungs, hearts, and soon brains). Again, free will becomes an issue, as a defense against criminal charges, already used in a few cases, will be that the implant(s) transformed the recipient from a self-governing citizen into an individual controlled, at least in part, by bionic implants or genetic manipulation. A philosophical crisis might be expected.

When the Singularity does arrive (2030?), concepts such as human, free will, even life itself, will have to be rethought, and within that transformative conundrum will lie the future of the concept of public safety and its implementation.

About the Author

Gene Stephens, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina, continues to teach and write about the future, especially of public safety, as a working member of the Futures Working Group, the Public Safety Leadership Development Consortium, and the Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas. He is also Criminal Justice Editor of THE FUTURIST and a consulting futurist. He can be reached at stephens-gene@sc.rr.com.

Eldering: Aging with Resilience

By James H. Lee

As populations grow older in developed countries, societies are meeting the challenges of aging with newfound resilience. By tapping the maturity and improved vitality of their seniors, families may grow stronger, economies more sustainable, and nations more peaceful.

Can you hear the ticking of a demographic time bomb? As the population ages, there will be fewer workers putting money into the system to cover the costs of government programs that pay out lifetime benefits, from pensions to Social Security and Medicare. Simply put, when there are more grandmothers than babies, the system is in trouble.

But in this time of crisis, communities and families are drawing on their resilience and resourcefulness in ways that are truly transformational. “Post-nuclear” families in the United States are reextending to embrace multiple generations. More than 6 million elder Americans now live with their children, a number that increased by more than 50% between 2000 and 2010, according to the Census Bureau.

While institutionalized care was once seen as inevitable, the number of people over the age of 75 in nursing homes has been dropping since the mid-1980s. Part of this trend is accounted for by the increase in multigenerational households, but other factors are also involved. Improvements in longevity mean that many people are able to delay going to a nursing home. Also, more families have part-time help available to provide caregiving services for their parents.

Fewer adults over 65 are living alone; those who do live alone are more likely to report that they are not in good health, and that they are sad, depressed, or lonely, compared with their peers who are either living with a spouse or another family member, according to a Pew Research Center study.

Continued work is another source of resilience for an “eldering” population. A second career for many early retirees means personal retooling and rebranding. Some are going back to school and living on campus. More than 50 universities in the United States now offer “senior housing” either on the edge of campus or within short walking distance. The Village at Penn State University offers a continuum of care, including independent living, assisted living, and a skilled nursing facility. For those with the intellectual interest and the financial reserves, this may become an increasingly popular option.

Economic Impacts of the Elder Boom

With all of the gifts of longevity, we may find that an aging population is one that requires significant care and attention. While we can only hope that our elder population will be healthy and active, gains in longevity sometimes come with the cost of living with frailty. Living longer can sometimes mean living a more limited life—economically, mentally, and physically. Half of all people over the age of 65 have at least two chronic health conditions. Meanwhile, a study from the Centers for Disease Control suggests that only one-fifth of Americans over the age of 65 stay physically active on a regular basis.

We may soon see the first generation in history to spend more time caring for elderly parents than for children, as Ted Fishman writes in A Shock of Gray (Scribner, 2010). There are multiple factors that support the trend toward greater longevity, he notes. The population shift toward urban centers and improvements in education, public health, access to medical care, and reliable treatments for infections are the “main ingredients for a potion that foils early death and gives us the joys and sorrows of longer lives.”

The same developments that enable a culture to become modernized will also change the demographic mixture of its population. Literacy gives women a choice between focusing on career or on family. The pursuit of higher levels of education may delay the start of childbearing for some. Moving a large segment of the population away from farms and into cities, where people can be more productive and enjoy higher access to health care, is another factor.

Eventually, this turns the demographic pyramid upside down, with a profusion of elders and a vastly diminished number of children. The countries that experienced early modernization will be among the first to experience the full effects of the “age wave.”

In the United States, the Institute on Aging reports that there are 17 million Americans between the ages of 75 and 85. That figure is expected to double by 2050. While centenarians are something of a rarity today, the population of Americans living beyond the age of 100 is expected to grow to 2.5 million during the same period.

Internationally, we see the same pattern, but in Japan and Europe the trends toward aging are even more pronounced. By 2050, Japan is expected to see a net population decline as a result of couples choosing to have fewer children and tight immigration policies, while the ranks of the elderly are expected to swell to close to 40% of total population.

Europe’s total population is expected to stabilize over the next few years, yet the proportion of its population over the age of 65 is anticipated to grow faster than any other age group. By that time, close to three in ten Europeans will be older than 65, one in six over 75, and one in ten over the age of 80.

Economics is the driving factor behind almost all social change, and this will be particularly evident with regard to care of the elderly. Just as the extended family disappeared during the boom decades of the twentieth century, it is quite likely that extended family structures will return again during times of economic stress.

The costs are not insignificant.

A private room in a nursing home with skilled staff costs an average of $77,000 per year. At the other end of the spectrum, licensed personal care assistants that help with basic errands such as cooking, shopping, and housekeeping cost an average of $18 per hour, according to research by Genworth Financial. Home health aides who help with basic activities such as bathing, dressing, and mobility are in a similar cost range.

Many households cannot afford skilled nursing care for any sustained period of time. Given the choice of living in a nursing home or staying with family, most people would prefer to be under the care of their children. For families able to make the transition, the consolidation of households can greatly help cash flow by combining expenses such as rent and utilities under a single roof.

Choices will need to be made at all levels.

In the early 1960s, national defense was the U.S. government’s largest expense. It comprised half of total spending. By 2011, the nation had reduced defense expenditures down to just 20% of the budget—even while fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Medicare and Medicaid combined are now 23% of total expenditures, while Social Security is closer to 20%. This means that just under half of total government expenditures are targeted toward older Americans. When translated to dollars, government support to the average American over the age of 65 has grown to about $26,000 per year ($14,000 through Social Security and $12,000 through Medicare).

These are enormous expenses, which everyone is motivated to sustain for as long as possible. People who have spent a lifetime paying into the Social Security system deserve to have some sort of benefit. The difficulty arrives when these benefits become such a significant portion of government outlays that they can no longer be ignored.

Regardless, the rising costs of unlimited health care for seniors will be an extremely divisive political battleground by the end of this decade. Tough decisions will need to be made in order to keep the system going. Medicare benefits may go into effect at a later age. Social Security benefits may be reduced for those who have other sources of income.

Sometime toward the second half of this decade, we may also see some type of health-care rationing. Eventually, this may limit health-care benefits for those who suffer severe cognitive disabilities or are under artificial life support. As a result, we may see considerable growth in palliative care as support grows for choosing a natural death.

The face of health care will be changed for decades, but we will also develop a new maturity toward our culture’s acceptance of the inevitable transition from this life to the next.

A Wisdom Culture

The late Marty Knowlton, a co-founder of Elderhostel, had said, “In many ways, elders are the dominant force in society. We control 75 percent of the wealth, and because we typically vote in greater numbers than younger people, we wield enormous political clout. Elders have the potential of influencing the political, economic, and cultural agendas of the future.”

In the best of all possible worlds, the inversion of the demographic pyramid could bring about a wisdom culture, marked by tolerance and maturity.

If we could imagine living with a strong generation of elders who have seen decades of success and folly, how would it change our perspective? Would it help us to maintain a long-term view that can encompass several generations? Or would it cause us to become increasingly conservative and more risk-averse?

Most baby boomers are still in the retooling phase of life. Culturally, we still value the image of the “aerobic grandparent”—busy, engaged, active, and involved. In many ways, this is simply an extension of middle age.

As more boomers become elders, they may gradually feel a desire to spend less time doing and more time being. Action moves inward. Life becomes more meditative and the world becomes a quieter, less hurried place.

If done consciously, daily activities can take on an almost Zen-like level of perfection. If we live long enough, we can become experts at living. Reviewing the past enables us to understand the present. We can see some things more clearly with the benefit of hindsight. There is also wisdom to be gathered from seeing cycles and patterns over the course of many decades.

Some of these patterns involve personal pain and bodily decline. By tapping into these experiences, there is the potential to develop a great deal of empathy and compassion for others. While personal suffering will seldom be sought after, it may become accepted as an important part of spiritual cultivation. Driven by necessity and freed from the responsibilities of mid-life, there is a newfound freedom to explore faith and one’s own soul.

These values are passed on to family and community in the form of unconditional love and acceptance. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi writes, “By example as well as by instruction (elders) can help family life become a training ground for contentment and inner satisfaction. They can model how to slow down our feverish pursuit of material possessions by embracing inner-directed values that stress unconditional love, self-acceptance, and service to others.”

When combined with the growth of multigenerational families, there is an opportunity for elders to cultivate younger generations and imbue them with a deeper sense of self and family. In today’s busy world, many couples lack the time, patience, and attention to fully immerse themselves in parenting. Elders have all of these qualities in abundance. This does not suggest that elders will have sole responsibility for taking care of children; they may not necessarily have the energy or endurance. It merely points to the possibility that raising children will become more of a shared experience.

The contributions of elders are significant, yet immeasurable, in many ways. “While productive aging propagates the image of elders as active, engaged, and vital, ultimately it presents a rather weak and incomplete vision of life,” says gerontologist Harry Moody. “By insisting on the productivity of the old, we put the last stage of life on the same level as the other stages. This sets up a power struggle over who can be the most productive, a competition that the old are doomed to lose.

“By celebrating efficiency and productivity,” Moody continues, “we abandon the moral and spiritual value of life’s stage, stripping old age of meaning. What we need is a wider vision of late-life productivity that includes values such as altruism, citizenship, stewardship, creativity, and the search for faith. In short, we need a spiritual vision that recognizes the value of elders’ non-economic contributions to society.”

These contributions to society may cultivate a more sustainable form of “social security,” in which elders can enjoy a greater level of social acceptance and relevance, while their communities benefit from a higher level of social cohesion. It transcends transactions that are merely financial in exchange for a type of social currency. Eventually, we could redefine our concepts of aging successfully to include those that are able to move beyond material concerns in favor of leaving the world a better place.

From Living Well to Dying Well

My grandmother was a small woman of French and Dutch descent who lived in a suburb outside of New York City. When I remember her home, I always recall the scents of coffee, sugared ham, and anisette toast. She was always up-to-date on current events and unusually willing to share her opinions. Despite her tiny frame, my grandmother would best be described as “feisty” and “determined.”

When she reached her late 70s, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Later, a CAT scan indicated that the cancer had spread to the part of her brain that was necessary for breathing. Her doctor advised that she could have the tumor surgically removed, but also said that if her breathing stopped she could potentially enter a coma.

My grandmother decided that it was not worth the cost or the trouble. She stayed at home, and my mother moved in to take care of her. After a few months, she passed away in her sleep while my mom was preparing breakfast.

Before she died at the age of 82, Grandma said that she “could not have hoped for anything more” out of life. Not everyone gets to have this kind of choice. Not everyone has such a clear view of their life’s end. For my grandmother, it was clear that personal dignity and independence were every bit as important as recovery from illness. Living well meant dying well.

For many, life is marked by struggle. Living takes effort; few things take greater effort than dealing with a terminal illness. We constantly refer to disease in terms of conflict, as in the “battle against heart disease” or the “fight against cancer.” Dying is usually spoken of in terms of defeat and loss—“she finally gave in after a three-month bout of pneumonia.”

The U.S. medical system treats death as a failure and not as an inevitability. We all die. The awareness of this helps us to appreciate and become aware of every moment. Living with the fact that life is both temporary and fragile teaches us to express our gratitude without delay or hesitation. There is no need to wait for the perfect time to share ourselves with someone, because each moment is perfect. This spontaneity of sharing is such an important part of helping us to reconcile our past with our future.

My wife, Stephanie, is a doctor at a nearby hospital and treats many people as they experience the end of their lives. She is an amazingly empathetic person and spends almost as much time caring for families as she does attending to patients.

Stephanie is trained as an infectious disease specialist, but many of her conversations serve as a sort of therapy for families as they are coming to terms with the impending passage of a loved one. It is a complicated mix of emotions that can range from love to grief, guilt to generosity, fatigue to relief. In working with families, she has noted that the family members who push the hardest for artificial medical support and intervention at the end of a patient’s life tend to be the most distant—either physically or emotionally. They seek a delay of death not because the patient isn’t ready, but because they are not ready.

We can keep people alive in a mechanical sense, through oxygen pumps, catheters, and intravenous infusions of nutrients. However, unless there is the hope of wellness or ability to communicate and recognize others, the potential for adequate emotional closure is minimal.

In many instances, it appears that we are attempting to use medical technologies to heal relationships. Dying well means living well.

One of the signs of maturity is the acceptance of the inevitability of dying. When we do so, death becomes somewhat less accidental, less a failure of the body and more of a soulful act. Transitioning is the process of preparation for a life passage that starts decades before the moment of death.

Starting the Transition

Transitioning can involve many small steps. These are all taken to provide a degree of closure and comfort to the surviving family and to prepare for the final transition.

On the administrative side, transitioning can start early by meeting with a legal advisor to draft the appropriate documents. At the most basic level, everyone should have a simple will to direct where their assets will go when they are gone. More people are choosing advance health-care directives to express their wishes regarding life-prolonging medical treatments in the event of their incapacitation. They may also specify whether or not they wish to donate tissue or organs for others in need.

Finally, a durable power of attorney is a document that gives another person the ability to act on one’s behalf regarding financial matters, such as paying bills or filing tax returns.

For all but the most basic documents, it is worthwhile consulting an attorney in your state of residence.

There also are other aspects of transitioning. On a purely physical level, transitioning sometimes resembles an act of simplifying things. This is a matter of going through “stuff” and separating the valuable and the sentimental from the clutter. As part of the transitioning process, some elders may choose to gift beloved heirlooms while still able to share the stories that belong to them. In telling family history and in sharing everything that needs to be said, it is possible for elders to leave legacies that are more memorable to younger generations.

One of the most overlooked aspects of the transitioning process is the importance of healing emotions and relationships. We all have a certain window of time to say the things that need to be said to the people that we care about the most. There is an opportunity to change how we will be remembered by others.

Finally, an important aspect of dying well is that of mentoring. This involves passing on skills and knowledge to others, so that they may also gain the wisdom of elders. This too, may involve sharing stories and history, to pass onward a sense of perspective that would otherwise be lost.

Dying is a truly personal process. The ideal outcome is to create a sense of closure not only for oneself, but for one’s family as well. Everyone approaches transition differently. For some, the stages of dying may be more of a conscious process than for others.

My grandmother had a unique aspect to her own process of transitioning. As teenagers, my sisters and I were always somewhat mystified by our grandmother’s ever-growing collection of paper bags. She must have had several hundred of them—grocery store bags, gift bags, and shopping bags. All of these were used once or twice, then tucked and folded away. She was the wife of a successful banker and always well dressed, yet something of a “bag lady” in her own home.

She had convinced Mom that she needed all of those bags for some future event. She never gave any indication of what that might be. This, too, was a mystery. After she passed away, my parents spent a few months traveling back and forth to her house to settle the estate. Everything was packed away and passed on to relatives or given to charity. When the house was finally emptied, her last stack of books went into the final remaining paper bag.

As always, she was prepared and thinking ahead.

About the Author

James H. Lee is a futurist and investment manager at StratFI. His previous article for THE FUTURIST was “Hard at Work in the Jobless Future,” March-April 2012. E-mail lee.advisor@gmail.com.

This article was adapted with permission from his book Resilience and the Future of Everyday Life (Wasteland Press, 2012).

The Coming of Intelligent Green Vehicles

A Report from the TechCast Project

By Laura B. Huhn, Kenneth W. Harris, and Dexter Snyder

While many people simply want to get from A to B, transportation options (and especially automobiles) have to meet a variety of consumer demands: They must be clean, affordable, safe, and increasingly intelligent. Here is an overview of the choices and challenges for carmakers and consumers over the next 10 to 15 years.

Imagine being able to sit back during your morning commute while your car does the driving. Would you move closer to the country? Take up the oboe? Finally read War and Peace?

And just imagine the freedom it would bring to those who are disabled. Take, for instance, the legally blind man who earlier in 2012 took a spin in Google’s self-driving car to go to Taco Bell and then pick up his dry cleaning. Following Nevada’s recent legalization of driverless cars on the road, Florida has passed a bill allowing tests of self-driving cars. And legislation has also been introduced to make self-driving cars street legal in California.

Self-driving cars may take some getting used to, but we are only at the dawn of a new age in automotive automation.

Ever since the 1939 World’s Fair, the idea of autonomous vehicles has captured the public’s imagination. Today, intelligent, green vehicles are driving the future of transportation. The looming energy and environmental MegaCrisis has carmakers scrambling to raise fuel economy and develop commercially viable vehicles that limit pollutants.

Enabling technologies such as advanced IT systems, artificial intelligence, and speech recognition are giving rise to smart cars that drive themselves and to highway “road trains” or platoons. However, some skepticism remains for the latter, as the rapid installation of intelligent systems in vehicles currently outpaces the level of R&D for platoons.

Drawing on TechCast’s work, this article explains how hybrids, electrics, fuel-cell cars, and intelligent vehicles are likely to enter mainstream use. (See the table “Summary of TechCast Results on Intelligent and Green Vehicles.”)

Hybrids: The All-Purpose Car?

An industrializing world population, a warming planet, and depleting supplies of fossil fuels are causing rising prices at the pump. Consumers are increasingly looking to save on fuel costs.

Under the leadership of Japanese carmakers, the first mass-produced alternative to the internal combustion engine has been so successful that it seems likely to revolutionize car design. A few different types of hybrids exist, all powered by some combination of electric motor, a small gasoline engine operating at high speeds for efficiency, and a battery at lower speeds, providing fuel economy gains and pollution reduction. And hybrids keep improving. Toyota’s third-generation Prius is comparable to a gas-powered Camry in size, price, and performance, and it has a high-tech style that buyers love.

Some manufacturers are also experimenting with solar power. Fisker Automotive has added rooftop solar panels to its Fisker Karma to augment the battery. With enough sunny days, the manufacturer says, the solar glass roof can harness enough energy to extend driving range up to an additional 200 miles annually.

Equipped with high-capacity batteries, hybrids can recharge at night with energy from the grid, costing the equivalent of $1 per gallon. In addition to reducing costs, hybrids could provide storage for intermittent energy like wind; the hybrid car fleet could serve as a source of backup power to the grid.

Although the consumer could get more miles per gallon from their hybrid, the expense of buying one currently means slower adoption. Hybrids still generally cost more than comparable cars in the United States, and they’re a hard sell in China, where a 2012 Toyota Camry HEV starts at about $50,000.

Hybrids, though, remain formidable competitors to all-electrics. If present indications hold and cost improvements continue, TechCast estimates 30% adoption of hybrids by 2016 (plus or minus three years), which would easily translate into a global market in the trillions.

Plugging In to Electrics

The Obama administration set a goal of having 1 million electric cars (including hybrids) on the road by 2015. And China, driven by the need to conserve energy and avoid pollution, plans to have 5 million vehicles powered only by electric motors (all-electrics) on the road by 2020.

All-electric vehicles (EVs) have existed almost as long as gas-engine vehicles, offering advantages of “refueling” with relatively cheap electricity, quieter ride, and simpler mechanisms. They emit no pollutants, require no fossil fuels, and the electricity to power them can be generated from clean sources such as wind and solar in years to come. They can be recharged from 110 or 220 volt outlets at nominal cost and do not require oil changes, tune-ups or emissions inspections. The shift to electric-powered cars is expected to cause sales of gasoline and diesel powered cars to begin to decline about 2020.

EVs remain limited by range on a single battery charge and time required for recharge. However, significant advances in batteries and capacitors and the emergence of home and public charging and exchange stations are making EVs more practical. Some plug-in hybrids, like the GM Volt, are designed for all-electric drive with on-board charging. Improvements in technology will show up directly as models with increased range for all-battery or all-ultracapacitor mode appear in the market. Auto manufacturers are offering broader selections, and prices are nearly competitive with gas-powered vehicles (after government subsidies).

Ford, GM, Chrysler, and top German carmakers have adopted a new standard connecting system enabling EVs to be fast-charged in as little as 15 minutes. The DC Fast Charging with a Combined Charging System, or “combo connector,” is slated for use throughout Europe beginning in 2017. The European Commission seeks to implement a single plug system for recharging and infrastructure. Several Japanese firms, as well, are developing charging standards. Pike Research projects 13,000 U.S. charging stations by the end of 2012, compared with 160,000 gas stations. However, to make electrics comparable to gas-powered and hybrid vehicles, outdoor electrical outlets will be needed at homes, as well as public stations that charge batteries and swap them.

Battery packs cost from $12,000 to $15,000, so EVs are not yet competitive without government subsidy. And while the Mitsubishi i-MiEV retails for around $31,000 in the United States before the $7,500 tax credit, or a net $23,500, a fairly well-equipped Mitsubishi gas-powered vehicle retails for under $20,000. Additional costs for EVs come from the chargers and installation. Moreover, U.S. federal tax credits for the purchase of home and commercial chargers have, for now, expired.

Will costs decrease to the point of affordability? It depends. Scarcity of raw materials like lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt used in batteries may prevent costs from declining and may even increase costs.

All-electrics also face tough competition from improved gas-powered vehicles, hybrids, and fuel-cell cars. A 2010 ZPryme Research survey of 1,046 U.S. residents revealed that a majority were either “only somewhat likely” or “very unlikely” to buy an electric car within the next five years. TechCast estimates that electrics will lag in adoption behind hybrids, entering mainstream in the 2020s.

Fuel-Cell Cars: The Final Solution?

Governments and the auto industry are pouring billions of dollars into hydrogen vehicle research and development. Gas engines in conventional cars are less than 20% efficient, while hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles use 40%–60% of the fuel’s energy. Automotive fuel cells are still in the research stage, as no version has durability anywhere near the 5,000 hours required for vehicle use.

Fuel-cell vehicles are considered long-range alternatives to electric cars, and they are also similar to hybrids. They use electric motors to drive wheels, batteries to store energy, regenerative braking to conserve it, and may in time use lighter composite bodies.

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded millions of dollars to innovative hydrogen storage technology projects across the United States to advance adoption of fuel-cell vehicles. The U.S. National Research Council states that lower-cost fuel-cell cars are likely to be available by 2015, and 2 million hydrogen-powered cars could be operating across the nation in 2020 and 25 million by 2030.

Hydrogen-powered vehicles that used to cost a shocking $1 million to build just a few years ago have dropped to $100,000. Now, more than 100 companies are developing fuel-cell cars, with significant gains in driving range, power density, cost, durability, and weight. Several major automakers, including Toyota, Hyundai, and Mercedes-Benz, plan to launch limited sales of hydrogen-powered cars in 2015.

But gasoline refineries, gas stations, distribution systems, and the entire infrastructure of auto fuel will have to change. There are a few experimental hydrogen fuel stations in Southern California, where Honda plans to lease about 200 FCX Clarity FCEV vehicles over the next few years.

Methods for extracting hydrogen, too, are still not yet clearly defined nor commercially feasible. Also, some scientists warn that hydrogen from fuel cells could leak into the atmosphere and disrupt the ozone layer. TechCast estimates that fuel-cell cars will enter the commercial market by 2015, eventually creating global demand that may reach several trillion dollars.

Competing Alternatives

U.S. consumers and manufacturers are reviving interest in modern diesel cars, which can achieve substantially greater fuel economy than gasoline-powered vehicles, meet strict environmental standards, are competitively priced, and have also taken 50% of Europe’s auto market.

Gasoline and diesel engines are becoming more efficient with fuel injection, variable valve timing, and cylinder cutout under part load. EcoMotors company is building a gas engine that’s 50% more fuel-efficient at lower cost. Nissan has developed the supercharged, gasoline-powered, three-cylinder Micra, which gets a combined 68.9 miles per gallon. And the 2012 Chevrolet Cruze Eco gets 39 mpg on the highway, compared with 48 mpg for the 2012 Toyota Prius and 44 mpg for the 2012 Honda Insight. Gas and diesel vehicles are being made out of stronger, lighter materials, and they can be powered with liquid biofuels, which wouldn’t require significant fueling infrastructure changes.

An innovative engine developed at the University of Michigan uses a wave disk generator that causes “shock waves” to ignite compressed fuel and air, using no pistons, rods, crankshaft, valves, spark plugs, or cooling systems. It’s expected to run at 60% efficiency, compared with the typical gas-powered vehicle that runs about 15%. It should also take about 1,000 pounds off of the average car’s total weight, improving fuel efficiency and decreasing emissions 90%.

India’s Tata Motors aims to produce and sell zero-pollution cars that run on compressed air. And Volvo, Ford, Land Rover, and Jaguar are experimenting with flywheel-powered cars, which store kinetic energy in a spinning wheel to power hybrid electric vehicles, which could reduce fuel consumption by 20% at a third of the price of a standard battery.

Vehicles as Information Technologies

Rapid advances in information technology and the urgent need to improve highway safety, relieve congestion, and raise fuel economy are spurring development of intelligent systems throughout the automotive fleet much the same way that next-generation airport systems replace tower control with satellite, plane-to-plane, and plane-to-infrastructure control.

Intelligent vehicles guide drivers through traffic, navigate to a destination, automate driving, guard against accidents, and perform other intelligent functions in concert with other vehicles or the highway infrastructure. Intelligent cars also reduce wasted fuel, lost work hours, accidents, and other drawbacks of congested roads. The U.S. Department of Transportation projects that the 2.9 trillion U.S. highway vehicle miles traveled in 2005 will increase by 60% to 4.7 trillion in 2030. Computer models indicate that automation would double or even triple highway capacity.

Successful DARPA-funded tests and other experiments are providing a foundation for commercial introduction of fully autonomous cars. A European Research Council project led four driverless vans on a 13,000-kilometer (8,077-mile) journey from Italy to China with only minimal human intervention. Google’s self-driving cars traveled more than 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometers) as of late 2011. Volvo is testing a “road train” system in which cars electronically follow a lead car. And Japan has introduced an Intelligent Transport System that enables unmanned pickup and return of cars.

Challenges to smart-vehicle adoption remain, along with doubts about whether they can travel on highways at close intervals without a governing infrastructure. Problems include controlling entry onto onramps and off-ramps, ensuring that vehicles have compatible intelligent systems, setting speed limits, managing accidents, controlling intersections, and optimizing other system functions. In addition, the mix between cars with many gradations of intelligence and those with little or none could cause an important road safety issue for years to come.

Automakers are now steadily integrating and evaluating safety features, such as intelligent brakes and lane following, that will be part of the eventual autonomous vehicle. This trend allows time for truly autonomous systems to evolve naturally and to match the particular needs of different world markets.

The U.S. Department of Transportation launched a one-year pilot study in 2012 with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor. Nearly 3,000 test vehicles will be equipped with wireless vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technology, which can send signals to another vehicle within a 1,000-mile radius as a dashboard warning to alert drivers of impending danger.

Governments will need to change laws and regulations to make self-driving vehicles “street legal.” Liability for accidents remains an issue, not to mention security. As vehicles become increasingly able to transmit data over the Internet, car manufacturers may face the same kinds of privacy concerns that credit card companies do. Intelligent-vehicle systems also make cars vulnerable to terrorist and criminal hacking.

As these challenges are met, TechCast estimates that intelligent vehicles could enter the mainstream about 2015 or shortly thereafter.

The Global MegaCrisis: An Opportunity in Disguise?

Recent years have marked some of the hottest temperatures on record, and if greenhouse gases keep rising, a 10˚F rise is possible in the next few decades. Greenhouse gases must be reduced by 60% from 1980 levels in order to avoid severe climate change. Not only is this daunting, but it is also costly, leading global leaders, power-producing plants, and auto manufacturers to seek ways to cut carbon-dioxide levels in emissions in order to adapt.

This constitutes a Global MegaCrisis: Multiple threats of worldwide industrialization, energy shortages, climate change, environmental collapse, and other unknown global disruptions could reach critical levels about 2020 (see “The Global MegaCrisis: Four Scenarios, Two Perspectives” by William E. Halal and Michael Marien, THE FUTURIST, May-June 2011).

Technology is creating an electronically unified world that is largely industrialized but faces unprecedented challenges in energy, climate change, the environment, and more. World GDP should double by 2020 and almost quadruple by 2030, producing commensurate increases in the above threats.

Crisis? Yes. But automobile manufacturers, seeing an opportunity in disguise, have started a gold rush in the development of clean-energy vehicles. As green practices move into the mainstream over the next five or more years, the decade of the 2010s should prove critical to address global warming, which would also help in the transition to alternative energy by about 2020.

Sustainable practices promise to become one of the most crucial sectors of the economy, while a new form of global order is needed to avert disaster—one that includes pollution control. In Earth in the Balance, Al Gore noted that pollution control was a $500 billion market in 2000 and is expected to reach $10 trillion in 2020—larger than auto, health care, and defense. A rising interest in saving the planet is cutting across global leadership, big business, and consumers who are seeking ways to save at the pump while reducing their future ecological footprint.

The Road Ahead

So what might the next few decades bring? What will a typical driver experience as advanced vehicles alter life into the future? Here’s a quick two-stage scenario describing the life of Sue Smith, an average car owner making her way through the year 2020 and then 2025.

2020—Hybrids Rule

Hi, I’m Sue Smith, systems analyst at a big telecom firm in Denver. Married with two kids; my husband’s name is Brad. We own a Prius and love it, although I really pine for a good all-electric instead of hassling with gas, now at $10.50 a gallon and climbing. With Congress’s new carbon taxes due to kick in soon, electric is the way to go, especially now that solar and other alternatives are picking up the slack from oil.

They say that gas could reach $20 a gallon by 2025 if climate change gets worse. But we can only afford one car, so we need the range of a hybrid.

Most of our neighbors own hybrids now for the same reason, although I must admit that Detroit has improved their traditional cars (internal combustion engines) to the point where there isn’t a great difference in fuel costs. I know Brad loves the thrill of hearing a big V8 roaring down the highway with mufflers blazing. Too bad for Brad, because I’m against using more oil.

I’m tempted by the new hydrogen fuel-cell car that GM just brought out to follow up on the old Volt. With a 300-mile range, and with the hydrogen coming from solar systems that split water, the new “Cell” is really green. Nice to have options.

2025—Smart Electrics and Everything Else

Brad and I decided to trade in the Prius for the new version of the old GM Volt– “Volt II.” Ultracapacitors hold enough power for a 200-mile trip, and carbon-reinforced bodies only weigh half as much.

I love the new Exxon charging stations that have sprung up everywhere, especially with no more gas smells and waiting for the tank to fill. Hit the recharge switch, and zap—the car is ready for another 200 miles.

My friend’s Volt short-circuited out about half of his ultracapacitor, so it could hold less than 100 miles of power. We had to hopscotch across the country on our trip to the coast, stopping every 50–60 miles to recharge. But with the roof-top solar panels we are buying, that car can charge itself while sitting in the driveway most days.

I’m still sweating the self-driving features of smart cars today. Good to be released from the hard work of long drives, and the system does reduce congestion by handling traffic flow well. The big surprise was seeing how self-driving solved the problem with texting, cell-phone use, and other distractions. Now that the car drives itself, it’s easy to use the time for other things.

But I hate the way the highway system groups us into caravans roaring along three feet apart at the speed limit. And I don’t like the tone of the Virtual Highway Assistant, who sometimes seems to sass me.

What really scares me is the thought of giving up control of the car, even though I know it’s really intelligent and safer than relying on other people. I was terrified to see TV shots of that accident in the mountains when the “smart” highway drove a convoy of 46 cars off a cliff, killing 126 people—almost like an airline crash. The courts will be struggling for years figuring out who is liable in this mess.

No, thanks. I’ll just continue using manual mode. It’s slower and risky in other ways, but I like being in control.

About the Authors

Laura B. Huhn provides relevant insights on emerging technologies and social trends to help guide business strategy and marketing communications planning. She has served as TechCast’s field editor for Energy and Environment and currently reports on emerging tech issues and challenges.

Kenneth W. Harris is chairman of the Consilience Group LLC and is editor of Transportation and Managing Editor of TechCast. He also serves as a board member and secretary of the World Future Society.

Dexter Snyder is a business consultant with Fulcrum Edge and TechCast E-Commerce Editor, with expertise in advanced automotive, communications, and energy technologies.

Science and a New Kind of Prediction: An Interview with Stephen Wolfram

Interview by Patrick Tucker

Better living through data? When a pioneer of data collection and organization turned his analytical tools on himself, he revealed the complexity of automating human judgment and the difficulty of predicting just what is predictable.

Stephen Wolfram, creator of the Wolfram|Alpha search engine and author of the books Mathematica and A New Kind of Science, is known all over the world for his contributions to our understanding of computation. In 2012, he received a lot of attention for something else: At the SXSW show, he revealed that he had a more than 20-year personal computational log of, basically, the life of Stephen Wolfram. This included everything from every e-mail he had sent, to when he had gone to bed, to how long his phone conversations lasted, and much more. He then released this data on his personal blog.

So, what can one of the world’s foremost mathematical minds learn about life by examining his own computational data? THE FUTURIST called to ask.

THE FUTURIST: In your blog, you write that “in time I’m looking forward to being able to ask Wolfram|Alpha all sorts of things about my life and times—and have it immediately generate reports about them. Not only being able to act as an adjunct to my personal memory, but also to be able to do automatic computational history—explaining how and why things happened—and then making projections and predictions.” What sort of things have you been able to predict based on this data set you released?

Stephen Wolfram: One thing I found out is that I’m much more habitual than I ever imagined. It’s amazing to see oneself turned into full distribution. It got me thinking about lots of different ways that I could improve my life and times with data. What I realized is that one of the more important things is to have quick feedback about what’s going on, so you don’t have to wait for a year to go back and look at what happened. You can just see it quickly.

I was actually embarrassed that I hadn’t had a real-time display of the history of my unread e-mail, as a function of time. We built that after this blog post, and I have found it’s quite amazing. By having this feedback, I’m able to work more efficiently. It’s also telling me things like, Gosh, if I ignore my e-mail for four days, or five days, or ten days, or something, it will get totally out of hand, and it would take me weeks and weeks to recover from that. Those sound like very mundane [insights], but in terms of how one actually spends one’s time, they can be quite significant effects.

THE FUTURIST: Nobel Prize–winning economist Daniel Kahneman tells us that people, even particularly smart people in extremely high-performing situations, will consistently underestimate how much time it takes them to complete a certain task. So now that you’ve been able to rid yourself of subjective bias in terms of how long it takes to complete tasks, it sounds like you’ve actually been able to see efficiency improvements, just based on taking a look at what you can get done, how long it actually takes, versus how long you think and that sort of thing.

Wolfram: I have pretty good metrics now. If I’m going to write out something for some talk I’m going to give, or something like this, I know how long it takes me now to give the talk, or to write it out. I know how long to set aside. I have learned that there’s no point in starting early, because I won’t finish it until just in time anyway. I have to know how long it’s actually going to take to finish so that I can get it done in an efficient way. If I start it too early, it takes me longer. The task expands into the space available, so to speak.

THE FUTURIST: According to your data, you actually go to sleep late and wake up late. And that’s interesting because now I know that about you, and so do millions of other people. When you released this material, you gave the public a really unique window into aspects of your life. The vast majority of the comments on the blog are really supportive. But are there any reactions that really stood out when you released all of this information?

Wolfram: I was waiting for someone to say, Ah, well, you know, based on what I can see in this beaker, that must mean that you have the following terrible condition, or something like that. But nothing like that happened.

I felt much nerdier after I watched the reaction to the blog, because I really thought there were lots of other people who were thinking about it more than I was, collecting lots of stuff. And it doesn’t seem that there were.

THE FUTURIST: Only very recently, a growing number of people are routinely collecting data about themselves all the time. The drivers for this trend seem to be better and lighter computers that make personal record keeping much easier. And things like Excel spreadsheets, and, of course, shareability through the Internet are also pushing this trend toward personal record keeping and sharing of personal data. How do you see these trends evolving in the context of present-day battles over privacy and over access to information technology? And what has to happen in order for the self-quantification trend to become a truly sustainable movement?

Wolfram: Right now, for most people, it’s dealing with this data. There’s all kinds of plumbing that has to be done. Like, how do you actually get your cell phone call record out? It’s going to stay a complex, multi-part, multi-vendor environment, where people have different phones, e-mail systems, computers, and little devices like pedometers. Those devices will come from lots of places. So the main thing that holds things up is just the practical difficulty of all of this plumbing, of getting data from here to there, and so on.

THE FUTURIST: So there’s a lot of data that we create that we don’t really have access to, that’s stored, perhaps, in the servers of supermarkets, of different people that we give money to, of different vendors, and things like that. If more of that could become transparent, then it would become more useful to us. Would that deepen our relationship with those different entities that have that data? Would it basically give us a lot more information about ourselves?

Wolfram: You know, that’s actually something I haven’t done—taking all the online versions of all these financial records and combining them. I don’t even need to collect that data. It’s already been collected.

THE FUTURIST: Your seminal book, A New Kind of Science, is ten years old. You recently wrote a blog post on the anniversary. Can you talk a little bit about the future of science?

Wolfram: The main idea of A New Kind of Science was to introduce a new way to model things in the world. Three hundred years ago, there was this big transformation in science when it was realized that one could use math, and the formal structure of math, to talk about the natural world. Using math, one could actually compute what should happen in the world—how planets should move, how comets should move, and all those kinds of things.

That has been the dominant paradigm for the last 300 years for the exact sciences. Essentially it says, Let’s find a math equation that represents what we’re talking about, and let’s use that math equation to predict what a system will do. That paradigm has also been the basis for most of our engineering: Let’s figure out how this bridge should work using calculus equations, and so on. Or, Let’s work out this electric circuit using some other kind of differential equation, or algebraic equation or whatever.

That approach has been pretty successful for lots of things. It’s led to a certain choice of subject matter for science, because the science has tended to choose subject matter where it can be successful.

The same is true with engineering. We’ve pursued the particular directions of engineering because we know how to make them work. My goal was to look at the things that science has not traditionally had so much to say about—typically, systems that are more complex in their behavior, and so on—and to ask what we can do with these.

It’s a great approach, but it’s limited. The question is, what’s the space with all possible models that you can imagine using?

A good way to describe that space is to think about computer programs. Any program is [a set of] defined rules for how a system works. For example, when we look at nature, we would ask what kinds of programs nature is using to do what it does, to grow the biological organisms it grows, how fluids flow the way they do—all those kinds of things.

I’ve discovered that very simple programs can serve as remarkably accurate models for lots of things that happen in nature. In natural science, that gives us a vastly better pool of possible models to use than we had from just math. We then see that these may be good models for how nature works. They tell us something about how nature is so easily able to make all this complicated stuff that would be very hard for us to make if we just imagined that nature worked according to math.

Now we realize that there’s a whole different kind of engineering that we can do, and we can look at all of these possible simple programs and use those to create our engineering systems.

This is different from the traditional approach, where I would say, I know these things that work. I know about levers. I know about pulleys. I know about this. I know about that. Let me incrementally build the system where I, as an engineer, know every step of how the thing is going to work as I construct it.

THE FUTURIST: One of the key themes of A New Kind of Science, and also a key theme in your TED talk, is this notion of irreducibility. There are certain things that can’t really be predicted, no matter what. You can’t model them in advance. They have to be experienced. And I wonder, given the future of digitized knowledge, the exponential growth in structured and unstructured data that we can look forward to over the coming decades, is it possible that the space of irreducible knowledge, of unpredictable knowledge—while it will still always exist—is shrinking? Would this mean that the space of predictable knowledge is in fact growing?

Wolfram: Interesting question. Once we know enough, will we just be able to predict everything? In Wolfram|Alpha, for example, we know how to compute lots of things that you might have imagined weren’t predictable. You have a tree in your backyard. It’s such and such a size right now. How big will it be in 10 years? It’s now more or less predictable.

As we accumulate more data, there will certainly be patterns that can be seen, and things that one can readily see that are predictable. You can expect to have a dashboard—with certain constraints—showing how things are likely to evolve for you. You then get to make decisions: Should I do this? Should I do that?

But some part of the world is never going to be predictable. It just has this kind of computational irreducibility. We just have to watch it unfold, so to speak. There’s no way we can outrun it. I suspect that, in lots of practical situations, things will become a lot more predictable. That’s a big part of what we’re trying to address with Wolfram|Alpha. Take the corpus of knowledge that our civilization has accumulated and set it up so that you can automatically make use of it.

There are three reasons why one can’t predict the things that can’t be predicted. The first reason is not enough underlying data. The second is computational irreducibility—it’s just hard to predict. The third is simply not knowing enough to be able to predict something. You, as an individual, don’t happen to know enough about that particular area to be able to do it. I’m trying to solve that problem.

We’re seeing a transition happening right now, and more and more things can be figured out in an automatic way. We’re seeing computation that is finally impinging on our lives in a very direct way. There are lots of things that used to be up to us to estimate, but now they’re just being computed for us: a camera that auto focuses, for example, or that picks out faces and figures what to do, or automatically clicks the shutter when it sees a smile—those kinds of things. Those are all very human judgment activities, and now they’re automated.

I think this is the trend of technology. It’s the one thing, I suppose, in human history that has actually had a progression: There’s more technology; there are more layers of automation about what we do.

THE FUTURIST: You talk about the twenty-first century as being the era where personal analytics really took off. But for you, it was actually the twentieth century. You’ve got the data set that would allow you to answer this question with the largest degree of evidence behind it: Where do you see yourself in 10 years? And what do you see yourself having accomplished 10 years from now?

Wolfram: Well, that’s an interesting question. My gosh. That’s the kind of question one’s supposed to ask at a job interview. I never ask those, because I always figure that they’re silly questions. I’m hoping I’ll do a few new things. We’ll see. For the last decade, Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha were my main activities. I felt pretty good about those. I hope for a few more in the decade to come.

About the Interviewee

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of the Mathematica computational platform, the author of A New Kind of Science, the creator of Wolfram|Alpha, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, www.wolfram.com.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker, deputy editor of THE FUTURIST, and is a preview of his book, A Future Ever Certain: How the Science of Prediction Will Change the Way We Work, Live, and Love (forthcoming from Current Books, Fall 2013).

High Stakes for Humanity’s Future

The Millennium Project calls for global action on challenges that touch every country.

Americans once thought that landing astronauts on the Moon would be impossible, but the U.S. government’s Apollo program made it happen within a mere 10 years. It is now time for China and the United States to jointly marshal an Apollo-like program to tackle climate change and boost renewable energy, argue the authors of the 2012 State of the Future. The report praises global progress in many areas of life but sounds warnings about our overall future.

“It is increasingly clear that the world has the resources to address its challenges. It is also increasingly clear that the current decisionmaking structures are not making good decisions fast enough and on the scale necessary to really address the global challenges,” the report states.

The Millennium Project, an international, participatory think tank, has been publishing the State of the Future reports annually since 1996. Like its predecessors, this year’s report drew from ongoing surveys of 3,000 contributing researchers to compile a list of 15 Global Challenges that world leaders will have to address collaboratively, as well as a State of the Future Index (SOFI) that delineates areas of life that are improving and others that are worsening or remaining unchanged.

The latest SOFI indicates that the world has less poverty, lower rates of infectious diseases, and fewer wars. People are living longer, literacy rates are rising, more women serve in elected office, and Internet connectivity is more widespread than ever. The report looks forward over the next two decades to health disparities between rich and poor countries narrowing, and biotechnology aiding efforts to cope with climate change, demographic imbalances, and scarcities of natural resources.

The world is also growing more ethically aware, the authors indicate. Corporate social responsibility, socially responsible investing, and ethical marketing are all becoming more commonplace, and the Internet and new media are connecting and empowering activists everywhere.

“New technologies make it easier for more people to do more good at a faster pace than ever before,” the report states.

But dangers lie beneath the surface: Political instability directly threatens as much as half the world’s people, terrorism and organized crime are growing, supplies of water and other vital resources are shrinking, and greenhouse-gas emissions are on the rise. The world still grapples with pervasively high unemployment, burgeoning debts, rich–poor gaps, and rising prices for food and electricity. If humanity does not make huge strides forward over the next few decades in green nanotech manufacturing, desalination, urban design, electric vehicles, sustainable farming, and synthetic biology for medicine and energy, the authors warn, then turmoil and mass migrations will ensue.

The report presents plans of action for the international community to put into effect. A global R&D strategy on climate change is among these recommendations, as well as:

• An international campaign against organized crime.
• An international science and technology organization that connects the world’s scientists, tracks advancements, and forecasts their consequences, so that the world community understands the impacts of new technologies before they reach widespread use.
• A universal commitment to nonviolence that mobilizes public education systems; implements an early-warning system that connects NGOs and media services with governments and UN agencies; employs Web-based citizen collaborations for peace promotion, rumor control, fact finding, and reconciliation; and enacts better land ownership recording systems in developing countries to remove land grabbing as a cause of conflict.
• Renewed international legislation to combat violence against women and to safeguard women’s rights.
• International attention to water shortages, and implementation across the Earth of saltwater agriculture on coastlines, hydroponics, aquaponics, vertical urban agriculture installations in buildings, production of pure meat without growing animals, vegetarianism, repair of leaking pipes, and reuse of treated water.

The 2012 report has a few new features, as well. For instance, there is a first-ever national SOFI for Azerbaijan. It charts progress from 1990 through 2010, and a continuing rate of progress through 2020, depending on such feasible (but not guaranteed) developments as year-by-year improvements in energy efficiency, increasing enrollment, utilization of fiber-optic cable to expand broadband capacity, and accession of Azerbaijan into the World Trade Organization.

Kuwait also has a first-time spotlight in the report. A chapter details 16 hopes and 16 fears for Kuwait that the prime minister’s Technical & Advisory Office devised through analysis workshops. The “hope” ledger includes fostering human capital formation, restoring the rule of law, and enhancing transparency and accountability throughout the government. Increases in corruption, declines in oil revenues, and water scarcities are among the fears.

The 2012 State of the Future affords these additional insights:

• Cooperatives can be a major generator of employment and development, particularly in lower-income countries, and merit greater consideration as an option for developing economies to reduce their rich–poor disparities.
• Companies, universities, and research centers will increasingly form partnerships and cooperation networks, combining their expertise to bring new advancements in nanotechnology, photonics, advanced manufacturing, and other areas of endeavor to fruition.
• The fast-growing science of ontology could exert a greater impact on humanity than the rise of the Internet. (Ontology is a type of linguistic abstraction used in artificial intelligence, software, biomedical informatics, and information systems; ontologies allow for data to interoperate and for machines to make inferences.) The report calls for more education and training opportunities for ontologists, and for better means of connecting ontologists with organizations that need them.

“Humanity needs a global, multifaceted, general long-term view of the future with long-range goals to help it make better decisions today to build a brighter future,” states the report. “Short-term, selfish economic decisionmaking has led to many problems, ranging from the Euro crisis to the political stalemate in Washington and insufficient actions from Rio+20.”

Although rivalries and mistrust have afflicted international relations throughout history, this year’s State of the Future shows that the international community will ultimately rise or fall together, and it puts forth concrete plans by which we might rise together toward a better future.

The Millennium Project, continuing its tradition of forward-thinking global scholarship, has once again delivered an opus that is impeccably researched and worthy of world leaders’ study.

About the Reviewer

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

Challenges and Opportunities for Professional Futurists

The Future of Futures

Editor: Andrew Curry
Publisher: Association of Professional Futurists (2012)
Binding: 48 pages, Paperback
List Price: $40
E-book available from www.profuturists.org

Futures work is on the verge of a “profound transition,” according to Andrew Curry, futurist with the London-based Futures Company, and 14 contributors from consulting firms and research institutes based across the planet, in The Future of Futures. Together they explore new directions in which futures studies might be heading, and the changes within technology and scientific research that are driving it.

Among these contributors are some of the best-known names in futuring, including Tom Abeles, president of Sagacity, Inc.; Verne Wheelright, founder of the Personal Futures Network; and Andy Hines, executive-in-residence at the University of Houston’s futures program. The Association of Professional Futurists underwrote and published the book.

Abeles writes about the implications of the emergence of complexity science, a set of theories that questions the veracity of standard mathematical models and posits that mathematical “constants” are only really constant some of the time. The scientific community’s growing acceptance of complexity science is fomenting shake-ups in science in general, according to Abeles. He expects that futures studies and practice could in turn undergo substantial change. Whether the change is for the better, however, will depend on whether futuring is able to effectively jump to a complexity-based paradigm, he concludes.

Futuring in Africa is the subject of a chapter by Tanja Hitchert, a South African futures practitioner who directs The Millennium Project’s South African Node. She describes her home continent as both a vibrant subject for futuring and the base of a dynamic futurist community. She also outlines the factors that are shaping Africa’s future development (such as the growth of megacities and slums and the persistence of corruption in government), and the opportunities that Africa’s futurists have in helping to direct their continent’s future toward the best ends possible.

Noah Raford, international strategic planner, writes on several cutting-edge scenario planning innovations, such as how crowdsourcing could allocate much of the futures to the general public. He also describes young multimedia-inclined futurists employing video and graphics to illuminate society’s future pathways, a niche that he calls “design futures.” Examples include a film that depicts life in a future era of mass commercial space flight and vastly expanded electronic banking, a live dramatization of an auction of early twenty-first-century wares in the year 2059, and an artistic display that illustrates the buildup of plastics in our oceans from the twentieth century through 2030.

“Design can be used to create both compelling visions of tomorrow, and powerful lenses to reinterpret today,” Raford writes.

Riel Miller, a strategic foresight practitioner who serves as head of foresight at UNESCO in Paris, stresses the increasing importance of futures practitioners adhering to a “discipline of anticipation” that defines thinking about and using the future. Specifically, they and their clients need this discipline to help them find ways to live and act without truly knowing the future.

The challenge now is to move away from conventional methods of planning and probability that extrapolate from the present and make too little room for novelty, and to reconcile the use of anticipatory methods with the fundamental impossibility of knowing the future, Miller explains. A discipline of anticipation is already emerging within futures thought, and he is hopeful that it will enable futurists to produce faster and higher-quality work.

“Success in using the future without a discipline is reaching its limits,” he writes.

Editor Curry reflects on the futuring field in general. He forecasts that it will grow progressively more distributed and more networked, and that it will engage more fully with complex and emerging systems as futurists gain a better awareness of the field’s history and contexts. Practitioners will operate with a richer understanding of methods and rationale, stronger philosophical underpinnings, and an awareness of the variety of ways of knowing. And as the world at large contends with trends of descent—i.e., economic regression and resource scarcities—visioning may resurge.

Curry reminds readers that it isn’t just futurists’ career prospects that are at stake. The world’s well-being relies to an extent on futurists meeting the challenge to adapt.

“New ways of imagining the world are more urgent than ever,” Curry writes. “Never was there a better time to test the implicit claim made by all futurists, that good futures work can make a difference.”

The Future of Futures is concise, at only 48 pages, but offers a starting point for more extensive discussions about futuring and where the field itself is heading. The ideas and insights that it presents make it a worthwhile addition to any practicing futurist’s library.—Rick Docksai

Networking for Progress

In Future Perfect, bestselling author Steven Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good for You) declares himself a member of the new revolutionary party, the peer progressives. For the most part, it’s a quiet movement, steady, not inherently violent. The recent uprisings in Bahrain, Egypt, the Occupy Wall Street protests, and other well-covered clashes between Net-enabled citizens and truncheon-wielding cops do not embody this phenomenon, but are instead merely a symptom. Make no mistake, however: A revolution is afoot.

Peer progressivism is the social change that occurs outside of rigid government structures but in a way that isn’t guided by capitalistic self-interest, at least not exclusively. It’s spontaneous networks of free and equal agents, democratically intertwined. For instance, the crowdfunding site Kickstarter is nominally owned by a for-profit company but is powered by millions of selfless users seeking only to reward worthy creative projects. Wikipedia is peer progressive, as are employee-owned businesses.

The New York City 311 network is one of the most interesting examples. In times of public distress, as occurred in 2005 when a strange maple syrup smell descended upon the city, it served as an information distribution center to calm anxieties. The odor was not toxic, after all. But the 311 network also served as a listening mechanism, recording the time and location of each call until eventually the source of the odor could be triangulated. (Not surprisingly, it emanated from New Jersey.) The peer progressive network is the distributed, adaptive, message block switching protocols that make up the backbone of the Internet.

Peer progressivism stands in contrast to what postmodernist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari might refer to as an arborescent: a system in which all information points toward—and all decisions radiate from—the center. Johnson makes a narrative parallel to the Legrand Star, the railway scheme put in place in France by Victor Legrand after the French Revolution. The Star was the quintessence of top-down efficiency, geometrical and symmetrical. It was beautiful—on paper. But it was a bit too perfect, too pretty, and, in the way it privileged central nodes at the expense of outlying and perhaps more defensible points, it proved to be a major liability to the French in the war with Prussia that broke out in 1870.

Today, we are in the midst of a historic sweep from Star formations to decentralized peer-progressive confederations, Johnson argues. The power to collect, process, and use information is moving away from institutions of authority toward the outlying nodes of more organic networks. This change is accelerated by the Internet.

Johnson brings up the case of orçamento participativo, or participatory budgeting, committees of Porto Alegre, Brazil, as a seminal example of what peer progressivism can do. In orçamento participativo systems, budget setting is not done by elected officials, but rather according to a transparent set of processes. City neighborhoods receive money based on the number of residents and the current state of the infrastructure in that neighborhood; in other words, to each according to her means. Elected officials work more like switches in a machine than like competitors for more money or legislative power for their districts or constituents. The system expanded water sanitation and paved roads throughout Porto Alegre at a rate that was orders of magnitude faster than the old top-down system that came before it.

“In the United States, the recent talk about reinventing government has focused on the potential breakthroughs that Internet-based engagement can produce,” says Johnson. “But the history of those Porto Alegre general assemblies suggests that the more radical advance could well come from the simple act of neighborhoods gathering in a meeting hall or a church or a living room, and drafting up a list of the community’s needs.”

Revolutions, it seems, haven’t changed much after all.

About the reviewer

Patrick Tucker is the deputy editor of THE FUTURIST and author of the forthcoming A Future Ever Certain: How the Science of Prediction Will Change the Way We Work, Live, and Love (from Current Books, Fall 2013)

Tourism 3.0

Vacationing in a climate-changed and AI-driven world will be very different, writes Victoria University futurologist Ian Yeoman in 2050—Tomorrow’s Tourism. He lays out scenarios for how global demographic shifts, climate warming, and radical technological innovations will transform global tourism in the next four decades.

By 2050, there could be as many as 4.7 billion tourists traversing the globe’s vacation hotspots, with the majority hailing from China, India, and other currently emerging economic powers. Many won’t be making their trips for pleasure, but for health: Medical tourism will be a booming business.

Meanwhile, virtual Web media will make it possible to explore a city’s streets in real time and to preview restaurants and other sites before one actually goes there. Mobile phones will increasingly be the tool of choice for booking hotels, flights, and even restaurant reservations. Augmented reality, biometrics, brain–computer interfaces, artificially intelligent robot agents, and other technological breakthroughs will help tourists to complete more transactions in less time and gather more relevant information about their destinations in real time.

Other topics that Yeoman speculates upon include how transit systems in 2050 will differ from today’s, what rugby and other sporting events might look like, and whether humanoid robots could bring on the end of human trafficking as we know it. He also guesses which of today’s hot vacation favorites—California, South Korea, and Shanghai—might morph due to climate change, technological innovation, ongoing urbanization, and rising food prices.

Tourism professionals who want to know where their industries are headed will find volumes of eye-opening material throughout 2050—Tomorrow’s Tourism. Everyday consumers who like to travel will enjoy this book, too, as Yeoman has many insights on what tourism packages in the future may offer. Why wait to get a head start on planning for your 2050 dream vacation?—Rick Docksai

Mobilizing for a More Peaceful Twenty-First Century

The world’s peace movements are undergoing a transition, according to James O’Dea, retired Amnesty International director. Whereas they once focused on simply opposing wars, peace organizations are now striving to actively build new social systems that embody justice and nonviolence, he writes in Cultivating Peace.

O’Dea calls on regular people everywhere to join in the shared effort by being “evolved peace leaders” in their own everyday lives. This type of peace leadership runs far deeper than protests and political campaigns: It involves a transformation of one’s own mind and heart.

Collective transformation toward more peaceable states of mind will come from thinking positively, learning to laugh, seeking wisdom, appropriately managing anger, and so on. We will not successfully stop violence, O’Dea concludes, unless we address the attitudes and patterns of thinking that give rise to it—and replace them with mind-sets conducive to shared understanding and affirmation of life.

O’Dea effectively melds social action and self-improvement into an inspiring clarion call for societal justice. At a time when mass movements are manifesting across the globe and swaying or even overthrowing whole governments, the author reminds readers of the transformative potential that concerned citizens of any country can yield when they work together. Activists and non-activists will find Cultivating Peace a worthy read.—Rick Docksai

Tomorrow in Brief

Consumption 2.0

By Hugo Garcia

The accumulation of property may be less enticing to consumers seeking alternatives to ownership.

We are in the midst of a very powerful and disruptive change in consumer behavior, from buying to pay-per-use. Apparently, the new consumer is fed up with buying stuff and now wants to use things without owning them. This gives the consumer more freedom and the ability to make easier and faster decisions. It also poses a threat to some old business models, but enormous opportunities for new ones.

Behind this trend is that today’s consumers increasingly expect everything here and now: They want new and cool stuff, right when they want them, but can’t afford to buy them all. Moreover, in a culture of fast obsolescence that makes a two-year-old smartphone look like a vintage item (consider an iPhone 2G), for the eager consumer there is no great attachment to stuff. It’s only a matter of using it and throwing it away, like chewing gum.

Collaborative consumption is a more conscious approach to consumption, with an environmental mind-set. It’s a very solid argument that, by sharing products, the economy becomes more efficient and we consume fewer of Earth’s resources. This is one reason behind new business models like car sharing, upcycling (using old items in a new way), co-working, and handbag renting.

While much of collaborative consumption stems from ecological awareness, not all of Consumption 2.0 is green.

Freedom is another common reason for detaching from property. Finding a new job in a different city, country, or continent is a great motivation to dispose of any physical attachments that impair mobility. In a paradigm where lifelong jobs are highly improbable, and at any moment you may have to change your job, everybody wants to be mobile.

Or you may want to keep your job and work from anywhere in the world, thanks to an Internet connection. German futurist Stephen Magnus, for example, has chosen to live in Algarve, Portugal, while keeping his German clients. He calls himself a cyber-dropout for doing so.

The rise of this non-ownership trend comes with an increasing disappointment regarding property.

Younger generations have received from their parents land and property that are now worth less and consequently not easy to sell. Also, the economic crisis reminded a lot of homeowners that, in reality, “their” house doesn’t belong to them, but to the bank.

Owning big things like personal vehicles can also be a burden due to the numerous inherent costs, such as insurance and maintenance. And they don’t represent as much freedom as one would expect, especially when good public transportation service is an easy alternative. Teenagers who are now reaching driving age aren’t as eager to get a driver’s license or buy a car as were the teens of 10 years ago.

Finally, there is a new perspective that physical is ephemeral, but virtual lasts forever. Most things we value today, like knowledge and reputation, are not physical. Even the money in your bank account isn’t much more than a number in some server. Most Web top-users tend to trust absolutely in the cloud.

With so many “deep causes” underlying this non-owership trend, Consumption 2.0 will likely keep growing in the next decades, making this new lifestyle into something common. The trend primarily affects young adults who strive in a very competitive environment, are eager to see the world, have friends from all continents, and become impatient very easily.

Impacts of Consumption 2.0

Whether it is referred to as Consumption 2.0, “pay-per-use,” “collaborative consumption and sharing,” or something else, the trend reflects a whole new lifestyle.

1. Homes, not houses. The new consumers may never own a house or even want to. Instead, they’ll rent them, or just rent rooms. In the near future, it might become mainstream to live in residential hotels (similar to a dorm aimed at professionals), with services for your entire daily needs (food, laundry, weekly room services, and Wi-Fi).

2. Forget your “office.” Whether you are working for yourself or for others, you’ll probably be using a co-working or shared facility, and you’ll want to change from place to place on a regular basis. Imagine that where you live it has been raining for the past three weeks and there are no signs it will stop. Why can’t you go for a month to work in a place near the beach and learn a new language, or how to surf, in your spare time?

3. Web before food. You are constantly moving from one place to another, so you are not acquainted with local shops. You’ll need online information every step of the way. You may still own your computer, a tablet and a smartphone, and whatever comes next, but all the important stuff will be on the Web.

4. Shared mobility. Public transportation and vehicle sharing will do most of your moving around. Take a bus in the morning to work, go back home in a rented bike. Avoid driving! You’ll need that quality time on your social network, which will be a prerequisite to maintain the thousands of friends you’ll have all over the world, because who knows where you are going to live next month.

5. Cleaned closets and the end of clutter. In order to travel light, you’ll want to carry only basic clothes. Other items like suits, handbags, and accessories you may easily rent in any city.

6. Goodbye, media libraries. For entertainment, even if piracy takes a step back, buying CDs and books won’t become popular again. Pay-per-listen with a monthly fee, book exchange, or digital access for a short period of time can serve your needs.

7. Goodbye, filing cabinets. Invoices and documents will gradually disappear. No more old receipts in your pocket, as all of your shopping will be immediately registered in your online banking account.

From a macro perspective, Consumption 2.0 will have a great impact in mobility and globalization, making borders meaningless. If a country has an unemployment problem, people will react to it almost instantly. Massive immigration will become a reality so much faster.

This constant mobility will improve social equity between nations. Unfortunately, some areas may become abandoned because they lack competitive advantages. The war for talent between countries will increase, but regions that offer good living conditions may gain an advantage.

About the Author

Hugo Garcia is a consulting futurist with a background in marketing and consumer behavior, based in Lisbon, Portugal. Web site http://futureslab.pt/home-en.html.

Toward a More Predictable Union

More information makes for better predictions—and better management of public budgets.

Do you know what your salary is going to be three months from now? Or nine months? If you live in federally subsidized housing, the U.S. government knows.

At the September 2012 Predictive Analytics World conference in Washington, D.C., Dave Vennergrund, director of business analytics for the business consultancy CACI, discussed how his firm helped the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) anticipate the future cost of one its key programs by forecasting how much renters would be able to afford in the future.

The Project-Based Rental Assistance program (PBRA) connects HUD to the owners of apartment buildings and housing developments. The building owners rent their apartments or houses directly to HUD. The government then rents those units to applicants and subsidizes the portion of the rent that the applicants can’t pay. Knowing what tenants will be able to pay in the future is key to funding the program.

CACI used time-series forecasting to predict subsidies, on an individual renter basis, by month. They used Office of Management and Budget (OMB) forecasts for wage, income, and cost of living, going out 36 months. Result: CACI can predict the subsidy that HUD will have to pay at the unit level, based on area demographics and the type of income that the tenant receives.

The system isn’t perfect. OMB forecasts can be off, and when they are, the rest of the model works less well. But HUD serviced 17,000 contracts with building owners, for 1 million units and 2.2 million tenants, at a cost of $9.2 billion in 2012. Even a slight improvement in forecasting the cost of the PBRA program can make a big difference. This, in part, is why the U.S. government got into the business of predicting future trends with massive data sets in the first place, and why it has recently moved more aggressively in this direction.

Big Data in Big Government

In March 2012, the Obama administration announced $200 million in big data research and development funding. Big data—or petabyte-scale stores of structured and unstructured data—has emerged as one of the most important business concepts of 2012 and 2013, gracing the cover of the Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. The U.S. government has been trying to extract useful insight from massive data sets for decades.

“Data mining wasn’t used as a business practice until the mid-1990s; we were using it at the dawn of the computer age,” said Dean Silverman of the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS processes 140 million individual tax returns a year. Auditing even a small fraction of these returns can be extremely costly, so knowing which returns to flag for possible audit when they come is the key to managing costs. Silverman didn’t disclose how the IRS does that, but did indicate that bad tax returns fit certain patterns that individual agents might not notice, while cutting-edge machine-learning programs pick them up fairly easily.

Using a database of seven years of adjudicated claims to train its machine-learning system, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services now knows right away when one of the doctors who get payments from Medicaid dies, loses his license, etc. This cuts down considerably on fraud, a principal goal of the fraud-prevention program mandated by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in 2010.

The agency now says that the false-positive rate on its predictive models is 22%, so when a health-care provider is flagged as a fraudster, there’s a 78% chance the agency is right. And Medicare can now detect fraud at the first instance, for amounts as low as $4,000.

“We call that a huge success,” said David Nelson, director of Medicare’s Data Analytics and Control Group.

Medicare recently built a new central command room that looks like something from a spy movie, and the agency brings in law enforcement professionals across other agencies to attack specific types of fraud. These sound like big improvements, but for most agencies, the challenge—and the amount of data—will far outsize the ability of budget-constrained government workers to deal with it for the foreseeable future.

As originally reported by Bloomberg News, senators Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), and Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), have sent letters urging the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to be more open about the performance metrics for the predictive analytics program. The absence of such metrics makes it difficult to judge the success of the program, the senators told Bloomberg. But establishing such metrics won’t be easy.

“We don’t even know how much fraud there is in Medicare,” said Nelson.

Big data, it seems, can create more problems than it solves.—Patrick Tucker

Source: Predictive Analytics World, Washington, D.C., September 17-18, 2012, www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/gov/2012/.

[Editor’s note: FUTURIST deputy editor Patrick Tucker’s forthcoming book, A Future Ever Certain: How the Science of Prediction Will Change the Way We Live, Work, and Love, will be published by Current, an imprint of Penguin, in 2013.]

Integrated Interfaces for Intelligent Furnishings

“Smart furniture” means comfortable, warm, and no need to hunt for the remote.

Future functional furniture will bring smart-house controls to your fingertips, thanks to such projects as WoodTouch. The idea is to use the warmth of wood as the interface for controlling the lighting, heating, and other interior systems.

Rather than hunt for the light switch or bump your knee in the dark to adjust the thermostat, you would simply stroke the headboard of your bed to control the room.

Tecnalia, a private technology research center in Spain, is teaming with electronics and home furnishing manufacturers in the project to integrate automation systems that are aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. The goal is to meet a growing demand among consumers for simplicity in home automation systems.

It is also hoped that such cooperation among different sectors of manufacturing will boost prospects for all that have faced stiff competition and challenges in the recent economic environment, according to a Tecnalia press statement.

Among the companies participating are Grumal, a subsidiary of the Mondragon Corporation Furniture Group; Nueva Linea, Spain’s renowned designer and manufacturer of innovative furniture; electronic equipment developer Elson Electronica; and lighting manufacturer Ekoleds Innovation.—Cynthia G. Wagner

Source: Basque Research, www.basqueresearch.com.

The Brain as Health Forecaster

Doctors are gaining new tools to diagnose and treat health problems before they arise.

The brain is turning out to be a fairly accurate forecaster of health conditions that a patient might suffer later in life. Doctors at several research institutions attest that, by reading brain scans, they can identify problems to be treated years, or even decades, before symptoms actually surface.

“The early signs of changes are made by biomarkers,” says neurologist Randall Bateman of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. A biomarker, he explains, refers to any indicator of a person’s physical health. For instance, heart rate and blood pressure are biomarkers, and so are more intricate signals of brain structure and brain activity. “The biomarkers that are being developed continue to get more advanced, and they allow us a window into the brain’s function.”

Bateman and a consortium of other doctors in the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer’s Network (DIAN) are finding biomarkers that foretell the onset of Alzheimer’s disease as many as 10 to 15 years before the patient starts to show any disease-related cognitive decline. Using some brain-scanning and fluid-sample-analysis systems, some of which have only been developed in the last few years, the researchers pinpoint certain key Alzheimer’s-related biomarkers, such as changes in the brain’s metabolism of glucose and drops in the levels of amyloid within the spinal fluid.

Although no cure exists for Alzheimer’s, Bateman says that some experimental treatments show promise in slowing or reducing its progression. These treatments could yield much greater results with early detection and start administering the treatments before the disease has taken hold.

“We’re currently trying to treat the disease in the last few years of the disease, and that’s probably not the best therapeutic strategy,” Bateman says. Biomarker detection “gives us an earlier window of opportunity where we could detect it and possibly intervene.”

Even better, Bateman adds, the knowledge of these biomarkers could facilitate development of new treatments that stop the disease’s progression altogether. Knowing more precisely how the disease manifests and develops makes it easier for researchers to fight it, he explains.

DIAN’s research may signal hope for treatment of other degenerative diseases, as well, such as dementia and Lou Gehrig’s. They, too, have distinctive biomarkers, and doctors could likewise learn to spot the earliest signs of them and diagnose patients accordingly.

“All of these processes start with damage that builds up over time, probably years,” says Bateman. By understanding what causes it, “you can more exactly design a drug that counters the disease.”—Rick Docksai

Source: Randall Bateman, Washington University School of Medicine, http://medschool.wustl.edu.

2012 Subject/Author Index to The Futurist

Covering all issues from January-February 2012 through November-December 2012 (Volume 46)

SUBJECT INDEX

BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

Adventure Capitalists: Meet the Space Billionaires [box], Joseph N. Pelton, September-October 2012.

An Economy Of, By, and For the People [review of Owning Our Future by Marjorie Kelly], Rick Docksai, November-December 2012.

The Future of the Commercial Sex Industry, Emily Empel, May-June 2012.

India’s Innovation Potential [review of India Inside by Nirmalya Kumar and Phanish Puranam], Rick Docksai, May-June 2012.

The New Age of Space Business, Joseph N. Pelton, September-October 2012.

Renewing Prospects for American Prosperity [review of The Price of Civilization by Jeffrey D. Sachs], Rick Docksai, March-April 2012.

Rethinking “Return on Investment”: What We Really Need to Invest In, Timothy C. Mack, March-April 2012.

Thriving in the Automated Economy, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, March-April 2012.

Why Businesses Must Own Their Futures [review of Communicating with the Future by Thomas Frey], Rick Docksai, January-February 2012.

COMMUNICATIONS

From the Three Rs to the Four Cs: Radically Redesigning K-12 Education, William Crossman, March-April 2012.

A Future of Fewer Words? Five Trends Shaping the Future of Language, Lawrence Baines, March-April 2012.

A World Wide Mind: The Coming Collective Telempathy, Michael Chorost, March-April 2012.

ENVIRONMENT AND RESOURCES

Nuclear Power’s Unsettled Future, Ozzie Zehner, March-April 2012.

Unlimiting Energy’s Growth, Tsvi Bisk, May-June 2012.

FUTURISM AND FORESIGHT

Change Masters: Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., Edward Cornish, July-August 2012.

A Future-Driven Life Adventure [review of Memories of the Future by Wendell Bell], Rick Docksai, July-August 2012.

Innovating the Future: From Ideas to Adoption, Peter J. Denning, January-February 2012.

To Predict or to Build the Future? Michel Godet, May-June 2012.

Tools for Foresight, with a French Twist [review of Strategic Foresight for Corporate and Regional Development by Michel Godet and Philippe Durance], Rick Docksai, January-February 2012.

Trend Analysis in Action [box], Edie Weiner, July-August 2012.

GENERAL TRENDS AND FORECASTS

The Best Predictions of 2011, FUTURIST staff, January-February 2012.

Outlook 2013, FUTURIST staff, November-December 2012.

The 22nd Century at First Light: Envisioning Life in the Year 2100 [special report], September-October 2012.

• Automated Government, Peter Denning
• Beyond Transhumanism, Gene Stephens
• Bio Age 2100, Olli Hietanen and Marko Ahvenainen
• Energy and Living Well, Paul Bristow
• From Communication to Transmission, Manjul Rathee
• Game Changers for the Next Century, Arthur Shostak
• Geonautics, Gereon Klein
• Healthy Aging in the 22nd Century, Marta M. Keane
• Keys to Future Energy Prosperity, Ozzie Zehner
• Lanes in the Sky, Davidson Barlett
• Life and Love in the Pod, Bart Main
• The Local–Global Duality, Joshua Loughman
• Looking Back: The Wonders We Didn’t Expect, Paul Saffo
• Major Transformations to 2100: Highlights from the TechCast Project, Laura B. Huhn and William Halal
• Meaning for Miranda, Robert Moran
• On Being Human: Questioning Ourselves, David Brin
• Paradise Found: No Aging, No Pensions, Jouni J. Särkijärvi
• Religious Belief in 2100, Gina A. Bellofatto
• Reunion: A Civil War Fable, Cynthia G. Wagner
• Scenarios for Long-Term Thinking, House of Futures (Gitte Larsen, Søren Steen Olsen, and Steen Svendsen)
• Slums: A Catalyst Bed for Poverty Eradication, Eric Meade
• Southern Africa Takes Center Stage, Michael Lee
• Ten Big Questions for 2100, Michael Marien
• 2099: Headlines Warn of Global Cooling, Tsvi Bisk
• When the Storms Came, Richard David Hames
• Where the Wild Things Are Not, Brenda Cooper
• Will We Still Have Money in 2100? Stephen Aguilar-Millan

GOVERNANCE

Building and Connecting Communities for the Future, Center for Communities of the Future, July-August 2012.

Communities of the Future: Case Studies [box], FUTURIST staff, July-August 2012.

Integrated and Innovative: The Future of Regions, John Eger, July-August 2012.

Regulating the Final Frontier, Frans von der Dunk, September-October 2012.

Serving Justice with Conversational Law, David R. Johnson, September-October 2012.

HABITATS

From Smart House to Networked Home, Chris Carbone and Kristin Nauth, July-August 2012.

HEALTH AND MEDICINE

The Human Brain’s Biggest Enemies [box], Hank Pellissier, September-October 2012.

Medical Recycling as Health “REMEDY” [box], Rick Docksai, July-August 2012.

Rescuing the Mind of Africa, Hank Pellissier, September-October 2012.

Revolutionary Health: Local Solutions for Global Health Problems, Rick Docksai, July-August 2012.

A Thousand Years Young, Aubrey de Grey, May-June 2012.

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

The Abundance Builders, Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, July-August 2012.

A Brief History of Prize Incentives: Why We Need to Compete [box], Thomas Frey, January-February 2012.

Crossing the Species Boundary: Genetic Engineering as Conscious Evolution, Jeffrey Scott Coker, January-February 2012.

Eight Grand Challenges for Human Advancement, Thomas Frey, January-February 2012.

Engineering the Future of Food, Josh Schonwald, May-June 2012.

Futurists Review the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, Patrick Tucker and Thomas Frey, May-June 2012.

One Response to the Eight Grand Challenges, Richard Yonck, January-February 2012.

The Secret Life of Data in the Year 2020, Brian David Johnson, July-August 2012.

Toward Better Space-Weather Forecasts, Cynthia G. Wagner, March-April 2012.

Welcome to the Future Cloud: Five Bets for 2025, Marcel Bullinga, January-February 2012.

SOCIETY AND VALUES

Anticipating an “Anything Goes” World of Online Porn, Roger Howard, May-June 2012.

Eight Ways That Longer Lives Will Change Us [box], Rick Docksai, May-June 2012.

In Search of the “Better Angels” of Our Future, Kenneth B. Taylor, November-December 2012.

The Individual in a Networked World: Two Scenarios, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman, July-August 2012.

Sex, Technology, and Machine Morality [box], FUTURIST staff, May-June 2012.

Whatever Happened to Western Civilization? The Cultural Crisis, 20 Years Later, Richard Eckersley, November-December 2012.

WORK AND CAREERS

The Global Talent Chase: China, India, and U.S. Vie for Skilled Workers, Edward E. Gordon, November-December 2012.

Hard at Work in the Jobless Future, James H. Lee, March-April 2012.

WORLD AFFAIRS

The Darker Side of the Sex Industry: Slavery and Sex Trafficking [box], Cynthia G. Wagner, May-June 2012.

A Leaderless World Order? [review of Every Nation for Itself by Ian Bremmer], Rick Docksai, September-October 2012.

Who Will Be Free? The Battles for Human Rights to 2050, Josh Calder, November-December 2012.

The World’s Destiny Is Modernity [review of History of the Future by Max Singer], Rick Docksai, January-February 2012.

WORLD FUTURE SOCIETY

Dream, Design, Develop, Deliver: From Great Ideas to Better Outcomes, Rick Docksai, November-December 2012.

Education, Agency, Crisis, and Emergence: A WorldFuture Sampler [box], David Hochfelder, November-December 2012.

Future Food and Health: A WorldFuture Sampler [box], Joyce Gioia, November-December 2012.

Futurists: BetaLaunch Showcase [box], Patrick Tucker, November-December 2012.

Preview of Future Inventions—Futurists: BetaLaunch 2012, Kenneth J. Moore, July-August 2012.

WORLD TRENDS & FORECASTS

[Written by staff editors Rick Docksai, Kenneth J. Moore, Patrick Tucker, and Cynthia G. Wagner, except where noted.]

COMMERCE

Growing Pains Ahead for China and India, March-April 2012.

Market for Bioplastics, November-December 2012.

“Rateocracy” and Corporate Reputation, Robert Moran, May-June 2012.

The Road Ahead for Gasoline-Free Cars, Jim Motavalli, March-April 2012.

Shakeups in the “C Suite”: Hail to the New Chiefs, Geoffrey Colon, July-August 2012.

EARTH

Biofuels Miss the Mark—So Far, July-August 2012.

Diversity, Discovery, and a Ticking Clock, September-October 2012.

Rising Temperatures Stress Farmlands, May-June 2012.

Solving Renewables’ Storage Problems, Letha Tawney, March-April 2012.

FUTURING

A Curriculum for Foresight, John C. Lundt, November-December 2012.

Dealing with “Warning Fatigue,” March-April 2012.

More -topias, January-February 2012.

Taking Stock in Teaching Forecasting, Byron C. Anderson, January-February 2012.

GOVERNANCE

Connectivity and Accountability in Africa, Matthias Mordi, January-February 2012.

Ecoful Town: A Neighborhood Tour of Green Innovation, November-December 2012.

Investing in Ex-Cons, September-October 2012.

Partnership for a Freer World, March-April 2012.

Waterways to Connect Communities, July-August 2012.

HUMANITY

Chemical Tools for Treating Alcoholism, May-June 2012.

Child Marriage Declines in South Asia, September-October 2012.

Games for Character and Mindfulness, September-October 2012.

The Rise of mChurches: From Mega to Mobile, November-December 2012.

SCI/TECH

Are You Smarter Than a Sixth-Generation Computer? Richard Yonck, September-October 2012.

A Competition for Lunar Enterprise, March-April 2012.

Harvesting Vehicles’ Waste Heat, July-August 2012.

Nanobots to Fight Cancer, May-June 2012.

Sensing Brain Injuries, July-August 2012.

Visualizing Human Intention, January-February 2012.

BOOKS REVIEWED

After the Crime, Susan L. Miller [Books in Brief], March-April 2012.

The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker [Books in Brief], May-June 2012.

Birth 2012 and Beyond, Barbara Marx Hubbard [Books in Brief], September-October 2012.

Burdens of Proof, Jean-François Blanchette [Books in Brief], September-October 2012.

But Will the Planet Notice? Gernot Wagner [Books in Brief], January-February 2012.

Communicating with the Future, Thomas Frey [reviewed by Rick Docksai], January-February 2012.

Community Leadership 4.0, Carolyn Corbin [Books in Brief], January-February 2012.

Every Nation for Itself, Ian Bremmer [reviewed by Rick Docksai], September-October 2012.

Evolving, Daniel J. Fairbanks [Books in Brief], July-August 2012.

Forces of Nature, Barry A. Van [Books in Brief], May-June 2012.

The Future of God in the Global Village, Thomas McFaul [Books in Brief], May-June 2012.

The Great Disruption, Paul Gilding [Books in Brief], January-February 2012.

Green Illusions, Ozzie Zehner [Books in Brief], July-August 2012.

History of the Future, Max Singer [reviewed by Rick Docksai], January-February 2012.

India Inside, Nirmalya Kumar and Phanish Puranam [reviewed by Rick Docksai], May-June 2012.

Managing the Future, Stephen M. Millett [Books in Brief], July-August 2012.

Memories of the Future, Wendell Bell [reviewed by Rick Docksai], July-August 2012.

100 Plus, Sonia Arrison [box], May-June 2012, and [Books in Brief], January-February 2012.

Owning Our Future, Marjorie Kelly [reviewed by Rick Docksai], November-December 2012.

Power, Inc., David Rothkopf [Books in Brief], July-August 2012.

The Precarious Human Role in a Mechanistic Universe, John F. Brinster [Books in Brief], January-February 2012.

The Price of Civilization, Jeffrey D. Sachs [reviewed by Rick Docksai], March-April 2012.

The Prosperity of Vice, Daniel Cohen [Books in Brief], September-October 2012.

The Real Population Bomb, P. H. Liotta [Books in Brief], July-August 2012.

Robot Ethics, Patrick Lin, Keith Abney, and George Bekey (eds.) [Books in Brief], July-August 2012, and [box], May-June 2012.

Space Solar Power, John C. Mankins and Nobuyuki Kaya (eds.) [Books in Brief], May-June 2012.

Techno-Fix, Michael Huesemann and Joyce Huesemann [Books in Brief], March-April 2012.

Time Travel and Warp Drives, Allen Everett and Thomas Roman [Books in Brief], March-April 2012.

Virtual Water, Tony Allan [Books in Brief], March-April 2012.

Visionaries Have Wrinkles, Karen Sands [Books in Brief], September-October 2012.

X-Events, John L. Casti [Books in Brief], September-October 2012.

AUTHORS

Aguilar-Millan, Stephen, Will We Still Have Money in 2100? [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Ahvenainen, Marko, and Olli Hietanen, Bio Age 2100 [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Anderson, Byron C., Taking Stock in Teaching Forecasting [World Trends & Forecasts], January-February 2012.

Baines, Lawrence, A Future of Fewer Words? Five Trends Shaping the Future of Language, March-April 2012.

Barlett, Davidson, Lanes in the Sky [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Bellofatto, Gina A., Religious Belief in 2100 [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Bisk, Tsvi, 2099: Headlines Warn of Global Cooling [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012; Unlimiting Energy’s Growth, May-June 2012.

Brin, David, On Being Human: Questioning Ourselves [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Bristow, Paul, Energy and Living Well [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee, Thriving in the Automated Economy, March-April 2012.

Bullinga, Marcel, Welcome to the Future Cloud: Five Bets for 2025, January-February 2012.

Calder, Josh, Who Will Be Free? The Battles for Human Rights to 2050, November-December 2012.

Carbone, Chris, and Kristin Nauth, From Smart House to Networked Home, July-August 2012.

Center for Communities of the Future, Building and Connecting Communities for the Future, July-August 2012.

Chorost, Michael, A World Wide Mind: The Coming Collective Telempathy, March-April 2012.

Coker, Jeffrey Scott, Crossing the Species Boundary: Genetic Engineering as Conscious Evolution, January-February 2012.

Colon, Geoffrey, Shakeups in the “C Suite”: Hail to the New Chiefs [World Trends & Forecasts], July-August 2012.

Cooper, Brenda, Where the Wild Things Are Not [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Cornish, Edward, Change Masters: Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., July-August 2012.

Crossman, William, From the Three Rs to the Four Cs: Radically Redesigning K-12 Education, March-April 2012.

de Grey, Aubrey, A Thousand Years Young, May-June 2012.

Denning, Peter, Automated Government [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012; Innovating the Future: From Ideas to Adoption, January-February 2012.

Diamandis, Peter H., and Steven Kotler, The Abundance Builders, July-August 2012.

Docksai, Rick, Dream, Design, Develop, Deliver: From Great Ideas to Better Outcomes, November-December 2012; An Economy Of, By, and For the People [review of Owning Our Future by Marjorie Kelly], November-December 2012; A Leaderless World Order? [review of Every Nation for Itself by Ian Bremmer], September-October 2012; Revolutionary Health: Local Solutions for Global Health Problems, July-August 2012; Medical Recycling as Health “REMEDY” [box], July-August 2012; A Future-Driven Life Adventure [review of Memories of the Future by Wendell Bell], July-August 2012; India’s Innovation Potential [review of India Inside by Nirmalya Kumar and Phanish Puranam], May-June 2012; Eight Ways That Longer Lives Will Change Us [box], May-June 2012; Renewing Prospects for American Prosperity [review of The Price of Civilization by Jeffrey D. Sachs], March-April 2012; Tools for Foresight, with a French Twist [review of Strategic Foresight for Corporate and Regional Development by Michel Godet and Philippe Durance], January-February 2012; The World’s Destiny Is Modernity [review of History of the Future by Max Singer], January-February 2012.

Eckersley, Richard, Whatever Happened to Western Civilization? The Cultural Crisis, 20 Years Later, November-December 2012.

Eger, John, Integrated and Innovative: The Future of Regions, July-August 2012.

Empel, Emily, The Future of the Commercial Sex Industry, May-June 2012.

Frey, Thomas, Eight Grand Challenges for Human Advancement, January-February 2012; A Brief History of Prize Incentives: Why We Need to Compete [box], January-February 2012.

Frey, Thomas, and Patrick Tucker, Futurists Review the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, May-June 2012.

FUTURIST staff, Outlook 2013, November-December 2012; Communities of the Future: Case Studies [box], July-August 2012; Sex, Technology, and Machine Morality [box], May-June 2012; The Best Predictions of 2011, January-February 2012.

Gioia, Joyce, Future Food and Health: A WorldFuture Sampler [box], November-December 2012.

Godet, Michel, To Predict or to Build the Future? May-June 2012.

Gordon, Edward E., The Global Talent Chase: China, India, and U.S. Vie for Skilled Workers, November-December 2012.

Halal, William, and Laura B. Huhn, Major Transformations to 2100: Highlights from the TechCast Project [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Hames, Richard David, When the Storms Came [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Hietanen Olli, and Marko Ahvenainen, Bio Age 2100 [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Hochfelder, David, Education, Agency, Crisis, and Emergence: A WorldFuture Sampler [box], November-December 2012.

House of Futures (Gitte Larsen, Søren Steen Olsen, and Steen Svendsen), Scenarios for Long-Term Thinking [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Howard, Roger, Anticipating an “Anything Goes” World of Online Porn, May-June 2012.

Huhn, Laura B., and William Halal, Major Transformations to 2100: Highlights from the TechCast Project [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Johnson, Brian David, The Secret Life of Data in the Year 2020, July-August 2012.

Johnson, David R., Serving Justice with Conversational Law, September-October 2012.

Keane, Marta M., Healthy Aging in the 22nd Century [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Klein, Gereon, Geonautics [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Kotler, Steven, and Peter H. Diamandis, The Abundance Builders, July-August 2012.

Lee, James H., Hard at Work in the Jobless Future, March-April 2012.

Lee, Michael, Southern Africa Takes Center Stage [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Loughman, Joshua, The Local–Global Duality [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Lundt, John C., A Curriculum for Foresight [World Trends & Forecasts], November-December 2012.

Mack, Timothy C., Rethinking “Return on Investment”: What We Really Need to Invest In, March-April 2012.

Main, Bart, Life and Love in the Pod [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Marien, Michael, Ten Big Questions for 2100 [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

McAfee, Andrew, and Erik Brynjolfsson, Thriving in the Automated Economy, March-April 2012.

Meade, Eric, Slums: A Catalyst Bed for Poverty Eradication [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Moore, Kenneth J., Preview of Future Inventions—Futurists: BetaLaunch 2012, July-August 2012.

Moran, Robert, Meaning for Miranda [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012; “Rateocracy” and Corporate Reputation [World Trends & Forecasts, May-June 2012.

Mordi, Matthias, Connectivity and Accountability in Africa [World Trends & Forecasts], January-February 2012.

Motavalli, Jim, The Road Ahead for Gasoline-Free Cars [World Trends & Forecasts], March-April 2012.

Nauth, Kristin, and Chris Carbone, From Smart House to Networked Home, July-August 2012.

Pellissier, Hank, Rescuing the Mind of Africa, September-October 2012; The Human Brain’s Biggest Enemies [box], September-October 2012.

Pelton, Joseph N., A New Age of Space Business, September-October 2012; Adventure Capitalists: Meet the Space Billionaires [box], September-October 2012.

Rainie, Lee, and Barry Wellman, The Individual in a Networked World: Two Scenarios, July-August 2012.

Rathee, Manjul, From Communication to Transmission [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Saffo, Paul, Looking Back: The Wonders We Didn’t Expect [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Särkijärvi, Jouni J., Paradise Found: No Aging, No Pensions [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Schonwald, Josh, Engineering the Future of Food, May-June 2012.

Shostak, Arthur, Game Changers for the Next Century [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Stephens, Gene, Beyond Transhumanism [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012.

Tawney, Letha, Solving Renewables’ Storage Problems [World Trends & Forecasts], March-April 2012.

Taylor, Kenneth B., In Search of the “Better Angels” of Our Future, November-December 2012.

Tucker, Patrick, Futurists: BetaLaunch Showcase [box], November-December 2012.

Tucker, Patrick, and Thomas Frey, Futurists Review the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, May-June 2012.

von der Dunk, Frans, Regulating the Final Frontier, September-October 2012.

Wagner, Cynthia G., Reunion: A Civil War Fable [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012; The Darker Side of the Sex Industry: Slavery and Sex Trafficking [box], May-June 2012; Toward Better Space-Weather Forecasts, March-April 2012.

Weiner, Edie, Trend Analysis in Action [box], July-August 2012.

Wellman, Barry, and Lee Rainie, The Individual in a Networked World: Two Scenarios, July-August 2012.

Yonck, Richard, Are You Smarter Than a Sixth-Generation Computer? [World Trends & Forecasts], September-October 2012; One Response to the Eight Grand Challenges, January-February 2012.

Zehner, Ozzie, Keys to Future Energy Prosperity [The 22nd Century at First Light, special report], September-October 2012; Nuclear Power’s Unsettled Future, March-April 2012.