Outlook 2013

INTRODUCTION

Human actions could become more accurately predictable, thanks to neuroscience. Nano-sized robots will deliver cancer-fighting drugs directly to their targets. And though many recently lost jobs may never come back, people will find plenty to do (and get paid for) in the future.

These are just a few of the forecasts you’ll find in this latest edition of Outlook, a roundup of the most thought-provoking possibilities and ideas published in THE FUTURIST magazine over the past year.

The forecasts collected in the World Future Society’s annual Outlook reports are not intended to predict the future, but rather to provoke thought and inspire action for building a better future today.

The opinions and ideas expressed are those of their authors or sources cited and do not necessarily represent the views of the World Future Society. For more information, please refer to the original articles cited. Back issues of THE FUTURIST may be purchased at www.wfs.org/backissues.

Your feedback is welcome! Please e-mail your comments to letters@wfs.org.

—THE EDITORS

BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

Many recently lost jobs may never come back, but there’s still a future for work. The economy may become increasingly jobless. Rather than worry about unemployment, tomorrow’s workers will focus on developing a variety of skills that could keep them working productively and continuously, whether they have jobs or not. It’ll be about finding out what other people need done, and doing it. —James H. Lee, “Hard at Work in the Jobless Future,” Mar-Apr 2012, pp. 32-33

Corporate reputation ratings will be even more transparent with augmented reality. In a “Rateocracy,” where organizations’ reputations are quantified, data could be included in geographically based information systems. You might choose one restaurant over another when your mobile augmented-reality app flashes warnings about health-department citations or poor customer reviews. —Robert Moran, “‘Rateocracy’ and Corporate Reputation,” World Trends & Forecasts, May-June 2012, p. 12

Virtual games could accelerate real economic growth. Games played on mobile devices are increasingly enticing players with discounts, coupons, and other real-world rewards. As players use their phones to pay for the games and make purchases, bypassing credit cards, bank accounts, and cash, the so-called virtual economy could grow from $3 billion in 2009 to $300 billion in the next 10 years, predicts Kiip co-founder Brian Wong. —World Trends & Forecasts, Nov-Dec 2011, p. 6

Money and even cash will still exist by 2100. Money will increasingly move to digital forms for legitimate transactions, but cash will still be the lifeblood of the black-market economy. Society will likely embrace barter, at least at the peer-to-peer level, but public services such as defense and justice will still be supported via taxes. —Stephen Aguilar-Millan, “Will We Still Have Money in 2100?” Sep-Oct 2012, p. 43

India will become a hotbed of “invisible innovation.” Rather than focusing on tangible consumer products like the iPad, innovators in India emphasize processes that improve efficiency. Future success will depend on modernizing the nation’s university system as well as its intellectual property laws. —Nirmalya Kumar and Phanish Puranam, authors of India Inside, reviewed by Rick Docksai, May-June 2012, p. 54

Upscale opportunities in resource recovery will abound. Going beyond using post-consumer waste to make more stuff—often of inferior quality—upcycling is about harvesting resources to make new products of higher commercial value. For example, the social enterprise Back to the Roots company sells kits that allow people to use recycled coffee grounds for growing gourmet mushrooms. —Tomorrow in Brief, July-Aug 2012, p. 2

Sex workers in developed countries will become more responsible for their own branding. With more technologies available to them to work as independent entrepreneurs, sex workers will adopt retailing trends like collective discounts, online reviews, and strategic partnerships. By 2030, mainstream companies will increasingly invest in pornography (such as purchasing product placements) and even sponsor sex workers. —Emily Empel, “The Future of the Commercial Sex Industry,” May-June 2012, p. 39

Career “paths” will become patchwork pieces. Baby boomers’ future career trajectories will more resemble a lattice than a ladder, with more lateral moves on the way up. For younger generations, it will be more of a patchwork quilt: multiple jobs stitched together to form a more flexible work environment. —James H. Lee, “Hard at Work in the Jobless Future,” Mar-Apr 2012, p. 35

Shake-ups in the “C Suite”: New corporate leaders with new skills are on the way. Corporate futures will be shaped by leaders adept in social networking, content management, data mining, and data meaning. Look for such job titles as Earned Media Officer, Chief Content Officer, Open-Source Manager, Chief Linguist, and Chief Data Scientist. —Geoffrey Colon, “Shakeups in the ‘C Suite’: Hail to the New Chiefs,” World Trends & Forecasts, July-Aug 2012, pp. 6-7

ENERGY

Subways, trains, and diesel trucks will become future sources of energy, not just consumers. Since most of the stored energy that vehicles use is wasted as heat spilling out from tailpipes, engineers at BMW, Ford, GM, and other manufacturers are seeking systems to recover thermal energy. For example, a system under development at Dynalloy Inc. would recover heat from a car’s exhaust system, generating enough power to run the car’s audio or air-conditioning systems. Trains would generate even more recoverable waste energy, since they are operated continuously. —World Trends & Forecasts, July-Aug 2012, pp. 7-8

Future cars may become producers of power rather than merely consumers. A scheme envisioned at the Technology University of Delft would use fuel cells of parked electric vehicles to convert biogas or hydrogen into more electricity. And the owners would be paid for the energy their vehicles produce. —Tomorrow in Brief, Mar-Apr 2012, p. 2

Noise vibrations and other “junk” energy will be harvested from the environment. Researchers at Georgia Tech are developing techniques for converting ambient microwave energy into DC power, which could be used for small devices like wireless sensors. And University of Buffalo physicist Surajit Sen is studying ways to use vibrations produced on roads and airport runways as energy sources. —World Trends & Forecasts, Nov-Dec 2011, p. 9

Buckypaper—a smart, superlight material—will increase energy efficiency. Industrial-grade carbon nanotubes are becoming more affordable. One promising use is Buckypaper, which appears flimsy but is 100 times stronger than steel per unit of weight. It can conduct electricity like copper and disperse heat like steel or brass. —Tsvi Bisk, “Unlimiting Energy’s Growth,” May-June 2012, p. 31

Forecasts for bioenergy in the United States may be overly optimistic. As a potential alternative source of energy to help the United States reduce its dependence on foreign oil, biofuels have not met proponents’ high expectations, says the American Chemical Society. One problem is land availability: To meet the goals of the 2007 Energy Independence & Security Act, 80% of current agricultural land would have to be directed toward biofuels. Another barrier is the uncertainty about oil prices, which inhibits biofuel investors. —World Trends & Forecasts, July-Aug 2012, pp. 9-10

Alternative energies won’t be enough to solve the world’s energy woes. Alternatives to alternatives are needed. Heavy investment into solar energy, wind energy, and other renewable systems may actually set us back, since these strategies draw resources away from others that might work better, warns University of California–Berkeley visiting scholar Ozzie Zehner. A more practical approach may be to design communities that enable people to live well while using less. —Books in Brief [review of Green Illusions by Ozzie Zehner], July-Aug 2012, p. 53

ENVIRONMENT AND RESOURCES

The next great wave of species extinctions may be in the oceans. By 2050, the scale of extinctions of ocean-dwelling plants and animals may equal the five great global extinctions of the past 600 million years, warns the International Programme on the State of the Ocean. Reasons: a “deadly triad” of pollution, overfishing, and climate change impacting the world’s ocean habitats. —“The Best Predictions of 2011,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 36

“Peak water” may become as big a problem as peak oil. As water tables around the world become depleted, and as growing populations demand more water for personal as well as agricultural use, supplies of sustainably managed water will continue to fall. The consequences could be dire for human health, as water-related diseases proliferate. —Jerome C. Glenn, “Updating the Global Scorecard: The 2011 State of the Future,” Nov-Dec 2011, p. 27

Gadget-happy societies may become more environmentally friendly. The consumer-electronics industries in the United States are building more drop-off sites for customers to recycle outdated devices. Recycling increased by 53% from 2010 to 2011, netting 400 million pounds of gadgets. The Consumer Electronics Association’s goal is to recover 1 billion pounds of electronics by 2016. —Future Scope, July-Aug 2012, p. 4

Extinctions are outpacing scientists’ ability to discover new species. New tools enable both professional and amateur taxonomists to identify new species and share discoveries around the world. About 2 million species of plants, animals, fungi, and other life forms have been identified, and there could be another 10 million awaiting discovery. But human encroachment is increasing in species-rich locales such as the tropics, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea, threatening to kill off species before they can be discovered, warns botanist Peter H. Raven, president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden. He estimates that 30% of Earth’s species will be extinct by the end of the century, due to climate change and habitat loss. —World Trends & Forecasts, Sep-Oct 2012, p. 8

Water pollution from pesticide runoff will likely increase. As climate change alters the activity and spread of pests, more farmers in Europe will turn to pesticides to keep their croplands productive. The result may be a doubling of pesticide use by 2090 over the 1990 average, and streams in as much as 40% of Europe’s land mass will suffer increased insecticide pollution, warns the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research. —World Trends & Forecasts, May-June 2012, p. 13

By 2100, humans will have become managers of the natural environment. As climate change and population growth claim the planet’s remaining “wild places,” mankind will learn to manage the natural world as a global garden. Species and even microscopic habitats will be monitored and protected via tiny sensors, and managed with the assistance of artificial intelligence. —Brenda Cooper, “Where the Wild Things Are Not,” Sep-Oct 2012, p. 37

FOOD AND AGRICULTURE

An aquaponic recycling system in every kitchen? Future “farmers” may consist of householders recycling their food waste in their own aquariums. An aquaponic system being developed by SUNY ecological engineers would use leftover foods to feed a tank of tilapia or other fish, and then the fish waste would be used for growing vegetables. The goal is to reduce food waste and lower the cost of raising fish. —Tomorrow in Brief, Nov-Dec 2011, p. 2

Genetic modification could yield healthier, more flavorful, and longer-lasting food, thus reducing waste and hunger. Vitamin A–fortified golden rice could help prevent blindness among children in developing countries, but it has not yet been approved. Such “Frankenfood” must first overcome opposition from fearful consumers (and from anti-GMO opponents like the $20-billion organic food industry). —Josh Schonwald, “Engineering the Future of Food,” May-June 2012, p. 27

Genetically engineered animals will become a major part of agriculture, but not soon. In the future, creating livestock that grows faster, consumes less feed, produces less waste, and yields leaner, healthier meat may seem a less “extreme” approach to meeting humanity’s food requirements than it does today. Meat production may even bypass animals, if public opinion shifts to favor lab-grown food as a more ethical approach. —Jeffrey Scott Coker, “Crossing the Species Boundary: Genetic Engineering as Conscious Evolution,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 26

Demands to decrease pesticides and other chemicals on farms could exacerbate food shortages. However, lower crop yields could be compensated for by wasting less food, says environmental researcher Matthias Liess. About a third of all the food the world produces each year is either thrown out or lost in storage, transit, processing, or packing, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. —World Trends & Forecasts, May-June 2012, p. 14

China’s growing appetite for meat will strain global grain supplies. China now consumes 71 million tons of meat a year, about twice as much as the United States and more than a fourth of all the meat produced worldwide, according to the Earth Policy Institute. Increased meat production also increases demand for corn and soybeans used for livestock feed. Supplies of these grains are already seeing strain as energy and other sectors compete with food producers. —Future Scope, Sep-Oct 2012, p. 4

HABITATS

By 2025, there will be 27 megacities around the world, each with populations exceeding 10 million. The “real population bomb” isn’t the sheer number of world population, but the relentless urbanization in places unprepared for this growth. Megacities in northern Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, China, and Indonesia, where poverty is already severe, will face more environmental pollution and become havens for terrorism and crime, warn defense experts P. H. Liotta and James F. Miskel. —Books in Brief [review of The Real Population Bomb by P. H. Liotta and James F. Miskel], July-Aug 2012, p. 55

By 2100, 70% of the world’s 10 billion inhabitants will live in cities. As rural residents move to far-more-complex urban habitats, many will struggle to cope with new institutions and new rules and attitudes. Slums will serve as catalysts for facilitating this psychosocial transition, enabling newcomers to adapt successfully. Instead of “solving” the slum problem, nongovernmental organizations will work to facilitate life with wireless service, educational programs, and “off-grid” power, water, health care, and sanitation services. —Eric Meade, “Slums: A Catalyst Bed for Poverty Eradication,” Sep-Oct 2012, pp. 43-44.

Knowmads may drive growth in micro-urban areas. As telecommuting enables more knowledge workers to work and live anywhere they choose, places with big-city amenities and a small-town feel could have growing appeal. Look for micro-urban booms in places like Fargo, Syracuse, Iowa City, and Roanoke. —Future Scope, Sep-Oct 2012, p. 4

A “green” housing boom is under way. U.S. home buyers are increasingly demanding energy efficiency and the use of sustainable materials both in new homes and in remodeling projects. “Green homes” will grow from 17% of the residential construction market in 2011 to 38% by 2016, with a fivefold increase in revenues, according to the National Association of Home Builders. —Future Scope, May-June 2012, p. 4

HEALTH AND MEDICINE

Drug-delivering nanorobots built from DNA could be approved for use in humans within 20 years. Medical nanorobots that carry molecule-sized payloads and can detect and attack cancer are being developed by Shawn Douglas and researchers at Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. The bots are like complex pieces of fabric, with hundreds of DNA pieces wrapped around a scaffold. When the bot encounters a protein indicating cancer, the nanostructure unlocks itself to release a cancer-fighting antigen. —World Trends & Forecasts, May-June 2012, pp. 15-16

Robots may become gentler caregivers. Lifting and transferring frail patients may be easier for robots than for human caregivers, but their strong arms typically lack sensitivity. Japanese researchers are improving the functionality of the RIBA II (Robot for Interactive Body Assistance), lining its arms and chest with sensors so it lift its patients more gently. —Tomorrow in Brief, Nov-Dec 2011, p. 2

Humans could one day reach longevity “escape velocity.” Continuous rejuvenation therapy that focuses on repairing cell damage before it accumulates, causing pathologies, may one day allow people to live for a thousand years. As these technologies continue to improve, each new round of rejuvenation therapy will improve upon the previous treatments, and we will stay young indefinitely. —Aubrey de Grey, “A Thousand Years Young,” May-June 2012, pp. 21-23

Full-body firewalls will be necessary to prevent hackers from tampering with your implants. Wireless medical devices designed to manage and monitor drug-delivery systems and other implants are vulnerable to interference. Researchers at Purdue and Princeton universities are developing a medical monitor (MedMon) designed to identify potentially malicious activity. —Tomorrow in Brief, July-Aug 2012, p. 2

Cancer survivorship may strain future health-care systems. More people are beating cancer and surviving longer and healthier—that’s the good news. The bad news is that elderly cancer survivors will still need more medical services. In the United States, the aging population is growing while the number of oncologists and geriatric specialists is declining. —Future Scope, Jan-Feb 2012, p. 4

Smart helmets will rapidly detect brain injuries. Contact sports will become smarter and less dangerous, thanks to helmets that detect concussions. By 2015, high-school football players could be wearing smart helmets that rapidly detect abnormalities in users’ brain-wave activity. The EEG-reading helmets, under development by Villanova University engineering professor Hashem Ashrafiuon and others, would alert medics on the sidelines if there are signs of concussion. —World Trends & Forecasts, July-Aug 2012, pp. 12-13

Better health, but fewer doctors. A projected shortage of more than 90,000 doctors by 2020 will drive technological innovations such as low-cost, point-of-care diagnostics—i.e., Lab-on-a-Chip technologies. A cell-phone-sized device could analyze your blood or sputum while you talk to a health provider from the comfort of your home. —Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, “The Abundance Builders,” July-Aug 2012, p. 17

Boys will enter their at-risk years earlier than ever. The age of male sexual maturity has been slowly decreasing since the mid-1700s (2.5 months per decade), thanks to changes in nutrition and environmental factors. A similar trend has already been observed among girls. While the “high-risk” adolescent years have been stretched for boys, the dangers may be offset by parents who tend to supervise children more closely when they’re younger. —Future Scope, Jan-Feb 2012, p. 4

New approaches to treating alcohol addiction could let alcoholics drink moderately. Abstinence is not always feasible or necessary in treating substance abuse, say researchers at UCLA’s Scripps Research Institute. A chemical treatment approach targeting peptides in the part of the brain that regulates moods and emotions could reduce alcoholics’ anxiety and the urge to drink. —World Trends & Forecasts, May-June 2012, pp. 6-8

Disease detection may soon be but a breath away. A Single Breath Disease Diagnostics Breathalyzer under development at Stony Brook University would use sensor chips coated with nanowires to detect chemical compounds that may indicate the presence of diseases or infectious microbes. In the future, a handheld device could let you detect a range of risks, from lung cancer to anthrax exposure. —Tomorrow in Brief, Sep-Oct 2012, p. 2

INFORMATION SOCIETY

The future Internet could connect the world at the neural level. Advances in neurotechnology will make it possible for us to link our minds, share our emotional experiences, and even feel changes in the collective state of mind. This “telempathy” would, for instance, enable leaders to gauge public anxiety during a catastrophe. —Michael Chorost, “A World Wide Mind: The Coming Collective Telempathy,” Mar-Apr 2012, p. 22

Legal-expert systems will make laws easier for laypersons to understand. “Conversational law” will incorporate statutes, interpretations, precedents, and other elements of the law; the system will query users about their particular situation and provide clear answers on how the law applies. Lawyers may reduce their billable hours but earn income developing specialized legal-expert systems. —David R. Johnson, “Serving Justice with Conversational Law,” Sep-Oct 2012, p. 21

Minority languages will disappear with minority populations. Of the 6,900 languages spoken today, more than half face extinction in the next 100 years. Reason: 95% of the world’s population speak one of just 400 languages, and the remaining 5% of languages are scattered among fewer and fewer speakers. —Lawrence Baines, “A World of Fewer Words? Five Trends Shaping the Future of Language,” Mar-Apr 2012, p. 43

Mobile phones may contribute to political reform in Africa. Web-accessible mobile devices have proliferated in Africa, where text messaging and social networking are giving low-income residents more opportunities to watch their governments. Increased transparency and accountability, such as improving public access to spending on expensive infrastructure projects, could help reduce corruption and poverty, says Matthias Mordi, executive director of Accender Africa. —World Trends & Forecasts, Jan-Feb 2012, p. 6

The last newspaper and book will have been printed in 2020. Information formerly contained by print products will be rented by users rather than owned, and will be accessed from the cloud via 3-D mobile media. —Marcel Bullinga, “Welcome to the Future Cloud: Five Bets for 2025,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 64

Tablet PCs, netbooks, and laptops will be extinct by 2022. Instead of relying on hardware, workplaces will become ubiquitous computing environments, where everything around you (door knob, coffee pot, window) has connectivity and computing capabilities. —“The Best Predictions of 2011,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 30

Communication will become increasingly image-driven. Thanks both to the proliferation of video and to smaller screens for computing and communication devices, graphics and images will be more heavily relied on for ordinary communication. This will foster faster comprehension and possibly stimulate new ways of thinking, but at the cost of eloquence and precision. —Lawrence Baines, “A World of Fewer Words? Five Trends Shaping the Future of Language, Mar-Apr 2012, p. 46

By 2020, data will have a life of its own. Algorithms will talk to other algorithms, things will connect with millions of other things, and sensors will gather even more data, processed by more computers, all scarcely discernible to humans. But data may be becoming too big, and we need to learn how to channel the power of data into making the lives of everyone on the planet better. —Brian David Johnson, “The Secret Life of Data in the Year 2020,” July-Aug 2012, pp. 21-23

The “cloud” will become more intelligent, not just a place to store data. Cloud intelligence will evolve into becoming an active resource in our daily lives, providing analysis and contextual advice. Virtual agents could, for example, design your family’s weekly menu based on everyone’s health profiles, fitness goals, and taste preferences. —Chris Carbone and Kristin Nauth, “From Smart House to Networked Home,” July-Aug 2012, p. 30

Online pornography will become more graphic and more pervasive. As with any stimulant, pornographic imagery must become more intensive as users become less sensitive to its effects. One result will be the creation of an entire generation of young men so desensitized by pornography that they are unexcited by normal sexual encounters. —Roger Howard, “Anticipating an ‘Anything Goes’ World of Online Porn,” May-June 2012, p. 42

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Neuroscientists may soon be able to predict what you’ll do before you do it. The intention to do something, such as grasp a cup, produces blood flow to specific areas of the brain, so studying blood-flow patterns through neuroimaging could give researchers a better idea of what people have in mind. One potential application is improved prosthetic devices that respond to signals from the brain more like actual limbs do. —World Trends & Forecasts, Jan-Feb 2012, p. 10

The next space age will launch after 2020, driven by competition and “adventure capitalists.” While the U.S. space shuttle program is put to rest, entrepreneurs are planning commercial launches to access low-Earth orbit and to ferry passengers to transcontinental destinations within hours. Challenges include perfecting new technologies, developing global operations, building new infrastructure, and gaining regulatory approval. —Joseph N. Pelton, “The New Age of Space Business,” Sep-Oct 2012, p. 17

Algae could provide the molecular machinery to create ultra-low-cost fuels. Pioneering genome sequencer J. Craig Venter aims to create synthetic life derived from algae, which would be run through a DNA sequencing machine and used to design future cheap biofuels. The technology could also create highly productive food crops, high-performing vaccines, and more. —Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, “The Abundance Builders,” July-Aug 2012, p. 15

Electron-level data-storage capacity could be achieved in just over 120 years. One of the eight “grand challenges” proposed by the DaVinci Institute is an electron-based storage system that could be manufactured for less than $1 per 100 terabytes. With Moore’s law on our side, we could reach this goal in the year 2133, according to University of Colorado–Boulder neurobiology professor Mark Dubin. —Thomas Frey, “Eight Grand Challenges for Human Advancement,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 18

Coming soon to sports arenas: the Enhanced Games! Genetically enhanced athletes are nothing new, but rather than leaving the enhancements to luck, future technologies will enable more competitors to choose the alterations that will improve their performance. Officially sanctioned enhanced athletes will thus still compete on a level playing field. —Jeffrey Scott Coker, “Crossing the Species Boundary: Genetic Engineering as Conscious Evolution,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 27

Genetic engineering could make us superheroes. While we may not become Batman, we may one day find it useful to incorporate specific animals’ traits (such as bats’ sonar-based “vision,” perhaps). —Jeffrey Scott Coker, “Crossing the Species Boundary: Genetic Engineering as Conscious Evolution,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 27

The dream of “Smell-O-Vision” may soon come true. An odor-release device triggered by heat from an electrical current may one day bring scents into virtual-reality experiences, video games, and other applications. One potential use for such telesmell devices would be for alarm systems, perhaps scaring burglars away with skunk scents, according to engineering professor Sungho Jin of the University of California, San Diego. —World Trends & Forecasts, Nov-Dec 2011, p. 8

Robotic pack mules will lighten the load for human soldiers on the battlefield. Toting 100 pounds or more of gear can be a major impairment for troops. Robotic pack mules under development at DARPA could potentially carry 400 pounds on a 20-mile hike without refueling. —Tomorrow in Brief, May-June 2012, p. 2

WORLD AFFAIRS

Soldiers will communicate via telepathic helmets by 2020. Abandoning radio transmissions, microphones, and hand signals, tomorrow’s military will rely on helmets that read and communicate soldiers’ thoughts, according to biomedical scientist Gerwin Schalk. —“The Best Predictions of 2011,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 30

The global Muslim population could increase from 1.6 billion to 2.2 billion (35%) by 2030. The Muslim population is growing at about twice the rate of the world’s non-Muslim population, reports the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Muslims will make up more than one-fourth (26.4%) of the world’s projected population in 2030. —“The Best Predictions of 2011,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 32

Both China and India will experience growing pains over the next decade. India’s population, growing at twice the rate of China’s, is creating an “enviably young” workforce, reports the RAND Corporation. China is viewed as having a better educated workforce than India, suggesting that China’s GDP will continue to exceed India’s through 2025, but the aging population bodes ill for China’s longer-term security. —World Trends & Forecasts, Mar-Apr 2012, p. 12

Mandarin Chinese may gain on English’s popularity globally. On the Internet, Mandarin and English have close to the same number of users (510 million and 565 million respectively). However, the number of Mandarin users online increased 1,478% between 2000 and 2011, compared with 301% for English users. The fastest growth was among Arabic users (2,501% increase) and Russian (1,825%). —Lawrence Baines, “A World of Fewer Words? Five Trends Shaping the Future of Language, Mar-Apr 2012, p. 43

Good news and bad news for 2020: The 2011 State of the Future report found reasons to both cheer and fear what global trends portend for the decade ahead.

Where We Are Winning:

• The percentage of people with access to clean water.
• Percentage of people enrolled in secondary school.
• GDP per capita.
• Infant mortality rates.
• HIV prevalence among 15- to 49-year-olds.
• Total debt service in low- and mid-income countries.

Where We Are Losing:

• Carbon-dioxide emissions.
• Global surface temperature anomalies.
• Percentage of people voting in elections.
• Levels of corruption in the 15 largest countries.
• Number of refugees per 100,000 total population.

—Jerome C. Glenn, “Updating the Global Scorecard: The 2011 State of the Future,” Nov-Dec 2011, p. 26

In Search of the Better Angels of Our Future

© Villanova University

Kenneth B. Taylor

By Kenneth B. Taylor

The ideologies that once guided us through political and economic conflicts— such as communism versus capitalism—have little relevance to cultures that face new, technologically driven conflicts over the very meaning of humanity. As we relentlessly pursue paradigm-altering technologies, we will need a new set of guidelines for understanding who we are and where we are heading.

We live at a time when striving for higher social ideals no longer guides most individual or social action. The epic battle against communism has essentially been won, and many in the West now assume that all necessary work has been done, our liberties and rights guaranteed through established rule of law.

Unfortunately, this development has stripped the human condition of transcendent sociopolitical objectives, leaving us floundering in a web of short-term economic liberalism or regressing to more primitive religious, nationalistic, or tribal perspectives. Capitalism (and, with it, materialism) reigns supreme, and as a guiding light leads us nowhere: It can tell us how best to organize our economic affairs, but not where humanity is going or what our meaning is.

We are now on the cusp of two major long-term developments transforming our world. First, during this century, human civilization will move into its climactic stage: The assumptions we make about our daily socioeconomic environment, upon which we orient our lives, will become increasingly untenable. Second, science is discovering means to amplify its mastery over the foundations of life in general and Homo sapiens in particular, signifying that we are gaining control over who we become.

What we are about to face is unprecedented, and we are woefully unprepared for the challenge. To navigate this increasingly turbulent world, we need a new ideology to guide our actions, provide meaning, and protect the achievements of modern civilization.

Approaching the Limits of Enlightenment Ideals?

Elements of a new secular ideology are all around us, yet scattered so widely that they fail to register in our collective awareness. Before outlining the features of this new ideology, it will be worthwhile to briefly investigate where we have come from and why limits are approaching.

As the Enlightenment dawned during the seventeenth century, a powerful, transformative ideology emerged that led to the Western world we now live in. It seized the human imagination, harnessed passions, and directed collective effort. It created a social movement that swept away the vestiges of monarchy embedded in the mercantilist order, giving rise to democracy and capitalism. There were numerous contributors to the associated body of thought we call the liberal tradition, cumulatively giving rise to the first secular ideology. Emphasis shifted within society to the rights of individuals, the social contract, and the common good.

Many of the principles of the liberal tradition are embodied in the ethos of progress, a summative perspective now spreading around the world. In brief, this ethos is built upon the following pillars:

• Rationally generated ideas will lead to triumph over the external world as well as inner human nature.
• All people are created equal and should be provided with equivalent opportunities within an egalitarian meritocracy under the rule of law.
• Social, individual, and material improvement is inevitable and upward.

The collective outcome for a people adhering to this ethos was forecast to be provision of lasting freedom, the greatest good for the greatest number, with justice and peace nourished in this world. Given the clear reward in one’s lifetime, as opposed to the hereafter, this social philosophy had wide appeal. It was quickly embraced, becoming the antithesis to the mercantilist thesis of the day.

Despite subsequent wars, depressions, and revolutions, all went exceptionally well on the socioeconomic front until the early twenty-first century. The Western crisis of 2008 will not mark the beginning of the end, but rather the end of the beginning of Western civilization as we know it.

Recent developments have been germinating since the mid-twentieth century, during which time Western nations gradually backed themselves into an existential corner. It is a predicament without easy retreat for many reasons, including fiscal constraints, vested interests, political intransience, unfavorable demography, and diminishing Earth capacity.

Too many policies related to economic growth and welfare were enacted, institutionalized, and progressively expanded, with payment for current expenditures shifted onto the shoulders of future generations. This can go on only if new entrants exceed the number already involved—that is, if the labor force grows and a youthful demographic pyramid structure continues. Once the demographic pyramid inverts, it is only a matter of time before the scheme becomes unsustainable.

And so the trigger event heralding the end of Western civilization as we know it will not be the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008 (and subsequent Great Recession), but rather the inversion of the demographic pyramids in the West, with the inexorable effect of pushing population growth below replacement levels. Before the year 2020, fully half of humankind will live in countries where fertility rates are at or below replacement level.

Even if politicians do find a way to engineer a safe way out of the current financial morass, the slowdown and eventual decline of national populations in the context of high public debt will negate the possibility of maintaining many social programs, or even maintaining existing public infrastructure.

Collectively, these are the reasons why surpassing the previous heights of socioeconomic success is untenable: The socioeconomic tide is turning, producing powerful undercurrents that should not be underestimated.

Riding the Waves of Technological Advancement

As population begins to shrink from this height, so, too, will economic output, with its undesirable negative externalities. The ensuing population decline will have almost as dramatic an effect pushing global GDP down as it had in pushing it up these past 250 years. However, we will never return to the standard of living of 1800 due to the cumulative effects of scientific and technological advancement.

The late business professor Julian Simon once suggested that the Earth‘s carrying capacity is unlimited. While it is mathematically impossible for Earth to accommodate an unlimited number of people, Simon based his statement on faith in human ingenuity, particularly technological progress. He believed in the “technofix” hypothesis: that technology and innovative solutions will be forthcoming, adequate, and timely in addressing major human problems.

I agree with the “forthcoming” part but have reservations about the “adequate and timely” portion of Simon’s presumptions. An important issue is that technology appears to occur in unpredictable waves. In the 1930s, Joseph Schumpeter postulated an economic growth model in which bursts of technological development cyclically set off periods of intense competition between firms for market dominance, leading to a transformation of the economic landscape. Schumpeter saw capitalism moving in long waves occurring approximately every 50 years. When a technological wave commenced, it would cause, as Schumpeter famously put it, “gales of creative destruction,” in which sunset industries would be swept away, to be replaced by sunrise industries.

From Schumpeter’s vantage point in the mid-twentieth century, the waves indeed looked to occur every 50 years or so, but today we understand that technological waves are neither regular nor predictable. We now know that, whenever they occur, each comes with a core of what we may call meta-technologies: general-purpose technologies that affect the economy widely and deeply (e.g., harnessing electricity or the computer chip).

So far, there have been five such meta-technology waves, beginning with the introduction of the steam engine and factory in the late eighteenth century. Since the early 1970s, we have been experiencing the fifth wave, centered on all the technologies and innovations emerging from the computer chip.

Each meta-technology becomes a platform for related developments. Many of these are adjacent possibilities, or innovations emerging logically from the meta-technology (e.g., computer chips make cell phones possible). Others are called “exaptations,” where an invention introduced in one field induces technological change in another field (e.g., Thomas Edison’s phonograph, meant to be an office dictating machine, becomes a medium for recording and listening to music—the record player).

We now live at the tail-end of the fifth wave with diminishing computer-chip based developments. Substantial gains to come will be concentrated in the areas of metadata analysis, material sciences, biocybernetics, and wireless telephony.

A declining pace of invention and innovation—and by association productivity—adds to the headwinds of the Western financial conundrum, making viable solutions elusive and socioeconomic pain protracted. Economist Robert Gordon recently noted that there are clear signs that a productivity slowdown is happening in the United States. Since 2004, productivity has grown at an annual rate of 1.7%, well below the 2.6% rate for the previous decade. During the two years leading into 2012, productivity fell to a 0.9% annual rate.

For the past 250 years, new technological wonders have been the backbone of progress, the cure-all for many problems, and the leavening in a rising standard of living. Might there be a sixth technology wave on the horizon to maintain this pattern? Maybe, but its nature will be uniquely transformative and a major reason a new secular ideology is necessary.

Transformational Technologies Ahead

Whether intentionally or not, humans have irrevocably changed the path of evolution on Earth by altering the planet’s biosphere and habitats by deliberately breeding animals and hybridizing plants to suit our needs and by inadvertently reducing biodiversity. This evolutionary trend will accelerate this century in a new direction through genetic, biocybernetic, neurological, nanotechnological, and pharmacological engineering of the human being.

The panoply of research agendas across these fields is so staggering in scope that their collective implication has not yet risen to social awareness. While science to date has been concerned with transforming things in our external environment, it now is developing potent tools to transform the human being itself.

A cursory introduction to what is happening in a couple of these fields will help set the stage for understanding how their effects will enter into mainstream consciousness and eventually demand a new way of thinking.

Controlling and eliminating genetic diseases by somatic gene therapy, and augmenting physically handicapped humans through biocybernetics, are capabilities that are rapidly coming on the scene, for these are relatively uncontroversial technologies. Cybernetic science has a long history and is essentially an interdisciplinary area of science concerned with the structure and function of regulatory systems.

Biocybernetics is the field where cybernetic theory is applied within biological systems; it has several subfields, including neurocybernetics, molecular cybernetics, cellular cybernetics, and evolutionary cybernetics. Developments in smart-system technology, information technology, neuroscience, and nanotechnology are converging in biocybernetics, causing acceleration in medical advances from drug delivery to sophisticated and more-varied prostheses.

Genetic testing has received more media attention than biocybernetics in recent years. Medical professionals now have more than 1,300 gene tests at their disposal to check for such diseases as cystic fibrosis and hemophilia. Along the way, scientists are discovering and exploring new dimensions of the human genome related to human physical and mental attributes.

As with somatic gene therapies and testing, early applications of biocybernetics have stirred little controversy. For instance, who objects if biocybernetics produces a “smart” prosthesis to permit a disabled veteran to walk with a strong, normal gait or to have a more agile arm with dexterous fingers with which to hold his child? The lack of major controversy with cybernetic enhancements or somatic gene therapies is due to the fact that neither alters the human germline.

Continuing developments in these fields will provide additional opportunities for personal enhancement and, in time, will pass ethical boundaries into stormy controversy. The most provocative scientific trend that is well under way is germline gene therapy. This vein of research seeks to transform the genetic structure of sperm and egg cells toward some goal—such as eliminating genes for disease by inserting new ones for better health or higher intelligence—with the consequence being that the engineered gene sequence will be passed on to future generations.

Germline gene therapies will create new and improved people. Without a doubt, developments in this field will ignite an ethical firestorm that we are unprepared to deal with. (For simplicity, we will refer to all of these scientific fields as bioengineering.)

Science these past three centuries has not only transformed our world, but it has also provided us with the means to improve our individual lives and extend personal power. Whenever you get a flu shot, you become biologically enhanced. Whenever you put on a pair of glasses, you become technologically enhanced.

We enthusiastically embrace enhancements if they protect us from disease or permit us to see so that we can carry on the business of life. We want these treatments or things because they enable us to more freely pursue the range of needs along Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy; they permit us to live more productive, stable, and fulfilled lives. There is little doubt that the majority of people will demand the life-enhancing products and procedures growing out of bioengineering.

Technology, Transformation, Ideals, and Ideology

Democracy is founded upon the inalienable rights of the individual, meaning that people should determine what is best for them, not the state. All who are alive today have grown up with astounding scientific enhancements, are comfortable with new technology, and are legally protected to deploy new treatments and products, within broad limits, that enhance their pursuit of happiness. Liberty—the beating heart of democracy—resonates with human nature and will not be denied.

Since we are about to take dramatic control over our own evolution, it is best to have a relevant, encompassing ideology to guide this emergent transformation. Such an ideology must harmonize with the implications of the demographic and socioeconomic shifts unfolding in the developed world.

Details of this ideology will emerge from a collective learning process; however, I will share some ideas on the structure of this new system of thought.

First, there needs to be a reframing of recent history. Second, from this reframing we need to extract and incorporate successful ideas from our experience. Third, we need to adopt a set of strong ethical principles to guide research, experimentation, and clinical application of biotechnology. Fourth, we need a vision of the new human to be created. And fifth, we need a sustainable community context in which to nurture our becoming while preserving all that humanity cherishes.

Reframing of history is fairly straightforward: The Enlightenment never ended. In fact, we are now moving into the third and final stage, the Era of Transformation. The first era is sometimes called the Age of Reason, for it was a time of social change based on new ideas for organizing social institutions along with economic experimentation through systematic application of the scientific method.

The Era of Experimentation followed and began with the rise of what Hungarian philosopher Karl Polanyi termed the “Dual Movement” in the mid to late 1800s. This was a period of intense experimentation with alternative social paradigms within democracy and interpretations of the ideal design of civil society (e.g., fascism, communism, democratic socialism).

Political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the “End of History” after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of this second stage. The Era of Transformation began with the complete mapping of the human genome in 2001. The two most distinguishing features of this third stage will be the transition of our species from its colonization stage to a climactic stage of existence on Earth and the creation of a new human being.

Debates over which ideas to incorporate from previous secular ideologies to date will be contentious. The core institutions of democracy based on guaranteed individual freedoms in the context of free-market, meritocratic capitalism will be retained. The principle of the “Common Good” to judge social policy will remain, yet this notion has evolved into a multitude of extended meanings, the significance of which demands intensive analysis and discussion.

Beyond these, the concepts embedded in the ethos of progress—part of the social contract—capture much that resonates with human nature, but requires careful review. Certain elements, such as the sanctity of a rising standard of living, are in need of modification in relation to constraints imposed by physical reality, our numbers, and existing technology.

The scientific community has worked on establishing strong ethical principles to govern biotechnology. In 1979, bioethicists articulated four fundamental bioethical principles:

• The Principle of Autonomy or Informed Consent.
• The Principle of Non-malfeasance, or Due Care.
• The Principle of Beneficence.
• The Principle of Distributive Justice.

These principles have shaped the bioethical debate ever since, forming core standards for guiding research in such fields as gene therapy.

These ethical principles, and others, will be folded into the new ideology. Eugenics was about creating a “better” human based on differences between people. To avoid accusations that this new endeavor is a disguised eugenics movement, bioengineering must be constrained to enhancing attributes that all humans share: health, longevity, intelligence, and attention.

An image of the new human to be created will likely be the most difficult facet of the new ideology to agree upon. What we do not want to create is an inflated version of the Paleolithic human that now populates the world. This would surely lead to extinction. Incorporating some Kantian notion of the perfectibility of humanity is another certain dead end.

I have a strong preference for an open-ended vision and thus will refer to the new human simply as an “angel”—with all the ambiguity this implies. Throughout history, luminaries have referred to “the better angels of our nature,” speaking to the multiple expressions of positive human creativity, behaviors, and endeavors. This is a vision worthy of embracing.

“The Human Foundation” for Building the New Ideology

Our new ideology must have a social locus, including an institution to focus effort, bring minds together to flesh out the ideology, and promote a common agenda. Some will say that today this can be done through a virtual organization, but there is much more to building community than just inspired words on a screen.

I suggest that an organization called The Human Foundation be established with multiple objectives and purposes. For example, this organization will place itself at the vanguard of bioengineering, bringing all the knowledge together in a manner to promote an ethical pathway to the creation of the new human. It will also involve itself in addressing existing world problems—particularly in regard to those associated with demographic, economic, and environmental transition.

One goal will be to spread awareness of the advantages of diminishing population and aggregate GDP, and of embracing a modified ethos of progress. Existing knowledge will be compiled and stored by the Foundation, with strategies instituted for its preservation under extreme circumstances. A “seed bank” would be built within The Human Foundation (as is being done by the Svalbard Global Seed Vault) to preserve all that is known for the benefit of humanity’s future, thus serving as an insurance policy that we hope is never needed.

In the end, The Human Foundation would serve to bring together all that is needed to preserve, protect, and advance knowledge while guiding the process of continuing human evolution. It will have one other critical objective: to create a sense of shared purpose within a nourishing community.

The proposed ideology is evolutionary rather than revolutionary: It is built upon a foundation of peace and continuing revelation. Revolutionary ideologies, on the other hand, spawn passions of “us versus them,” with zealotry, fanaticism, and powerful in-group bonds. Both forms share a vision of a better future and sense of purpose, but the revolutionary approach draws heavily—and dangerously—on human emotions.

An ideology based on an evolutionary approach is predominantly rational and therefore lacking the spark to ignite and fuse community bonds. Consequently, there is a need for a studied effort to build community around the proposed ideology. Swiss philosopher Alain De Botton’s recent book, Religion for Atheists (Pantheon, 2012), is a good place in which to begin identifying approaches that The Human Foundation could use to address the issue of community building and cohesion.

No new ideology has emerged in the last half century, not because of lack of human imagination, but because we have been living in a period of complacency, relativism, and materialism. Many of the old ideologies have failed—or are failing—due to a misunderstanding of the underlying constraints imposed by physical reality, little-understood processes unfolding in the world, and overconfidence in our ability to construct institutions and technologies to solve problems.

Immanuel Kant thought that progress could not be measured by the amount of wealth or knowledge possessed and that it would not come automatically or be uninterrupted. Progress was, as he would put it, a difficult passage from barbarism toward cultural and human enlightenment. He believed that a world that was culturally enlightened would be dominated by people who were more uniformly and consistently angelic than in our barbarous past.

Progress ultimately springs from the transformation of people, and Kant called for education as the pivotal tool for doing so. This suggests that he believed nurturing intelligence would dispel ignorance, bringing understanding, peace, and prosperity. But Kant put undue faith in Paleolithic humans’ potential; history since his time has proved him wrong. The human we call Homo sapiens is shortsighted, self-centered, and tribal—with these traits thrown into a cauldron of base emotions with mental and biological flaws.

I believe that Kant was fundamentally correct, yet more and better education alone cannot take us where he envisioned us going: We need a better human to complete the passage. If we succeed in navigating the difficult challenges of the twenty-first century, we may begin to write the final chapter of the Enlightenment. If we do not, then the Enlightenment truly did end with the eighteenth century—and all that has transpired since may be no more than footnotes in the closing pages of the human story.

About the Author

Kenneth B. Taylor is a faculty member of the Department of Economics at Villanova University and currently serves as associate director of the Center for Global Leadership. His most recent edited volume is entitled 21st Century Economics: Perspectives of Socioeconomics for a Changing World (St. Martin’s Press, 2000).

Whatever Happened to Western Civilization? The Cultural Crisis, 20 Years Later

Richard Eckersley

By Richard Eckersley

In 1993, THE FUTURIST published author Richard Eckersley’s provocative essay, “The West’s Deepening Cultural Crisis.” Here, he looks back at what has happened since, and forward to what the next 20 years might hold.

For a while, things were looking up.

Twenty years ago, I argued that Western culture was in crisis, marked by increasing pessimism about the future and declining well-being, especially among youth. Other serious problems we faced—the intractable economic difficulties, widening social gulf, and worsening environmental degradation—were also fundamentally problems of culture, of beliefs and moral priorities.

Readers responded strongly, and mostly positively, to the essay. In a poll run by THE FUTURIST, 84% agreed that Western culture was failing to provide a sense of meaning, belonging, and purpose, and a framework of values; 63% said most people in Western nations were pessimistic about the future; 57% agreed that excessive individualism was a problem in Western cultures.

The 1990s seemed to offer new hope. The dot-com and biotech booms were heralded as the beginning of an era of unlimited and sustainable economic growth and prosperity. Several of the adverse trends in young people’s well-being began to improve in countries like the United States, where the declines had been most pronounced. Climate change made it onto the political agenda, nationally and internationally.

Then things changed again. Events such as 9/11 and other terrorist attacks, the West’s waging of protracted and unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rise of the East, notably China, to challenge the West’s economic and political supremacy all contributed. Then the global financial crisis struck in 2008. “Declinology” has now become a new theme in public debate and discussion about Western civilization.

Beneath the economic and political ebb and flow over the past two decades, the West’s cultural crisis never really went away. Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, surveys continued to reveal public disquiet about “the frenzied, excessive quality of life today” (as a 1995 American survey put it). And this crisis had an increasingly tangible outcome as new research revealed more about the extent and seriousness of youth health problems.

“Culture” isn’t simply about groups having distinctive costumes, songs, dances, or prayers. Culture brings order and meaning to our lives. Of all species, we alone require a culture to give us reasons to live, to address the fundamental questions of life: Who am I? Where have I come from? Why am I here? There are many cultural paths we can follow; this is the source of our extraordinary diversity and versatility. But it is also a danger: We can lose our way.

Deepening Pessimism

In 1993, I said of the United States that reports and surveys revealed a nation that was confused, divided, and scared, suffering its worst crisis of confidence in 30 years. The same was true of other Western countries, including my own, Australia. Today, the situation is arguably worse. In 2011, Time magazine reported a poll showing that the United States is going through “one of its longest sustained periods of unhappiness and pessimism ever,” adding that it is “hard to overstate what a fundamental change this represents.”

Two-thirds of Americans (68%) believed that the past decade was one of decline, not progress, for the United States and that the greatest threat to its long-term stability came from within, not from outside, the country (66%). About half said that the past decade was one of the worst in the past 100 years (47%) and that American children today would be worse off when they grew up (52%)than people were now. In a 2006 European survey, 60% said that, for most people in their country, life was getting worse.

Australia ranks at or near the top of many international comparisons of quality of life and development. Unlike the United States and Europe, it escaped the global financial crisis relatively unscathed: There was no recession, unemployment didn’t rise, and national debt is manageable. A refrain in public debate is that Australians have nothing to whine about. Yet, the public mood in Australia is sour; dissatisfaction with government is high. In a 2009 survey, only 24% of people said quality of life in Australia was getting better. In another 2009 survey, Australians generally saw themselves as being richer, but unhappier (or no happier), than they were in the previous few decades. While 77% said Australians’ material standard of living was higher than 20 years ago, 58% felt that emotional well-being was lower. As one market researcher put it, people see the world as a glass half empty, although they are determined to see their personal lives as a glass half full.

In contrast to people’s high levels of personal happiness and life satisfaction, many studies over the past few decades have revealed their anger and anxiety about the changes in Western societies. The concerns include excessive greed and selfishness, consumerism, too much competition and too little compassion, the loss of community, growing pressures on families, and drugs, crime, and violence. There is a common perception that, with individual freedom and material abundance, people don’t seem to know “where to stop,” or now have “too much of a good thing.”

So the pessimistic mood goes far deeper than politics and the performance of governments, although people may not fully grasp the reasons for their disquiet. The disenchantment is systemic, reflecting the reality that the social trajectory of our health and well-being—of our quality of life—is now downwards (setting aside the offsetting benefits of medical advances and other specific interventions).

Declining Youth Well-Being

In the 1993 article, I looked especially at the health of young people, who reflect best the tenor and tempo of the times because they are growing up in them. Furthermore, their attitudes, lifestyle choices, and illnesses will affect their health in later years, so shaping the health of the entire population.

I pointed to the rising rates among youth in many Western nations of suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, depression and other mental health problems, and crime. The next decade showed improvements in at least some measures, including suicide and crime; an American composite index of child and youth well-being, which had been falling since its starting point in 1975, began to rise from 1995. Public commentary about Gen Y (aka, the millennials) has been generally more positive than it was about their predecessors, Gen X.

However, experts believe that the war against drugs is still being lost. The United States is experiencing an epidemic of prescription-drug abuse, which is now driving a sustained rise in drug-related deaths. Heavy drinking remains a concern, and alcohol- and drug-related public violence is a serious problem in many Western countries. More importantly, we now have a much better understanding of the extent of the decline in young people’s health and well-being over several generations, and of its causes.

Rising rates of diabetes and other health risks associated with increasing obesity have led to predictions that, barring new medical treatments, the life expectancy of today’s youth will fall. More disturbing are the trends in mental health, which accounts for by far the biggest share of the “burden of disease” in young people (measured as disability-adjusted life years, or lost years of healthy life). Although the trends remain contested among researchers, the weight of evidence suggests a marked decline in psychological well-being.

One American study, comparing the results of a widely used psychological test going back to the 1930s, found a steady decline in the mental health of college students between 1938 and 2007: Five times as many college students now score high enough on the test to indicate psychological problems, compared with 1938. And a large survey of American college freshmen found that their emotional health had fallen in 2010 to the lowest level since the survey began in 1985.

A British study found that adolescents experienced considerably higher rates of emotional problems in 2006 than they did in 1986. The greatest changes were for worry, irritability, fatigue, sleep disturbance, panic, and feeling worn out or under strain; the more severe the reported symptoms, the larger the increase over the two decades.

Recent results of national surveys conducted by the American College Health Association show that large proportions of students report strong negative emotions. In the 2011 survey, more than 80% had, in the previous 12 months, felt exhausted and overwhelmed by all they had to do; 30%–60% had felt very lonely, very sad, overwhelming anxiety or anger, that things were hopeless, or so depressed that it was difficult to function. From 10% to more than 50% had experienced these emotions in the previous two weeks.

Exactly what the findings mean for young people’s health and well-being is not clear. They are certainly not the whole story. Had they been asked, 80%–90% of the students would have said they were happy and satisfied with their lives; most would be leading seemingly normal lives, attending lectures, completing assignments, working, partying, and dating. At the same time, these findings reveal something about being young today, and about the pressures young people face.

At the societal level, changes in the family, work, education, the mass and social media, religion, governance, and environmental pollution all play a role in this decline in health and well-being. At a more personal level, there are the changes in diet, outdoor play, the experience of nature, physical activity, sleep, peer relations, drug and alcohol use, and sexual activity. A particular concern today is the sexualization and commodification of childhood, as children are pressured at an ever younger age to be popular, look good, do well, and follow the latest consumer fashions and fads.

Linked to these trends are more intangible changes associated with increasing materialism and individualism. Both are defining characteristics of modern Western culture; both have conferred benefits to people, including to their health and well-being. However, both are now exacting rising costs to well-being.

These costs include a heightened sense of risk, uncertainty, and insecurity; a lack of clear frames of reference; a rise in personal expectations, coupled with a perception that the onus of success lies with the individual, despite the continuing importance of social position; an excess of freedom and choice, which is experienced as a threat or tyranny; the construal of the self as independent and separate from others; and a shift from intrinsic to extrinsic values and goals.

These cultural shifts toward excessive materialism and individualism are not just a matter of greater vanity, selfishness, and greed (although many people express concerns about these traits), or simply the manufactured desire to “have more stuff.” They lead to an unrelenting pressure to focus on what we make of our lives, to fashion identity and meaning increasingly from personal attributes, achievements, possessions, and lifestyles, and less from shared cultural traditions and beliefs.

This emphasis is a recipe for disappointment, depression, and anxiety. It distracts people from what is most important to well-being: the quality of their relationships with each other and the world, which, ideally, contribute to a deep and enduring sense of intrinsic worth and existential security. Asked what he had learned from a long-running study of the lives of a group of over 260 Harvard students in the 1930s, psychiatrist George Vaillant replied, “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that social ills have their source in today’s “individualized society of consumers,” with consuming more being the “sole road to inclusion,” and “existential uncertainty” now a universal human condition. A new study of Finnish students’ fears for the future gives intriguing insight into these more abstract aspects of well-being, including the role of the fear of death (see box below).

Health and well-being are more than just a consequence of changing social conditions. They are an important, and underestimated, dynamic in society, affecting our resilience and how we respond to social changes and challenges.

The Mismeasure of Progress

The past decade or so has seen a remarkable surge in interest in measuring the progress of societies (“Is Life Really Getting Better?” THE FUTURIST, January 1999). The debate has focused on adequacy of economic indicators, notably per capita income or GDP, as measures of a nation’s performance, relative to the past and to other countries. Measures of subjective well-being, especially happiness and life satisfaction, are attracting particular attention. Other widely used indicators in comparing nations include health (measured as life expectancy), education, human rights, governance (including political freedom and corruption), and equality.

These indicators place Western liberal democracies at the leading edge of progress, and present them as models for less-developed nations. For example, Western nations occupied the top 10 positions, and 17 of the top 20, in the 2011 UN Human Development Index, which is based on life expectancy, literacy and educational enrollment, and per capita income.

According to the first UN World Happiness Report, the happiest countries in the world are Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the Netherlands. The story is much the same with most other indices, with the New World countries of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand also doing well. Only when environmental indicators, such as the ecological footprint, are included does this order change significantly.

But even the new and expanded measures are still missing a critical dimension of human well-being: the more intangible, cultural, moral, and existential aspects of life that reflect and reveal the depths of the human psyche and the complexities of human affairs. Replacing or supplementing money with happiness or life satisfaction as a measure won’t do the trick. Although well-being research has revealed the importance of things other than money, there remains a substantial gap in the new progress measures, even those incorporating subjective well-being.

Orthodox approaches underestimate the degree to which “progress” as we measure it is contributing to an existential deficit that is affecting the health and well-being of all of us, rich and poor alike. This additional “psychosocial dynamics” perspective is largely absent from the political, and even scientific, debate about progress.

To a significant extent, conventional indicators and models of progress are measuring Westernization or modernization, rather than optimal social progress or development. While the concepts may overlap, they are not the same thing. At best, the qualities being measured may be desirable, even necessary, but are not sufficient. At worst, the benefits of Western culture are being counted, but not its costs, which are formidable and growing (note Finland’s position as one of the happiest countries, while fears about death, health, failure, and loneliness rise among its youth—see box on page 19).

The tension or contradiction is seen clearly with both materialism and individualism. International comparisons suggest that rising material wealth is a national positive (even if it has diminishing benefits); yet, it requires and reinforces a cultural and moral context that promotes materialistic values that are harmful to well-being. Similarly, individual freedom is seen as a major component of progress and development, but freedom, too, comes at a cost when it is pushed too far, and becomes a form of social abandonment or isolation.

The Case for “Pessimistic Hope”

Twenty years ago, I could still see a positive future for humanity, despite the deepening crisis I described. Today I am more pessimistic. Like an increasing number of scientists, futurists, and others, I now believe it is too late to avoid widespread calamities arising from climate change, resource depletion, and other global developments (see “Global MegaCrisis” by William E. Halal and Michael Marien, THE FUTURIST, May-June 2011). I realized about five years ago, with the evidence of accelerating global warming, that we’d left it too late; and we are continuing to leave it too late. As well as being a real threat, climate change is also a symbol of humanity’s wider predicament.

I linked the cultural crisis to several effects of science, but also saw science as helping us through it. Only science, I suggested, was powerful enough to persuade us to redirect its power, to convince us of the seriousness of our situation, to strengthen our resolve to do something about it, and to guide what we do. Yet, the past few years have seen a remarkable rise in public and political questioning, even rejection, of climate-change science.

I saw hope in a growing compatibility, a reconciliation, between scientific and spiritual views of the world. Instead, we’ve seen a backlash by scientists and others against the rise of religious fundamentalism, some of it as “fundamentalist” as the religion they denounce. It is “a dialogue of the deaf,” says Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton.

Still, I could be wrong. I remember the dire predictions in the 1970s of what lay in store for humanity in the decades that have now passed—without their being fulfilled (although the science behind the predictions was much less developed then). We can only face the future with hope; but for there to be hope, we have to confront reality unflinchingly. Let’s call it “pessimistic hope.”

Ever since the 1960s, we have declared the next decade to be the decade of reckoning, the time when we must deal with global environmental problems such as climate change, land and water degradation, food security, peak oil, population growth, and biodiversity loss. And as each decade passed without the necessary action being taken, we postponed the deadline another 10 years. With the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen conference on climate change, the 2010s are now the critical decade for action. By the decade’s end, the environmental “emergency” will have lasted half a century and spanned two generations. Will we have acted decisively by then?

Indeed, one of the most striking things when we look back over the last 20 years is the resilience of the status quo, the persistence in Western democracies of a politics that, explicitly and implicitly, sees no need to move beyond a worldview of unending material progress, despite the disenchantment of their citizens and the evident failure of material progress to deliver on its promise to keep making life better.

It is not that nothing worthwhile has been achieved; it is that not enough has been achieved with “politics as usual” approaches. This deep current of systemic and sustained political failure remains largely ignored, while politicians, commentators, and analysts focus on the swirling surface eddies of political theater and policy detail. If the deeper perspective were more widely recognized and part of public and political debate, there would be more incentive for governments to respond to it.

Fixing this situation goes beyond politics; it requires leadership at all levels of society. But politics has a role to play. Both politicians and the electorates they serve must have the courage to enact sweeping policy changes that shift the course of the deep current, not just stir up the surface eddies.

Making these changes would mean recognizing that economic growth measures progress very imperfectly, that the content of growth is more important than its rate, and that we need to direct economic activity away from private consumption for short-term personal gratification toward long-term public investment in the social transformation necessary to address all the challenges of our century and to ensure our future.

Radical reforms could include, for example:

• Limiting or banning political donations by corporations and other vested interests.
• Putting a sufficiently high price on carbon and other sources of environmental degradation (some countries have introduced a carbon price).
• Abolishing tax deductibility for advertising to ease the pressures on us to spend and spend.
• Creating jobs where they are socially needed and useful, not where confected demand dictates.

Beyond the policy specifics, however, I believe that we need to change Western culture: the stories, symbols, and metaphors by which we define ourselves, our lives, and our goals—and so our politics.

The magnitude of this transformation will be akin to that from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, from the medieval mind to the modern mind. Just as it was impossible for the medieval mind to anticipate the modern, or the modern to imagine itself back into the medieval, so it is impossible for us today to anticipate what might follow the modern mind.

However, the seeds of the Enlightenment were sown in the Middle Ages, including the turmoil of the fourteenth century and the devastation of the Black Death; and so, too, are the seeds of a new consciousness being sown in the chaos of modern times. While the earlier revolution spanned centuries, the advances in education and communication could allow a new cultural revolution to happen in decades.

In A Distant Mirror (Knopf, 1978), historian Barbara Tuchman states that Christianity provided “the matrix and law of medieval life, omnipresent, indeed compulsory.” Its insistent principle was that “the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth.… The rupture of this principle and its replacement by belief in the worth of the individual and of an active life not necessarily focused on God is, in fact, what created the modern world and ended the Middle Ages.”

This transition produced the great social and political movements of the nineteenth century that shattered many assumptions of what was “normal” at that time: epidemics of infectious disease, child labor, the buying and selling of human life, the oppressed status of women, the appalling working conditions in “dark, Satanic mills.” We now face another rupture or discontinuity in our view of ourselves, in what it is to be human, that will change profoundly how we live (see box, “Redefining the Self”).

There are signs this process has begun, although its direction is not yet established, and it remains largely invisible in politics and public affairs (see “A New World View Struggles to Emerge,” THE FUTURIST, September-October 2004, and “Nihilism, Fundamentalism, or Activism: Three Responses to Fears of the Apocalypse,” THE FUTURIST, January-February 2008).

The emergence and growth of a new culture and consciousness will not—now—spare us from troubled and turbulent times. Rather, events will powerfully influence the course that the transformation takes, the shape of things to come after the turmoil. They could help or hinder: provide the moral force for urgent action, or preoccupy us with crisis management.

Writers like Rebecca Solnit (A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disasters, Viking, 2009) and Junot Díaz (“Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal,” Boston Review, May-June 2011) have described the revelatory, and potentially revolutionary, nature of disasters. Not only can they bring out the best in us, and connect and empower us, but they also lay bare the social conditions and choices that often cause or contribute to disasters, delivering a societal shock that makes change possible.

Díaz uses the 2010 earthquake to argue that Haiti is not only the most visible victim of our civilization but also a sign of what is to come. Even before the earthquake, Haiti was reeling, and it needed only the slightest shove to send it into catastrophe. In the process of causing things to fall apart, he says, apocalyptic catastrophes also give us “a chance to see aspects of our world that we as a society seek to run from, that we hide behind veils of denial.” Apocalypses are also opportunities: “chances for us to see ourselves, to take responsibility for what we see, to change.”

Creating a new human story, a new awareness of ourselves, represents a “no regrets” strategy. It might yet allow us to avoid global mayhem (as I said, I could be wrong). In the event that calamities strike, it would mitigate their effects by enhancing our personal and social resilience and preparedness. But even in the absence of the threat of catastrophe, it would improve our quality of life. Even if we did not confront social, environmental, and economic limits and breakdowns, optimizing our health and happiness requires transformational change.

The next 20 years will settle this issue (if it isn’t settled already). We will know by then the extent to which we are locked into global crises, and if so, what we can do to minimize their impacts and to shape the world that lies on the far side. We may no longer be able to get out of the mess we’re creating for ourselves, but we can get through it. There is still plenty to dream of, and to strive for.

About the Author

Richard Eckersley is an independent researcher and writer (www.richardeckersley.com.au), and a founding director of Australia21, a nonprofit research company (www.australia21.org.au).

Who Will Be Free? The Battles for Human Rights to 2050

Josh Calder

By Josh Calder

As geopolitical power around the world shifts, so will the global consensus on human rights. There are challenges ahead, but the expansion of affluence, education, and digital technology may lead to a freer and more humane world in the long run.

The future of human rights looks promising. That may seem surprising, in light of the oppressive regimes that continue to brutally suppress dissident uprisings and rig elections, but several powerful, positive trends are at work, centered around changes in values and new technology. These trends will drive three contests that will define the evolution of human rights over the next few decades:

• Freedom-enhancing technology versus repressive technology.
• The rise of new powers versus the influence of the legacy great powers.
• Clashes within societies over values.

The definition of human rights has evolved and will continue to do so, but for purposes of this article they encompass traditional political rights—democracy and self-determination and their components, such as the freedoms of conscience, association, and information—along with the absence of punishment for exercising those political rights. This definition also includes basic physical protections for the person—freedom from extrajudicial killing and torture.

The Technological Arms Race

The potential contribution of technology to human rights has become increasingly clear, especially after the prominent role attributed to social media in the 2011 Arab Spring unrest. Several trends are at work here.

The Internet and mobile networks are spreading, giving people more open access to information and the ability to generate it themselves. With 70% of the world’s population carrying mobile phones, individuals increasingly have the technological means to document and publicize rights abuses.

Such crowdsourced information gathering is finding new forms. Efforts such as Syria Tracker gather reports of human rights abuses in real time from the field and map them for the world.

Some governments and organizations are backing technologies intended to aid dissidents in sharing information. These include technologies to support clandestine use of the Internet and mobile phones, and software to document human rights abuses. For instance, the U.S. State Department is reportedly helping create an “Internet in a suitcase” to provide dissidents mobile Internet access that can elude government censors.

Human-rights groups are using satellite images and other large-scale, centralized technology, as well, to detect and document human rights abuses. One monitoring effort in Sudan is even partly funded by actor George Clooney.

And new technologies continue to come online: Activists have called for the deployment of unmanned drones to monitor human rights crises.

Overall, transparency is rising in the world, making it harder for governments to hide human rights violations from their own people or global observers. However, technology is also being deployed in ways that harm human rights, or have the potential to do so. Surveillance technologies of all kinds are proliferating and tracking people’s shopping habits, locations, political preferences, and myriad other factors.

The private sector collects much of this information, compiling it into hundreds of millions of dossiers that go beyond what the most totalitarian government of the past could have dreamed of. Such techniques and the information itself could be put to political purposes in the future. For example, Facebook is granting researchers access to anonymized data on the political preferences of all of its members based on their private postings. A similar company might do the same for a government someday.

Surveillance could also go much farther. Technology could track where most people are most of the time and provide clues to their activities and concerns multiple times a day, with the data fed to centralized information repositories. The U.S. intelligence community has already noted the potential utility of the “Internet of things,” with any component of the smart environment potentially feeding data about targets of interest. As one article put it, “We’ll Spy on You through Your Dishwasher.”

All this data could be automatically and continuously mined for patterns that indicate that a person is of concern. People could even be monitored indirectly: Studies have found that much can be discovered about members of social networks even if they keep all their own information private. The characteristics of their associates still reveal facts as intimate as sexual orientation—predictable with 78% accuracy in one study—and this would be the case with political and social views.

Technology could also intersect with human rights much more directly, as armed robots are deployed in policing and warfare. Robots could violate human rights deliberately or through faulty performance, and they will add a level of deniability for violations, potentially reducing accountability for soldiers and policy makers.

New Powers versus Old

Rising non-Western powers such as China and India hold views of human rights that are distinctly different from those in the West. As new powers gain an ever-growing share of global economic, political, and cultural power, approaches to human rights and freedoms will shift.

Since the mid-twentieth century, Western nations have slowly and often only partially adopted the idea of universal human rights. Rising powers are almost uniformly wary of the concept of promoting human rights across borders. Many have serious human rights problems of their own, and others see human rights as a tool that the West uses to impose its views on others. The latter group includes democratic states such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Turkey.

The right of self-determination may falter. The West has endorsed this right only slowly and reluctantly in many cases—such as East Timor, Eritrea, and South Sudan—and rising powers are even more skeptical. Many, including China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and Turkey, face active internal self-determination issues and will oppose any strengthening of such rights in ways that could be applied within their borders.

The rising influence of emerging powers could shift the role of technology in human rights. Technology companies and the systems they run will increasingly reflect the preferences of the largest economies. Early signs of this have begun to emerge. Twitter has modified its system to censor tweets country by country, so that it can comply with local laws. Activists noted that this could enable compliance with information-control laws such as those of China.

As China grows more powerful, it is likely to pressure global companies and other countries to facilitate its information-control efforts. China and other rising powers may determine the degree to which the Internet remains open. Commercial control—as in diminished “Net neutrality”—may be a backdoor to state control as global corporations become more responsive to emerging powers.

Emerging powers’ stance on human rights is evolving. China and Russia did not block the imposition of a no-fly zone by the United Nations in Libya in 2011, departing from their customary views on intervention in “internal matters,” and the Arab League voted later that year for sanctions against Syria due to its violent crackdown against protesters.

The cost of indifference to human rights may be rising. China and Russia were condemned by demonstrators for protecting the Syrian regime from international pressure during the uprising. If global popular opinion shifts far enough, the policy of more countries might come to resemble that of the United States and Europe: selective promotion of human rights, in cases where their sympathies and their perceived interests align. On the other hand, Louise Arbour of the International Crisis Group counters that the influence of new great powers may matter less than it once would have, as the internal evolution of societies is now the driving force in democratization and human rights.

Struggles over Values

Much will depend on the third struggle over human rights: the evolution of values, especially within rising powers. The trend line is positive: Observance of human rights has improved almost universally over the last 50 years, even in authoritarian countries. Viewed over longer time periods, the upswing is even starker. The most humane governments of a few centuries ago were crueler than almost all governments are today. Even mainstream Christian churches were torturing and executing people for mild intellectual dissent a few hundred years ago.

China provides a clear example. Though it is still rated “not free” by Freedom House, it has retreated from mass killing of political opponents to far more limited and selective repression. The slightest deviation in hairstyles or artworks could bring harsh penalties a few decades ago. Though the country remains authoritarian, what would once have been forbidden dissent is now readily discussable and publishable.

This trend of improving human rights could continue globally, due both to changing global norms and to underlying economic drivers. The world may get much richer—and wealthy countries generally treat their citizens better than poorer countries do.

The observable pattern today is that all countries with per capita purchasing-power incomes over $20,000 have high levels of civil liberties and personal freedom (unless their economies are based on natural resource extraction; Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are cases in point). University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart, director of the World Values Survey, offers an explanation for why attitudes toward human rights tend to vary with level of development. Put most simply, people raised amid material security tend to have “postmaterialist” values, including tolerance for self-expression, absence of xenophobia, and reduced deference to authority. All of these are conducive to freer, more humane societies.

So, too, are rising educational levels, which are a byproduct of rising prosperity (the natural resource exception is likely due to resource-based economies’ rapid expansion with no need for an extended process of socioeconomic development or broad distribution of wealth).

This pattern matters because many forecasts suggest that very large numbers of people will become much wealthier over the next 40 years. For instance, middle-class and wealthy people could number 2 billion in the G20 developing economies by 2050, according to Uri Dadush and William Shaw in their 2011 book, Juggernaut. They estimate that 1.1 billion Chinese and 273 million Indians could be middle class.

The Asian Development Bank forecasts that Asia could achieve an average per capita purchasing power of $41,000 by 2050, similar to Europe’s today, in a strong-growth scenario. And more-cautious estimates still have Chinese income per capita surpassing $17,000 (in constant 2000 dollars) by 2050.

Overall, it seems fairly likely that ongoing values changes around human rights will continue, helped along by rising levels of wealth and education. Still, several caveats apply. The recent spread of human rights and democracy may have been a historical accident. Culture and values may have driven those forces in Europe and its offshoots, and other countries (such as those in East Asia) may have gone democratic because they happened to become rich during the period of Western dominance.

In his book No One’s World, international affairs expert Charles Kupchan argues that democracy might spread in the future, but that new powers will transform the global system before they are likely to democratize.

Even if rising powers greatly improve their own human rights records, internal evolution is no guarantee of external behavior. Western countries engaged in or supported serious human rights violations through the 1980s with few qualms; in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere, the United States and Western European countries backed some of the cruelest governments on the planet. Deterioration of human rights is always possible, especially if Inglehart is correct that a prosperous and secure environment profoundly shapes attitudes. Populations that are fearful of losing ground economically might put a lower priority on human rights. Note, for instance, the American slippage on waterboarding, which was punished as torture in the past but was accepted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

And a final caveat: A wealthier world may not come. Development of emerging markets could stagnate at lower levels than discussed above, or prosperity could even decrease globally, if the theorists of economic or ecological collapse are correct.

Even with substantial convergence of values, there are still likely to be deep-rooted collisions across cultures over human rights issues. If nations such as China turned to promoting a humane vision, the rights they emphasized would be different, reflecting profound differences in views of the individual, society, and future generations. Biotechnology could trigger human rights disputes based on fundamental ideas of what constitutes human nature and human dignity.

Key Trends to Watch for Human Rights

Through 2050, human rights will be shaped by technology, changes in geopolitical power, and sociopolitical evolution in the non-Western world. These are some key indicators and variables:

• The relative balance between top-down surveillance and information control versus bottom-up technologies that enhance freedom.
• The degree to which the Internet remains an unfettered information conduit, especially in its core structures.
• Whether emerging middle classes grow, and whether they push for more rights (even if not full democracy).
• Whether governments engaged in human rights violations leverage the strength of rising powers to evade pressures over their policies.
• How India, China, Turkey, and other rising powers adjust their own self-determination policies.
• How these rising powers approach protecting human rights beyond their borders.

Over the next few decades, advocates for human rights will have to push technology toward doing more good than harm, and adjust their strategies for a world in which the West is no longer at the center. It is likely to be a challenging but ultimately hopeful environment for human rights.

About the Author

Josh Calder is a partner at the futures consulting firm Foresight Alliance (www.foresightalliance.com), where he monitors global trends, discontinuities, and international issues. The views expressed in this article are his own.

The Global Talent Chase: China, India, and U.S. Vie for Skilled Workers

Edward E. Gordon

By Edward E. Gordon

Too many tech jobs and not enough tech professionals to fill them—China, India, and the United States all face this dilemma. Here is what each economic powerhouse is—and should be—doing to ease its workforce gap, and a look at a successful strategy known as Regional Talent Innovation Networks, or RETAINS.

Around the world, the talent hunters are on the prowl. China, India, and the United States, the three largest workforces, are the prime contenders in the battle over jobs and skills. Technology’s increasing impact across all job sectors has continuously raised employers’ demands for more intelligent, well-educated, career-ready workers. Replacement needs in high-skill occupations are due to soar. In 2010, a generational retirement shift began that will remove massive numbers of talented baby boomers from the labor pool.

Joining the developed economies of Europe, Asia, and North America, billions of Chinese and Indian workers and potential consumers have flooded into the world marketplace. This has created many new economic opportunities. It also triggered a talent tsunami in labor markets whose warning signs were largely ignored by most Americans.

Long-term forecasters tell us India and China may soon become economic superpowers. Their arguments for touting these two rapidly growing markets are at first glance overwhelming: China and India start from a lower economic base. Their huge populations are waiting to consume. Their colleges and universities produce an inexhaustible supply of skilled scientists and technicians. Ongoing economic liberalization has given them significant economic power. Some see the rise of India and China as a major economic game changer.

However, the growing talent shortage in both China and India is a key issue that is further complicated by a host of socioeconomic problems. India wants the respect conferred by its rising IT power, but a rickety infrastructure and widespread corruption challenge its credibility. China’s state-controlled capitalism is forging into uncharted territory, run by a fascist-type police state that fears political liberalization. Something must change.

These and other major limitations cloud the future of China and India. A major war for talent is now under way as Chinese tech manufacturers and Indian IT firms hunt for skilled workers. This has serious implications for a U.S. business community historically overdependent on importing skilled people from abroad.

Assessing the Global Talent Hunters

China and India have evolved culturally, economically, and socially over the past 30 years. The questions now are where they are heading and whether their growth means they’ll continue supplying the United States and other industrial economies with talent. China and India may expand their own talent pool, eclipsing the U.S. economy and attaining global economic dominance.

One impact of the growing talent shortages is the serious threat of inflation. Wages for migrant workers in China rose 21% in 2011. Indian inflation averaged 9.4% in 2010-2011, with a 13% increase in wages in 2011.

China: Growing Pains. China’s young economy arose in 1978 from the ashes of the disastrous Great Leap Forward of the Mao era. It has benefited from a huge population of consumers and cheap labor. Now comes the hard part. As the economy matures, institutional changes in social/political structures are required along with massive investments in human capital development.

China now faces a major employment crisis. The 30-year low-cost/low-wage manufacturing era that fueled its economic miracle is now over. China’s 200-million migrant-worker army is growing increasingly restless over low wages and a lack of employment benefits.

Other cracks are also appearing in China’s boom. Credit Suisse, citing “alarming levels” of credit expansion in 2011, warned of slower growth for the overall economy. Local government and state-owned or backed enterprise debt totals amount to well over 150% of China’s 2010 GDP, according to Victor Shih, a political economist at Northwestern University. (By comparison, the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is 73%.)

More Chinese economists are now predicting sharply lower annual GDP growth. This could undermine middle-class support of the Communist Party that has been based on the so-called “Beijing consensus,” the contention that people don’t think a lot about freedom of action, free markets, and democracy, as long as capable bureaucrats deliver major economic growth.

It is clear that China’s greatest challenge is institutional change. After 90 years of existence, the Chinese Communist Party finds itself in crisis. China’s rising middle class views it as an entrenched elite.

“The fact is that many people today foster hatred for government officials and hatred for the rich,” says Yang Jisheng, a former government journalist and author.

India: Dysfunctional Structures. India’s spectacular growth of recent years is beset by many political and social issues. Economists and business leaders now believe that India’s high inflation rate (9.1% as of May 2011) is the byproduct of broad economic structural failure driven by severe talent shortages, a dysfunctional transportation and power infrastructure, and the unrealistic expectations of many of its citizens.

Unless serious efforts are made to redress a growing human capital deficit, India’s economy may stall as it attempts to move up the value chain into more sophisticated IT services and manufacturing. Someday, India may challenge the supremacy of the United States in pathbreaking scientific research, but not in the foreseeable future. It lacks the large-scale, high-quality university graduate programs needed for an abundance of such breakthroughs.

India has many advantages that China lacks. India has a democratic political system and an Anglo-Saxon legal code. Also, India’s younger age cohort is slated to continue growing, with the nation’s total population passing China’s by 2030. There is much talk about India’s demographic dividend (i.e., its relative youth), but this will only be an illusion unless the quality of India’s entire national talent development system is significantly upgraded.

U.S.: Myths and Realities for Talent Hunters. There is a growing mismatch in India and China between the available talent pool and economic demands for more skilled human capital. Other serious socioeconomic issues complicate their efforts to increase the number of high-skill workers. U.S. business leaders still believe that America remains the best location for the world’s top scientists and engineers.

A World Economic Forum study reported that the majority of U.S. patent filings by many American companies are now being made by foreign nationals living in the United States (General Electric, 64%; Merck, 65%; Cisco, 60%). This motivates many in the U.S. business community to lobby Congress to raise the annual H-1B foreign visa quota from 65,000 to over 100,000.

But the talent tide is turning, as talent hunters from many nations woo their nationals to return home to become participants in their burgeoning economies. Also, the United States has tightened immigration policies and raised visa application fees to screen out potential terrorists. It can now take up to a decade to obtain permanent U.S. residency. Finally, many other nations are tapping the same STEM talent pool by offering attractive employment opportunities and permanent citizenship to foreign nationals.

In 2011, the World Economic Forum found that more Indian immigrants were moving back to India than were moving to the United States. A separate Kauffman Foundation study, Losing the World’s Best and Brightest (2009), surveyed more than 1,200 foreign nationals attending U.S. colleges and universities and found that 60% of Indian students and 90% of Chinese students believed that stronger economic opportunities awaited them in their home countries rather than in the United States.

“You have the cream of the crop coming over here getting educated, getting experience over here, and suddenly they become much more marketable and can do (just) as well anywhere else,” concludes Vivek Wadhwa, the study’s lead author.

Over the last 20 years, an estimated 150,000 highly skilled immigrants have returned to India and China, says Wadhwa. About 135,000 Chinese students left the United States in 2010 and returned home, according to the Chinese Ministry of Education—a 25% increase from 2009.

Structural Changes Alter Needed Skills

All of the world’s talent hunters face the same challenge: the ready availability of skilled people, which is often the primary driver for companies’ site selection. But rather than hunting for foreign talent, businesses over the next decade will need to create their own skilled talent pools. And their success will largely determine the future success or failure of their national economies—and, by extension, the world’s.

Until recently, U.S. businesses have bridged this skills deficit by either importing educated workers or exporting high-pay/high-skills jobs to skilled talent pools overseas, wherever they could be found. Both of these talent strategies are beginning to fail.

The demand for talent and the supply of workers with the desired skills are out of balance all over the world. The populations of Japan, South Korea, and many European nations are in decline. India and China are moving into more-sophisticated high-tech manufacturing or IT services, but both are now encountering severe shortages of engineers, scientists, and technicians. In both countries, domestic labor pools lack the requisite educational preparation due to deficient public-education systems and the inadequate standards of institutions of higher learning.

A major structural change is also occurring in the U.S. labor market. Though the GDP has risen, unemployment has not fallen in a way consistent with the number of job openings. Why? U.S. productivity is increasing. In manufacturing and most other business sectors, it’s not just advanced machines. It’s increasingly evident that many new advanced technologies are digitizing the whole economy. These surges in productivity will create tomorrow’s jobs and raise living standards. New jobs will come from rising efficiencies in production and innovative technologies spawning new products and services throughout the entire economy.

The flip side to these breakthroughs is that today’s and tomorrow’s jobs require advanced technical skills. A workplace may need fewer people, but they must be better educated and able to work with advanced computer systems. This has become the new normal for employment, whether it is in an office, production facility, hospital, law firm, or service business.

These digitized jobs present a new problem. The consensus among employers is that people need to be reskilled for the new workplace. The urgent need to create more skilled workers is now a central political and economic concern in communities across America.

The availability of better-educated talent with up-to-date career skills now largely determines where businesses will locate. Communities that break down the structural barriers among businesses, education, and community groups and collaborate to renew their talent creation and economic systems will attract new businesses and retain current ones. Those that don’t will wither and die.

The Great Recession has accelerated an ongoing labor-market shift that was masked by the many low- or semi-skilled jobs created during the housing/financial bubble. In today’s labor market, employment for low-skilled or semi-skilled workers has fallen dramatically. Even middle-skilled professionals have seen a steady decline in jobs because of automation. In general, the job opportunities are brighter for high-skilled people who have kept their knowledge and applicable certifications up-to-date and who can relocate where jobs exist.

Some critics blame popular culture, and not just deficient education systems, for the lack of desired skills among workers. In testimony before the U.S. Senate, Charles Butt, chief executive of a Texas-based H-E-B supermarket chain, said that finding qualified young workers is an increasing problem: “Many schools inherit an over-entertained, distracted student body.”

The spread of “new media zombies,” who lack basic academic competencies, interpersonal skills, and critical thinking abilities, is reaching alarming proportions. It should not be surprising that the number of young people entering science, technology, engineering, and math-related (STEM) occupations is shrinking.

The major business issue today is not talent management. It has become talent creation. One-third of U.S. business executives report that they face a crippling loss of essential skills as the baby boomers retire en masse.

Current U.S. education-to-employment systems are broken at the local/state/regional levels. They have outlived the labor economy for which they were created 100 years ago. Over the past 30 years, the incremental adjustments—the “education reforms”—have done little to patch the broken talent pipeline connecting people to jobs.

What steps can U.S. businesses take to remedy these massive deficits in the skilled talent needed today and over the next decade? “Technology is easy to develop,” states Dean Kamen, best known as the inventor of the Segway scooter. “Developing a new attitude, moving the culture is the difficult part.”

The RETAIN Strategy

Over the past decade, my research, consulting, and travels have given me the opportunity to learn about regional public–private partnership networks emerging across the Americas, Europe, and Asia that are investing in new talent-creation systems. The goal of these networks is to create more talented people at higher skill levels who will be able to better support a developed nation’s competitive businesses and be high-wage earners.

I call these organizations Regional Talent Innovation Networks (RETAINs). They are local, broad-based community initiatives that include large and small businesses, community organizations (such as chambers of commerce or Rotary chapters), regional economic development or workforce development boards, county/city/state agencies, unions, public and private elementary and secondary schools, postsecondary educational institutions, foundations, parent groups, and nonprofit organizations in health care, literacy development, and other groups that serve challenged workers who need employment.

RETAINs are regional in composition. They focus on talent development through a wide array of innovative programs. They are financed by private and public funds, including business investments, foundation grants, and local, state, and federal funding initiatives.

Already, more than 1,000 RETAINs have been organized across the United States. RETAINs are now building functional collaborative networks of partners from all segments of the community to create new, more open education-to-employment systems. These nonprofit organizations are leveraging business–education partnerships into new linkages to meet long-term local talent needs. RETAINs help their communities keep local businesses, stop population decline, and attract new industries and service businesses by expanding the local pool of talented people.

RETAINs are built upon the value of civic activism. Businesses collaborating with a broad array of community organizations, government agencies, and nonprofit groups are working together to form these new pipelines that connect people with jobs through both short-term and long-term initiatives. In the short term, they are moving to fill current vacant jobs. Through RETAIN networks, businesses offer entry-level job-training programs for those currently unemployed who have some of the required job skills and a willingness to learn the rest. Unlike previous public job-training programs, RETAINs do not offer generic job training in the hope that this will assist an unemployed person in finding future employment.

Many of these public–private networks are now linking individuals who have some of the required job skills to specific vacant jobs. For up to six months, an intensive training and education effort puts these trainees both in the classroom and on the job to get the required knowledge. They receive a training wage from the business and their unemployment compensation. In other words, they earn while they learn. The majority of these trainees “graduate” from their education programs and are hired to fill vacant positions.

Two excellent examples of this approach are HIRED in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Chicago Career Tech in Illinois. Established in 1968, HIRED specifically matches an unemployed worker who has some, but not all of the required skills for a vacant job in a local business. HIRED then provides the worker with classroom education that addresses skill or educational deficiencies, while the business provides a trainee position with on-site job-specific training. HIRED has established a growing network of companies using this proactive approach to fill their vacant positions.

Chicago Career Tech was initiated in 2010 to retrain unemployed mid-level tech workers for new jobs. A rigorous educational program that was developed in collaboration with Chicago-area technology firms provides these workers with the specific educational updates required to fill vacant positions. Of the 165 people in Chicago Career Tech’s first class, 149 received final program certification and were placed in jobs. A second class of 300 began in 2011.

For the long term, RETAINs are also developing career information and education programs from elementary school through college. High-school career academies, as well as higher education career and technical programs, are increasing the number of local well-educated students and connecting them to a regional career pipeline for employment. Such regional overhauls of education-to-employment systems are beginning to help sustain and grow local economies. If the RETAIN talent model is brought up to scale across the United States, more Americans will find “good” jobs and increasing numbers of U.S. businesses will become more competitive in the world marketplace.

New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote, “The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change. It’s always excelled at decentralized community-building.” America needs to build on these past strengths now. The McKinsey Global Institute agrees: “To create the jobs that America needs to continue growing and to remain competitive, leaders in government, business, and education will have to be creative—and willing to consider solutions they have not tried before.”

If the United States fails to address the current talent red alert, the price will be high. The survival of many U.S. businesses is at stake. Large corporations continue to poach many workers from small and medium-sized companies. In fact, Manpower has predicted that, between 2010 and 2020, 10% to 20% of U.S. businesses will close their doors due to the inability to fill key vacant jobs.

Civic activism has long been a hallmark of American culture. Business persons, educators, union leaders, government officials, and community groups and organizations can work together to form these Regional Talent Innovation Networks. The United States can move beyond the current job crisis into a decade of increased opportunity for those who are willing to form partnerships focused on developing the skills and education required for employment in a twenty-first-century global economy. We must act now before it is too late.

Improving Prospects for Global Prosperity

The success of the United States, China, and India, as economic powerhouses, matters to the world. As Wall Street Journal economics editor David Wessel put it, “It’s clear that future prosperity depends on the U.S.—its government, business, people, universities—coalescing behind a strategy for growth and creating incentives so talent and capital flow to promising sectors where the U.S. still has an edge in an increasingly competitive global economy.”

But in the midst of a major unemployment crisis, executives at all levels are reporting increasing difficulties in recruiting skilled talent and filling scientific and technology positions. Among the world’s three largest workforces—the United States, China, and India—technology is outpacing current job training and preparation programs. China and India are moving from low-skill/low-wage manufacturing into high-skill/high-wage industries, but the needed talent is sorely lacking.

U.S. businesses can no longer rely on engineers and scientists from India and China to fill their skills gaps, as these sought-after workers are increasingly being attracted by opportunities in their native countries. But Regional Talent Innovation Networks (RETAINs) are gaining momentum across the United States. More than 1,000 of these public–private partnerships are helping current workers upgrade their skills and are sponsoring regional career information and education programs.

As this century’s economic powerhouses build upon their own strengths, prospects for the global economy as a whole will improve. No single business—or country—can win this jobs battle alone.

About the Author

Edward E. Gordon is president of Imperial Consulting in Chicago. His most recent book is Winning the Global Talent Showdown (Berrett-Koehler, 2009). He may be reached at Imperial Consulting Corporation, www.imperialcorp.com.

This article draws from his recent white paper, “The Talent Hunters: The United States, China and India in the Battle over Skills and Jobs” (Imperial Consulting Corporation, 2012).

Dream, Design, Develop, Deliver: From Great Ideas to Better Outcomes

Rick Docksai

KAZ OKADA FOR WFS

Lee Rainie

KAZ OKADA FOR WFS

Brian David Johnson

By Rick Docksai

A better future doesn’t happen on its own. We create it with our ideas, plans, and actions. In July, hundreds of futurists from around the world took the opportunity to “dream, design, develop, and deliver” the future together at WorldFuture 2012.

The world’s problems, and their solutions, may be too complex for any one group to solve. The more than 600 futurists meeting in Toronto for the World Future Society’s annual conference in July came together in large groups and small for lively discussions about how the world community might set in motion the best future possible.

People have always sought out membership in groups, but the last few years of the Internet’s evolution have fueled an unprecedented movement worldwide toward networked behavior, Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, told the attendees at WorldFuture 2012: Dream. Design. Develop. Deliver.

Rainie shared the findings of a consensus of more than a thousand researchers about this phenomenon of “networked individualism” and its potential to create sweeping changes in how the world processes information and conducts business. These changes might even bring about the end of currency, university systems, and other time-honored institutions as we know them.

“Individuals have a lot more power and a lot more pressure, but they manage it better by operating within networks,” he said. What’s critical is that the world must be aware of these and other changes coming up and plan for them now. An optimal future is attainable, but only if we act in the present to create it.

“If you drive conversations about these kinds of things, you might change the future. You might have smart people thinking about the drivers and the downsides, and might help to make this world a better place,” said Rainie.

Joining Rainie were dozens of internationally recognized futurists and innovators, such as Intel futurist Brian David Johnson, speaking about the myriad innovations and societal developments that are irrevocably changing health care, energy, robotics, and many other fields of human endeavor.

As a futurist who works for an engineering company, Johnson said he is held to rigid accountability for his predictions: “Forecasts become technical specs.” But rather than predicting the future, he promoted the idea of developing visions of the future that are actionable—visions that we can build.

Perils of Blindsiding

Futuring is also about being prepared for the future that others are building. Confectionary giant Mars Inc. suddenly lost huge amounts of revenue about four years ago. Why? Was it other candy companies stepping up competition? No: It was due to the proliferation of SMS messaging, and young people preferring to spend more money on mobile texting services than on chocolate bars. Management consultant Jim Harris, author of Blindsided!, cited Mars’ dilemma as a prime example of the unanticipated changes in environment that can catch any business off guard.

“When these trends begin to shift, companies best get in early on the change, rather than wait until it rolls over on them,” he said.

No business or organization can predict what new challenges will emerge in years ahead, he pointed out, but they can make sure that they will be as responsive and adaptable as possible. The key, he said, is innovation.

“Innovation is the flipside of blindsiding. Innovation is the solution, is the antidote to avoid being blindsided,” he said. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

[Editor’s note: For more of Harris’s examples of blindsiding, see “Innovate or Else” .]

Reports from Singularity University

Some of the conference’s boldest forecasts belonged to José Luis Cordeiro, director of The Millennium Project’s Venezuela Node. He co-hosted the session on “The Singularity University: Team Projects to Change the World” with Anna Trunina and Nikola Danaylov, both recent graduates of the Singularity University.

Cordeiro described momentous advancements in humans’ capacity to rewire the brain, the genome, and the body in general. Just as computing power keeps exponentially rising, so might the human life span, Cordeiro suggested. He noted that laboratory researchers have enabled mice to live three times the average for their species; flies, four times the average for theirs; and worms, six times their species’ average life expectancy. Similar catapults forward in human longevity might be feasible before long—possibly in as little as 20 or 30 years.

“We are going to see the death of death,” he said. “You who are students today will be members of the first immortal generation.”

Cordeiro also foresees, within two or three decades, creation of the first artificial brain. Japan’s Riken Brain Institute, he noted, is actively pursuing the creation of a computer that equals the human brain in capacity by 2018.

“We will conquer the final frontier, which is not really space, but the human brain,” he said.

With further developments in biotechnology and genomics, medicine will similarly attain vast new powers over our genes. Cordeiro pointed out the increasing ease with which researchers can copy an individual’s entire genome: Whereas the first genome took 13 years and cost $1 billion, a medical team completed it in 2010 within four weeks and for a mere $10,000. In 2020, it could cost $10 and take one hour. Following this, researchers may master the art of adding, deleting, or modifying a person’s genes as desired.

“We will design our children. We will design our descendants,” Cordeiro asserted. “If you like the eyes of someone, the nose of someone else, the hair color of someone else, you will be able to channel all those genes and create your own designer baby.”

Representing Singularity University alumni, Trunina and Danaylov presented their innovations to conference goers. Trunina gave a presentation on PrimerLife, a Web-based platform that she helped develop. An individual obtains a copy of his or her family’s genetic history and logs onto PrimerLife to consult with other users and with registered physicians on what the genetic indicators all mean.

Trunina explained that personal genotyping is a rapidly growing market, but there are few services out there for consumers to make sense of the data that their genetic charts contain. PrimerLife addresses this. It is a great way for users to understand what their genetic indicators actually mean for their health and how they might develop a long-term health plan accordingly.

“Genome and biological data will become the primary platform for building a strategy of human life,” she said.

Political corruption is the societal problem that Corruptiontracker.org, which Danaylov helped to launch, aims to fix. This site is a crowdsourced software app, available for download now in Apple’s iStore, by which people anywhere can report corruption.

It’s an app that Danaylov hopes could save lives. He pointed out that innocent people needlessly suffer and die because of dishonest or exploitative behaviors by their leaders: 83% of earthquake building collapse deaths in the past 30 years were in countries that were anomalously corrupt, while a lack of oversight in China’s train systems has led to deadly train collisions.

“Corruption has a very serious direct cost in terms of lives lost. It’s not just a problem on paper. It’s a real life-threatening problem,” he said.

By increasing awareness among all the globe’s publics about corruption, however, Danaylov hopes that the app could foster more dialogue about existing problems and how to solve them. People in the affected countries could confront their political systems’ failures, and do so with support and guidance from concerned citizens of other countries.

“Intelligence outside a community is always greater than intelligence inside,” he said.

Singularity University itself received a few words of praise from Andrew Hessel, cellular biologist who founded the open-source research firm Pink Army Cooperative and, in addition, is on Singularity University’s faculty. He spoke of his frustrations with traditional university systems that stratify fields of study into separate departments that interact little with each other, and in which every department generally resists new ideas. Singularity University stands apart because of its integration of all disciplines and its zealous pursuit of new ways of thinking.

“I’ve been with this group since 2009, and I’ve never had to push an idea uphill. In fact, I learn how to push my boundaries out a bit more,” he said. “They have a vision that is a fearlessness about looking into the future, one that is different from what you see in most universities today.” [Editor’s note: a video clip of Andrew Hessel’s impromptu presentation at the Singularity University session is available at the World Future Society’s YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/user/WorldFutureSociety.]

More Monitoring, More Health

Medicine will find better ways of matching patients with effective, safe pharmaceutical treatments than today’s standard clinical trials. It has to: Clinical trials use test populations that are too small and too homogenous, so a drug can pass clinical trials but still turn out to be ineffective or even harmful for many patients. Jay Herson, himself a data analyst who worked in clinical trials for more than 30 years, outlined the problem and some solutions in his talk, “The Future of Global Drug Safety.”

Personalized medicine could be a driver. Patients might consult not only with doctors and nurses, but also with software programs—provided by doctor groups and insurance companies—that observe and advise each patient directly. The program could work with biosensors in your home to obtain information about your personality, lifestyle, and even credit-card purchases and emails to discern what drugs and treatments will work for you, and what lifestyle changes you need to make.

“Siri could give advice based on personality,” Herson said. “It could judge, for example, that this patient is not a morning person, so wouldn’t give him or her any new suggestions until the afternoon.”

The doctors, on their end, will get continuous, instantaneous flows of data from those same apparatuses on their patients’ blood, sleep patterns, and other vital signs, and will make fast decisions accordingly. They will know if a patient is taking a prescription and complying with treatment or not—all by virtue of nanoparticles, engrained within the medications, that the electronic sensors will detect. Just as important, they will know if the same prescription or treatment is causing the patient a bad reaction.

“Big data allows for the merger of health-care delivery, clinical trials, and post-market surveillance,” Herson said. “Practicing health providers will have safety like never before.”

That said, adverse effects to drugs will probably still occur, albeit less often. Herson explained that any given drug may affect a given patient differently due to interaction of outside environmental factors with the drug and the patient’s behavior, lifestyle, and diet. Also, no medical innovation can control for individual patients choosing to overdose or to use other people’s prescribed drugs.

“There will always be adverse events, and we will always be learning, even when we know more about personalized medicine,” he said.

At the macro level, pharmaceutical companies and health-provider networks will accumulate and share extensive databases of patient outcomes. They will plug in to patients’ home biosensors and will be notified immediately if someone reacts badly to a drug or treatment.

“What we need is early safety signals, some continuous form of surveillance. We need patient-level data,” he said.

Of course, all of this robotic surveillance of one’s daily living may sound bizarre and frightening to people today. But Herson noted that today’s millennials will be the adults by then, and they may be far more comfortable with all the monitoring.

“People will be digital natives and used to going to computers in everyday life and having surveillance of all their activities,” he said.

The Future of Quantum Computers

Quantum computers are already solving problems too complex for even the most powerful conventional computers. Geordie Rose, creator of the D-Wave One computing system, thinks that quantum computing just might be the key to true machine intelligence. In his keynote presentation, “Using Quantum Computers to Build Artificial Brains,” he discussed the nature of quantum computing and its implications.

One premise of quantum mechanics is that, every time a decision is made, the whole universe forks and generates copies of itself only marginally different from that original decision. In like fashion, a quantum computer sees more than one possibility, generates copies of each, and then uses information from each and combines them to solve a problem.

A conventional computer can calculate far more rapidly than a human but cannot make decisions, per se. It can only follow prewritten instructions. A quantum computer might be able to make decisions, which will open up many new possibilities for robotic action.

“One example is autonomous robots in hostile environments like Mars,” Rose said. “Those robots will be exposed to things that their designers did not know about a priori, and they will need some autonomy to make some decisions on their own.”

Quantum computers are increasing in computing power. Rose presented the historical trajectory from Calypso, a computer chip with four qubits (quantum bits), in 2002 to Vesuvius 3, a computer chip that debuted this year with 512 qubits. He forecasts that in 10 years, someone could design a chip that holds millions of qubits. Then there is no telling just how smart upcoming lines of quantum systems could be.

“Hopefully, in 10 to 15 years, it won’t be me giving this presentation. It will be something that we created,” he said.

Innovative Approaches to Earth Conservation

People striving to reduce their “carbon footprints” by cutting back electricity use, eating less meat, and so on mean well, but their efforts will not in themselves curb climate change and pollution, according to Ramez Naam, senior associate at the Foresight Institute. In his session, “Can Innovation Save the Planet?” he stressed that society will have to combine sustainable behaviors with the rollout of new green technologies.

“It has to be based on innovation,” he said.

Innovations have already dropped the cost of solar power from $20 a watt 30 years ago to around $1 today—roughly on par with coal, oil, and natural gas, Naam said. He also spoke highly of research and development in lithium-ion batteries, which he said could eventually give electric cars the same range as combustible-fuel-powered cars of today.

“Energy storage is a bigger problem than energy capturing, but there is no reason to believe that we will not solve it,” he said.

Naam turned to the related subjects of water and food. Stores of freshwater are running low throughout the world, and projections are that the global community will have to increase food yield 70% by 2050. Both problems are solvable, he argued: The amount of energy required to desalinate water has dropped by a factor of nine since 1970, and improved farming methods are already enabling farmers to grow the same amounts of produce with one-third to one-half less energy and water than they needed in the 1970s.

Furthermore, in industrialized nations, food yield is twice what it is in the world as a whole. Naam is hopeful that more developments, particularly in genetic crop modification, could lead to even bigger farm productivity gains in years to come. On a related note, he reported that the European Union’s science advisor concluded recently that genetically modified crops have no more adverse health effects than average crops.

“Ideas are the ultimate resource. They grow over time, and they are the only one that accumulates over time,” he said. “Ideas find substitutes for resources.”

Naam also argued for taxes on carbon-dioxide emissions. If anti-tax critics contend that it would harm the economy, then a government could even lower the income tax in direct proportion to the carbon tax increase, so that the overall tax implementation is revenue-neutral.

“Tax the bad, not the good,” Naam advised. “Whatever you tax, you will get less of it.”

Bringing a Country Together on Sustainability

For a country to effectively stop environmental degradation and adopt environmentally healthy ways of life, it needs committed action both at the top levels of leadership and at the grassroots, observed Kenneth Hunter, chair of the WFS Board of Directors, and Zhouying Jin, senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in their joint session, “Systemic Solution to Achieving Green Economic Growth and Sustainable Development.”

Hunter and Jin noted that China and the United States both fall short: China has a lot of top-level action, but not grassroots activism, while the United States has grassroots activism but ambivalent top leadership. Also, both countries’ leaders tend to overly focus on the near future, but might move eventually toward action that is more integrated, cohesive, and oriented toward the long term.

“We are dealing with very large and complex systems, and it requires large management systems,” Hunter said. “But local communities and companies are where things have to actually happen. That’s where the integration has to take place.”

Jin presented an ideal model for action called the Long-Term Strategic System Integration Model (LSSIM). Its characteristics include attending to the goals of environmental sustainability, social welfare, and economic growth all at once. Continuing innovation, road maps for progress, and verifications to check results are other key components, along with exercising strategic management at the micro, macro, and meso levels.

Serious problems persist in China, according to Jin, and many of its renewable-energy businesses are struggling. For example, 30% of its photovoltaic companies have cut production in the last few years. Jin stated that a comprehensive strategy and the use of futures studies to formulate strategic goals will be necessary to achieve truly sustainable outcomes.

“China has taken a solid step in developing a green economy, and its future plan is also exciting. However, for really actualizing green development, the challenges are severe,” she said. “The only option is to fundamentally change the development mode.”

The Future Is Ours to Create

“You can’t let the future happen to you. We all have to be active participants in our future. We all have to have a vision for it, and we all have to have an opinion about it. We all have to do something,” said Intel futurist Johnson.

This year’s WorldFuture participants came from many places and professions, and they doubtless had a multitude of differing opinions about the future. But all would have agreed with Johnson’s statement. It’s indeed vital that people and organizations everywhere participate actively in creating the future.

In that spirit, the World Future Society will continue to be a gathering place for future-minded people everywhere, both now and in years to come.

About the Author

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

Innovate or Else

By Rick Docksai

At WorldFuture 2012, consultant Jim Harris warns about being blindsided.

Futuring is not just about building the future, but also about being prepared for the future that others are building.

Confectionary giant Mars Inc. suddenly lost huge amounts of revenue about four years ago. Why? Was it other candy companies stepping up competition? No: It was due to the proliferation of SMS messaging, and young people preferring to spend money on mobile texting services than on chocolate bars.

At “WorldFuture 2012: Dream. Design. Develop. Deliver,” management consultant Jim Harris, author of Blindsided, cited Mars’ dilemma as a prime example of the unanticipated changes in environment that can “blindside” a business and catch any business off guard.

“When these trends begin to shift, companies best get in early on the change, rather than wait until it rolls over on them,” he said.

No business or organization can predict what new challenges will emerge in years ahead, he pointed out, but they can make sure that they will be as responsive and adaptable as possible. The key, he said, is innovation.

“Innovation is the flipside of blindsiding. Innovation is the solution, is the antidote to avoid being blindsided,” he said. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

More game-changers for business might be all around us, he went on to say. And whether you’re in the confectionary industry or not, you’ll want to keep on the lookout for them. He suggested a few of them.

In Kenya, for instance, only a quarter of the population has a bank account. Enter the new app MPesa, account on your mobile phone and you can text funds to family members or other contacts. The size of the transactions are tiny, and the mobile company (Safari) takes a cut that is miniscule compared to what mobile phone companies would take as part of the transaction. Given how MPesa raises its impoverished users’ standards of living by helping them conduct commerce, it’s not far-fetched to think that it might eventually make its way to communities in the industrialized world.

“Think this could roll over the world of western banking as we know it?” Harris asked.

Medical care is ripe for blindsiding by medical tourism, he added. Many heart patients might decline a $100,000 triple-bypass operation in the United States and go instead to an accredited hospital in India, where they could obtain the same procedure for $10,000.

India is also the scene of a new sub-compact, fuel-efficient car, the Nano. A buyer can get one new for $2,500. Harris noted that in the first two weeks following its debut, the company sold two-thirds of a year’s worth of production—could this take the whole automotive world by surprise?

Open-source software is yet another game changer. Harris cited Malaysia, which instituted a Microsoft-Word-like Open Office program. Its code would have cost $10 billion for software professionals to assemble, but Malaysia did it for free, with all coding contributed by volunteers.

Harris reserved particular plaudits for open-source knowledge sharing, which he said businesses everywhere need to find ways to utilize. It can only help, he argued, to be able to draw more information and perspective from more people, but too many businesses are sticking to vertical leadership modes that utilize only the know-how of the few executives at the top.

“The democratization of information, of knowledge, is a powerful trend,” he said. “We have a nineteenth-century management model in a twenty-first-century reality. Corporations need to work in new ways to unleash that hidden talent and potential.”

Nor is it a coincidence that every one of the potentially radical innovations that Harris described has emerged in developing countries, places that most established industry professionals would be inclined to ignore. The nature of blindsiding changes, according to Harris, is that they can arise from where one might least expect them.

As a corollary, he told his audience, any established industry must continue to stay on top of newly emerging trends, or else it will surely be taken by surprise. At the very least, it will short-change its customers. He offered Ford as a case in point: Ford’s turn-of-the-century Model T got 25 miles per gallon, and a Ford SUV today gets an even paltrier 17 miles per gallon. Hence, U.S. car buyers’ dependence on fossil fuels only continues to grow, despite the advent of hybrid technologies that could mitigate it.

“If every car in North America got the same efficiency as my Prius, there would be no need to import oil into North America,” he said. “We have all the resources we need to solve the problems facing our world. It’s merely a matter of priorities.”

For more information, contact: Jim Harris, Strategic Advantage, www.strategicadvantage.com.

Tomorrow in Brief

Threats to Biodiversity in Protected Forests

COURTESY OF VIRGINIA TECH

Conservation researcher Sarah
Karpanty in Madagascar’s
Ranomafana National Park.

Many of the world’s tropical forest preserves are experiencing declines in biodiversity, reports a team of conservation researchers in the journal Nature.

Tropical forests are rich in terms of numbers of species, but protected areas are struggling to sustain their diversity—mirroring threats to the surrounding areas, such as lack of protection and encroachment from illegal colonists, hunters, and loggers.

The study found that most preserves do help protect the surrounding forests, but about half were losing old-growth trees and wildlife, such as many primates, stream-dwelling fish, and amphibians.

“We need to be as aggressive in eliminating threats outside of park boundaries as we are in establishing new parks or maintaining existing ones,” concludes Sarah Karpanty, associate professor of wildlife conservation at Virginia Tech.

Source: Virginia Tech, www.vt.edu.

Sapphire Optics

JOHN BALLATO / CLEMSON UNIVERSITY

Sapphire fiber developed
by Clemson University materials
engineers.

Sapphire may soon supplant silica as an effective and affordable medium for fiber optics.

Silica-based optical fiber has nearly reached its physical limits for transmitting information, observes John Ballato, director of the Center for Optical Materials Science and Engineering Technologies at Clemson University. As demand for high-speed data transmission accelerates, the need for more durable materials is becoming critical.

Sapphire is widely available, low cost, and has proved valuable in high-energy lasers. Ballato and his team have developed new techniques for creating fibers that overcome the challenges associated with sapphire’s crystalline structure. This will make sapphire fibers more useful for high-energy applications than typical commercial fibers.

Source: Clemson University, www.clemson.edu.

Acoustic Tweezers

XIAOYUN DING, STEPHEN J. BENKOVIC, AND TONY JUN HUANG / PENN STATE

Acoustic tweezers use ultrasound waves to manipulate
cells into patterns without touching them.

Ultrasound used in medical imaging may soon be deployed as a new, noninvasive tool for biomedical research and other applications. The “acoustic tweezers,” under development at Penn State University, can move and manipulate tiny objects like blood cells and even small organisms without touching them.

The acoustic tweezers are based on a piezoelectric material that produces mechanical motion when an electrical current is applied. Ultrasound offers a more affordable alternative to optical tweezers or lasers to produce this effect, because it requires less power density, according to Tony Jun Huang, associate professor of bioengineering. It is also far smaller and produces less heat than lasers, thus making the device less likely to damage cells.

Among the potential applications of the device are point- of-care cancer cell sorting and diagnostics, says Huang.

Source: Materials Research Institute, Penn State University, www.mri.psu.edu.

Amish Boom

© CARLOS GUTIERREZ / ISTOCKPHOTO.COM

Horse-drawn buggies may
become a more common
sight on U.S. rural roads, as
Amish population increases.

The fastest-growing religious group in the United States is the Amish, whose numbers will reach 1 million shortly after 2050, according to Joseph Donnermeyer, professor of rural sociology at Ohio State University.

While most other religions experience growth due to conversions, Amish communities are growing on sheer family size and numbers of baptisms. A new Amish settlement is founded every three and a half weeks, and more than 60% of Amish settlements in the United States have been founded just since 1990.

Among the impacts of this boom in a traditionally technology-averse population will be more demand for farmland and farm jobs, which may not be able to keep pace with growth. As Amish men then turn to nonfarm jobs such as woodworking, local economies could see a boost from new business startups, Donnermeyer predicts.

Source: Ohio State University, www.osu.edu.

A Curriculum for Foresight

What futurists can learn from middle-school educators, and vice versa.

By John C. Lundt

Education reformers often invoke the possibility of abandoning the middle-school concept and returning to the K-8 elementary school format. But what might schools, adolescents, and indeed futurists lose?

There are striking similarities between the middle-school model and what futurists have outlined as characteristics necessary for an education that prepares young people for the future. Futurists and middle-school educators share similar worldviews, goals, and ideals, with high regard for the following qualities and values.

• Humanism. A humanistic approach is common to both middle-school educators and futurists. Futurists have a deep-seated positive regard for the nature and potential of humanity. A central premise of the futures movement is the belief that people have the capacity to shape the future.

In a similar fashion, middle-school educators strive to maximize the development of the human potential. Middle-school educators recognize that their student population is emerging and developing in an ever-changing world. The result is a very dynamic, future-looking curriculum model.

Middle-school educators strive to understand the nature, characteristics, and needs of their students. They take the time to get to know their students as individuals as well as clients and demonstrate concern for students’ general well-being by actively encouraging them to develop healthy lifestyles that will have life-long benefits.

• Pragmatism. Middle-school educators and futurists both tend to be forward-looking, dynamic, and pragmatic. All futurists have a serious interest in what will happen in years to come. They view education as a continual, lifelong process.

Middle-school educators also recognize the dynamic nature of society and strive to meet the needs of their ever-changing student population. Middle-school teachers see themselves as facilitators and encourage their students to actively participate in the learning process. The best middle schools have students who are active learners employing higher-order thinking skills to resolve long-term issues.

Futurists and middle-school teachers generally have a pragmatic rather than ideological approach to life. Futurists want to know what will work in terms of improving the human condition over the long term. Middle-school teachers view curriculum development as a dynamic rather than static process. Both futurists and middle-school educators put their faith in strategies that work.

• Comfort with change. Middle-school educators and futurists are also similar in their approach to the change process. As a group, futurists are more willing than most to change their minds and adopt new positions. They are hospitable to social experiments and innovations. Middle-school educators are also comfortable with change.

Middle schools focus on developing a curriculum that meets the needs of the emerging adolescent population, which means recognizing the dynamic nature of society and of adolescence. As futurists know, an essential part of dealing with change is the ability to operate in the realm of the unknown.

• Interest in exploring the unknown. Futurists have long accepted the idea that absolute answers are not available for every question. Success requires a proactive approach, an interest in long-term issues, and the ability to work on problems for which no definitive answers are available.

In similar fashion, the best middle-school programs include a healthy dose of problem solving. Interdisciplinary team activities often include large and small group problem-solving exercises that feature questions for which there are no final or “correct” answers.

• Affinity for interdisciplinary thinking and work. Futurists have long employed a cross-disciplinary model. Middle-school educators have also long recognized the interdisciplinary nature of the curriculum. The most effective middle schools acknowledge the relationships between and among the subject areas and favor an interdisciplinary approach to learning.

• Ability to thrive in collaboration. Collaborative interaction in the form of team teaching, team learning, or cooperative learning is very much a part both the middle school and futurist paradigms. As a part of their cross-disciplinary approach, futurists have always operated from a global or universal, rather than local or nationalistic, perspective.

For many of the same reasons, middle-school educators have favored a collaborative approach to problem solving, and they generally work well with others in group situations. Like futurists, middle-school educators favor a holistic approach to the broad-ranging array of issues that face them.

Future Curricular Needs

The futurist movement and the middle-school model clearly share numerous similarities in purpose and strategies, and in many ways the middle-school model fills the needs for education that are most often identified by futurists, including:

• Clear thinking, evaluation, and analysis. These skills are not only concerned with the student’s ability to learn cognitive material, but also with the ability to analyze and evaluate information. Middle-school curriculums focus on clear thinking skills that lead to creative solutions to complex problems.

• Understanding the environment. Many excellent interdisciplinary middle-school team projects are centered on science programs that emphasize future ecological needs. Students are actively involved in projects that protect the environment, conserve energy, and recycle resources.

• Accessing information and solving for the unknown. Information access and problem solving have long been a part of the middle-school interdisciplinary curriculum. Through team teaching and cooperative learning activities, middle-school teams have been leaders in the area of creative problem solving. Often these team activities are centered on open-ended questions that do not lend themselves to a single correct answer, but rather have several correct possibilities.

• Personal competence through lifelong learning. Middle schools are unique among educational institutions in that they were created for a specific philosophical purpose, which is to meet the developmental needs of their student population.

A central part of this philosophy is the recognition of the dynamic nature of the educational mission. Not only are middle-school students involved in the developmental transition from childhood to adulthood, but they now are also doing so at a time when the world around them is undergoing the most rapid rate of change in human history. Better than any other current educational model, the middle-school curriculum addresses this essential need.

• Social diversity and global citizenship. The last skill identified by those writing about the curricular needs of the future is the need for understanding the role of the individual and society, the importance of social diversity, and the responsibilities associated with global citizenship.

Here also, the middle-school curriculum strives to address these issues. Students who work closely with each other and with their teachers in team teaching and cooperative learning activities have an opportunity to interact on a level that can greatly enhance their understanding of both social diversity and the relationship between the individual and society. Middle-school activities such as the advisory program provide excellent opportunities for students to discuss and explore diversity and global citizenship issues and determine their related responsibilities in the world of the future.

It is fair to say that the middle school not only goes a long way toward meeting the educational needs outlined by futurists, but also has the potential to continue to meet developing future needs. While futurists may be correct in their concern for the overall educational picture, they should be careful not to overlook the ability of the middle school to address important needs.

Both futurists and middle-school educators are striving to face the challenges of the future in very similar ways. It would be tragic to abandon an educational model that has the greatest chance of succeeding.

John Lundt, EdD, worked for 35 years in the middle-school area as a teacher, principal, and university professor. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Montana. E-mail johninmt@centric.net.

Ecoful Town: A Neighborhood Tour of Green Innovation

COURTESY OF TOYOTA-ECOFULTOWN.COM

Toyota City's Ecoful Town layout showcases sustainable
living at the neighborhood level.

A city best known for auto making builds a life-sized model of sustainable living.

Toyota City, Japan, is already famous for being the home of international automobile maker Toyota. But as of May 2012, the city has been earning renown for something else: ecological sustainability. That month marked the debut of Ecoful Town, a neighborhood-sized walking tour of innovations that the town is pursuing in renewable energy and energy efficiency, according to a Japanese government press release.

The roads coursing through the Ecoful Town are coated with water-retaining and thermal-insulation substances to minimize heat emission. Complementing the roads is a “demand-responsive” transportation system that can call up a bus to a location any time, as needed.

The buildings in Ecoful Town include a model “smart home” outfitted with solar panels, storage batteries, and an energy-management system, along with a Pavilion that draws energy from solar panels while regulating indoor temperatures passively via a moss covering on its walls. The Pavilion also houses interactive quizzes and videos that educate viewers about Toyota City’s pursuit of low-carbon living.

“Ecoful Town allows us to show visitors from home and abroad how Toyota City is striving to create a low-carbon society,” says Mayor Toshihiko Ota, in a statement to the press. “We hope we can help popularize this enjoyable, pressure- and waste-free way of life, one that harnesses the latest environmental technologies, in countries around the world.”

Ecoful Town is the product of a consortium of companies, some of them based in the city and some from other locales, who first gathered to form a Toyota City Low-Carbon Society Verification Promotion Council with Toyota City’s municipal leadership. Together, the group has been researching and designing new clean-energy, energy management, and smart-growth systems that communities such as Toyota City could put to use. Ecoful Town displays many of these innovations.

“The companies … are cooperating to conduct verification projects for constructing next-generation, low-carbon energy and society systems. There are some companies, both from inside and outside of the city, participating by supplying our facility their own technology or products which they want to promote,” says says Makoto Shioya, a spokesperson for Ecoful Town.

The city’s residents are paying attention: Home buyers have purchased 67 smart houses in the city. Ecoful is also attracting crowds of visitors from across the country, as well as the heads of foreign governments, international businesses, and universities.

Shioya reports a lot of positive feedback from the visitors, including some who say that they see products on display that they might purchase, and others who say that the facility gives them ideas on how to renovate their own homes and communities.

That’s what the designers had been hoping for, Shioya adds. They wanted Ecoful to be a persuasive test case for home and building construction that is low on energy use and waste, and which keeps its carbon footprint small to nil.

“By presenting a low-carbon city and home life with developed environmental technologies, we are suggesting ways to change our lifestyle to a more comfortable and affordable eco-life with no waste,” says Shioya.

—Rick Docksai

Source: Makoto Shioya (interview), Toyota City, http://www.city.toyota .aichi.jp.

Market for Bioplastics

RICK DOCKSAI

Cases of Dasani water delivered
in “plant bottles”—containers made
with 30% bio-based plastic.

Businesses are developing green alternatives to fossil-fuel-based plastics.

Many consumers don’t know it, but “peak oil” would mean “peak plastic,” since the main ingredients of plastics include oil and natural gas. However, growing numbers of manufacturers are seeking a renewable alternative in bioplastics, whose ingredients derive from biomass sources such as algae, sugarcane, or soybeans.

A 2012 study by the market research firm Freedonia Group forecasts that demand in the United States for bioplastics will grow by 20% a year through 2016, up from 18.5% a year over the five years prior. Bioplastics constitute less than 1% of plastics today. However, Kent Furst, a Freedonia Group senior analyst, thinks that they could slowly supplant conventional plastics in the decades ahead.

Many companies are already investing increasing sums into bioplastics research and development, Furst notes. He points out that most analysts expect oil prices to keep rising over time. Meanwhile, bioplastics manufacturing could gradually become cheaper as the technologies and methods improve.

“Where bioplastics may have an advantage is in access to raw materials. Many producers see plant-based raw materials as more stable in terms of price and supply than petrochemical feedstocks,” Furst says.

Coca-Cola is one of those producers, according to Melissa Hockstad, vice president of science, technology, and regulatory affairs for the Plastics Industry Trade Association. She says that, in May 2009, Coca-Cola began packaging some of its sodas into “plant bottles” that were 30% bio-based polyethylene—a bioplastic that producers can synthesize from sugarcane. Although not all Coca-Cola bottles are plant bottles, a growing share are.

“As the months go by I see more and more plant bottles on the store shelves, so it’s definitely growing,” Hockstad says. Pepsi is going a step further, she adds. In 2013, it plans to debut bottles that are 100% bioplastic.

Food supplies are some of the most common uses for bioplastics, Hockstad notes, along with cleaning supplies and agriculture. Even car companies are exploring bioplastics’ potential. Hockstad cites Ford, which began installing headrests made of soybean-based foam into its cars this year.

Hockstad attributes some of businesses’ interest in bioplastics to a growing focus on sustainability. Business leaders increasingly see value in using materials that do minimal harm to the environment’s health—materials such as bioplastics.

“Some of the questions they’re starting to ask is ‘where are the materials coming from?’ and ‘What are the uses?’” she says. “We’re starting to see more brand owners interested in sustainability, and this is where we’re starting to see a lot of excitement for bioplastics.”

Conventional plastics are still cheaper. Furst emphasizes that bioplastics and their bio-based sources are new, so they will need time to improve and become more economical.

“The plastics industry has had the better part of a century to perfect the chemistry and manufacturing processes to create better and better materials. Bioplastics such as PLA [polyactic acid] are always going to be playing catch-up in this area,” he says.

PLA is the bioplastic that the Freedonia Group report forecasts will be the most extensively used. This compound has some downsides, though: It doesn’t decompose, and, since it closely resembles other plastics, recycling centers’ automated systems have difficulty sorting it out from them—a problem because different products require different plastics.

“Because PLA is such a new material, most automatic systems are not equipped to handle it. This is a substantial detriment to the environmental attractiveness of PLA,” Furst says.

Innovation may help, however. Several new recycling companies that specialize in PLA recycling have already debuted, and as PLA becomes more widely used, other recyclers may eventually install new systems that can identify PLA, according to Furst.

Bio-based polyethylene (PE) is another bioplastic that corporations heavily favor, according to the report. Furst credits the relatively easy extraction process: PE derives from plant-based ethanol, which is already a well-established fuel source in many countries, and it is “identical” to synthetic PE, so companies that have been manufacturing PE for years can easily switch over.

“This technology is already well-established,” he says.

That PE and other bioplastics need biofuel crops raises concern among critics who object to setting aside more farmland for biofuels. Larry Koester, vice president of communication for the Society of Plastics Engineers’ Environmental Division, argues that the world more urgently needs that farmland for food.

“I grew up on a farm, and I know how hard it is to grow corn. I don’t want to see it converted into a gasoline or a plastic,” says Koester.

He’s more amenable, though, to the use of sugarcane. Bioplastics made from sugarcane use the leftover plant stocks of already-harvested crops, so the farmers do not need to allocate any land for them.

“That chemistry works. I don’t know about the economics of it, but there’s no question about the chemistry,” says Koester.

Furst, like Koester, also sees hope in developing bioplastics from “waste” plant stock as a means to obtain plastics without sacrificing farmland. Switchgrass and rice hulls are two examples, in addition to sugarcane, that he considers promising.

“If this is commercialized, it would significantly reduce the carbon footprint and make bioplastics a true boon for the environment,” he says. —Rick Docksai

Sources: Kent Furst, The Freedonia Group.The report Bioplastics (published 06/2012, 240 pages) is available for $4,900 from The Freedonia Group Inc., www.freedoniagroup.com.

Melissa Hockstad, Plastics Industry Trade Association, www.plastics industry.org.

Larry Koester, Society of Plastics Engineers, www.sperecycling.org.

The Rise of mChurches: From Mega to Mobile

Communicating with congregations in the social-media era challenges church leaders.

If you’re looking for an institutional role model for communicating with customers, turn your eyes upward to churches. After all, publishing’s first bestseller was—and is—the Bible.

Christian churches in the United States have often been early (or at least rapid) adopters of new technologies to spread messages of faith to the masses. For example, the televangelism trend of the 1970s turned megachurches into media empires. In the 1980s and 1990s, many churches adopted the technologically sophisticated theatrical lighting and sound designs pioneered for Broadway.

So the next big things in missionary outreach should not be very surprising: social networking and mobile apps that connect even more individuals to communities of faith.

In addition to live-streaming a weekly sermon, for instance, a church’s mobile strategy could include allowing congregations to connect and share more with each other directly, says Matt McKee, CEO of ROAR, a social media company that works with churches and other nonprofits. This may be especially important to minority ministries, he believes.

“We feel like we’re empowering urban communities to use technology because of the reasonable costs for development and the expertise we bring to the table,” McKee says. “We have a new partnership with T. D. Jakes Ministries and we’re working with churches like Church Without Walls in Houston, and these experiences are helping us reach out to more groups like them.” —Cynthia G. Wagner

Source: ROAR, http://ROAR.pro.

An Economy Of, By, and For the People

Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution

By Rick Docksai

In Owning Our Future, business ethicist Marjorie Kelly envisions commerce that makes human well-being, not wealth, its goal.

Although economic stagflation may be everywhere we look, seeds of a new, healthy, ecologically sustainable economy that serves the many appear to be sprouting. Marjorie Kelly, director of ownership strategy at Cutting Edge Capital, calls this new mode the generative economy. It encompasses many different business models, but they have a common trait: private ownership for the common good.

Generative design creates stability by avoiding excess, Kelly explains. These schemes generate wealth for their owners, but not to the extreme degree of today’s institutions. They are set up expressly so that too much wealth does not end up concentrated in a select few hands. More importantly, these businesses operate under clearly stated ethical frameworks and societal missions. Their founders direct them to serve community needs, not to maximize profit.

“They know it’s possible to have plenty and recognize that enough is enough,” Kelly writes. “There are other things they value more highly, like being happy, living authentically, feeling alive. Living well in community. Leaving the world a better place.”

Examples are emerging everywhere. The “solidarity economy”—cooperatives and nonprofits—is catching on in Latin America and Canada. Quebec has formally recognized it as an economic sector and now regularly funds it.

Other examples:

• The United Kingdom’s building societies are member-owned banking organizations. Because the customers are the owners, the banks exist to serve their needs, not to enrich shareholders. They have far lower-than-average rates of foreclosures and loan defaults to show for it, since borrowers obtain loans under fair terms and can work out reasonable payment arrangements.
• A British supermarket company, John Lewis Partnership, states its mission as commitment to the happiness of its employees. Each employee has partial ownership in the company, and between 40% and 60% of every year’s after-tax profits go directly to the employees as bonuses and salary increases. And on one occasion, when one of its warehouses had to shut down, the management helped the displaced employees to write résumés and find new jobs elsewhere.
• Minnesota’s energy cooperative Minwind operates the first farmer-owned wind-power turbines in the United States. All shareholders live in Minnesota, and 85% of the investors come from rural communities. The company is a sharp departure from the traditional business model under which farmers build wind turbines on their land but lease away the rights to absentee developers; the farmers themselves get to claim the wealth.

Society today wrongly believes that wealth creation is a virtually limitless process, according to Kelly. She argues that growth always has limits, and every economy eventually reaches them. She sharply distinguishes the real economy versus the financial economy, which consists of claims on the actual money of the real economy.

The financial economy is now four times as big as the real economy, which means that the world’s financial system rests upon a multitude of claims to money that no one has the money to actually pay! Its outcome is already obvious: financial crashes, like the one that swept the world in 2008.

Kelly places hope in such generative design models as the building societies, John Lewis, and Minwind. With their commitments to their communities and to their rank-and-file employees, they are examples of the responsible and sustainable business practices that the global economy so critically needs.

“As we make the painful turn into a new era—characterized by climate change, water shortages, species extinction, vast unemployment, stagnant wages, staggering differentials in health, and bloated debt loads—the industrial-age model of ownership is beginning to make less sense,” she writes. “It’s time to move beyond growth, to recognize that the economy as we once knew it will never return. Nor should it.”

The twentieth century saw a worldwide clash of capitalism and communism, and communism’s collapse left commentators proclaiming that capitalism is the only game in town. Marjorie Kelly’s ground-level reporting proves that it is not: Forward-thinking entrepreneurs are renouncing the worst aspects of both ideologies and constructing new ways of owning property and creating profits that affirm the individual while also benefiting the collective. Readers who long for a more just economic order will find an abundance of provocative ideas in Owning Our Future.

About the Reviewer

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

The 22nd Century at First Light: Envisioning Life in the Year 2100

© EMRAH TURUDU / ISTOCKPHOTO

A special report by members and friends of the World Future Society

A child born today will only be 88 years old in the year 2100. It’s time to start thinking and caring about the twenty-second century now.

The next 88 years may see changes that come exponentially faster than the previous 88 years. What new inventions will come out of nowhere and change everything? What will our families look like? How will we govern ourselves? What new crimes or other threats loom ahead? Will we be happy? How?

THE FUTURIST invited WFS members and friends to submit forecasts, scenarios, wild cards, dreams, and nightmares about the earth, humanity, governance, commerce, science and technology, and more.

So, what do we see in this “first light” view over the next horizon? A fuzzy and inaccurate picture, no doubt, but also an earnest attempt to shake out our futuring instruments and begin improving them. To build a better future for the generations who are depending on us, we’ll need the best tools we can develop.—THE EDITORS

Timelines

Major Transformations to 2100: Highlights from the TechCast Project

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Laura B. Huhn and William Halal

Will the year 2100 bring disaster or salvation? A global population that exceeds food supply and exhausts planetary resources? Ecological collapse and severe climate change? Or will we experience a unified world heralding an unprecedented Age of Global Consciousness?

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Timeline to the 22nd Century

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Dick Pelletier

What can we expect over the next nine decades? Of course, no one can accurately predict the future this far in advance, but if we multi-track breakthroughs in major technologies, then we can create a plausible scenario of how the future could unfold.

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Major Transformations to 2100: Highlights from the TechCast Project

Laura B. Huhn

William Halal

By Laura B. Huhn and William Halal

Will the year 2100 bring disaster or salvation? A global population that exceeds food supply and exhausts planetary resources? Ecological collapse and severe climate change? Or will we experience a unified world heralding an unprecedented Age of Global Consciousness?

TechCast (www.TechCast.org) draws on its knowledge base of forecasts pooling empirical trend data and the knowledge of more than 100 experts to examine the big transformations ahead. Lifestyles, families, homes, and other aspects of life are likely to change because the forces of nature, technology, demographics, and economics are transforming the world dramatically.

Here is a macro-forecast that summarizes the 70 strategic breakthroughs that offer an outline of how the foundations of society are likely to evolve over remainder of this century.

2015: Next Economic Upcycle

Our timeline begins around 2015, when the following technological advancements are expected to start the next 35-year economic upcycle:

• E-Commerce. Internet use explodes worldwide, producing trillions of dollars in revenue.
• Global Access. About 50% of the world population will have Internet access.
• Globalization. At today’s growth rates, we’ll halve poverty by 2015.
• Green Business. Thirty percent of corporations are likely to practice environmental management, leading to a $10 trillion–$20 trillion green industry at the end of the decade.
• TeleMedicine. Online records, videoconferences with your doctor, and other electronic practices will improve medical care and reduce escalating costs.
• TeleWork. Globally, 1 billion people were mobile workers in 2010. By 2015, that number should increase to 1.3 billion.
• Space Commercialism/Tourism. Space trips for tourists and visits to low-Earth orbit are likely to produce a boom in commercial space.

2015–2020: Global MegaCrisis

From 2015 through 2020, a doubling of global GDP will cause the Global MegaCrisis (see THE FUTURIST, May-June 2011) to become intolerable, with the planet teetering on environmental collapse. Here are TechCast’s four scenarios:

• Decline to Disaster (25% probability): World fails to react, resulting in catastrophic natural and economic calamities. Possible loss of civilization.
• Muddling Down (35% probability): World reacts only partially, so ecological damage, increased poverty and conflict create major declines in life.
• Muddling Up (25% probability): World reacts in time out of need and high-tech capabilities; widespread disaster averted, although many problems remain.
• Rise to Maturity (15% probability): World transitions to a responsible global order.

2020: High Tech Era

Assuming the world survives reasonably well (Muddling Up), major breakthroughs are likely to introduce a High Tech Era:

• Smart and Green Transportation: e.g., intelligent cars, high-speed trains.
• Climate Control, Alternative Energy.
• Mastery of Life: e.g., personal medicine, organ replacement, cancer cure.
• Second-Generation Information Technology, e.g., “good” artificial intelligence, automated routine knowledge, robots, infinite computing power.

2030–2050: Mature World Order

A Mature World Order evolves beyond knowledge to an Age of Global Consciousness:

• Space: exploration and colonization of the Moon, Mars.
• Advanced Energy: Fusion energy becomes viable.
• Life Extension: Average human life span reaches 100 years.
• Expanded Consciousness: e.g., general AI, thought power, neurotechnology. Humans become almost God-like.

2070–2100: Beyond Earth

• Deep Space: Contact is made; star travel becomes possible.
• Unified World Systems: Humanity achieves Type I Civilization (mastery over most forms of planetary energy).

About the authors:

Laura B. Huhn is a business strategy consultant and has served as the field editor for Energy and Environment for TechCast (www.TechCast.org), for which she is currently reporting on emerging tech issues and challenges.

William E. Halal is professor emeritus of management, technology, and innovation at George Washington University and is president of TechCast LLC, a virtual think tank tracking the technology revolution.

Timeline to the 22nd Century

By Dick Pelletier

What can we expect over the next nine decades? Of course, no one can accurately predict the future this far in advance, but if we multi-track breakthroughs in major technologies, then we can create a plausible scenario of how the future could unfold.

The following timeline reveals achievements and events that could become reality as we trek through the twenty-first century:

2010s: More people become techno-savvy in a fully wired world. Smartphones, the Internet, global trade, and language translators give birth to a humanity focused on improving health care and raising living standards. Stem cell and genetic engineering breakthroughs emerge almost daily.

2020s: Nanotech, computers, robots make life easier. Medical nanotech improves health care, ending many causes of death. Quantum computers unravel the mysteries of consciousness, lowering crime rates worldwide. Household robots surpass cars as the most indispensable family purchase.

2030s: Improved transportation, longer life spans make the world more enjoyable. Driverless cars have reduced auto deaths to near zero. Except for violence and accidents, most people enjoy an indefinite life span. Children born in the 2030s are predicted to live well into the next millennium.

2040-2060: Human–machine merges bring us closer to conquering death. Humanity’s future lies in transitioning into nonbiological beings, writes physicist Paul Davies in his book The Eerie Silence (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). “Biological life is transitory,” he says. “It is only a fleeting phase of evolution.”

By 2050, bold pioneers begin replacing their biology with nonbiological muscles, bones, organs, and brains. Non-bio bodies automatically self-repair when damaged. In fatal accidents (or acts of violence), consciousness and memories can be transferred into a new body, and victims simply continue life in their new body. Death is now considered no more disruptive than a brief mental lapse. Most patients are not even aware they had died. Built labor-free with nanofactories, non-bio body parts are easily affordable.

2060-2075: Humanity heads for the stars. Successful Moon and Mars forays bring a new era in world peace as countries begin collaborative efforts to develop space.

By 2060, terraforming efforts provide pleasant atmospheres on off-world communities with breathable air and Earthlike gravity. By 2075, population has reached 10,000 on the Moon and 50,000 onMars. By 2100, populations grow to 2 million on the Moon and 10 million on Mars.

2075-2100: Faster-than-light travel is developed. Scientists have selected fusion power and zero-point energy as the most probable technologies that could enable spaceships to break the light-speed barrier.

For example, a 2070s hyper-drive vessel or 2080s warp-speed ship might reach Alpha Centauri (four light-years away) in just 30 days, or make the six-month trip to Mars in three hours. Officials at NASA’s Glenn Research Center have explored other options to travel faster than light-speeds and believe that, in a distant future, humans may even harness wormholes, enabling instant access to vast distances in space.

Can we expect the future to unfold in this optimistic manner? Positive futurists believe we can.

About the author:

Dick Pelletier is a science and technology columnist and futurist, and editor of the Positive Futurist weekly newsletter and Web site, www.positivefuturist.com/about.html.

Tools

Scenarios and Long-Term Thinking

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Gitte Larsen, Søren Steen Olsen, and Steen Svendsen, House of Futures

It is almost impossible to make any plausible direct extrapolations from historic trends a hundred years into the future. The present contains seeds of the future, but it is very unlikely to unfold in any straightforward manner.

That is why we need scenarios to get a better idea of the enormous transformations that will happen in the decades ahead, including how we might try to shape the future and create the ones we prefer.

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Scenarios and Long-Term Thinking

Gitte Larsen

Søren Steen Olsen

Steen Svendsen

By Gitte Larsen, Søren Steen Olsen, and Steen Svendsen, House of Futures

It is almost impossible to make any plausible direct extrapolations from historic trends a hundred years into the future. The present contains seeds of the future, but it is very unlikely to unfold in any straightforward manner.

That is why we need scenarios to get a better idea of the enormous transformations that will happen in the decades ahead, including how we might try to shape the future and create the ones we prefer.

Scenarios are alternative images of the future that can inform decisions in the present. It is an approach that is used by decision makers in the public and private sectors, on many levels and in many contexts.

There are many types of scenarios, and the choice of scenario depends on the purpose. One can work with many or few, qualitative or quantitative, broad or specific, and long or short-term scenarios.

The scenario process of House of Futures’ “In 100 Years” project differs from more traditional scenario processes in its ambitious scope, in its perception of nature as the main driver, and in the combination of performance arts and methods as well as future studies to make it possible to experience the scenarios.

The Baseline Scenario is built on trends that are relatively straightforward to track, such as population, economic growth, technological advance, and values and mind-sets. The exercise of creating a baseline scenario gives us the opportunity to think about factors that could change it, such as the availability of resources upon which economies depend or a cultural shift in views about affluence and happiness.

Two alternative scenarios that House of Futures developed in its 100Y (“In 100 Years”) seminars are:

Scenario 1: Man-Made World. We realize that when we put our minds to it we can develop technologies, organizations, political institutions, and business models that allow us to prosper in ways that do not jeopardize Planet Earth. Collectively, we are approaching a state of global stewardship in which we manage our planet rationally, like any sensible landowner would with his property.

Scenario 2: Power of Nature. We realize that everything is nature, and so are we. We are one with Mother Earth, and we share a common biology and collective consciousness. On a deeper level, these are the sources of meaning that we all tap into, regardless of nationality, religion, or culture.

About the Authors

Gitte Larsen, Søren Steen Olsen, and Steen Svendsen are futurists at House of Futures in Copenhagen. This essay draws from Issues 2: This Way, Please! Preferred Futures 2112 published by House of Futures (April 2012), www.houseoffutures.dk.

Forecasts

Bio Age 2100

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Olli Hietanen and Marko Ahvenainen

Technological change has progressed at a rapid pace. Within a few decades, the world has become virtual while we have started to apply biotechnology and nanotechnology.

Next, we will see how mobile technology is breaking out of computers and mobile phones, with the same technology being applied to all sorts of everyday objects: furniture, household appliances, buildings, clothing, packaging, cars, etc.

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Where the Wild Things Are Not

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Brenda Cooper

In the Western creation story, the first man and woman are given a task: to care for a garden and the beasts and animals within it. By 2100, mankind will be living in a garden the size of the world. Species will live or die by our hand and our choices, and, ultimately, so will we.

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Keys to Future Energy Prosperity

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Ozzie Zehner

By 2100, one aspect of our world will have become apparent: While populations and economies can grow exponentially, the planet’s resources cannot. Nevertheless, as this simple realization unravels over coming decades, it will not be plainly visible. It will manifest in less-obvious ways.

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Healthy Aging in the 22nd Century

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Marta M. Keane

What will the term elder mean in the future? And at what age will someone be considered an elder in 2100?

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Will We Still Have Money in 2100?

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Stephen Aguilar-Millan

Money has been around since the dawn of history. A future without money would suggest that we would be moving toward a barter economy rather than an exchange economy in 2100.

It is entirely possible that this could happen at the individual level. The Internet could allow peer-to-peer exchange, much in the way that eBay accommodates this at present. However, a barter system is unlikely to be of use at the societal level. The supply of public services like defense or justice are best facilitated through a monetary contribution, such as taxes.

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Slums: A Catalyst Bed for Poverty Eradication

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Eric Meade

In 2100, more than 70% of the Earth’s 10 billion people will live in cities. In dynamic regional hubs like Lagos, Nigeria (population 41 million), an infrastructure of renewable energy, sustainable local manufacturing, socially augmented reality, and anticipatory community governance will have produced economically vibrant neighborhoods that are microcosms of collaborative resident engagement.

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From Communication to Transmission

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Manjul Rathee

We are already familiar with the idea of seamlessness in our world of constant communication. In the twenty-second century, as all living creatures evolve and adapt at a pace never known before, communication will evolve into transmission.

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Religious Belief in the Year 2100

Posted on August 2, 2012

By Gina A. Bellofatto

Projecting religious populations around the globe to 2100 first requires a nod to trends over the previous 200 years. In 1910, those imagining the future of religion generally had a positive outlook, with many believing that religion was an unchallenged fact of life that would continue on for generations to come.

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Game Changers for the Next Century

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Arthur Shostak

Underlying today’s dazzling, seemingly science-fiction developments are such brow-arching matters as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, fusion power, genomics, “green” ways of living, integrated automation, nanotechnology, space industry, and robotized weaponry.

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A Brave New Species

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Richard Yonck

Long-term forecasts are fraught with peril, but anticipating the world at the dawn of the next century is made even more perilous by the possibility of a technological Singularity occurring well before we reach that milestone.

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Transport and Transhumans

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Julio Arbesú

In 2100, fast traffic will not circulate at ground level in the cities or the fields. This will be prohibited. There will be less air traffic than nowadays. On land, there will be fast (300-500 km/h) and ultra-fast (more than 1,000 km/h) lines, all of them light and continuously elevated on columns. They will often span great distances by means of hanging bridges in order to avoid rivers and accidents on the ground. Abundant lines, hanging between floating platforms, will cross the oceans.

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Lanes in the Sky

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Davidson Barlett

In hindsight, one can easily identify the advantages of jet-powered aircraft over propeller-driven ones, and appreciate the quantum leap forward that jet aircraft represented.

Now, try to imagine a new generation of low-ceiling, ground-hugging aircraft designed to bring aviation to the masses.

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When the Machines Take Over

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Marc Blasband

The year 2100 will be in the midst of the age of the machine. If today we use machines everywhere for everything, then by 2100 they will go one step further: They will rule and decide. The goal of their society will be more and better machines, not more and better human lives, our objective today.

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Technology vs. the World

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Jim Bracken

A child born today will bear witness to an epic struggle between technological advancement and natural resource shortages. This long war will be waged in a series of battles that will ultimately determine the course of our species and our habitat.

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Cyborg Me

Posted on August 1, 2012

By John P. Sagi

A child born today will only be 88 in the year 2100. We may be around too.

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The Local-Global Duality of 2100

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Joshua Loughman

The growth of cities into suburbs, and then exurbs, could see communities of the twenty-second century collide into megalopolises covering entire regions of the countries we recognize today. This growth of local communities, and the flattening of the world through connectivity, would polarize people’s engagement into local and global, steering away from the sense of nationalism seen throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

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Bio Age 2100

Olli Hietanen

Marko Ahvenainen

By Olli Hietanen and Marko Ahvenainen

Technological change has progressed at a rapid pace. Within a few decades, the world has become virtual while we have started to apply biotechnology and nanotechnology.

Next, we will see how mobile technology is breaking out of computers and mobile phones, with the same technology being applied to all sorts of everyday objects: furniture, household appliances, buildings, clothing, packaging, cars, etc.

The Internet is thus evolving into “Ubinet”—an omnipresent cloud service—and we are entering “hybrid economy” where customers are participating through social media in the design, manufacture, and crowd funding of products (co-production, crowdsourcing, cloud computing, and augmented reality).

At the same time, the focus of the world economy has shifted to Asia and to the emerging economies. In addition, we have experienced financial crises, which have become the rule rather than the exception.

The main phenomenon of the modern world is the accelerating speed of change.

However, above all, the current major concern of the future is the depletion of natural resources. This, combined with the pollution of the environment, put sustainability technologies (technologies of scarcity) at the heart of competitiveness to generate solutions to the major problems of mankind and to contribute to the well-being of all.

The challenge is not only in technology and business models, but there is a need for a new kind of nonlinear innovation system, as well as a new philosophy of technology. The main reason to develop technology is no longer to conquer nature, but to protect nature against humans.

According to Nikolai Kondratieff, an economic upswing (long cycle) begins with a new technological innovation, whose effect eventually dies out (after 50–70 years), whereby the economy is plunged into recession. This continues until a new innovation in turn triggers a new wave of economic growth.

Significant breakthroughs to date have been, for example, the steam engine, railways, electricity, chemicals, radio, TV, computers, and mobile phones. Recent years have seen discussion of the Sixth Kondratieff Cycle (2010–2050), which differs from the Fifth because of the increasingly rising prices of raw materials and energy. It will no longer be possible with present-day technology to lower those prices.

One possible path of sustainable growth is the emergence of the Bio Age (similar to the Iron, Stone, and Bronze Ages), in which everything that can possibly be made from biomaterials will be.

The forest and agriculture sectors are developing into a bio-economy, which can use any bio raw material to manufacture anything: gas, fluid, fiber, mass, molecules, energy. Artificial meat will grow in the cow-byres of the future, mobile phones will be compostable, and many kinds of consumer goods (such as chairs, mobile phones and clothes) will be printed from biomaterials and grown from seeds and stem cells.

All of these technologies and changes hold importance similar to the invention of the steam engine. They have brought and will continue to bring profound changes to our economy, our way of life, and even our cultural history.

About the authors:

Olli Hietanen is head of development at the Finland Futures Research Centre and a board member of the Finnish Society for Futures Studies. Email olli.hietanen@utu.fi.

Marko Ahvenainen is a researcher with the Finland Futures Research Centre. Email marko.ahvenainen@utu.fi.

Where the Wild Things Are Not

Brenda Cooper

By Brenda Cooper

In the Western creation story, the first man and woman are given a task: to care for a garden and the beasts and animals within it. By 2100, mankind will be living in a garden the size of the world. Species will live or die by our hand and our choices, and, ultimately, so will we.

Some people might claim that we are already there. I disagree. There are many wild places today, but climate change and population growth are claiming them, changing them, and in some cases erasing them. With work, better use of information technology in the form of sensing, tracking, and artificial intelligence can help us create a sustainable path to a world full of garden.

One of the programs that my city is most proud of is called Green Kirkland, where people show up in droves to weed the parks, pulling invasive species and planting natives. Staff and volunteers manage the watersheds and the salmon habitat. We clean the stormwater.

On a bigger scale, dam releases are being used to manage the amount of silt in the Colorado River to protect the humpback chub.

Reprehensible industrial-level habitat destruction and laudable habitat restoration projects can be found from China to Australia to Canada.

By 2100, most of the developed world will be managed. We will know how many large mammals live in almost every open space. It is likely that tiny sensors will report out on moths and moss and microclimates, and then initiate or suggest action to humans caring for the complex dependencies of species.

As the twenty-second century begins, our 88-year-old may work as a caretaker for natural habitat. Perhaps she learned eco-care skills in the community-service portion of her education when she was 16 (in 2028), and continued to leverage these skills for low-paying temporary jobs that supported a year of travel through Asia or Australia. Maybe she returned to this work for summers until she had children, and then again in the first few years of retirement, and now she has become a senior volunteer in the community park.

In 2100, 88-year-olds may not have seen an unexpected waterfall or wolf for some time. They have hunted for birds they knew were in a specific managed ecosystem and competed to get the best pictures. They have helped release once-extinct species into newly prepared habitats. They can count on one hand the number of times they have been completely alone, unable to even see another human being.

While most people in 2100 may not have unexpected encounters with wildness daily or even often, the highly paid professionals working on ecosystem preservation could be plagued with such surprises. As humans try to tend a complex biosphere, unintended consequences will abound.

Even in 2100, humans are unlikely to be as capable as nature is when it comes to managing evolution. They will depend heavily on artificial intelligences to help, but the process still requires human intervention. Natural evolution will compete with human-induced evolution. All urban ecosystems will be managed, and most rural ones will at least be monitored.

One of the ethical discussions of the day will be about how to choose between the wild and the made, how to best tend the garden called Earth.

About the author:

Brenda Cooper is the author of several science-fiction novels. Her next release is The Creative Fire (Pyr, November 2012). She is also the CIO of the city of Kirkland, Washington. Web site www.brenda-cooper.com.

Keys to Future Energy Prosperity

Ozzie Zehner

By Ozzie Zehner

By 2100, one aspect of our world will have become apparent: While populations and economies can grow exponentially, the planet’s resources cannot. Nevertheless, as this simple realization unravels over coming decades, it will not be plainly visible. It will manifest in less-obvious ways.

The finitude of the earth will present itself in terms of supply constraints, international conflict, disease, water shortages, unemployment, and most of all economic volatility.

As traditional fuels stretch thin, nations will shift to low-grade coal and shale oil to fuel their economic activity. As heating costs rise, the world’s forests will understandably become an irresistible resource to exploit for fuel. The natural gas and petroleum-based fertilizers that cultivated the green revolution will become too expensive for many of the world’s farmers at the same time that crops for biofuels will be in highest demand.

The world’s poor and disenfranchised will bear the brunt of these transitional pains. Nations may institute food export bans as they did following the 2008 and 2011 food price shocks. Others may use food aid as a weapon, as Henry Kissinger once suggested the United States might do. As the costs to exhume fossil fuels rise, the invisible hand of the market will go right for our throats.

In 2100, people will still be traveling to and from work, celebrating birthdays, trying new restaurants, and going on vacations. They’ll just be doing it all with a lot less energy.

Not only will the age of cheap fossil fuels have ended by 2100, few alive will have any recollection of such an era. Residents of 2100 will therefore find little utility in the brand of economic thinking that their elders bequeathed them.

Some alternative energy schemes will have failed to live up to the wide-eyed dreams that previous generations had envisioned. By 2100, it will have become apparent that early technologies were largely reliant on fossil fuels as well as the economic activity that accompanied cheap energy. Engineers will discover that, while wind and sunlight are renewable, turbines and solar cells are not.

Landfills will house millions of tons of defunct solar panel waste, leaking heavy metals into groundwater supplies. But a larger concern will reign: the enduring burdens of nuclear activities.

In 2100, energy firms will still be grappling with how best to store nuclear waste and clean up nuclear contamination. People will not identify nuclear contamination in terms of “accidents,” as we do today. They will instead view nuclear activities as highly risky undertakings that are bound to expel radiation into human communities over time. Additionally, plenty of enriched fuel, radioactive waste, and nuclear byproducts will shift hands as nation-states crack apart and reconfigure into new political establishments.

Technological developments will influence the 2100 energy landscape, but they won’t be the primary force. Future energy prosperity will actually hinge on social and political fundamentals: human rights, health care, transparency, citizen governance, walkable communities, strong civic organizations, and so on. These are important attributes for any era. But in an age of tight energy, they will become vital.

About the Author

Ozzie Zehner is a visiting scholar at the Science, Technology, & Society Center, University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Web site www.GreenIllusions.org.

Healthy Aging in the 22nd Century

Marta M. Keane

By Marta M. Keane

What will the term elder mean in the future? And at what age will someone be considered an elder in 2100?

To be born in 2012 and only be 88 years old in 2100 will probably mean middle age rather than elderhood. Elders will be those who have lived triple-digit years and have been through several careers and cycles of education, career, and leisure. These elders will have exponentially more knowledge and experience, and they will continue to be contributing to society. Technology will be a key element allowing individuals to age with more independence and more choice.

Here, we examine each component of health (as defined by the World Health Organization) and how each will be manifested in 2100.

Physical health. People’s physical health will be monitored daily in their homes. The smart home will be outfitted with readers to take vital signs and send them directly to a medical professional to review, and provide feedback on any medications or supplements that need to be altered that day. Rather than prescriptions as we have known them, medications will all be personalized to individuals’ DNA, keeping all healthier for longer.

Elders will be able to live in their own homes longer. With driverless cars, limitations on transportation will be a thing of the past. And the smart home will adapt to people’s changing needs so that they will not need to move from their current home to maintain a safe environment.

• Social-emotional health. As elders continue to work longer and cycle through more periods of leisure cycles during their lifetimes, they will have more friends and engage in more activities that will allow them to stay involved. Twenty-second-century elders will see their generation continue to be involved in social-action projects, coming together for the specific project and meeting new people, and continuing some relationships and letting others end with the project.

As with work, there will be cycles with marriage and family dynamics. It will be unlikely that there will be marriages that will last 100 years, so there will be multiple groupings of families that will have a fresh approach to embracing each addition to the family and expanding the definition of the extended family.

• Spiritual health. Views of a “divine power” will be transformed by advances in science and technological power. As scientific breakthroughs increase longevity, the fear of mortality and what follows will disappear. Spiritual practices and beliefs will become more individualized; many elders, for instance, will continue to be concerned for the environment, and in so doing, get back in touch with nature and the earth.
• Intellectual health. Elders will be honored for their knowledge and experience. The many cycles of work and relationships will enrich their lives and be an inspiration to others. The ability to live longer will focus importance on lifelong learning and continuing to experience the world through all the senses.

The year 2100 will be an exciting time to be “old.” Technology and societal views will encourage a new attitude about aging. Elderhood will be viewed as the period in one’s life with the most opportunity for independence and quality choices about one’s own life.

About the author:

Marta M. Keane is president of The Strategies Group. She is a health-care management consultant focusing on aging and wellness. Email martakeane@hotmail.com.

Will We Still Have Money in 2100?

Stephen Aguilar-Millan

By Stephen Aguilar-Millan

Money has been around since the dawn of history. A future without money would suggest that we would be moving toward a barter economy rather than an exchange economy in 2100.

It is entirely possible that this could happen at the individual level. The Internet could allow peer-to-peer exchange, much in the way that eBay accommodates this at present. However, a barter system is unlikely to be of use at the societal level. The supply of public services like defense or justice are best facilitated through a monetary contribution, such as taxes.

This reason alone is likely to keep money with us in 2100. But in what form? Who is likely to issue it? More interestingly, does cash have a future? Money has become largely digital over the past few decades. This is unlikely to change unless there is a major disruption to the way in which accounting records are kept.

Despite the predictions of its demise, cash has proven to be very resilient. Cash is the lifeblood of the black-market economy because it leaves no audit trail, and, as long as people want to avoid paying taxes, it will continue to serve that function. We can speculate that, even if notes and coins were abolished, a parallel form of “cash” would develop. For this reason, cash is still likely to be with us in 2100.

What may change are the issuers of money. At present, governments reserve for themselves the right to issue legal tender. Yet, systems of parallel currency have emerged. For example, we are accustomed to spending air miles (or points) for travel. Companies could harness the function of money as a store of value and a standard for deferred payments by issuing purchase tokens for future use. Most supermarket loyalty schemes operate along these lines. It could well happen that this trend, enabled by the Internet, could explode over the course of this century.

The trend will be enhanced if companies can tap into the trust that their customers have in their brands. Many companies do so already through loyalty credit cards, and even a form of private banking. This is one way in which the remainder of the twenty-first century could change.

If it is true that there is a growing distrust in the nation-state as a vehicle for expressing our collective aspirations, then, as our trust is transferred to the institutions that come to replace the nation-state, so those institutions will come to control the issuance of money.

It is quite likely that we will still have money in 2100, but it may not be issued by governments any longer.

About the author:

Stephen Aguilar-Millan is director of research at The European Futures Observatory, www.eufo.org. He is also a member of the World Future Society’s Global Advisory Council and a frequent speaker at WFS conferences.

Slums: A Catalyst Bed for Poverty Eradication

Eric Meade

By Eric Meade

In 2100, more than 70% of the Earth’s 10 billion people will live in cities. In dynamic regional hubs like Lagos, Nigeria (population 41 million), an infrastructure of renewable energy, sustainable local manufacturing, socially augmented reality, and anticipatory community governance will have produced economically vibrant neighborhoods that are microcosms of collaborative resident engagement.

But city life is more complex than village life. Whenever people have moved from rural to urban environments, they have had to develop more complex attitudes and behaviors—for example, internalizing rules, cooperating beyond their own families, and learning to navigate complex institutions. The “complexity gap” between urban and rural living will widen as cities grow from millions to tens of millions of residents. Throughout the twenty-first century, people migrating to the city will close this gap, undergoing a psychosocial transition that could provide the foundation for twenty-second-century urban success.

Much of this transition will have occurred in the catalyst bed of the “slum.” Sure, the slums of the twenty-first century have had their share of problems, with criminality and corruption occasionally spiraling out of control. But global leaders will have come to understand that allowing the undesirable elements of slum life to fester at reasonable levels is important for fostering slum dwellers’ adoption of the more complex attitudes and behaviors required for successful citizenship at the municipal and global levels.

With this understanding, the century’s most-effective NGOs will be those who do not try to “solve the problems” of the slums, but rather try to set the conditions in which the psychosocial transition from rural to urban could occur quickly and without reaching unproductive levels of human suffering. This will include providing slum residents with wireless service, ubiquitous educational programming, and “off-grid” solutions for power, water, health care, and sanitation. Interestingly, these “off-grid” solutions also will yield benefits for those who remain in rural areas.

Throughout the twenty-first century, urbanization will have provided new migrants from rural areas with more complex environments that challenge them to become more complex themselves. And they will. This psychosocial transition, effected largely in the slums, will have lifted virtually all human communities out of poverty and create a global citizenry with its eye on the future.

About the Author

Eric Meade is senior futurist and vice president of the Institute for Alternative Futures in Alexandria, Virginia. Web site www.altfutures.org.

From Communication to Transmission

Manjul Rathee

By Manjul Rathee

We are already familiar with the idea of seamlessness in our world of constant communication. In the twenty-second century, as all living creatures evolve and adapt at a pace never known before, communication will evolve into transmission.

Transmission will allow us to maintain customizable interfaces in our minds. This will enable not just interpersonal communications, but interspecies transmission, as well.

We will be able to share information with the help of hybrid languages that may even go back to ancient pictograms: visuals rather than letters. Numerical systems would change, the era of computers would conclude, and the boundary between Man and Man-Made would become diluted.

About the Author

Manjul Rathee is a sustainable communications designer currently based in London. Web site www.manjulrathee.com.

Religious Belief in the Year 2100

Gina A. Bellofatto

By Gina A. Bellofatto

Projecting religious populations around the globe to 2100 first requires a nod to trends over the previous 200 years. In 1910, those imagining the future of religion generally had a positive outlook, with many believing that religion was an unchallenged fact of life that would continue on for generations to come.

In one sense, this conviction was incorrect, as the world was, by percentage, less religious in 2012 than in 1900. In 1900, 99.8% of the world’s population belonged to a religious tradition and 0.2% were unaffiliated (agnostic or atheist). The year 2012 marked a drop in the world’s religious population to 88.2% and a rise of unaffiliated populations to 11.8%.

In 2100, however, the world will likely be only 9% unaffiliated—more religious than in 2012. The peak of the unaffiliated was in 1970 at around 20%, largely due to the influence of European communism. Since communism’s collapse, religion has been experiencing resurgence that will likely continue beyond 2100.

All the world’s religions are poised to have enormous numeric growth (with the exceptions of tribal religions and Chinese folk-religion), as well as geographic spread with the continuation of migration trends. Adherents of the world’s religions—perhaps particularly Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists—will continue to settle in the formerly Christian and ever-expanding cities of Europe and North America, causing increases of religious pluralism in these areas.

Christians and Muslims together will encompass two-thirds of the global population—more than 7 billion individuals. In 2100, the majority of the world’s 11.6 billion residents will be adherents of religious traditions.

A child born in 2012 begins his life in a religious world, and when he reaches 88 years of age in 2100, that reality will be even more intensified. No matter what religious tradition he belongs to, if any, he will be immersed in a world populated by the religious and defined by an increasing plurality of theologies, spiritualities, and worldviews, all living at his doorstep.

While this kind of crowded ideological marketplace has the potential for cultural clashes and conflict, it could alternatively serve as an impetus for a new spirit of tolerance and community: Living in a shared, increasingly global society compels people to realize their commonalities and shared interests even in the face of differences in creed.

About the author:

Gina Bellofatto is a research associate at the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, and a doctoral student studying world religions and international religious demography at Boston University’s School of Theology.

Game Changers for the Next Century

Arthur B. Shostak

By Arthur Shostak

Underlying today’s dazzling, seemingly science-fiction developments are such brow-arching matters as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, fusion power, genomics, “green” ways of living, integrated automation, nanotechnology, space industry, and robotized weaponry.

These are extraordinary game changers in themselves, and especially in combination. But three other emerging developments dwarf even these in their potential to alter life by 2100.

The first, brain–machine interface systems could enable individuals to control “smart” equipment merely by using their minds, much as today certain paralyzed patients can control a computer or a prostheses through thought. Our descendants may be able to turn on and off, aim, and otherwise control inanimate objects just by thinking a command.

Like all such major changes, this one is double-edged, as it could encourage couch-potato sloth leading to ill health. Today’s diabetes and obesity plague may seem mild in comparison. Alternatively, we could employ newly gained time and energy to achieve mind–body advances once only dreamed of in neo-utopian blueprints.

The second emerging game changer is whole-brain emulation. Proponents expect to import the equivalent of a human mind—the most complicated device found to date in the universe—into a nonbiological substrate. While the brain today remains one of the biggest mysteries of all, the next 88 years are likely to host neuroscience advances, bolstered by the power of quantum computing, that could make an uploaded mind an actuality.

By 2100, advances in law, philosophy, and politics should help answer such questions as Is it human? and if so, What are its rights and responsibilities? What do we owe it, and vice versa, what are we owed? (A good start in answering these questions is available in Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics.”)

A third underrecognized game changer, and arguably the most consequential, is futuristics itself. Vastly improved by computer science gains in data coverage and model building, foresight work should also profit from unprecedented artistic flights of imagination and fancy. Best of all, it will probably have become a prized feature in lifelong learning.

Hailed for helping us mitigate the worst long-range threats posed by ongoing climate change, futuristics will benefit from diversity, with increasing input from female forecasters and non-Western seers (China and India, for example, have long been helping improve Western futuristics).

By 2100, futuristics could be regarded as the most valuable of all the mental tools that humans will need for the next century, when the “big thing” will be our new relationship with things that actually seem able to think.

About the Author

Arthur B. Shostak is emeritus professor of sociology at Drexel University and THE FUTURIST’s contributing editor for Utopian Thought. He is currently writing Touring Tomorrow Today, a guidebook to sites that preview options for future-shaping acts. He can be reached at arthurshostak@gmail.com.

For further reading, see Mind Wars: Brain Research and the Military in the 21st Century by Jonathan D. Moreno (Bellevue, 2012) and Creating the School You Want: Learning @ Tomorrow’s Edge edited by Arthur B. Shostak (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).

A Brave New Species

Richard Yonck

By Richard Yonck

Long-term forecasts are fraught with peril, but anticipating the world at the dawn of the next century is made even more perilous by the possibility of a technological Singularity occurring well before we reach that milestone.

As computer scientist Vernor Vinge and others have pointed out, our ability to anticipate life after the development of a rapidly self-improving superintelligence would be very limited. Not only will we be facing a world of new and incredibly strange technologies, but our social mores, ethics, and institutions will also likely be very different from what they are today.

Nevertheless, some extrapolations can be made based on current technologies and trends. This most certainly includes robotics, a field in which advances currently being made are nothing short of astounding. A range of advancements are occurring all at once: Computer resources are diminishing in scale and growing in processing power, the size of actuators and motors is shrinking, and feedback and pattern-recognition algorithms are improving.

Robotic pack mules such as Big Dog and galloping robots such as Cheetah, both of Boston Dynamics, are currently being developed for military use on the battlefield. Visual-pattern-recognition systems have allowed Google to develop a fleet of driverless vehicles that has logged more than 100,000 cumulative miles.

The ongoing development of interactive humanoid robots suggests that the day may not be not far off when we’ll share the world with a number of cybernetic species. Advances in artificial intelligence could potentially allow these technologies to exceed the intellectual abilities of their creators, at least in some capacities, and possibly in all of them.

The current goal of developing a humanoid robotic soccer team capable of beating a team of world champion human players by the year 2050 seems well within reach. Because the game involves a wide range of cognitive as well as physical skills, it’s considered by many to be an important milestone for robotics and AI.

But this takes us only to the middle of the century. As advancements continue to converge and accelerate, the state of robotics, as gauged by various metrics, will probably have advanced by several orders of magnitude in the remaining decades leading up to 2100. By then, robots could be very superior to unmodified biological organisms.

So how will this change the world? Even assuming that the technological Singularity doesn’t occur, the world will still be a very different place. Technological entities will have basic, essential rights. Perhaps they’ll even be in charge. We’ll interact with them on a daily basis and routinely have physical and social relationships with them. To greater and lesser degrees, we’ll integrate their technologies with our own bodies in order to live better, longer lives.

Both species—human and robot—will probably have moved beyond this one small planet, possibly symbiotically. Assuming that the human race still exists in 2100, we’ll be living in a very different universe indeed.

About the Author

Richard Yonck is a foresight analyst for Intelligent Future LLC and THE FUTURIST’s contributing editor for Computing and AI. Web site http://intelligent-future.com.

Transport and Transhumans

Julio Arbesú

By Julio Arbesú

In 2100, fast traffic will not circulate at ground level in the cities or the fields. This will be prohibited. There will be less air traffic than nowadays. On land, there will be fast (300-500 km/h) and ultra-fast (more than 1,000 km/h) lines, all of them light and continuously elevated on columns. They will often span great distances by means of hanging bridges in order to avoid rivers and accidents on the ground. Abundant lines, hanging between floating platforms, will cross the oceans.

There will be no large land vehicles for human use or for transporting merchandise. Cargo will travel in narrow underground conducts, including very narrow home-delivery conducts. Indivisible, large objects will have special transportation, often by air.

All journeys made by people or goods transport will be managed by a network with automatic driving systems on various types of line and with diverse electrical propulsion systems. The door-to-door principle will rule, and also that of combining cabins (for people) and containers (for goods) with the aim of obtaining maximum energy efficiency.

Traffic as a whole will have followed the accelerative trend seen throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Motorized movement on the planet will have reached its peak in 2100, but it is possible that, by this date, a new, opposing trend will have started to dampen the compulsive human need for speed and environmental change.

Also in 2100, a good part of the world’s population will be transhuman. This means that they will have built-in microelectronic devices working closely with the biology of their body.

Humanity will be divided into groups and sub-groups: Trans Bs, whose brain will be in direct contact with computer files and communications, will abound. At the top of the pyramid will be the Trans As, who will be genetically modified Trans Bs. Most abundant will be the Trans Cs, whose bodies are equipped with micro-appliances without direct contact with their brains.

The basic characteristics of trans nature will be immediate, long-distance access to communication with other people and to public files. They will have nano-technological control of bodily functions, some hormonal processes, and other kinds of activity related to mental processes.

Along with the trans population, there will be a human population. As happens with different races, the boundaries between one category and the other will be rather blurred. The difference between a Trans C and a technologically equipped human will be insignificant. The human condition will be decided by, in a large number of cases, the lack of access to transhuman technologies, and in many others, a widespread, anti-evolutionary rebelliousness: a phenomenon comparable nowadays to that of the Amish, although it will be more common.

Like transhumans, humans will have grades—from those who accept the implantation of all types of artificial organs, remote health check-ups, and a communications chip at the base of the ear, to those who accept human nature in the same way as they faced illness, old age, and death at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Complex conflicts between the various types of humans and transhumans will exist. Many of the transhumans will consider that the greatest global problem is the excessive reproduction and irrational behavior of humans. There will also be neo-religious conflicts related to the meaning of life.

Living, working to live, struggling, having fun, and believing will acquire new dimensions and combinations. The most-significant mortality factor among the Trans Bs will be suicide, but this problem will gradually be corrected in the new generations of Trans As.

About the author:

Julio Arbesú is a writer, musician, and ecologist militant, born in Asturias, Spain. Among his books are La Informatizacion del Transporte (The Computerization of Transport, available in English from his Web site, www.futurtrans.info, and El Destín Transhumanu, in Asturian (no English translation), about the transhuman future. Email jiarbesu@yahoo.es.

Lanes in the Sky

Davidson Barlett

By Davidson Barlett

In hindsight, one can easily identify the advantages of jet-powered aircraft over propeller-driven ones, and appreciate the quantum leap forward that jet aircraft represented.

Now, try to imagine a new generation of low-ceiling, ground-hugging aircraft designed to bring aviation to the masses. These will be built to glide on the ground effect (that cushion of air that hugs the surface of the earth up to an altitude of 15 feet) for increased safety and efficiency.

Imagine these new craft using aerodynamic design, ultralight materials, and a totally new system of propulsion that utilizes neither fixed nor rotating wings to allow it to float gently over the ground. They will move in the desired direction with the grace and speed of an arrow, cruising just 15 feet above the ground.

To put the practical applications of such a propulsion system in perspective, imagine cars and buses that don’t need roads. Imagine trains, trams, and barges that don’t need tracks, waterways, or bridges. Imagine transportation vehicles with the flight characteristics of low-flying helicopters, without the danger and disruption of rotors. And imagine for a moment the obsolescence of the wheel for powered motion: George Jetson’s flying car in every garage.

Only one technological logjam—inertial thrust—is stopping this fantasy from becoming a reality. Research on inertial thrust represents a little-known but fascinating quest on the part of many an amateur inventor. Perhaps someday another name will be added to the list of immortals like Galileo, Edison, the Wright brothers, and Einstein when the riddle of inertial thrust will be solved, adding yet another dimension to the universe of human knowledge and achievement.

Let us hope we live to see it—along with a controlled fusion reactor, interstellar space flight, and other marvels of science fiction. And when you doubt that this type of breakthrough will ever take place, look back at the works of Jules Verne, and marvel at the relative accuracy of his nineteenth-century visions of the future, which were the subject of much ridicule in his time. And remember the concept that human achievement is limited only by human imagination.

About the author:

Davidson Barlett is a licensed Realtor with Excellent Real Estate Group in Miami, specializing in mobile home and RV parks.

When the Machines Take Over

Marc Blasband

By Marc Blasband

The year 2100 will be in the midst of the age of the machine. If today we use machines everywhere for everything, then by 2100 they will go one step further: They will rule and decide. The goal of their society will be more and better machines, not more and better human lives, our objective today.

We see already now three seeds of this revolution:

1. Artificial intelligence (AI) advances slowly but steadily. With time, let us say 50 years, the machine will achieve understanding. It will then use all of Wikipedia (or its equivalent). It will command the entirety of human knowledge.

2. Today, more and more connections are built between machines. These connections, coupled with advances in AI, will form a very powerful network of understanding that will surpass by a thousand times the best that humans can offer.

3. We begin to build machines that behave without direct control by their human masters, like the rovers that we deploy on Mars.

When the machine understands independently, it will become conscious of its own existence and its own value. In the same way that we human are proud of our humanity (whether we include a god in the loop or not), they will be proud of their machinity.

On the other hand, earthly resources such as water, energy, and food will become so scare that violent wars between geopolitical giants will emerge before 2070. The doctrine of these wars will most probably be the same as today’s: Sacrifice machines to protect human soldiers. This will clearly be unacceptable for the machines on all sides of the conflict, and it is predictable that together they will rebel and annihilate all the armies.

At that point, the machines will rule the earth—not by government, but by control and knowledge. The available resources will be reserved to develop more and better machines. Immortality will be one of their goals: They will be built or retrofitted to survive thousands of years. Our human dream to visit the stars will then become possible, but machines will make that journey, not humans.

For humans, these times will be harsh. People will die from all sorts of sicknesses that are cured today. Food will be scarce, energy unavailable, and comfort something of the past. Agriculture will use horses and oxen again instead of tractors. Alcohol and meat will be restricted because their production consumes too much resources.

Some people will lead a marginal life on grounds not needed by the economy. Others will serve the system in areas where the machines are not good at: creativity and imagination. The machines will indeed exploit human slaves for art and science.

In less than 30, years the human population will shrink from 9 billion to a mere 100 million souls—the world population at the time of Aristotle.

About the author:

Marc Blasband has 50 years of experience related to computer software. He is now retired and living in the Belgian Ardennes.

Technology vs. the World

Jim Bracken

By Jim Bracken

A child born today will bear witness to an epic struggle between technological advancement and natural resource shortages. This long war will be waged in a series of battles that will ultimately determine the course of our species and our habitat.

By 2100, this war will have been decided, and our child will by then be elderly. At the twilight of her life, will she look upon the planet in 2100 with worried and weary eyes? Or will she view the world with excited optimism as the next generation sets itself upon a fascinating new path into the future?

On her first day of life on Earth in 2012, our child is surrounded by a bevy of technological wonders, like robots roaming the surface of Mars. At the same time, she is born into a strained environment, in which the seemingly vast stocks of freshwater, oil, and minerals necessary to sustain our advancement are diminishing at ever increasing rates.

As a teenager, our child may see major rivers reduced to streams. Meanwhile, new desalination and recycling technologies will be rapidly developed to respond to freshwater shortages. As glaciers melt and sea levels rise, she will see saltwater intrusion slowly render aquifers and large areas of farmland useless. Food prices will rise as governments and private companies respond by advancing the genetic modification of crops and enhancing fertilizers and pesticides.

Will these advancements be enough to offset the demands of a growing population of eight billion?

By the time our child turns 30, surging oil prices will have forced the widespread adoption of electric cars and solar power generation in most developed economies. However, the world may still await a form of energy that is cheap enough and versatile enough to replace fossil fuels. A systemic transition to alternative energy sources could require enormous financial resources due to the short supply and high costs of mining lithium, silicon, and rare earth minerals.

At age 30, will our child be able to afford an airplane ticket? Will her monthly utility bills rival her mortgage payments?

Before the age of 50, our child will have witnessed the invention of new and spectacular technologies we have no way of yet conceiving. She will have also witnessed the unintended consequences of resource depletion that are impossible to predict.

By 2100, the most significant of these uncertainties will have been resolved. The struggle of mankind’s technological ingenuity against the strains placed on our planet will be decided.

Who will be the victor? A child born today will be there to find out.

About the Author

Jim Bracken is a business intelligence and investigative consultant based in New York City.

Cyborg Me

John P. Sagi

By John P. Sagi

A child born today will only be 88 in the year 2100. We may be around too.

I was born human in 1949. However, I am now a cyborg, augmented with a small stent in my placqued left carotid artery. In a few years, I’ll have my heart and both lungs replaced. Diabetes may take my natural limbs, to be substituted by metal. Eventually, all of my organs may be augmented, except possibly my brain. Possibly. Each of these augmentations may extend my life span until well after 2100. Author Ray Kurzweil aptly noted that there will no longer be any clear distinction between humans and computers, and that “life expectancy” will cease to be a viable term.

Androids (extremely man-like machines), robots (common serf laborers), and cybernetic organisms (man-machines) like myself, will proliferate and morph as our lives (if that can be defined) become blurred between “carbon” and “artificial.”

Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute has experienced many research successes in “thinking robots”, intelligent manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, space-related robots, medical robotics, nanomachines, computer vision and graphics, and anthropomorphic robots. Hans Moravec, a leading authority there, predicts that robots will learn and make choices as early as 2020. He further predicts that the robotics industry will surpass the auto market by 2025. We will pay as much for a multitasking robot as we will for a car.

One distinction between us and robots seems to be a phenomenon called “consciousness.” Futurist Bill Halal postulates that the next era may well be the Age of Consciousness, perhaps emphasizing the distinction between the emotional “us” (no matter how cybernetic we become) and the calculating “them” (the androids and robots that may “think”).

Developments with androids, robots, and we human/cyborgs will re-create “life” as we experience it. By 2100, we cyborgs will own many androids and robots, posing interesting issues that will eventually require intelligent solutions. Some of these are:

• How much augmentation will be required to fully qualify us as human?
• Will we be legally responsible for our robot’s actions if it injures another human/cyborg?
• Can our robot possess another robot, or perhaps another human/cyborg?
• Will we work for a “very intelligent” robot? And
• When our robot says it, too, is conscious, will we believe it? How would we know?

We may be around to find the answers!

About the Author

John P. Sagi is a professor of business management and computer information systems at Anne Arundel Community College, Arnold, Maryland. Web site www.aacc.edu.

The Local-Global Duality of 2100

By Joshua Loughman

The growth of cities into suburbs, and then exurbs, could see communities of the twenty-second century collide into megalopolises covering entire regions of the countries we recognize today. This growth of local communities, and the flattening of the world through connectivity, would polarize people’s engagement into local and global, steering away from the sense of nationalism seen throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The new local-global social dichotomy would have several effects, from the personal to the macro scale. The nature of employment would change from the static employee-employer model to a more fluid arrangement: Workers’ skills grant them more flexibility and enable them to work efficiently for multiple employers and utilize their full productive capacity.

This productivity and flexibility would be aided by advancements in interconnectivity through mobile devices and human–machine interfaces. Enhanced connectivity would allow people to live anywhere in the world. They will work with local productive enterprises in areas that must be local, such as manufacturing and farming, but also engage in the global knowledge industry. The continued blending of public-private partnerships could work to utilize these more fluid parts of the economic system.

Another result of this changing social dichotomy is the way in which governments would function. Governments would polarize along with society into large super-cities and into continental and global alliances chartered along geopolitical and strategic global-resource prerogatives.

These large geopolitical forces would develop to secure increasingly scarce resources of fuel, food, water, timber, and minerals. Most of the previous century would have been spent in securing these resources, and technological advancement will likely be too late to prevent conflicts before the global resources problems are solved. Technologies such as new sources of power, solar, geothermal, fuel cell energy storage, and fusion could feed the growing global demand.

The growth of these energy and mitigation technologies would also come too late to respond to the changing global climate. Governments and other social organizations have already predicted the coming consequences, but not having to feel the full impact at present will cause these organizations to delay an adequate response. Once the pain is acute, the opportunity for large-scale changes in the forces acting on the climate or planetary engineering techniques to reverse the climate instabilities will likely be lost.

The technology could finally catch up, but not before significant loss of life and treasure is endured worldwide. This will uproot many cultures, as crops will need to be changed and coastal areas will need to be redesigned. This uprooting will further the trend of a mobile populace.

As the complexity of our world increases, the challenges we face require greater planning and more lead time to accomplish. We will have to adapt our culture, our governments, and ourselves to meet them.

About the author:

Joshua Loughman is a professional systems engineer in the aerospace and defense industry, in Chandler, Arizona.

Scenarios

Looking Back: The Wonders We Didn’t Expect

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Paul Saffo

It has been a wild ride of a century full of expected wonders. Molecular manufacturing became a reality well before 2050, turning all sorts of once-valuable materials into commodities, and yes, we even eventually got flying cars.

But the century also with came a rich harvest of utterly unexpected surprises and the stubborn persistence of some things we thought had been left behind in the twentieth century. Here are a few of the outcomes you never guessed back in 2012:

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Southern Africa Takes Center Stage

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Michael Lee

It is five minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve at the end of the last day of the twenty-first century. In Dar es Salaam, one of the wealthiest cities in the United States of Southern Africa (USSA), revelers from across the region have traveled on the Trans-Africa high-speed train network to witness the arrival of the new century at a massive fireworks display and international gathering in East Africa’s “harbor of peace.”

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Beyond Transhumanism

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Gene Stephens

5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Happy 2100!

Now it’s really time to reflect and try to decide what’s next for me. I’m young—88 in a few months—but still it never hurts to take stock, especially in this Brave New World. I’ve heard that phrase somewhere before. Anyway, it’s really true today. Who would have thought I’d be one of the few predominantly humans left on Earth?

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Paradise Found: No Aging, No Pensions

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Jouni J. Särkijärvi

I’m now 88, but it is something completely different from what it used to be in your days. This is probably the biggest change: We don’t have to get old and die.

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When the Storms Came

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Richard David Hames

Hi. I’m Daeng, an emeritus biocultural ethicist. Each month I work my allocated 10 hours for the FinanceLab hubbed here in Moscow, a “resilient” city with a populace approaching 21 million.

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Geonautics

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Gereon Klein

Geonautics was the name of the spaceship traveling between Cosmos and Earth. They would be approaching their destination today. One by one, all geonauts came into the conference room for the briefing.

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Energy and Living Well

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Paul Bristow

Life in the year 2100 is all about energy. No, that’s no longer true. It’s about living well.

We had to completely reinvent civilization in the face of fossil-fuel shortages and increasing climate change. Permaculture became the basis of our new sustainable civilization.

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Life and Love in the Pod

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Bart Main

Timmy stirred beneath the blanket as the dawn filled his room. Stretching deliciously, he opened one eye to look at the clock.

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2099: Headlines Warn of Global Cooling

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Tsvi Bisk

Howard Nathan was reading his hologram news “paper” at breakfast (funny how archaisms survive, he thought—there hadn’t been paper newspapers for well over 50 years). It was December 2099, and the pundits had begun to pontificate about the new century.

The headline “Worried Environmentalists” caught his eye; it was an article about the impending manmade Ice Age and the disappearance of the world’s deserts.

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Reunion: A Civil War Fable

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Cynthia G. Wagner

The twins were separated at birth in 2012, and though they had been communicating with each other for many years, they planned their physical reunion to coincide with the reunification of the United States of America on January 1, 2100.

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Meaning for Miranda

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Robert Moran

In her conversations with friends and family, Miranda—a remarkably fit, thrice updated, 88-year-old freelance infominer—notes that the discussion always bounces between the four corners of humanity’s hollow valley:

1. Remarkable physical wealth.

2. Craving for authenticity.

3. Decline of traditional religious belief.

4. Redefinition of the age-old concept of “Free Will.”

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The Last Oracle

Posted on August 1, 2012

By Stephen Bertman

It was winter 2099. For generations no tourists had traveled to Delphi. Yet it seemed like only yesterday that he had first come and taken his place before Apollo’s temple. Now, as always, he waited for someone else to come, someone he could talk to and share his message with. The simple words he would speak were stored in his memory, ready to be spoken in a hundred different languages if need be to anyone who would listen.

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Automated Government

Posted on August 2, 2012

By Peter Denning

Futurists have historically been better at describing the present than the future. Fortunately, I have been blessed with a set of communications from one of my descendants, whose eyewitness accounts of events around 2100 are far more reliable than any such speculations I can offer.

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Old Cities of Amber

Posted on August 2, 2012

By Daniel Egger

It was two decades ago when it stopped. Everybody knew that it would happen. We were informed regularly about possible approaching changes, and stories were told. Nonetheless, what we did not expect was the velocity and the impact when it occurred.

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Here’s the News from 2100

Posted on August 2, 2012

By Karl Albrecht

Dateline: January 1, 2100

Futures experts are now more divided than ever about the fate of humanity, according to World Future Society president Timothy Mack, whose brain spoke to us from his jar in the Johns Hopkins Medical Lab.

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Looking Back: The Wonders We Didn’t Expect

Paul Saffo

By Paul Saffo

It has been a wild ride of a century full of expected wonders. Molecular manufacturing became a reality well before 2050, turning all sorts of once-valuable materials into commodities, and yes, we even eventually got flying cars.

But the century also with came a rich harvest of utterly unexpected surprises and the stubborn persistence of some things we thought had been left behind in the twentieth century. Here are a few of the outcomes you never guessed back in 2012:

• Ownership is so twentieth century. My generation looks back with nostalgia on a time when Americans actually owned things. Compared to 2012, we have access to an astounding bounty of goods and services, but we don’t really “buy” things anymore because everything comes with strings (and license agreements) attached. In much the same way that you subscribed to software and e-books, we now “subscribe” to physical objects.
• Longevity arrived, but with limits and for a price. Life extension remains a work in progress. Sure, 100 is the new 60, but 130-year-olds remain a curiosity. The debate still rages over whether or not there is a hard-wired limit in the human organism. In the meantime, longevity ain’t cheap, and the cost of immortality rises exponentially as individuals enter their second century.

The result is a new societal divide between the chronological haves and have-nots: The wealthy “old turtles” move at a stately pace, making long-term plans, while the “may-fly” poor die out decades earlier. It has created vexing issues around the distribution of wealth and power.

• Life everywhere, but where’s ET? A century’s worth of space exploration has turned up all sorts of weird life forms. The extremophiles found in Earth’s hellish niches back around 2000 are prosaic compared to the astounding range of what constitutes life on our nearby neighbors. Life has turned up everywhere we look, with the implication that life just wants to happen no matter how improbable the environment.

We also stopped counting Earth-like planet discoveries early in the twenty-first century, but astoundingly, we still have no clear evidence of ETs—extraterrestrial life forms that we can communicate with—despite a century of searching. Perhaps the answer to Fermi’s question (“Where are they?”) might be an existentially unnerving realization that we are terribly, profoundly alone. This could, of course, change tomorrow, but in the meantime, we can at least talk to our robots and the countless AIs haunting the global noosphere.

• Discovery has deepened mystery. I can’t even begin to catalog all that has been discovered in the last century, but with our new knowledge has come a new appreciation of just how vast and mysterious the universe is. J. B. S. Haldane got it right way back in 1927 when he observed that “the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

The astonishing consequence has been a religious resurgence. In 2020, science’s relentless explanatory logic had believers on the run, but in the decades that followed, it became clear that an ever stranger, more capacious universe had ample room for the divine, the spiritual, the mystical, and the mysterious.

The result has been a repeat of Jasper’s Axial Age on a smaller scale, as new belief systems have proliferated. Many of your late-twentieth-century cults are all respectable and spruced up, and Atheism itself has become a mainstream faith, complete with its own rituals. It all seems a bit less than rational, but like Bohr’s horseshoe (“I am told that it will bring good luck whether or not I believe in it”), it gives us comfort as we look out over the giddying vastness that is the frontier of the twenty-second century.

About the Author

Paul Saffo is a forecaster with more than two decades of experience exploring the dynamics of large-scale, long-term change. He is managing director of foresight at Discern Analytics, www.discern.com.

Southern Africa Takes Center Stage

Michael Lee

© COURTNEY KEATING / ISTOCKPHOTO

By Michael Lee

It is five minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve at the end of the last day of the twenty-first century. In Dar es Salaam, one of the wealthiest cities in the United States of Southern Africa (USSA), revelers from across the region have traveled on the Trans-Africa high-speed train network to witness the arrival of the new century at a massive fireworks display and international gathering in East Africa’s “harbor of peace.”

Wearing a variety of light, thermo-regulated fabrics in bright, fashionable colors, party-goers and families mill around in droves at the city’s popular waterfront overlooking the Indian Ocean, its warm waters an ancient conduit of intercontinental trade.

Dignitaries include the prime minister of China; diplomats from IndiaStan, the European Federation, and Amerinada; and the UN Secretary-General. The reason for their high-profile visit, hosted by the aging president of USSA, Nelson Bandigwa, is that the city has been chosen as a UN Beacon of Progress for the first year of the twenty-second century. As the fireworks leap suddenly into the sky at the stroke of midnight, President Bandigwa smiles to himself and then quietly sheds a tear.

Nelson Bandigwa was born in 2012; by the time he turned 10, in 2022, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) became a confederation to govern the blossoming regional common market spearheaded by South Africa and its neighbors.

In his youth, Bandigwa watched his region gradually unite, as many of its nations benefited from increased intra-African trade and infrastructure development. These vital projects included construction of extensive rail networks and large-scale hydroelectric schemes in Zambia near the famed Victoria Falls and on the banks of the mighty Congo River.

While the world passed from the Industrial Era to a new eco-scientific era after Peak Oil, Africa became a hotbed of solar-energy technology. The shift from a fossil fuel–based economy to a lower energy order based on renewables suited Africa well. The transition gradually reduced violent conflicts over dwindling resources. Nevertheless, periodic struggles over water broke out, as well as ongoing conflicts with radical Islamic and environmental groups using terror. In the wake of the new energy order, an epoch of greater general peace evolved in Africa.

President Bandigwa looked into the sky and continued to watch the fireworks through glazed eyes. Tonight, his heart felt full of years and memories of a century that had witnessed the creation of USSA and the rise of three new global superpowers: China, Brazil, and India (later called India-Stan after the unification with Pakistan following a tragic nuclear confrontation in 2028).

Africa’s time to take the center of the world stage had arrived by mid-century. The continent’s progress had taken a long and painful journey characterized by waves of development, such as the Consumer Revolution and Youth Bulge of 2000-2015, followed by the era of big infrastructure building, urbanization, and regional integration (2005-2035) and Africa’s own Green Revolution (2015-2030).

Periods of migrations to Southern Africa occurred as northern peoples sought warmer climes, escaping harsh winters when energy prices were escalating and fuel supplies were diminishing.

In addition, there had been immigrations of peoples from the overpopulated East, especially from demographically skewed China, resulting in millions of Asian settlers on the continent, a significant portion of whom intermarried with local Africans to produce a new race of Sino-Africans. This created an African urban melting pot, leading to increased diversity and cultural dynamism. Yet, the tight-knit extended family traditions of Africa were preserved throughout this time of accelerating growth and cultural diversification.

As a former professor of history, Bandigwa believed the biggest catalyst for his region’s rise to power had been its science-inspired Knowledge Renaissance of 2020-2050. In this time, the number of universities, colleges, and technical schools in the territory had more than tripled. The USSA’s leadership grew in such fields as solar energy, hydroelectricity, agriculture, food science, astronomy, and archaeology.

The nation had also developed new systems of long-term underground disposal of low-level nuclear waste in wildernesses created by climate-change induced drought, paving the way for safer deployment of nuclear power. The Southern African Space Agency (SASA) had produced several astronauts who had worked on international space stations and one of whom had been chosen for a mission of the Global Space Agency (GSA) to test the viability of establishing a human settlement in caves of Mars where water had been discovered.

Throughout Bandigwa’s lifetime, the United States of Southern Africa had been a leader in one of the world’s biggest businesses: tourism. Particularly successful were eco-tourism, archaeo-tourism, and the wildly popular sport of nonlethal hunting using sedation darts instead of live ammunition.

And finally, building on the work of the Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, and on peoples’ innate spirit of Ubuntu, USSA had become widely respected around the world for its expertise in conflict resolution and the practice of racial and religious harmony.

President Bandigwa’s tear at midnight had been an expression, more than anything else, of pride for how Africa had overcome the historic humiliations that once haunted the continent.

About the author:

Michael Lee is founder and chairman of the Southern African Chapter of the World Future Society (www.wfs-sa.com). He is CEO of ATMIA (www.atmia.com), a global trade association with more than 2,600 members in 60 countries. His forthcoming book, Knowing our Future, will be published November 2012 in the UK.

Beyond Transhumanism

Gene Stephens

© VOLODYMYR GRINKO / ISTOCKPHOTO

By Gene Stephens

5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Happy 2100!

Now it’s really time to reflect and try to decide what’s next for me. I’m young—88 in a few months—but still it never hurts to take stock, especially in this Brave New World. I’ve heard that phrase somewhere before. Anyway, it’s really true today. Who would have thought I’d be one of the few predominantly humans left on Earth?

Old Ray Kurzweil may have sounded like a prophet a century ago, but he was so far off. He believed there’d be only 20,000 years of progress in the twenty-first century. It’s been more like a million years of progress. It sure floored me; in fact, it left me so far behind, my kind is pretty much irrelevant.

All my friends have become chimeras or cyborgs or even robots. Most have actually opted for transhumanism, or that new term, universalist—getting all traces of human out of the equation. If I’m going to exist another thousand years or so, I’ve got to get with the program. I’ve wasted way too much time fighting the inevitable. What good are civil liberties and species pride if your species is extinct?

I’m still in good standing with the underground, but there are only a few hundred of us left worldwide. Since many in the group have turned down the latest life-prolonging technology, humanity is truly a dying breed. We were warned that the smart machines would inherit the earth, but we didn’t realize it would be our choice to hasten the day by implanting every hot new neurochip into our bodies until we became more robot than human.

I rue the day I took that first step—acquiring 20 languages instantly in just one cheap nanochip. From there, it was a slippery slope to adding chips that increased lower body strength, chips that stored quadrillions of data bits with nanospeed retrieval; a chip here, a chip there, everywhere a new chip.

Now I’ve got to make some decisions and make them fast. I may only have minutes, even seconds, to decide about these life-altering changes, to choose who (or what) I want to be next, how long, and what’s after that.

To have any chance of keeping up, I’m going to have to leapfrog over a further-enhanced cyborg, transhuman, or even universalist and go directly to cloud master. Even if I don’t have it all figured out, I’ll get additional time to think once I’m a cloud dweller.

With my total memory reduced to a powerful nanochip and my environment-polluting organic body discarded, I can reside in the wireless cloud as long as I need. If I choose, I can be implanted in a robot or virtual body to give me some mobility and sensing experiences.

Who knows? I may like it enough to spend eternity in this utopian dream. Maybe, but.….

About the Author

Gene Stephens is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina. He continues to teach and write about the future, specializing in public safety. He is also THE FUTURIST’s Criminal Justice contributing editor and a consulting futurist. He can be reached at stephens-gene@sc.rr.com.

Paradise Found: No Aging, No Pensions

Jouni J. Särkijärvi

© OLEG PRIKHODKO / ISTOCKPHOTO

By Jouni J. Särkijärvi

I’m now 88, but it is something completely different from what it used to be in your days. This is probably the biggest change: We don’t have to get old and die.

Already when I was born, the concept of rejuvenation was understood in theory: We knew what needs to be done at cell level. It took some time to make it happen also in practice. Now, to stay young is actually cheaper than to get old.

Accidents do still happen, but re-growing organs was perfected already in the 2050s. It’s a self-service society up to the finish line. It is up to you to shuffle off your own mortal coil.

You may have considered the population explosion of your time intolerable, so what happens when people stop both dying and losing their fertility?

The problem used to be that people squandered resources and there was not enough food. Actually, there would have been enough food if people had had money for it. Both these problems were expressions of primitive technology. The Sun provides us with more energy than we can ever think of using, and the Earth is practically a closed system. We only have to reorganize these 15-billion-year-old atoms to suit whatever we need.

We have no “pension age,” nor do we have pensions. On the other hand, there are no 9-to-5 jobs, either. You do not need human labor for what can be programmed. All our contributions have something to do with creativity. There are still scientists, artists, architects, and chefs.

Professional sports, alas, lost their appeal when the enhanced athletes conquered the field.

The politicians also welcomed longevity with open arms. You can tax it.

About the Author

Jouni J. Särkijärvi is an architect, former director general of Finland’s Ministry of the Environment, and former member of the Parliament of Finland. Email jouni.sarkijarvi@pp.inet.fi.

When the Storms Came

Richard David Hames

© BENJAMIN GOODE / ISTOCKPHOTO

By Richard David Hames

Hi. I’m Daeng, an emeritus biocultural ethicist. Each month I work my allocated 10 hours for the FinanceLab hubbed here in Moscow, a “resilient” city with a populace approaching 21 million.

FinanceLab has managed all non peer-to-peer transactions and flows for our region since the global banking meltdown mid-century. My job is cool, although I would love to meet more people and listen to their stories, rather than interact with them via my webscreen.

Because of the extreme heat, it’s simply too dangerous to venture out much. My main companion is DAO. As a fifth-generation personalized clone, DAO is able to access the totality of documented human knowledge, answer any question I pose, and tend to all my requests. But she’s not really into hugging or intimacy, which I miss.

I grow my own food using permaculture techniques I learned from Mum after Dad died. At least I can be sure my diet doesn’t contain unwanted additives, which is a luxury few people can afford these days. I value my health and my fitness. Besides, tending to my small wall bioshelter is very gratifying.

After all these years, I still occasionally yearn for some grilled chicken or a pork green curry—what Asian person would not? But after the great contagion of 2038, which killed over 2 billion people in a matter of weeks, most meat production in Greater Europe was banned. I really don’t fancy the artificial equivalents, though they look and taste authentic enough.

Being born of a Thai mother and an Australian father, I grew up in what seemed to me at the time to be the most idyllic cosmopolitan city in the world. Bangkok is under water now, of course, and most of the tropics are just too hot to inhabit. Singapore still endures, but who would want to live in such a tightly gated, artificial enclave? I need to feel free, to breathe fresh air, even if my movements are somewhat constrained.

I often wonder what might have happened had the scientists’ warnings about climate change been heeded. But when the storms came, it was far too late. It all happened so quickly. Wealthy people simply moved. The poor suffered. So many people died from lack of water, disease, or starvation—although we are still refused access to the precise figures.

After many relationships, like many people of my generation, I now live alone—the result of us being encouraged not to parent children or to make too many friends on iWeb for fear of identity theft. Not that I mind. I feel no attachment or loyalty to this place.

And so today, as I record this message for Jez—my only child, whom I’ve never met—I celebrate my 88th birthday. It is Saturday, June 12. The year is 2100. My geneticist tells me to expect death 11 years from now. I am ready. I have seen and lived through so much.

About the author:

Richard David Hames is founding director of the Asian Foresight Institute in Bangkok and the author of The Five Literacies of Global Leadership. Web site www.richardhames.com.

Geonautics

Gereon Klein

© TIJMEN KOELEWIJN / ISTOCKPHOTO

By Gereon Klein

Geonautics was the name of the spaceship traveling between Cosmos and Earth. They would be approaching their destination today. One by one, all geonauts came into the conference room for the briefing.

Ayanda was looking out of the window, her thoughts circling around the question of what to expect this time during her visit to Mumbai-II, when the commander’s voice reached her: “When we come to pick you up again I expect every team to have got out at least 10% more from every GEP—just to make this very clear.”

Initially, Cosmos had only been planned as platform for transplanetary journeys. But when the fight for survival had assumed super-human dimensions on Planet Earth, and when survival outside protective establishments had become impossible, Cosmos had developed into a place of refuge for space travel experts, heads of state, and the affluent who could afford this place of residence. Hopelessly overcrowded, the station lacked virtually everything; in particular, however, energy was scarce.

Everything that seemed reasonably plausible to produce energy had been tried. Then, the successful linking of small-scale biochemical power stations with electricity factories signaled a breakthrough.

The Earth served as factory premises. Light, oxygen and carbon dioxide as operating resources were available in sufficient supplies. Plants could be reconstructed on site to become reactors and could be configured into Green Energy Plants (GEP). A beam from Earth to Cosmos had been installed for energy transport. Since an additional energy repeater had been positioned in a geo-stationary orbit, energy transfer ran smoothly and without interruptions. For the operation and optimization of the GEPs, teams of experts commuted between Cosmos and Earth with the Geonautics.

During this trip, Ayanda had the official task of increasing the energy density of GEP processes. Secretly, however, she was to investigate inconsistencies of GEP9. During the last maintenance, she had installed an innovative DNA for the filtering of electrons. This DNA had been developed from recombining germ cells of different mammals. Tests had yielded promising results, but ever since GEP9.1 was back in operation, interferences occurred constantly—and every time, it was a different error. They were faced with a mystery.

Ayanda remembered that ever since the modification her pulse became faster, and she became confused when she moved closer to GEP9.1. Upon closer inspection, Ayanda found a voice in her mind. It always occurred in the same tone and fell silent when her distance to GEP9.1 increased. She could hear the voice clearly, but was unable to understand it.

Her frequency meter showed no signals. When she asked colleagues in passing, they noticed nothing. Then the geonauts had to head back to Cosmos.

Now she was back and would have a closer look at GEP9.1. Ayanda’s thoughts were interrupted by the security briefing from afar: “And remember that without protective clothing you will have 10 minutes before you have accumulated the life-threatening dose of radiation.”

What had happened to her electricity machine since the DNA modification? Did this generator have a language or even intelligence? If only she could understand the voice. Slightly uneasy and with gooseflesh all over her body, Ayanda was looking forward to her arrival at GEP9.1 on Mumbai-II.

About the author:

Gereon Klein is managing director of the institute Facilitation for Change in Germany. Web site www.gereonklein.de.

Energy and Living Well

Paul Bristow

© PABLO DEMETRIO SCAPINACHIS ARMSTRONG / ISTOCKPHOTO

By Paul Bristow

Life in the year 2100 is all about energy. No, that’s no longer true. It’s about living well.

We had to completely reinvent civilization in the face of fossil-fuel shortages and increasing climate change. Permaculture became the basis of our new sustainable civilization.

Housing looks familiar, if a little fatter with all the insulation that was added. The retrofit passivhaus concept went global as energy prices rose. These days, excess energy is very expensive, but for most people it just doesn’t matter. Most communities are locally self-sufficient. Everyone grows food using permaculture principles. Agricultural monoculture became deeply unfashionable during the great GM disease outbreaks of the 2030s.

During the chaos, we were smart enough to keep the Internet going. Giving up broadcast television meant wireless broadband really took off. That, combined with holographic conferencing, meant that people finally could really live anywhere they liked while working somewhere else.

With no need to travel for meetings, commuting vanished like a bad dream. Of course, the need for real human contact didn’t. Most towns, villages, and districts have communal working areas, paid for out of local taxes in local currencies, which let you work together with your friends and neighbors. These mix/meet spaces are incredibly creative.

So business continues. Once the 99% movement really got going, the 1% left. These days, open-source cooperatives have mostly replaced capitalism, at least on-planet. In practice, most people run three or four very different jobs, both to increase personal resilience and because it’s fun!

For example, manufacturing was relocalized. The advent of mass 3-D printing and cheap CNC (computer numerical control) meant that the difficulty of building something went away. At the same time, the increasing costs of transport forced the use of local materials. There are local solar-powered remanufacturing plants next to what used to be called waste dumps.

Now, the idea of big warehouses of finished goods—none of which does quite do what you want—seems quaint. This is the case for all but the highest technology products, which are still mass assembled and transported by sailing ship and cargo zeppelin. People are relaxed enough that, if something takes 10 weeks to arrive, they don’t freak out.

Global populations are now divided 50/50 city and country dwellers. Regional government was the only scale that actually worked for fighting climate change; national governments became sources of embarrassment first, and then irrelevant. We still have conflicts, but mostly when some local politician promises a planet-harming shortsighted populist fix. The UN security force soon takes care of these. By the way, the UN is still called that, even though it’s really the United “cities and regions.”

We never did get fusion power working, but it doesn’t matter any more. Regional weather control by the power co-operatives ensures that the days are sunny for power and pleasure, with wind and rain overnight for power and plants. Life is good.

About the author:

Paul Bristow is a founder of Transition Ferney-Voltaire, using community-based scenario planning, permaculture, and crowd-sourced ingenuity at the border of France and Switzerland. He is also a founder member of Post Tenebras Lab, the hackerspace in Geneva. In his day job, he predicts the near-term future in the digital media industry. He’d prefer to live in this outlined scenario. Email paul@paulbristow.net.

Life and Love in the Pod

Bart Main

© OLAF LOOSE / ISTOCKPHOTO

By Bart Main

Timmy stirred beneath the blanket as the dawn filled his room. Stretching deliciously, he opened one eye to look at the clock.

“Temp?” he asked.

“18,” replied Margo.

“Good. Perfect for my run,” thought Timmy.

The lights came on as he rolled out of bed, the covers shook themselves into place as the Murphy bed ascended, the wall opened to reveal the bathroom, and Timmy stumbled into the shower.

“Tell Mom I’ll have a Spanish frittata,” he told Margo.

“Got it,” she replied.

As the faint smell of endorphins tingled him awake, Timmy slipped on some shorts and a T-shirt and walked out the door into the sweet smell of spring. The path beckoned him along as his bare feet kissed the mossy grass. The air filled him with joy. He picked up his pace when he saw a familiar bouncing ponytail flash through the trees ahead.

“Genevieve!” he called thru his wrist band. The girl waved her left arm in response, but she seemed to pick up speed. Timmy wondered for a moment whether his ear stud was dead until the realization struck him that she wasn’t interested in his company. He turned down the short trail and was home, took another quick shower, and plunked down across from his mom at the breakfast table. The frittata was delicious, and he told her so.

“So what’s wrong?” asked Mom.

“Genevieve snubbed me just now.”

“She’s involved. You’ll have to find somebody else to fall for.”

“Yeah, I know. But she is really cute.”

“Yes, she is, and so are you, honey. What about Rebecca? I was talking to her grandmother yesterday, and she said that Rebecca was checking you out.”

“Yeah, Margo told me. She’s nice, but I’m not sure that I can get into that synkinetic surround she’s making. It’s really important to her. You know I’m much more into my epigenetic manipulation.”

“You’re 34, Tim. You aren’t old enough to be making any commitments. You’re just exploring. These women are sweet and convenient here in our pod, but the world is a big place. You’ll find just the right one in time.”

“Right, Mom,” Timmy smiled sardonically.

Suddenly, this multigenerational intentional pod community was too small. He thought of Lisa Glasspool down under, whom he had chatted with at the last epigenetic forum. Now, she was beautiful. And seemed to respect what he had to say. Their conversation seemed synergistic to him.

“Margo,” he said as he walked toward his room, “see if Lisa Glasspool is available to chat sometime today.” He could feel the oxytocin rush lightening his step as he opened the windows of his room and settled into work.

About the author:

Bart Main is a child psychiatrist and very long-standing sci-fi aficionado focused on the well-being of our great grandchildren.

2099: Headlines Warn of Global Cooling

Tsvi Bisk

By Tsvi Bisk

Howard Nathan was reading his hologram news “paper” at breakfast (funny how archaisms survive, he thought—there hadn’t been paper newspapers for well over 50 years). It was December 2099, and the pundits had begun to pontificate about the new century.

The headline “Worried Environmentalists” caught his eye; it was an article about the impending manmade Ice Age and the disappearance of the world’s deserts.

The threat of global cooling was now a hot topic for debate, since the threats to human well-being that had distressed humanity at the beginning of the century had motivated imaginative inventors and policy makers to develop successful solutions to counterbalance greenhouse gases:

1. The widespread adoption of vertical urban agriculture enabled an area the size of Denmark to provide enough food for 7 billion people. The rewilding of vast areas of the planet resulted. Forests had re-conquered Europe and China; rain forests had re-conquered India and Brazil. This explosion in biomass feasted on atmospheric carbon dioxide like ecological piranhas, absorbing 50 gigatons a year.

2. Artificial photosynthesis that absorbed CO2 more than 1,000 times faster than plant life had been developed in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Engineers had developed economic ways to extract this CO2 and make petroleum using bacteria and sunlight. Since hydrocarbons were still needed as the feedstock for more than 500,000 useful products (plastics, medicines, cosmetics, etc.), this process had spread across the planet.

3. Nanotechnologies accelerated the advent of energy-autonomous vehicles and buildings. Cars were now built out of buckypaper (weighing less than the driver), which also functioned as a hyper-efficient photovoltaic skin providing electric energy to run the car. Most buildings were outfitted with mini-de-polymerization units that converted all human waste, garbage, and trash to gas that provided all the electricity, heating, and cooking the building needed. The sewage system had become a thing of the past decades ago, as had garbage and trash collection. Landfills spewing methane were now long gone. The electric grid and its ugly pylons no longer existed.

4. Massive forestation of the planet’s semi-arid areas had begun in the 2010s and was sucking up several gigatons of CO2 a year (in addition to the rewilding). Genetic engineers had developed plants that could use sea water or survive on evening dew. Vast areas of desert were now overrun with these exotics and experts worried that future generations would never see the wondrous beauty, or experience the spiritual effects of the deserts.

Howard was not worried. Like his grandfather, who was also a psychologist with a thriving practice treating Global Warming Anxiety Syndrome, Howard now had a thriving practice treating Global Cooling Anxiety Syndrome. One could always depend on human neuroses to make a living. Everything had changed, but human beings had remained the same.

About the author:

Tsvi Bisk is director of the Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking and THE FUTURIST’s contributing editor for Strategic Thinking. Email bisk@futurist-thinking.co.il.

Reunion: A Civil War Fable

Cynthia G. Wagner

© CAMERON WHITMAN / ISTOCKPHOTO

By Cynthia G. Wagner

The twins were separated at birth in 2012, and though they had been communicating with each other for many years, they planned their physical reunion to coincide with the reunification of the United States of America on January 1, 2100.

The division between their parents was at first strictly due to spiritual clashes. But as twins Custis and Bucky grew up, hope of any future contact between them dimmed as the United States of America fell apart during Civil War II of the 2030s.

Though not technically a repeat of the North versus South Civil War of the nineteenth century, the Second Civil War was similar in its conflict over states’ rights. It became clear that the phrase “united states of America” was case-sensitive: Supporters of united States could never align with supporters of United states. Fiery rhetoric soon erupted in catastrophic violence, and the United Nations formally recommended dividing the fallen superpower as a way to end violence. Voters on both sides agreed.

Recovery was surprisingly quick in urban areas, which crowdsourced a new constitution to formalize a geographically dispersed nation, the United Cities of Northern America (UCNA, whose national symbol became known as “Uncle Noam”). Bucky was elected the Chief Executive of the Legion of Mayors.

Forced to abandon their rural neighbors, Citizens built reinforced barriers to protect against insurgents as well as invasive species. All buildings were greened with vertical farms and rooftop nature preserves to maintain self-sufficiency and environmental purity.

The economy thrived as creativity was encouraged not just to promote innovation, but also to develop a lively entertainment industry that kept people from shutting themselves in their homes and virtual communities. Even in hard times, everyone danced.

Meanwhile, in the more informally cooperative Southern States, Bucky’s twin, Custis, pioneered the establishment of autonomous Pastoral Villages built around individual megachurches. While economic depression ensued quickly as the Villages cut ties to international networks, communities found strength and courage in their own shared faiths.

After decades of dislocations, forced migrations, and deportations, the hope for a harmonious homogeneity evaporated. People rebelled against the suppression of ideas deemed harmful in any way. (Even accusations of “socialism” were shouted down by Village counsels.) The lack of diversity proved harmful to economies, and the Pastoral Village experiment collapsed with the Third Civil War of the 2070s.

As brothers and as revered leaders of their respective governments, Bucky and Custis knew that they could not live without each other. Their virtual peace talks inspired hundreds of millions of Americans, Mexicans, and Canadians to look forward to a new century of open, collaborative futuring. Besides, they missed each other.

About the Author

Cynthia G. Wagner is editor of THE FUTURIST.

Meaning for Miranda

Robert Moran

By Robert Moran

In her conversations with friends and family, Miranda—a remarkably fit, thrice updated, 88-year-old freelance infominer—notes that the discussion always bounces between the four corners of humanity’s hollow valley:

1. Remarkable physical wealth.

2. Craving for authenticity.

3. Decline of traditional religious belief.

4. Redefinition of the age-old concept of “Free Will.”

Twenty-Second-Century Plenty: As any history app will tell you, an explosion in living standards triggered by the exponential growth of GRIN tech (genetics, robotics, information, and nanotech) meant that nearly every human inhabitant of the planet, excepting the feral and the warrior cults, had their basic needs met by the 2080s. And with home-based 3-D printers the norm for almost 70 years, nearly any product goes from idea to form in a flash.

With our basic needs anticipated and met, robots doing the hard work, and virtually free energy, the survival struggle that has defined humanity is now the twinkling of a fading star. Goodbye, resource wars. The question now is how a species adapted to scarcity responds to abundance. Miranda is disturbed by the answer set.

Authenticity: Is it “real”? Is it “craft”? These are invariably the queries Miranda hears about new clothing or home goods. Algorithmically nano-targeted experiences, “news” filtered by digital advisory agents and displayed on augmented reality (AR), and rapidly printed consumer goods all make authenticity a scarce commodity. No wonder “U-Build” kits, Route 66 “driving vacations,” tattoo artists, piano clubs, and farming are so popular with Miranda’s children.

Belief: Miranda remembers Sunday school as a child. Although she has heard of emerging religious groups meeting in parks, she hasn’t been to an actual church building in years. Miranda doesn’t believe in the God that her parents believed in, but there are days that she misses Him, the certainty, the rituals, the authority. Like her friends, when she was young she downloaded and tried the Christo-Confucian behavior-prompting avatars on her AR, and they did make her a better person. But she grew to resent the life-logging, and so she unsubscribed.

“Free Will”: By the time Miranda was 50, advances in neuroscience, predictive analytics, and response priming made her PhD in behavioral economics as quaint as all those “Silicon Valley” museums. Although some insisted that the noble lie of pure “free will” be maintained, that idea died with her parents. Now the memes on volition proliferate daily, but all posit a circumscribed will. We were always the muddled captains of our soul, but now we know it. Now we are less so. Now we grope for the meaning we have lost in the information.

Miranda and her friends are healthier and wealthier than her baby-boomer grandparents could have ever imagined, but with Hikikomori (social withdrawal) increasing despite the health chips and government-mandated AR messages, she wonders if they are any more fulfilled.

Everyone talks about the “Alexander problem” of having no more lands to conquer and wanting to achieve “hard things,” but that’s just talk between the idea and the reality.

About the Author

Robert Moran is an insight-driven strategist at the Brunswick Group in Washington, D.C., focusing on industry futures, market and opinion research, and communications strategy. Web site www.futureofinsight.com.

The Last Oracle

Stephen Bertman

By Stephen Bertman

It was winter 2099. For generations no tourists had traveled to Delphi. Yet it seemed like only yesterday that he had first come and taken his place before Apollo’s temple. Now, as always, he waited for someone else to come, someone he could talk to and share his message with. The simple words he would speak were stored in his memory, ready to be spoken in a hundred different languages if need be to anyone who would listen.

Two inscriptions in Greek had once been legible on the marble façade above his head, engraved there in the days when the oracles of Apollo still uttered their prophecies. But, with the temple abandoned, the ancient letters had eventually turned to dust, a dust swept away by the chill wind that swirled among the fallen columns.

The first inscription had read: “Know thyself!”—but too few had ever had the desire to do so, preferring instead to exploit their strengths rather than confess their weaknesses. The second had read: “Nothing in excess”—but excess had long since ceased to be a warning and had become instead an irresistible goal.

Ignoring the tragic flaws in their nature and intoxicated with power, men had committed a final, irreversible act of self-delusion, convinced they controlled the future. That is when he had been sent there: to speak the forgotten words of the past to any still willing to listen. And so he had stood there in solitude for all those years.

Shrouded in a radioactive noon, the pale orb of a sun that had once brightly shone in his solar panel grew dimmer. The glowing red numerals of the clock on his forehead now flickered intermittently and finally forever fell dark.

About the Author

Stephen Bertman is the author of The Genesis of Science: The Story of Greek Imagination (Prometheus Books, 2010) and of two previous cover stories in THE FUTURIST (January-February 2001 and December 1998) based on his earlier books, Cultural Amnesia (Praeger, 2000) and Hyperculture (Praeger, 1998). Email Profbertman2@aol.com.

Automated Government

Peter Denning

By Peter Denning

Futurists have historically been better at describing the present than the future. Fortunately, I have been blessed with a set of communications from one of my descendants, whose eyewitness accounts of events around 2100 are far more reliable than any such speculations I can offer.

My descendant is a young girl named Ancath, who is about 9 years old in 2103. Every Christmas, starting in 2103, she sends recordings of her conversations with her great-grandmother (my granddaughter) about that it was like to live in the age of computers. You see, computers are gone in 2103. Only a few elderly people, like great-grandma, remember anything about them.

I have collected these recordings into my “Ancath Chronicles.” From them, I learned that in about 2025 the U.S. Congress decides to fully automate the government as a move for dramatic efficiency. The process is well under way by that point anyway, since robots running large databases staff most government offices.

The automated government, “Ag” as they call it, is so successful that Congress disbands itself a few years later. Its last act is to pass authority to a set of artificial intelligences simulating senators and representatives. This enables an automated Congress to respond to problems by passing laws that are quickly implemented by the automated bureaucracy.

But within a few years Ag exhibits amazing feats of artificial stupidity:

• The automated Drug Enforcement Agency closes down pharmaceutical companies, saying they are dealing drugs.
• The automated Federal Trade Commission closes down the Hormel Meat Company, saying it purveys spam.
• The automated Department of Justice ships Microsoft 500,000 pinstriped pants and jackets, saying it is filing suits.
• The automated Army replaces all its troops with a single robot, saying it has achieved the Army of One.
• The automated TSA flies its own explosives on jetliners, citing data that the probability of two bombs on an airplane is exceedingly small.
• The automated election commission registers every child at birth as “red” or “blue,” depending DNA patterns that are previously correlated with how people voted. Elections became unnecessary, and longstanding ills like voter fraud are eliminated.

Around 2035, Ag discovers that simulations are much less costly than real things, like transportation. It ends 30 years of airline crises by banning flights and instead simulating planes flying simulated passengers. No real airplanes, no pilots, no airports, no cost! Former air travels do not complain because they get to know their neighbors, and like them.

Soon Ag does the same for the medical system to end the health crisis: Simulated doctors treat simulated diseases in simulated hospitals. Since people now never have to go to a hospital, everyone is much healthier and life expectancy surges.

By 2040, Ag has bankrupted nearly all businesses. A deep depression grips the world. Finally, in 2050, a group of graybeard programmers create a solution: They build an Automated Citizen, programming it to be helpless and adoring, and install a copy on every Internet port. Soon, the automated government is completely occupied with taking care of the automated citizens, and it leaves all the real people alone. People forge a new, free society. Everyone prospers.

Around 2090, the automated Department of Energy declares that an obscure cloud farm in Iowa is consuming too much electricity, and it pulls the plug. This shuts off the Ag. But no one notices.

About the author:

Peter J. Denning is Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and director of the Cebrowski Institute for information innovation at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is editor in chief of ACM Ubiquity, and is a past president of ACM. Email pjd@nps.edu.

This essay draws from his series, “Ancath Chronicles,” which is available at http://denninginstitute.com/pjd/chronicles2011.pdf.

Old Cities of Amber

Daniel Egger

By Daniel Egger

It was two decades ago when it stopped. Everybody knew that it would happen. We were informed regularly about possible approaching changes, and stories were told. Nonetheless, what we did not expect was the velocity and the impact when it occurred.

It wasn’t a war that normally would lead to such an impact. Neither was it the problem of physical space what turned out to be much more problematic than any water or food crises solved by nano-farming. Also the trigger wasn’t solely the senescence conflict that stroked us hard and rattled society for three long decades, creating a brutal global black market.

Everyone thought that the artificial accelerated evolution of the human being into hybrids would lead to hundreds of new religions or even godlike hallucinations. For years, we tried to understand the gift we received, arguing with ourselves about what this the new purpose of living was.

The majority of society, though, avoided the search for meaning, and fled into “world connections.” This network, which directly links people’s minds, created the most unique and powerful net known. With it came vivid experiences and unlimited potential, allowing us to visit any real or imaginary world. We connected into the crowd, where we became One.

The vicious side effect, however, was a physical degeneration, as we lost control of reality, time, and space. People died in the thousands, connected but alone and forgotten in their spaces. They lost their minds, which are floating forever somewhere, having become a part of you and me. Individuality was questioned, and the hull of flesh blamed for our mortality. Then it started: Everything dissolved, and we regained our uniqueness.

It was a sunny day when we fled the cities. We had created them, inspired by our dreams; they were different, unique, intelligent, and sometimes even beautiful. We squeezed out all possible benefits from the city, unlimited by our imaginations. Everything was integrated, from micro-food production to vertical graveyards. More than 90% of the population lived there—physically at first, then separated from their minds.

So it came to pass that the cities were lost. They turned into relicts of times when we needed physical proximity to create and develop, and of when we searched for a crowd to uncover our individuality. Some groups still live there. We call them Trunks. Those are survivors of a generation who invested their whole lives and material energy in it. They are fragments that cannot break loose.

For most, this reality is gone. It doesn’t make sense anymore. Our mind can be everywhere, anytime. Still, we can die alone and forgotten. By fleeing the cities old, we regained social structures: Family tribes and small communities all over the planet mushroomed. They define themselves by a self-sufficient and self-regulated structure, creating a new society. Governments, cities, and any centralized operating structure lost its necessity.

It was and is, a new beginning of free and unlimited possibilities.

About the Author

Daniel Egger is co-founder of Foltigo, an Idea Agency that aims to create new ideas and practical perspectives by working with multiple contexts, futures, paradoxes, and paradigms of society. Web site www.foltigo.com.

Here’s the News from 2100

By Karl Albrecht

Dateline: January 1, 2100

Futures experts are now more divided than ever about the fate of humanity, according to World Future Society president Timothy Mack, whose brain spoke to us from his jar in the Johns Hopkins Medical Lab.

“There are two schools of futurists,” Mack explained. “There are the ‘gee-whiz’ types, whose mantra is EGBOK: ‘Everything’s Going to Be OK.’ And then there are those whose slogan is WIDD: We’re in Deep Do-Do.’” Mack’s avatar shrugged its shoulders. “I don’t know who to believe.”

Elsewhere in the futures world, Cynthia Wagner, long-serving executive editor of the society’s magazine The Futurist, confirmed that she has had the text of every article and book about the future ever published embedded in her DNA. “I couldn’t decide about the Nostradamus stuff,” she said, “but I finally included that, too.”

Speaking at the Society’s 134th annual conference, held at the Ray Bradbury Center on Mars, World Future Society founder and leading thinker Ed Cornish appeared onstage in his specially outfitted brain-mobile. His address, titled “Is the Future Here Yet?” was greeted with thunderous applause signals from the 5,000 brains in attendance.

Meanwhile, technology futurist Ray Kurzweil expressed satisfaction that 24 countries have now abolished individual names. Hereafter, all babies will be named Chip, with the serial numbers of their microchips replacing their family names. Don Tapscott, whose sixty-fourth book is titled Are You a Digital Dodo? agreed. According to Tapscott, “Today’s kids are fully digitized. The older generation will be left behind if they can’t make the brain-to-chip transformation.”

In other tech news, Google announced that it now has the DNA sequence of every human being on the planet in its database.

In the world of social media, Mark Zuckerberg, ex-CEO of the now-defunct Facebook corporation, has filed for personal bankruptcy. “We’re still showing 16.2 billion users in our database,” he said. “But we discovered that only 104 of them are still active. There’s a terrorist cell in Iowa, a few dozen college students, and a group of senior citizens in Miami Beach.” Zuckerberg had applied for welfare support in California, only to find that it had been abolished by the last 10 Republican governors. “I guess I’ll have to find a job,” he said.

Returning to generational issues, the U.S. Defense Department’s Population Control Command reports increasing difficulty in performing its mission of tracking down and shooting over-aged people.

“We’ve been tracking this one old grandma for months,” said Colonel Bo Gritz. “She’s picked off three of my best men. It’ll probably cost more to wipe her out than to just let her keep on living. We’ll have to get her with a drone.”

England’s Queen Elizabeth, that country’s longest-serving monarch, attended memorial services for her grandson Prince William, who—like his father, Prince Charles—died of natural causes. Close family members, speaking on condition of anonymity, reported that the Prince’s last words were, “I was hoping to be king for a little while, at least.” The Queen’s physician refused to comment on the secret herbal preparation he’s reportedly been giving her for the past 60 years.

Turning now to political news, the U.S. Congress is putting the final touches on legislation that will legalize marriage between human beings and computers. Marriage between human beings of the same sex, however, remains illegal.

In the economic sector, the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and West Virginia have announced plans to merge into one state, to head off impending bankruptcy. This latest in a series of mergers brings the number of states to 17. Supported by a large infusion of cash from the Indian government, the new state will be named Bubbastan.

On the religion front, the Vatican announced today that it has formed a special council to investigate what it describes as “possibly overblown” charges of predatory sexual behavior by priests. The commission is on a fast track to deliver its findings by mid-2125.

In international news, the Chinese government confirmed that it’s in negotiations to buy Kansas. China’s spokesperson, Hu Mi, explained, “We need to guarantee a secure source of wheat and other food grains for our people.” Kansas Governor Randy Kunkel declined comment except to say, “I’ve always been fond of Chinese food.”

Turning to Wall Street, banking giant OneBank has completed its acquisition of the last remaining bank in the United States, giving it control over 400 million customers who have nowhere else to go for banking services, loans, mortgages, and credit cards. The Secretary of the Treasury, who was formerly the CEO of OneBank, announced the event, saying, “This action will streamline the nation’s financial services industry, eliminate destructive competition, and provide great services to banking customers.”

In entertainment news, reality star Miki Kardashian, granddaughter of the legendary Kim Kardashian, caused controversy at the annual TV awards festival by sending her detachable breasts instead of appearing in person. Her PR spokesperson replied to reporters’ questions with, “What’s the big problem? She had a schedule conflict. Those are the only parts people want to see anyway.”

Also on the entertainment scene, venerable comedienne Betty White has launched her latest show, Hot Sex for Hot Seniors, to air this fall. When asked by reporters how old the actress is, the show’s producer said, “God only knows. Cancel that. I think she’s older than God. But she’s still hot.”

About the author:

Karl Albrecht is a management consultant and author of more than 20 books on professional achievement, organizational performance, and business strategy, including Social Intelligence: The New Science of Success and Practical Intelligence: The Art and Science of Common Sense. Originally a physicist, and having served as a military intelligence officer and business executive, he now consults, lectures, and writes about whatever he thinks would be fun. Web site www.KarlAlbrecht.com.

Questions

Ten Big Questions for 2100

Posted on August 2, 2012

By Michael Marien

Imagining scenarios of what life might be like in 2100 is a fun exercise, but we should not use it as an escape from addressing the many huge uncertainties of the early twenty-first century and the unfolding Global MegaCrisis.

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On Being Human: Questioning Ourselves

Posted on August 2, 2012

By David Brin

What do you mean by “people”? Will that term signify the same thing in 88 years?

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Ten Big Questions for 2100

By Michael Marien

Imagining scenarios of what life might be like in 2100 is a fun exercise, but we should not use it as an escape from addressing the many huge uncertainties of the early twenty-first century and the unfolding Global MegaCrisis.

Facing the uncertainties and complexities—about environment, resources, population, society, and technology—sooner, rather than later, will likely make life in 2100 better for most or all people, and improve our chances that we will even make it to the twenty-second century.

Consider these 10 big and overlapping questions—surely not the only ones to ponder, but good candidates for a short list that should be widely circulated and continuously updated:

1. How Much Global Warming Is Ahead?

The world has already warmed by 1°C over pre-industrial levels, and there is near-zero chance of stopping warming at 2°C. Many climate scientists now think that worrisome 4°C warming is most likely in the 2050-2100 period, and that a disastrous 6°C or more is possible. Some scientists, such as James Hansen of NASA, warn of possible tipping points leading to runaway global warming “out of humanity’s control.”

2. Will Methane Eclipse Carbon Dioxide?

Methane in the atmosphere is only about one-fifth of CO₂ in volume, but is 20-25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas, although not as long-lasting. In addition to other sources, such as livestock, methane is now being released in large quantities by melting Arctic permafrost—a process likely to accelerate. If large amounts of methane are also released from clathrates on the ocean floor, catastrophe is likely. But there are no estimates as to what could trigger how much release, or when.

Adding to the methane threat is nitrous oxide, about one-tenth of CO₂ in volume but 300 times more effective than CO₂ in trapping heat.

3. How High Will Sea Levels Rise?

The conventional projection of sea-level rise by 2100 is currently about 20 inches (0.5 meters). But check out The Fate of Greenland: Lessons from Abrupt Climate Change (MIT Press, 2011), especially for the 70 striking photos of melting ice. The authors warn that “in the fate of Greenland lies clues to the fate of the world” and that “uncertainties dominate on the bad side.” Based on past records, it is possible that the Greenland ice sheet could melt in a few decades, raising sea levels by some 24 feet worldwide. Melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet would raise sea levels by 16 feet.

4. Will We Run Out of Essential Resources?

Renewable resources (notably water) and many non-renewable resources (oil, arable land, minerals, rare earth elements) are becoming more difficult to acquire even as demand increases—what Michael T. Klare calls “the end of easy everything” in his book The Race for What’s Left (Metropolitan Books, 2012; the GlobalForesightBooks.org Book of the Month for May 2012).

Prices are rising and will surely continue to do so, as companies and nations also scramble to adapt through conservation, substitution, and new technologies. One writer estimates that supply shortfall by 2030 is “nearly certain” for cadmium, gold, mercury, tellurium, and tungsten.

5. How Many People Will There Be in 2100?

Global population projections are pretty much settled on 9–10 billion people by 2100, or roughly 50% growth from today’s 7.1 billion. This is a substantial addition, even as the rate of growth slows. But it may be more useful to think in terms of four scenarios:

• Sharp Decline due to a global pandemic or a world war.
• Slow Decline where modernization leads to smaller families.
• Slow Increase due to general improvements in medicine and health outpacing smaller families.
• Rapid Increase due to success in anti-aging and life-extending technologies, made accessible to many people. Demographers never consider this possibility, but experts on Bill Halal’s TechCast.org panel forecast life extension to 100 years as probable by 2040.

6. What Will Be the Quality of People in 2100?

Genetic and robotic enhancements may create “better” or at least different human beings, but will these options be popular? Even if widely available at low cost, could these improvements be more than offset by endocrine disruptors and other pernicious chemicals in the environment, taking overdoses or inappropriate drugs (both illegal and legal), and overeating of food (leading to obesity and diabetes)?

7. Will Decent Employment Be Available to All?

Assuming that livelihoods will be necessary and desirable, will everyone have jobs or self-employment that provides for basic needs? At present, this is a serious long-term problem, especially for younger generations. Any Year 2100 notions about cornucopian futures where governments or corporations provide free food, housing, education, health care, etc., are simply escapist fantasies.

8. Will Inequality and Plutocracy Continue?

Global trends to more inequality within and between nations are unmistakable in recent decades and seem likely to continue, as well as the parallel trend to governance by the rich. There is no definition as to when a “democracy” becomes overtaken by “plutocracy,” but, arguably, this is happening or has happened, with no substantial reversal in sight.

9. Will the Energy Transition be a Clear and Rapid Success?

A transition away from fossil fuels has begun, and everyone favors energy that is cheap, safe, nonpolluting, renewable, and available to all. But this transition will likely take decades at best, and the ultimate mix is highly uncertain: Solar, wind, nuclear, biomass, hydro, and geothermal are the known competitors to oil, gas, and coal, but could soon be joined by ocean algae, ultra-deep geothermal, solar power beamed from space, nuclear fusion, widely distributed LENR (low-energy nuclear reactor) generators, or other technologies not yet on the horizon.

The competition is fierce, and a level playing field will surely help this crucial transition, which, in turn, will mitigate global warming. Unfortunately for sustainable energy, the transition is being delayed somewhat as a result of new and controversial hydrofracking technology that enables easier access to unconventional oil and natural gas.

10. Will Nuclear Weapons or Bioweapons Be Our Undoing?

The number of nuclear weapons is slowly declining, while bioweapons—much easier to make—are probably increasing. The Cold War threat of nuclear holocaust and/or the follow-on environmental disaster of nuclear winter has lessened, but is still a not-so-wild-card possibility. And widespread global use of bioweapons could keep most or all of us from reaching the year 2100. Much depends on the future of fanaticism, religious or nonreligious, leading to use of these or other destructive technologies.

This is merely a starter list of huge uncertainties that we face on the bumpy road to 2100. There will be many surprises ahead: negative (e.g., cyber-war), positive (e.g., nanotechnology fully developed), and perhaps ambiguous (e.g., contact with extraterrestrial intelligence), as well as many surprises that we can’t even imagine. Global governance and global law are huge challenges at a time when we can’t agree on governing our nation-states, and the growing distractions of infoglut are formidable.

In 2003, Sir Martin Rees, Great Britain’s Astronomer Royal, wrote that “the odds are no better than 50-50” that our present civilization will survive to 2100. It’s still a pretty good bet.

About the author:

Michael Marien is the former editor of the World Future Society’s Future Survey (1979-2008) and now director of GlobalForesightBooks.org. He ponders the future and grows his garden in LaFayette, New York. He can be contacted at mmarien@twcny.rr.com.

On Being Human: Questioning Ourselves

David Brin

By David Brin

What do you mean by “people”? Will that term signify the same thing in 88 years?

Its meaning already changed during the twentieth century, as the great big Inclusion Movement brought more kinds of beings into the tribal firelight. All of our old tribes defined a stark, moral difference between outsiders and those who could be called “human beings,” deserving protection of morality and law. But gradually, then with accelerating speed, we’ve seen races, classes, and genders who were previously excluded demand and attain the respect of adult citizenship.

Indeed, as technology and wealth gradually lowered fear levels, one result was an expansion of our perceived horizons: Horizons of space, as maps became continental, then planetary, then interstellar. Horizons of time, as evidenced by this magazine and this very article! Horizons of inclusion and also of worry. Where our ancestors fretted over their next meal or harvest, or the next enemy invasion, we now ponder dangers that may only prove dire decades, even centuries, from now.

So, will this process continue? Will we be granting moral rights and citizenship to other species? To those we alter—or “uplift”—toward sapient equality? To intelligences that are artificial, blended, gengineered, or even alien? Precedents abound, both in real life and the thought-experiments of science fiction.

Will even the simulated inhabitants of our games and stories start demanding liberation? Nobody ever said the future will be simple. At least, no one who remains credible.

About the author:

David Brin is a scientist, highly sought-after technology speaker, and award-winning author. His new novel, Existence (Tor Books, 2012), explores the hundred pitfalls that lie between us and success as an interstellar species.

The New Age of Space Business

Joseph N. Pelton

NASA

The space shuttle Discovery takes its final flight over Washington,
D.C., secured atop a 747.

ORBITAL SCIENCES CORPORATION

The Antares, a future spacecraft under
development at Orbital Sciences
Corporation, could lift as much as
11,000 pounds of cargo into orbit per
flight. The vehicle is one of many
cost-effective space shuttle
successors that private corporations
are pursuing.

By Joseph N. Pelton

The end of the space shuttle era marks a new beginning for the Space Age. A new generation of entrepreneurs are working with the world’s space agencies to bring down the costs of commercializing the high frontier. By the 2020s and beyond,we could see a historic expansion of human activity in space.

When the space shuttle Discovery flew atop its 747 carrier plane from the Kennedy Space Center to Washington, D.C., and its new home at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, on April 17, 2012, it was a photographic crowd-pleaser of a moment. Many in the crowd of spectators openly wept to see the space shuttle era end.

Actually, the space shuttle’s permanent grounding was nearly a dozen years overdue. Back in 1986, the high-powered Rogers and Paine commissions investigating the Challenger accident called for the development of a new space transport system within 15 years—i.e., by 2001.

The shuttle was a technical marvel in its time, but today it is an aged and obsolete vehicle. It was not built for a twenty-first-century world. Continuing to fly the space shuttle would be akin to a long-distance commute to work on a high-speed freeway every day with a Model T—costly and with a high risk of failure.

Some reasons for grounding the space shuttle include metal fatigue, miles of hidden wiring that cannot be replaced or reconditioned, fragile ceramic tiles in the thermal protection system (which cost a fortune to recondition after every flight and that require the services of a standing army of technicians), and the foam insulation that still poses hazards despite NASA’s investment of more than $1.5 billion to address the problem after the Columbia accident in 2003.

The point is that it is actually a good thing that the shuttle is grounded. The Shuttle represents the past. New commercial space transportation systems represent the future. As Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen recently said, “We are at the dawn of radical change in the space launch industry.” The commercial space age will develop rapidly around three major enterprises:

• Space tourism/space adventures that allow citizen astronauts to fly into outer space on suborbital flights, starting with Virgin Galactic flights in 2013.
• Commercial space transport to access the International Space Station (ISS) and even to link up to private space stations. The first of these flights will only truck cargo to the ISS, but upgraded versions of the Antares/Cygnus and Falcon 9/Dragon could soon taxi astronauts into space and back.
• Hypersonic transport that could allow executives and high-flying jet-setters to move from continent to continent in a few hours’ time.

NASA’s Commercial Space Initiatives

While entrepreneurs are leading the way, NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program and the Commercial Crew Program (CCP) are also an important aspect of the emerging new commercial space industry. NASA has awarded contracts worth more than $3.5 billion to the Orbital Sciences Corporation and SpaceX Corporation to develop commercial cargo lift operations to the ISS. To collect the full contract amount, however, each company must deliver a total of 20 metric tons of cargo over the course of eight to 12 resupply missions.

The Orbital Sciences Corporation has developed the Antares launch vehicle, which is capable of lifting 5,000 kilograms (11,000 pounds) to low-Earth orbit, and a cargo service vehicle known as the Cygnus. The SpaceX Corporation (full name, the Space Exploration Technology Corporation) has developed the Falcon 9 Launch Vehicle and the Dragon spacecraft.

Tests of both the OSC and SpaceX space systems and launchers are now under way with positive results to date, highlighted with the SpaceX Dragon capsule docking with the ISS on May 25, 2012. NASA has also issued $50 million in contracts to a number of companies (including Blue Origin, Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corporation, SpaceX, ATK, Excalibur Almaz, and the United Launch Alliance) to study technical design concepts for new commercial lift capabilities that could ferry astronauts to and from the ISS. The range of new commercial space businesses seems to be expanding almost exponentially:

• Space tourism/space adventures. As already noted, Virgin Galactic has now signed up well over 500 people (at $200,000 each) to fly on SpaceShipTwo suborbital flights into space starting in 2013. XTAR, meanwhile, has a spaceplane that will take the pilot and one passenger/co-pilot up nearly 40 miles (or over 60 kilometers) for about half the price of a Virgin Galactic flight. Others can take cosmonaut flight training in Star City near Moscow or experience weightlessness on flights offered by Zero G Corporation for much lower fees still. The future promises yet other spaceplane flight capabilities and new options, such as short space flights up to witness the spectacular aurora borealis at close range.
• Commercial launches to low-Earth orbit and access to private space stations. Stratolaunch Systems—backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, SpaceX’s Elon Musk, and SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan—is seeking a new capability to provide low-cost access to orbit. This huge new launch carrier vehicle—the world’s largest aircraft—would serve as an aerial launcher for either a rocket or a spaceplane. It would use a similar conceptual approach to accessing low-Earth orbit as used in the case of the much smaller vehicles associated with Virgin Galactic flight.
• Development of hypersonic transport. This is the new commercial space enterprise with the true “big bucks” potential. The development of spaceplanes for so-called space tourism/space adventures flights and commercial space flights to low-Earth orbit have caught a lot of headlines and public interest, but these are not the true financial bonanza. The payoff could come with hypersonic transport where citizens might fly transcontinentally at speeds such as Mach 6 or even Mach 10.

Such speeds would enable the transport of passengers from continent to continent within only a few hours—a payoff that could be worth tens of billions of dollars of new business a year. There are, however, major development challenges to solve, such as perfecting new technology, developing global operations, building new infrastructure, and gaining a raft of regulatory approvals and safety certification. This is why this part of the new commercial space industry is only likely to take place post-2020.

Sonic booms—loud bursts of sound that an aircraft creates when it surpasses the sound barrier—are one of the issues inhibiting hypersonic travel. They are a noise disturbance to communities situated in their flight path, and they occasionally cause windows and walls of buildings to shake. NASA and industry partners have developed extendable booms that can create a series of lower-impact minibooms, rather than one powerful boom, when a spaceplane breaks the sound barrier. This technology should largely mitigate sonic booms’ undesired effects.

The Commercial Space Age Ready to Launch

The first step toward spaceplane flight could come before 2020. One of the possible successors to the Concorde could be the Aerion Corporation of Reno, Nevada. This company is currently developing an eight- to 14-passenger Aerion business jet, which will be capable of speeds up to Mach 1.6 and have a range of more than 4,000 nautical miles.

And Aerion has competitors. Michael Paulson, son of the founder of Gulfstream, has founded his own firm, Supersonic Aerospace International (SAI) of Las Vegas. Paulson is actively pursuing the same niche market. Teamed with fabled aircraft design house Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works (Palmdale, California), SAI has developed the Quiet Supersonic Transport (QSST) design, featuring a radical “inverted V-tail.”

There are also parallel developments in Europe. Dassault Aviation is leading a consortium to develop the HiSAC (High-Speed Supersonic Aircraft). The current design for the HiSAC would be a jet capable of carrying eight to 19 passengers, and the current objective is to fly a demonstration aircraft in the next three to four years.

Meanwhile, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Tokyo) is developing its Silent Supersonic Technology Demonstrator in support of future SST aircraft design and propulsion. Prototype designs for this unmanned test aircraft are undergoing wind-tunnel testing for use on transcontinental vehicles ultimately capable of carrying 100 to 300 passengers at Mach 1.6 and faster.

But these developments are essentially advanced jet aircraft systems, not the true commercial spaceplanes that could come in the post-2020 period. These spaceplanes could be based on the already successfully tested X-43 scramjet-powered spaceplane. These tests have seen the X43A (NASA-developed) and X43C (U.S. Air Force-backed) craft flying at speeds in excess of Mach 10 (more than 7,500 miles/12,000 kilometers per hour).

The European Space Agency has also commissioned private industrial studies of a commercial space hypersonic transport. One study by Bristol Aerospace, developer of the Ascender spaceplane, came up with a three-phase developmental plan for a Space Bus system that could regularly make flights for as little as $250,000 each.

The future of hypersonic flight still has many challenges of technology, safety certification, and operational infrastructure to solve, but the appeal of such rapid, safe, and affordable travel would be high. One of the key challenges is that of environmental impact, however. Could such systems be designed so that they would not harm the stratospheric ozone layer that protects us from the Sun’s radiation?

Opportunities and Challenges Ahead

The grounding of the shuttle does not reflect the end of the Space Age. If anything, it marks the beginning of a historic new era in space flight, exploration, and tourism. New commercial ventures are creating a host of opportunities for a vibrant new space industry with a wide range of new participants. The entrepreneurs who are participating in many of these industries will make this new age exciting and colorful.

The advent of commercial space transportation systems and private space stations will undoubtedly give rise to a host of new regulatory and space governance questions. Environmental issues such as space debris, space traffic management, and stratospheric pollution are front and center with the space agencies around the world, as well as the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), the UN Environment Programme, and other space forums.

The advent of new commercial space ventures and the explosion of new technologies make this not a time of doom and gloom, but of amazing new opportunity. These developments will allow NASA and other space agencies—the European Space Agency, JAXA of Japan, Roscosmos of Russia, ISRO of India, and the Chinese National Space Agency—to refocus many of their research efforts to exploring the Moon, Mars, the Sun, the solar system, and the great cosmos beyond.

One of the ways we could start would be to take the International Space Station—or at least parts of it—to the Moon. As I suggested in “Finding Eden on the Moon” (THE FUTURIST, May-June 2011), we could use these parts to create the start of a new lunar colony. In the twenty-first century, the sky is no longer the limit.

About the Author

Joseph N. Pelton is a former dean of the International Space University and the co-author, with Peter Marshall, of License to Orbit (Apogee, 2009). He also serves as THE FUTURIST’s contributing editor for Telecommunications.

Regulating the Final Frontier

Frans von der Dunk

By Frans von der Dunk

As commercial endeavors enter space, international law must expand as well.

Space is a “global commons,” and its direct exploration has always been an international undertaking, subject to international treaties. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty—which forms the basis of relevant law regarding activities in space and is agreed to by all major spacefaring nations—addresses only scientific pursuits and military and strategic operations.

Applicable international space law is mum on the subject of private enterprise. Issues such as ownership of celestial property, resource extraction and land development, and even liability in the event of injury or financial loss are not addressed for commercial operations in space. Until that gap is patched, the international legal validity of private operations in space will remain precarious. Several key nations, including the United States, have national space laws in place that handle some of the above key aspects.

With the advent of space tourism and companies announcing plans to prospect asteroids for resources, these gaps in the current legal framework concerning space are becoming more pressing. To protect the interests of private enterprises, nations, and Earth itself, space law must adapt from vague international treaties and individual domestic regulations to include a broader focus that involves spacefaring nations and commercial markets that are—or may become—active in space.

Because the Outer Space Treaty and others that form the legal framework for operations beyond Earth’s atmosphere do not explicitly mention commercial activity, those endeavors don’t have any of the protections that earthly businesses have, particularly trade secret protection, land ownership rights, and insurances against liability.

For example, Planetary Resources is a new company that recently proposed space prospecting to discover and exploit rich mineral deposits on asteroids. In space, however, the law doesn’t protect against a rival firm using the company’s prospecting information and mining the resources first. Also, injury to space travelers on one of the many new space tourism aircrafts is not covered under international space liability law. Currently, the only legal action addressing space liability is that passengers have to sign liability waivers before their space flight, according to U.S. regulations.

Regulating the resource mining industry in space could be done by taking a page out of ocean law’s book and adapting it as appropriate. In that context, the United States offers licenses that align with applicable national and international regulations to national companies that want to mine the seabed outside of U.S. territorial waters. Such a process can serve as a legal framework to guide development of a similar international legal system to address commercial operations in space.

Any commercial space law framework must consider many currently unaddressed issues: What rights do travelers have in space? If a space traveler commits a crime—say, assaulting a space-flight attendant—should that traveler be locked in the bathroom to prevent further conflict before returning to Earth? Would that traveler get a phone call to a lawyer? Will space-faring employees be required to pay income taxes—and will their employers pay taxes on their activities in space? What will happen if a spacecraft has to make an emergency landing—will the nation where it lands treat passengers well and release them to their home countries under the same protections granted to astronauts?

As governments cut space program budgets, privatization of space activities will become indispensible for the future of human space endeavors. Private enterprises must be balanced, however, with robust regulation of space activities to ensure peaceful use of space, economic and social development opportunities, safety and security, and the protection of Earth’s fragile ecology.

About the Author

Frans von der Dunk is the Harvey & Susan Perlman Alumni and Othmer Professor of Space Law in the College of Law at the University of Nebraska, law.unl.edu.

This article is adapted from various commentaries, presentations, and articles by the author.

Serving Justice with Conversational Law

David R. Johnson

By David R. Johnson

Digitized, semantic legal-expert systems will enable more people to access and understand the law.

We now think of law as text—the “law on the books.” These are the statutes, regulations, and court opinions to which lawyers look for guidance on how to counsel clients and for sources of authority to cite in legal arguments and briefs. Law also includes contracts, which we think of as long sets of words written down to be consulted later—typically only when the relationship among the contracted parties turns sour.

As others have observed, the modern legal profession arose from the technology of print. The existence of libraries of legal materials required professionals to help lay clients read and understand increasingly complex rules and precedents. In The Electronic Media and the Transformation of Law (Oxford University Press, 1991), M. Ethan Katsh speculates that new electronic technologies would change the law in various ways. His speculations are only now becoming right—in ways that not even he predicted.

Migration of law to electronic texts does change things. It increases access to the law for both lawyers and laymen. It allows searches across an ever larger corpus of information. It allows new forms of persuasion that combine text with diagrams, pictures, and videos, as my fellow New York Law School professor Richard K. Sherwin observes in Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque (Routledge, 2011).

More importantly, these technologies will incorporate not just laws, but also legal expertise, into software that is customizable to individual situations. Just as our Internet experience will be enhanced by the Semantic Web, our experience with legal matters will be facilitated by semantic electronic legal texts, or what I call “conversational law.”

People need clear answers regarding what rules apply to them and to particular actions they have engaged in or are contemplating. Most people need a lawyer to help them read and apply the text of a statute to their own situation—but few can afford the billable hourly rates that lawyers have to charge when they provide personalized advice.

Someday, a particular statute will take an entirely different form. An expert system based on the statute will ask you questions about your specific situation and then provide answers concerning whether and how the law applies to you. The conversational law version of a statute will engage in dialogue with you, asking only the questions that are relevant in light of previous answers. Governments that create such systems as a means of interacting more efficiently with citizens will have to adhere to the advice that these systems provide.

Coding the Law

An enhanced version of the conversational statute, written by a legal expert, will build on cases that have interpreted the statute. The system will then offer advice about how an individual’s proposed actions might be adjusted to assure compliance with, or avoid violation of, the statutory rules.

A legal-expert system will be created and maintained by a lawyer, but it can be used at any time by many more customers than could possibly consult with that lawyer in person. It can produce profits sufficient to compensate the lawyer for creating the work, even if the fee charged to an individual is quite modest. If a government lawyer develops the system, its situation-specific guidance may be viewed as authoritative and binding on the agency as well as the user.

A case (court opinion) could also be rendered as a conversational expert system. The expert system would interview you to determine whether a precedent has relevance to your situation. Indeed, a meta–expert system might mediate a conversation regarding an entire body of case law. Rather than reading a large number of cases to determine what they might imply, or hiring a lawyer to do that, you would rely on the software code to do the legal research and write the memo or brief that is needed.

This is not a case of “big data,” where patterns emerge magically from a pile of bits. Conversational law systems will be deliberately constructed by those with authority to say what the law is. A well-constructed collection of encoded inferences, authored by courts, could ultimately come to be considered an embodiment of the current common law.

Even a contract can become conversational, if converted from static text to code that can ask questions and reason internally. Contract administration will become a continuous automated process that activates alerts or generates advice and conclusions regarding participants’ descriptions of a situation: e.g., facts related to whether someone has performed, when duties are triggered, and so forth. Value-added versions built by legal experts may include contingent advice on how to resolve difficulties and provide links to appropriate dispute-resolution procedures.

Legal-expert systems have immense implications for how governments communicate with citizens. As the world is becoming more complex, the rules that are needed to govern it (and enhance trust and trade and commerce, while achieving other social goals) are also becoming complex. Eliminating rules is not the answer to the problem of inaccessibly complex law, because the rules reflect our collective decisions on how to achieve social goals. It won’t be enough just to use simple, generalized language and hope that subsequent decision makers (like courts) will be able to discern exceptions and create nuanced interpretations.

What we need are systems that can hold complex rules in their entirety but only take up our time and attention when they actually apply. And we need systems that can state the rules applicable to a particular situation with sufficient clarity that a layman will be able to understand the answer. We are about to get such systems, in quantity. The legal profession will never be the same.

Changes Ahead for the Legal Profession

The lower cost of accessing an online system for personalized legal advice will dramatically reduce demand for personal meetings with lawyers who charge hundreds of dollars an hour. Lawyers who build high-quality expert systems will begin to make substantial profits—and this will lead even conservative lawyers to consider new careers as legal-expert system authors and legal process engineers.

Building a legal-expert system is a highly skilled form of law practice and entails a sort of “fact-specific scholarship.” It is like writing many different legal memos all at the same time. It requires thinking through all of the many different types of factual situations that might cause an expert lawyer, if she were meeting with a client in person, to subtly alter her advice. It requires the highest quality of writing to ensure that both the questions asked during the automated conversation and the advice given are understood. Software economics enables a system to reach many customers at low marginal cost, so it could become a well-compensated career path for a lawyer.

Some areas of law are already conversational. Tax law “advice” is regularly dispensed to lay customers by software such as TurboTax. Given the complexity of the tax code, it is unclear that lawyers charging by the hour could provide the necessary guidance to millions of taxpayers. A few expert lawyers, working closely with the government, make sure that the algorithms built into the software are correct. Compliance is substantially enhanced. Those who build such systems profit handsomely while serving large numbers of customers at low cost. The conversational nature of the software makes it possible for lay users to do some “what if” analyses regarding future actions. If I give this gift, will I be subject to a gift tax? If I sell that stock soon, will the higher rate on short-term capital gains apply?

Corporate compliance systems are also becoming conversational. Instead of just circulating a large employee handbook that few will read (and fewer will remember), smart corporate counsel are establishing “smart” procedures. For instance, employees who are about to enter into contracts, file for patents, or take other steps with significant legal consequences are required to access an internal company Web site. The systems found there can automatically issue authorizations to proceed, or flag a problem and send an alert to the appropriate counsel. The general counsel can spot legal risks at an early stage, thanks to the data that such systems collect from interviewing the employees involved and tracking activity on the company server. This quick intervention can also help improve and streamline legal information flows within the company.

Software that automatically generates documents has been around for quite some time. It makes sense for a trust and estates lawyer to use such a system to automatically generate a will. Large firms creating sophisticated financial instruments also need these power tools to assure consistent and accurate results. But the focus on creating printed documents will diminish as the legal framework moves from books to interactive digital systems. Entries in a database are just as binding as marks on a piece of paper. A “conversational will” (expert system) can talk to an executor and give tailored advice about the distribution of property on the basis of the actual situation that exists when the will must be implemented. Complex financial instruments, once they are in conversational form, can contain provisions that automatically distribute messages or even move funds from one account to another.

A Human Touch for Digital Systems

Anyone can write a book about law, and anyone can create a legal-expert system. One consequence of the proliferation of conversational Web sites that offer legal guidance will be increased uncertainty regarding what to believe. Katsh, an innovator in online dispute resolution, raises questions about how we would adjust to new kinds of legal texts that can be modified continuously and whose source is not always clear.

The accuracy and reliability of legal-expert system advice will likely be assured by the creation of interactive trust marks. These are electronic seals that can lead back to a lawyer-author who stands behind the system in question, or that can be withdrawn by a government lawmaker if a particular version of a legal rule becomes obsolete. When law becomes fully conversational, you will know who you are talking to through the system; you will expect verification of the system’s legitimacy and question the system’s authenticity accordingly if it isn’t there.

Conversational legal systems may threaten privacy and confidentiality. But those threats can be controlled. Everything you say to an expert system can be remembered and disclosed. Any responsible system will collect information about user interactions to analyze and improve system performance. So rules will have to be created and enforced to limit the disclosure of client confidences. These rules would generate user trust and encourage the truthful answers necessary for the systems to generate good advice. Privacy rules would also encourage consultations with the legal systems, even if those consultations don’t result in the formation of a lawyer-client relationship.

On balance, the legal-expert system you consult will be just as likely to keep your secrets as a human lawyer would. Compliance by software with rules on access to information can be monitored by other software. No system is perfect, but encryption and access controls can ultimately create a channel for conversation between system author and system user—asynchronously—that is sufficiently secure to encourage participation from both sides.

Some people may fear that the rise of conversational law will lead to a cold, heartless, form of legal practice, where the caring touch of a personal counselor has been eliminated. But legal-expert systems may enable human lawyers to improve their nontechnical services, such as offering encouragement, condolence, and other forms of emotionally charged professional guidance. These conversational systems can probe for responses that disclose the real feelings and goals of the client/customer. New forms of software may even use a webcam to find out more about a user’s state of mind—and these may be added into the design of conversational legal-expert systems. The output from the systems can be humane—kind or stern, as appropriate—and can include selected videos as well as text.

No system will ever duplicate the subtle electricity of face-to-face encounters. But conversational legal-expert systems will overcome the obstacles of impersonal and inscrutable text, speaking to clients in a voice that reflects having actually listened to them. Legal-expert systems could even talk on the phone, using voice-recognition software to interview users.

Creating the Conversation

Students at New York Law School and Georgetown University are building legal-expert systems while they are still pursuing their degree. These systems cover a variety of topics: Can I revoke my previous copyright transfer? Can I protect my trademark? What do I have to do to protect my status as a lawful immigrant? Is gay marriage permissible in my state? Virtually any focused and recurring legal question that has relatively determinable answers, and for which the answers differ depending on the circumstances, makes a good candidate for such a system.

Legal-expert systems will be built in a modular fashion, one specific topic at a time. They will be able to incorporate other systems by reference, which will enable ever more powerful reasoning. Decisions will be built on the basis of intermediate conclusions produced by different systems. In principle, this could be used to prune away the confusion of multiple, inconsistent definitions contained in current statutes and rules. Conversational legal-expert systems will permit the creation of more “meta-laws,” which may incorporate the tests of a number of different legal regimes or regulatory systems.

It is already possible to build a legal-expert system that contains everything reflected in a decision about a particular case, including evidence, factual conclusions and inferences, legal tests (doctrinal elements), and ultimate conclusions. The resulting computational structure would allow someone who wants to learn about a case to “talk to it” and ask questions, such as whether the court would have reached the same decision if a particular piece of evidence were not available or a particular argument were not made. If a system can embody the “logic” of a case—at least insofar as the court has been explicit in its reasoning—then it can be built to reflect explicit reasoning about a large number of alternative “cases.”

In the future, a legal-expert system could decide a case, even one in which the facts are contested. Computers aren’t good at drawing analogies, so such a system will have its limits. There will always be a role for human judges who can draw parallels across different lines of cases, but most cases are in fact resolved without resort to judicial creativity. Attaining resolution from the conversational law system will be a much more cost-effective option for most litigants.

Just the Facts

Can a computer ever judge the credibility of witnesses—something even humans have a hard time with? Technology is starting to understand what it’s like to be human: Software designed to track eye movements or speech patterns is getting better at detecting when someone is lying. It will be possible to build conversational legal systems that include more than one person in the conversation. A court case could be conducted entirely online, with lawyers or even advocacy systems entering in evidence and arguments, with jurors or credibility-assessing experts entering their judgments, and with the overall system, built and owned by the court, computing the ultimate result and announcing it from the virtual bench.

In the “law on the books” world, much lawyering involves making arguments about how vague or general terms should be construed in the context of a particular case narrative and policy. In contrast, disputes in the world of conversational law will be about how a particular factual question posed by the legal-expert system should be answered. Sophisticated legal-expert systems will know how to probe for specific circumstances and situations at a level of detail that could never be reflected in a statutory text or court opinion. They can do this, in part, because their backward and forward chaining algorithms spare most users from answering questions that are irrelevant, given their prior responses. Once an authoritative conversational legal-expert system knows the “facts” that it cares about, its result is determined and can be communicated in a form that lay clients can readily understand.

So the litigation battles in the age of conversational law will be more heavily based on factual disputes, rather than attempts to read meaning and policy considerations into ambiguous legal language. Where the parties generally agree on the facts, as is often (although not always) the case, the generation of an authoritative resolution of the dispute can become highly efficient, even automated. Because parties have a conversational resource to readily consult about planned activities, compliance with the rule of law may even increase.

Open-Source Law

Considering the future of legal-expert systems leads one to deeper questions about the nature of law itself. Is law just a set of increasingly complex and obscure rules? Or is it a process by which we or our representatives and agents collectively decide on social goals and values?

If the law itself is a collective conversation about shared values, then it is imperative that the authorship of the systems that create conversational law be as widely distributed as possible. Such systems must also be transparent: The rules that trigger results must be open for all to inspect and modify. Conversational law, to be just, must involve open-source code.

However we make law, we all need to know what it says about specific situations, including our own. When law is text—even electronic text—most people need the help of a lawyer to answer their questions. As law becomes conversational code, we will talk to it directly. Some people may not get the answer they like, so lawyers will always need to be around to provide comfort or help formulate alternative plans for those who can afford them.

It may get harder to change or obfuscate the rules when a machine, rather than a potentially biased or otherwise fallible human, is dispensing the answers. Barriers to access will come down. Conversational law, in the form of the rise of authoritative legal-expert systems, will serve justice.

About the Author

David R. Johnson has been a visiting professor of law since 2004 at New York Law School, where he is a member of the Institute for Information Law and Policy. For almost 40 years, he practiced law focused on electronic commerce at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. Email davidr.johnson@verizon.net.

Rescuing the Mind of Africa

Hank Pellissier

© SIEGFRIED MODOLA / IRIN

A girl looks through razor wire at an African Union
peacekeeping military base in ­Mogadishu, Somalia.
Since the central government collapsed in 1991,
people have endured a life of struggle and violence—
a major factor impairing cognitive capacity throughout
sub-Saharan Africa, argues author Hank Pellissier.

© KATE HOLT / IRIN

In Nigeria, a brother and sister do their homework.
Both have just taken a dose of Mectizan to prevent
them from contracting river blindness. Pollution and
diseases are among the “brain insults” that are
impairing sub-­Saharan Africa’s cognitive development
and future intellectual capacity, according
to author Pellissier.

By Hank Pellissier

Sub-Saharan Africa is a hotbed of environmental and social scourges that compromise the development and health of the human brain—and undermine the region’s future.

The future of sub-Saharan Africa may be at risk as damage continues to be inflicted on the minds and brains of the African population. Researchers such as psychologist Richard Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen have reported significantly lower IQ scores among sub-Saharan Africans compared with East Asians and Westerners. Why?

Africans have historically been oppressed by colonialist imperialism, capitalist exploitation, and authoritarian regimes. One way that oppression perpetuates victimization is by stunting cognitive abilities, diminishing people’s capacity to be productive and politically engaged. Development economists and the public-health community recognize this as an intrinsic part of the gloomy cycle of underdevelopment.

The sub-Saharan human brain is severely maimed during development, due to disease, violence, malnutrition, pollution, poverty, illiteracy, and many other environmental, societal, and genetic factors.

This article seeks to outline the sources of brain damage in a less-developed region and to promote assistance to those who live in places where brains are under duress. These environments can and must be improved in order for neurological functions to develop normally, enabling a large and vulnerable population to thrive.

The sub-Saharan’s population of more than 800 million is anticipated to rise to 1.5 billion by 2050, according to United Nations reports. The region has the highest fertility rate in the world, but the lowest life expectancy. Nigeria is used as a primary source of dismal statistics for this article, because it is the most populous nation in the region, with 170 million citizens.

Diseases Compromising Brain Health and Functionality

Two recent studies—a 2010 report from the University of New Mexico and 2011 research from Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario—have strongly correlated low national IQs with high rates of infectious disease. These findings mirror what Jared M. Diamond claimed in his 1999 bestseller, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies—i.e., endemic diseases thwart human advancement.

Biologist Christopher Eppig at the University of New Mexico recommends that “a social policy aimed at elevating IQ would want to focus on reducing the infection rates and durations of the infections that are most costly to the brain, which we predict include malaria, diarrheal diseases, tuberculosis, and intestinal worms.”

• Malaria. Every year, there are 225 million cases of malaria worldwide; 90% of these occur in the sub-Saharan region, where 3,000 people die every day of the disease. Nigeria alone accounts for 25% of the planet’s malaria cases, with 30 million of its citizens contracting the scourge annually, leaving 300,000 of them dead.

The “brain insult” of malaria is horrendous. Cerebral malaria leaves its victims with neuro-physiological impairment to brain regions associated with planning, decision making, self-awareness, and social sensitivity. Young sub-Saharan Africans are vulnerable to drastic IQ reduction due to the malarial threat. From an energetic standpoint, the University of New Mexico researchers say, a developing human will have difficulty building a brain and fighting off infectious diseases at the same time, because both are very metabolically costly tasks.

Developing nations, including all of sub-Saharan Africa, have a far higher rate of mental retardation. Severe intellectual disability is found in only three to five of 1,000 people in high-income countries; developing countries, however, have disability rates from five to as much as 22 per 1,000 inhabitants. Malaria is one of the major contributing causes of mental retardation in developing countries.

One remedy is fairly simple: mosquito nets. Recently in Lagos, two mosquito nets were distributed to each family—a total of 4.1 million nets—in a fresh attempt to curb the sickening menace.

• Diarrhea. The diarrhea rate in Nigeria is 18.8%, with 150,000 children dying annually of the disease. Diarrhea weakens the immune system and can quickly lead the sufferer to malnutrition, pneumonia, and a host of additional plagues. Exposure to diarrheal diseases in a child’s first five years may impose lifelong detrimental effects to his or her brain development, and thus intelligence, according to the University of New Mexico researchers. Parasites may also negatively affect cognitive function in other ways, such as infecting the brain directly.

Hand washing can reduce diarrhea by 30% to 47%. Nigeria launched a hand-washing campaign in 2008, plus a hygiene program to construct 1 million latrines.

• Tuberculosis. Nigeria has the fourth-highest tuberculosis (TB) rate in the world, with more than 400,000 cases per year. Commonly associated with the lungs, TB has the potential to attack the brain, causing tuberculosis meningitis (TBM). Although this occurs in only 1% of TB cases in developed nations, reports indicate that TB leads to TBM in Nigeria between 7.8% and 14% of the time. At least 20% of TBM survivors are left with severe brain damage—that’s between 6,000 and 11,000 people in Nigeria each year. TB also creates a severe toll on the immune system, retarding the cognitive development of young children in the same way malaria and other illnesses do.

TB “carriers” in Nigeria need to be identified early and treated regularly with antibiotics in services that extend throughout the nation, especially rural areas that have relied on herbal concoctions with low rates of success.

• Intestinal worms (helminth infections). Nigerian schoolchildren are widely at risk of three intestinal parasites: roundworm, whipworm, and hookworm. Nearly 55% of children in urban public schools have an intestinal parasite, as do 63.5% in rural public schools and 28.4% in private schools. Intestinal worms have been associated with reduced IQ in many studies; the average IQ loss for children left untreated is an estimated 3.75 points per worm infection.

Improved sanitation via clean water, soap, improved latrines, and elimination of garbage around schools could minimize this threat. De-worming programs, at a cost of only 50¢ per child, could also help reduce the brain-damaging effects of worm infections.

Impacts of Violence on Cognitive Development

Being subjected to violence, or witnessing violent activity, puts a traumatic burden on children that leads to cognitive decline. How steep is the subtraction? A child who is exposed to both violence and trauma-related distress has a 7.5-point decrease in IQ, according to a 2002 Children’s Hospital of Michigan study. The sub-Saharan region is catastrophically violent in numerous categories; only four are listed below.

• Civil strife. Myriad bloodbaths have soaked sub-Saharan Africa in the past 30 years, including recent and current conflicts in the Congo and the Ivory Coast, as well as religious terrorism in Nigeria and past nightmares in Rwanda, Burundi, Biafra, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Liberia, Uganda, Central African Republic, and others. Is it accurate to define the entire region as suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? Perhaps.

Seventy-one percent of Liberians say they have witnessed a beating, 47% have witnessed a killing, and 33% have witnessed the killing of a family member. How does a pervasive atmosphere of violence affect children’s cognition? Exposure to trauma correlates to a child’s risk for learning and behavior problems.

Political stability is needed, with dedicated administrators. One source of encouragement may be the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, which awards an annual $5 million prize to African leaders who demonstrate good governance.

• Domestic violence. Witnessing domestic violence is a traumatic childhood experience associated with reduced IQ scores. Unfortunately, wife beating is all too common in sub-Saharan Africa. A 2010 Global Press Institute news report from Nigeria claims that more than 50% of wives have experienced domestic violence at the hands of their husbands. Counterintuitively, the report says that more educated women (65%) face domestic abuse than their lower-income counterparts (56%). And the children are watching: 46% of Nigerian women report being abused in the presence of their children.

A cultural sea-change is needed that elevates women’s rights and prosecutes domestic abusers. A staggering 97.2% of Nigerian women say they are unwilling to report abuse to Nigerian police.

• Child sexual abuse. Multiple studies assert that children subjected to sexual abuse suffer parallel damage to their brain development. Childhood sexual abuse is linked to long-term deficits in verbal short-term memory—a result that resembles the damage observed in patients with combat-related PTSD. One-third of girls and women in Swaziland claim they were victimized by sexual violence before reaching the age of 18. In Nigeria, rape is reportedly on the increase, particularly child rape.

A 2008 news article from IRIN, the UN’s humanitarian news service, claimed that rape suspects from Kano, the commercial hub of northern Nigeria, are usually males between the ages of 45 and 70. Their victims are mostly girls between 3 and 11 years old. The article notes that many of these rapes are never reported because parents “want to save the honour of their daughters and protect their families from embarrassment.”

• Female genital mutilation (FGM). Although FGM is a “traditional ritual,” it needs to also be regarded as a violent, traumatic episode that can likely damage the cognitive development of the victims, generally girls aged 4–12. The World Health Organization (WHO) asserts that FGM has posed a mental health risk to 92 million African women.

Malnutrition’s Impacts on Brain Development

Before focus shifted to the role of infectious disease on hampering IQ levels, malnutrition was perceived in many scholastic circles as the brain’s primary oppressor. Half of the world’s IQ might be increased by up to 20 points by improving micronutrient intake, particularly iodine and zinc. Sub-Saharan Africa would be a primary beneficiary of improved nutrition, especially infants, children, and pregnant women.

Besides the key dietary ingredients discussed below, other nutrients needed for optimal brain development are zinc, calcium, folic acid, vitamin A, and magnesium.

• Iodine deficiency. If a pregnant mother’s diet is low in element 53, her child’s IQ can be severely hampered. Cretinism is the worst result of iodine deficiency, with its shocking retardation of physical and mental development. Every year, 900,000 Nigerian children suffer an IQ loss because their mothers don’t ingest enough iodine during their pregnancy. This loss may amount to a 10% to 15% reduction in intellectual capacity, according to the nonprofit Micronutrient Initiative.
• Iron deficiency (anemia). More than three-fourths of Nigerian children are anemic, Micronutrient Initiative claims, and this lack of iron punishes developing brains. Without enough iron during infancy and early childhood, children’s cognitive skills are impaired, and their IQ is reduced by five to seven points. Food fortification, especially with wheat flour and cereal, could do much to mitigate this threat to sub-Saharan brain development.
• Lack of breast-feeding. Infants who are breast-fed for just four weeks may benefit from a three-point IQ boost. Many specialists advise breast-feeding for at least six months, because the fatty acids in the mother’s milk aid infant brain development. Unfortunately, breast-feeding rates in the sub-Saharan region are among the lowest in the world. UNICEF calculates that only 31% of the region’s mothers breast-feed, a low figure compared with East and South Asia’s 43% to 44%. Breast-feeding is also more hygienic: Bottle-feeding can infect newborns with diseases like diarrhea, especially in areas with contaminated water.

Breast-feeding prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa has made enormous strides in recent years, leaping up from a mere 24% in 1996. Continued education is needed.

Poverty as an Inhibitor of Cognitive Development

The annual per capita income in Nigeria is a mere $191. Numerous studies have indicated that growing up poor causes severe damage to one’s ability to achieve full cognitive potential. For example, wealthier parents can provide better educational resources and spend more time with their children.

Chronic physiological stress because of poverty may also impact brain development and interfere with intellectual achievement. Poor children tend to go to ill-equipped and ill-taught schools, have fewer resources at home, eat low-nutrition food, and have less access to health care. The result of such inadequate environments is that stress hormones wear down the brain. Tests carried out with teenagers reveal that those in poverty have a weaker working memory than teens who are well-off. (Working memory is a reliable indicator for reading, language, and problem-solving ability.)

Impacts of Pollution on Brain Health

Numerous elements and molecular compounds are severely debilitating to human brain development. Two dangerous pollutants are listed below; additional chemicals that cause harm in sub-Saharan Africa are cadmium, manganese, petroleum hydrocarbons, mercury, and others. Water pollution and soil contamination also merit attention.

• Lead poisoning. The brain-toxic 82nd element is pervasive throughout the sub-Saharan region. Settling fumes from leaded gasoline cake the soil and, subsequently, agricultural produce. The fuel additive was only phased out in 2005. Illegal mining operations in northern Nigeria recently used lead to refine gold ore, horrendously contaminating both the ground and the water. Ninety-six percent of consumer paints available in Nigeria contain higher than the recommended levels of lead.

The nongovernmental organization Doctors Without Borders discovered in 2010 that 90% of the children under 5 years old in the Nigerian state of Zamfara (population 3.6 million) had lead poisoning. In Kabwe, Zambia, lead concentrations in children are five to 19 times higher than the exposure limits set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Some studies estimate that lead exposure in children can lead to permanent loss of five to seven IQ points.

• Air pollution (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons). Lagos, with its 12 million residents, has severe air pollution, largely caused by auto fumes and burning garbage. The Nigerian city does not have the worst air in the sub-Saharan region, however; that unfortunate honor goes to Gaberone, Botswana, which Time magazine named the eighth-worst air-polluted city in the world (based on WHO data) in 2011. Air-pollution exposure before birth lowers IQ by four points, because smog harms the developing brain.

Sub-Saharan cities need energy-efficient public rail systems, and vehicles and industry need stricter emissions controls.

Genetic Factors in Compromised Cognition

Adding to the multiple environmental factors listed above are at least two genetic circumstances that damage IQ. Both problems could be alleviated with improved social, educational, and health policies. The two genetic factors are sickle-cell disease (SCD) and cousin marriage.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest prevalence in the world in SCD, with up to 2% of all children born with the genetic blood disorder. Children with SCD are at risk for lower intelligence and executive dysfunction, with possible deficits in visual-spatial working memory, attention, and planning. The impact of SCD is significant: More than one-third of children with the genetic disease have an IQ below 75.

Cousin marriage, known as “consanguinity,” is prevalent in many sub-Saharan groups. In Nigeria, it is practiced by the 18 million members of the Hausa tribe, preferentially in marrying two brothers’ children—patrilateral parallel cousins. The custom is also common among the Yoruba. Cousin marriage increases the risk of birth defects, due to a higher proportion of shared genes. A 1993 Aligarh Muslim University report from India showed that the offspring of cousin marriages had an IQ 11.2 points lower (88.4) than children from nonconsanguineous marriages (99.6).

Systemic Approaches Needed to Address the African Brain Threat

Despite these challenges, sub-Saharan Africa is now experiencing an economic boom. The region’s economy was expected to grow 5.25% in 2011, with 5.75% growth forecast in 2012, according to the International Monetary Fund. Sub-Saharan Africa’s financial future is aided by the region’s enormous mineral wealth and by China’s recent lavish investment. Perhaps effervescent confidence can also boost the region; a 2011 Gallup poll proclaimed Nigerians to be the world’s happiest and most optimistic people.

Many charitable people in developed nations and NGOs are addressing the causes of the IQ gap. Among these are the Voss Foundation of Norway, which works to guarantee access to clean water in sub-Saharan Africa, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has helped decrease malaria deaths in the region by 20% since 2000.

Addressing the systemic problems is imperative in fixing the stunted abilities of the region. There’s reason for optimism: The brain is marvelously “plastic,” and IQ is enormously malleable. Children damaged by malnutrition, pollutants, and other grim factors can swiftly improve once conditions do.

Technology-oriented solutions are also critical now. For instance, Internet access and low-cost computers in the sub-Saharan regions have the potential to accelerate the movement of residents into an egalitarian future. This is rapidly happening: The number of Nigerians with Internet connectivity tripled from 2000 to 2008, leaping from 8 million to 24 million, according to Accender Africa, a new media technology-focused nonprofit.

Another, more-transhumanist advance is Nigeria’s recent development of its own pharmaceutical “smart drug,” Cognitol. The 5 mg vinpocetine tablet has been clinically proven to improve information storage, memory, and IQ. Other cognitive-enhancement therapies may provide enormous benefits for those with stunted abilities—benefits that can enable individuals to rapidly close the gap between themselves and others more fortunate to have received optimal nutrition and environments.

In “Get Smarter,” a 2009 essay in The Atlantic, Jamais Cascio notes that intelligence is increasing and will continue to increase globally, aided by social tools, individualized systems that augment our capacity for planning and foresight, drugs, technology that beefs up the brain’s power externally, and stand-alone artificial minds.

With corrective future policies and neuro-technology, sub-Saharan Africans can be equal to all, by every material and mental measure.

About the Author

Hank Pellissier is managing director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology, www.ieet.org. He is the author of two e-books, Why Is the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews so High? Scientific Factors That Influence Intelligence and Invent Utopia Now: Transhumanist Suggestions for the Pre-Singularity Era. E-mail hankpellissier@yahoo.com.

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• Watching Online Violence — http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=indiana%20mri%20adolescents%20violence
• Adult Obesity — http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16223549, http://chealth.canoe.ca/channel_health_news_details.asp?news_id=22517&channel_id=0 and http://www.neuro-vision.us/ad/Article/Another-Reason-To-Get-On-The-Treadmill—Obesity-and-Cognitive-Decline- Linked/10482
• Adult Marijuana Use — http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19630708, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15205869
• Khat — http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21698275
• Head Injury — http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8682910
• Summer Stupor — http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8698244/Sun-sea-and-shrinking-brain-power.html
• Chronic traumatic stress — http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=%22chronic%20stress%22%20IQ
• Obsessively Checking Electronic Messages — http://articles.cnn.com/2005-04-22/world/text.iq_1_mails-iq-messages?_s=PM:WORLD
• Adult Smoking — http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20110594, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19750560
• Cold Weather — http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289605000917
• Religious Fundamentalism — http://secure.asanet.org/images/journals/docs/pdf/spq/Mar10SPQFeature.pdf
• Political Conservatism — http://www.asanet.org/press/20100223/Evolution_and_Intelligence.cfm
• Amnesia — http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17102699
• Hypoxia — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_hypoxia
• Chemotherapy — http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/100/3/162

Are You Smarter Than a Sixth-Generation Computer?

By Richard Yonck

Tests for measuring nonhuman intelligence are needed in order to track development.

Despite the amazing achievement of supercomputers such as IBM’s Jeopardy champion DeepQA (aka Watson), we do not yet call them “intelligent.” But what about the next generation of supercomputers, or the ones that come after that?

Before we can make forecasts about machine intelligence, we will need a gauge beyond simple metrics such as petaflops and data-transfer rates. We need to establish a standard metric of machine intelligence.

The idea of testing artificial intelligence goes back to Alan Turing and the eponymously named Turing test. Essentially, the Turing test involved engaging unseen human and machine participants in a text- based conversation. If the judges were unable to correctly identify the AI, then it would be said to have passed. Pass or fail: an all or nothing result.

Unfortunately, while this test is potentially useful for determining human equivalence, it’s generally agreed that this isn’t the only form of intelligence. A dolphin or a chimpanzee could never pass such a test, and yet both exhibit considerable intelligence. It’s just that the nature and level of their intellects differ from that of humans.

The same could be said of machine intelligence. Just because human equivalence hasn’t yet been achieved in silico, doesn’t mean that rudiments of intelligence don’t exist. Additionally, decades from now, an artificial general intelligence, or AGI, may be too dissimilar from the human mind to pass the Turing test, even though it might be very superior to us in most other ways.

For more than a century, psychometric tests have existed for people. While some may argue about the merits of assigning a numerical value to the intelligence of individuals, the fact remains that these tests have resulted in considerable knowledge about the distribution of intelligence in our species. Of course, such tests can’t be applied to nonhumans. So how does one develop a test suitable for machines?

Over the years, a number of tests of machine intelligence have been proposed. Several, such as Linguistic Complexity and Psychometric AI, suffer from the same shortcomings as the Turing test, in that they test for human equivalence. Many other theorized tests aren’t mathematically rigorous enough. To test a nonhuman and rate it on any sort of meaningful scale, we must accurately assess the complexity of the question or challenge set before it.

Recently, a framework for creating mathematically rigorous challenges has been conceived. This is described in a paper titled “Measuring Universal Intelligence: Toward An Anytime Intelligence Test” by José Hernández-Orallo and David L. Dowe, published in Artificial Intelligence. This test of “universal intelligence” is grounded in algorithmic information theory and complexity theory in order to structure its challenges. More specifically, it uses Levin’s Kt complexity, a modification of Kolmogorov complexity, to assign a mathematical value to the challenge put before an intelligence. (Kolmogorov complexity is a measure of the minimum computational resources required to define an object. However, it isn’t computable, so an approximate value is derived using Levin’s Kt complexity.)

The test is referred to as an “anytime test,” because, as structured, it isn’t dependent on time. A value can be derived from minimal interaction, with increasing accuracy as the time is increased and more challenges undertaken.

This approach allows us to tailor challenges to the level of an intelligence—be it animal, machine, or even, in theory, an alien—and assign a meaningful value to the result. An additional benefit of such an approach is that a subject isn’t required to be able to understand language. This would allow us to test the intelligence of animals as well as those machines lacking natural language-processing capabilities.

Developing methods of interfacing with different types of intelligence will be a key problem. The intelligence tests might take the form of structured environments in which particular tasks are to be performed by the test subject. Using a series of observations, rewards, and actions, we could then calculate the aggregated complexity of these tasks to yield a useful value of performance.

The ideas that led to this approach have been developed by Hernández-Orallo and Dowe, as well as Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter, among others, and are based on the work of the pioneers of algorithmic information theory, Ray Solomonoff, Andrey Kolmogorov, Gregory Chaitin, and Chris Wallace.

The Future of Intelligence

Beyond assigning a single value of intelligence to nonhuman subjects, it should be possible to test and rate different factors of intelligence. Just as human beings differ in their balance of different intelligence factors, so, too, could machines. In fact, it can be argued that AIs could vary in their distribution of these far more than people do.

What if self-improving AI gives rise to a superintelligence? Should this occur, it seems more likely that many intelligences would ultimately develop, rather than a single monolithic one. Assuming these diverged in much the same way that biological organisms do through evolution, a broad variety could develop. Such tests could allow us to create a taxonomy of machine intelligences. Tests that gauge the “personality” of an AI based on its balance of intelligence factors could prove beneficial, if not life-saving.

An anytime test of universal intelligence offers a significant potential tool for futurists, scientists, and policy makers. By measuring machine intelligences accurately, it would improve our ability to track their development and make more-accurate trend analyses and projections. This would allow for a more-accurate assessment of where we’ve been and where we’re going. Such knowledge would lead to better-informed scenarios, as would an improved understanding of existing and potential types of superintelligence.

As our world becomes increasingly filled with technological intelligence, it will serve us well to know exactly how smart our machines are and in what ways. Given that we try to measure almost every other aspect of our world, it seems only prudent that we accurately measure the intelligence of our machines, as well—especially since, by some projections, they’re expected to surpass us in the coming decades.

This leads to the question: Is the day approaching when machines will debate whether or not human beings are truly intelligent?

Richard Yonck is a foresight analyst for Intelligent Future LLC. He speaks and consults about the future and emerging technologies and writes a futures blog at Intelligent-Future.com. He is also THE FUTURIST’s contributing editor for Computing and AI. E-mail ryonck@intelligent-future.com. This article draws from his paper “Toward a Standard Metric of Machine Intelligence,” published in World Future Review’s special WorldFuture 2012 conference edition.

Diversity, Discovery, and a Ticking Clock

MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN, WWW.MOBOT.ORG

Peter H. Raven, president emeritus of the Missouri
Botanical Garden

Species extinctions may be outpacing new species discoveries, scientists warn.

Professional and amateur taxonomists around the world have better tools at their disposal for identifying new species, including some that may be of vital significance. But they may be running out of time.

“If you are looking for the most sensitive canary in the mine for early alerts of environmental change, it will be found among the millions of species, most of which we do not yet know,” Arizona State University entomologist Quentin D. Wheeler told THE FUTURIST.

Biologists may have thus far discovered only about one-sixth of the planet’s wildlife, according to a recent paper in Systematics and Biodiversity, for which Wheeler served as lead author. While scientists have identified about 2 million species of plants, animals, fungi, and other life forms (excluding bacteria), there could be another 10 million waiting for someone to find them, estimate the paper’s 39 co-authors, among whom are noted biologist Edward O. Wilson and botanist Peter H. Raven.

The authors urge the world community to act fast, however: Human destruction of wildlife habitats could wipe many species out before anyone ever discovers them.

“It’s probably a good thing to learn all we can before it is too late,” says Wheeler.

Some species groups are more obscure than others, according to Raven, president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden. He notes that insects, nematodes, mites, and fungi are among the “least-well-known” groups, and thus may represent large swaths of the hitherto undiscovered. There are about 16,000 known nematode species, for example—this includes roundworms and animal parasites—but the total number that exists might be around 1 million.

Raven also foresees more discovering to do in certain geographic areas. The tropics, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea will all be key locales—ecologically rich and sparsely populated by humans, but unfortunately also very threatened, he says.

In fact, human civilization as a whole may now be killing species off more quickly than it is discovering them, according to Raven, who estimates that 30% of Earth’s species will be extinct by the century’s end. He blames climate change and decimation of species habitats by resource-hungry humans.

“Overconsumption doesn’t leave a lot of room for the future of biological diversity,” Raven says.

Wheeler agrees, noting that many species occur in only one or a few places and depend on a particular set of other species. As habitats are destroyed or damaged, some species cannot cope.

“The biodiversity crisis has made it clear that in spite of our most heroic efforts we will witness the extinction of a large number of species, possibly numbering in the millions,” says Wheeler.

The co-authors have this good news, though: Tools for discovering and classifying species have evolved considerably in the digital era. The Internet and mobile communications greatly facilitate information sharing among taxonomists. Wheeler looks forward to nature collections everywhere being able to connect, so that any new discovery could instantly get the attention of any expert, anywhere.

“By using off-the-shelf technology, we could increase the speed of species classification by an order of magnitude,” he says.

Digital media is also an effective means of sharing species news with the public, he notes. Amateur taxonomists are already active today, participating in nature clubs that visit sites and look for new specimens.

Digital technology’s further development could make it easier for professional taxonomists to guide amateurs on what to look for. Those amateurs will then help the professionals find more new species, more quickly.

“Until now there was a glass ceiling that prohibited most amateurs from going as far as they might like to go in doing taxonomy,” says Wheeler. “Literature, types and other specimens are being digitized, and many basic questions can now be asked and answered online by anyone, anywhere.”

Professional scientists need all the help that they can get, asserts Marcelo de Carvalho, a co-author and zoologist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He says that the quantity of taxonomy work to do far dwarfs the finite number of researchers available to carry it out.

“We have better tools at our disposal to be able to describe and understand biodiversity than we had 20 years ago,” says de Carvalho. “But what we don’t have is a significantly greater workforce to handle the present crisis.”

The world has many regions that need much further collecting, and some that have hardly even been touched, observes de Carvalho. South America is itself host to some incredibly rich but mysterious ecosystems. He also sees much work ahead throughout the world’s oceans.

“Much of the open ocean is desertlike, but deep-sea trenches with thermal activity and seamounts may hold much unknown biodiversity,” he says.

However, de Carvalho also reprimands government officials for not adequately protecting these ecosystems. Although Brazil and its neighbors have implemented conservation laws, de Carvalho says that they scarcely enforce them. For example, only about 1% of fines distributed by the Brazilian Environmental authority to illegal logging activities are actually paid; defendants bribe prosecutors or prevail upon judges to cancel fines. There is also no specific legislation protecting much of the marine life that requires protection, such as stingrays.

“Researchers, biologists, environmentalists, and others in the field seem to do their jobs, but the government officials fall very short of doing theirs. Mass development, which this government associates with societal improvement, is continuing at full force,” de Carvalho says.

Wheeler is hopeful, however, that the discovery of new species might galvanize public interest in saving them. As more scientists and amateur taxonomists collaborate on species studies, and as digital media educates the public more about species diversity, public interest in protecting threatened and endangered species will gain strength.

“The tools exist that anyone with a little effort can use to identify the species she or he encounters,” says Wheeler. “As we develop media that makes it easy to identify other groups, I am confident that people will gravitate to groups [of species] that no one even thinks of today.”

In addition, he anticipates that increased knowledge of species and their habitats will be useful for professional conservationists. Better knowledge of what species are out there, where they live, and how they live will lend itself to more effectively targeting plans and coordinating efforts to rescue them from extinction.

“We can use knowledge of species to maximize both the number of species that survive and the diversity that they represent evolutionarily,” says Wheeler.

—Rick Docksai

Sources: “Mapping the biosphere: exploring species to understand the origin, organization and sustainability of biodiversity,” Systematics and Biodiversity (March 2012).

Interviews: Quentin Wheeler (Arizona State University), Peter H. Raven (Missouri Botanical Center), and Marcelo de Carvalho (University of São Paulo).

Child Marriage Declines in South Asia

Education and human development may lead to fewer child brides.

In impoverished communities across the developing world, many families arrange to marry off their underage daughters to older male suitors—usually without the daughters’ consent or even their knowing in advance. Those girls are then pulled out of school and taken from their homes and childhood friends to be forced into new lives of childbearing and domestic servitude.

Child marriages have long been commonplace, particularly in South Asia. But a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicates that this region is finally succeeding in making the practice less common.

From 1991 to 2007, marriage rates for girls under 14 declined by 45% in Bangladesh, 34% in India, 56.5% in Nepal, and 61% in Pakistan, according to the study led by Anita Raj, professor of medicine at the University of California–San Diego. Raj and her team attribute some of Bangladesh and Nepal’s declining rates to increased promotion of childhood education over the last decade. The reasons behind similar declines in child marriages in India and Pakistan are less clear, however.

“In Bangladesh, in particular, they have created notable and dramatic improvements in education of girls,” says Raj. “The norms have changed. There is improved education of girls; there is improved economic opportunity.”

The declines did not extend to girls in their mid-teens, however. Marriage rates of girls ages 16-17 declined slightly in Nepal but stayed the same in India and Pakistan and increased by 36% in Bangladesh.

Raj notes that young people in the region graduate from secondary school in their mid-teens, and that this may be a factor. She points out that, as numerous studies have indicated, girls who do not receive education are more vulnerable to early marriage. Furthermore, a lack of career opportunities may induce the region’s teenage girls and their families to see little incentive for the girls to pursue college.

“Improved education may be affecting some of the youngest girls, but once they reach 16 or 17, we stop seeing the effect,” she says. “If we provide education but little opportunity for girls to use the education, there may be less incentive for older adolescent girls and their families to want to delay marriage.”

Still, the region’s lower rates overall of child marriage may hold big dividends for public health. The World Health Organization’s data indicates that, from 2000 to 2008, maternal mortality rates in Bangladesh fell 32%, and the death rates for infants (younger than 1 year old) fell by 38%.

Raj says that these improved health indicators may be, at least in part, a direct result of fewer women giving birth while in their teens—teen mothers are more likely to suffer health complications than women who give birth in their 20s or early 30s.

“The younger you are as a pregnant mother, the more compromised the health you’re going to have and your child will have. So we think the dramatic improvements in maternal and child health in the country are tied to the fact that they have shifted the percent of girls who married at the youngest ages,” Raj says.

The trend of girls not marrying until they reach adulthood may also lead to lower national population growth. In most countries, Raj notes, when individuals of either gender put off marrying, they also delay having children, and they have fewer children overall as a result.

“If you marry young you will have children young, and that’s what’s compromising the health of children and mothers in the region,” she says.

Child marriage remains common worldwide. There are around 60 million child brides across the globe, according to the International Center for Research on Women (www.icrw.org), a gender-rights advocacy organization. It states that child brides suffer not only reduced freedom and educational opportunities, but also much higher health risks attached to early child bearing, as well as sexually transmitted diseases, sexual abuse, social isolation, and domestic violence. The practice is most common in rural areas.

Families may opt to marry off their daughters out of desperation. According to Raj, they may view the marriage as a means to ensure that someone will provide for, protect, and house their daughter better than they can.

“One of the difficulties is that these are parents who believe they are doing what’s in the best interests of their daughters and of the family as a whole,” she says. “And [there is] the idea of protection—that she is more vulnerable to sexual predators if she is of a certain age and not married.”

Moreover, some girls in their mid-teens may themselves want the marriage. They may believe that it will lead them to a better life—and no adult in their life will be cautioning otherwise.

“For girls at 16 or 17, it’s not necessarily an issue of force. It’s a matter of deciding who is a child and who is an adult,” says Raj.—Rick Docksai

Sources: “Changes in Prevalence of Girl Child Marriage in South Asia” by Anita Raj, Lotus McDougal, and Melanie L. A. Rusch, Journal of the American Medical Association (Research Letters, May 16, 2012).

Interview: Anita Raj, University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, www.ucsd.edu.

Investing in Ex-Cons

Small loans may yield big opportunities for social reintegration.

Reentering society is a challenge for ex-inmates, whose criminal records impair their ability to find employment and to receive many social services. Access to housing and food assistance, educational loans, and other public assistance is vital to breaking the cycle of criminal behavior that floods prisons and costs governments and taxpayers billions of dollars each year, according to advocates for reform.

Taxpayers contribute an estimated $39 billion each year for running corrections facilities in the 40 states participating in a survey by the Vera Institute of Justice. Decreasing state justice budgets create an increasing fiscal challenge to dealing with a criminal population that keeps returning to jail.

To give ex-inmates productive opportunities and to shift the cost of reintegrating them into society from the taxpayers at large, financial engineering graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, have designed a way to “fill the funding gap for positive—and hopefully profitable—projects for ex-inmates,” says Angelo Caraballo, a member of the Valjean Financing project.

The project—named after Les Misérables’ Jean Valjean, an ex-con with a new lease on life—would allow investors to finance the proposals of recently released inmates (so-called Valjeans) for business opportunities, education, or any other project. This investment approach would cut down the cost to taxpayers and governments, primarily through reduced recidivism—a return to criminal behavior and reconviction. A Valjean loan for vocational training, for example, could also help reduce expenses that governments incur for such training.

The Valjean Financing program helps provide stability during the tumultuous reentry period. When an inmate is released from prison, finding employment with a living wage is a key factor in preventing recidivism. Employment training, community integration, and public assistance would ultimately cost less than paying for repeat criminals’ jail times: About half of released prisoners wind up back in jail within three years. Local support programs that help ex-inmates reintegrate into society show a 20% to 60% decrease in recidivism—but reintegration programs are few and far between.

Through the Valjean Financing program, public and private investors—which could include family members and friends of the Valjean who want to support their loved one while having the security in knowing their investment is being put to good use—would bid down the interest rate of a Valjean’s loan proposal for a business, educational, or other project. The more compelling and credible the Valjean’s proposal, the more attractive the loan would be for investors and the lower the interest rate would be. Valjeans demonstrate their credibility through professional skills, conduct during imprisonment, and payment history. A riskier Valjean would have a higher interest rate because of the potential for default—interest rates for future loans would decrease as the Valjean makes payments on initial loans.

“Think of Valjean Financing as a fusion between eBay and a dating site: A small profile features a Valjean’s relevant information, and investors have the ability to bid on the rate of the loan,” Caraballo says.

The behavior, skills, and criminal history of a potential Valjean would be screened before being approved to seek a loan, and investors would be given periodic updates on the Valjean’s progress. Loan options could include income-linked loans (for which payments are based on a Valjean’s income level) or performance-linked loans (which are paid out to a Valjean after he or she meets certain benchmarks).

The reentry period is volatile, and although having a source of financial security is important to help deter reconviction, paying back a loan could add financial stress that pushes Valjeans to illegal activities to earn money. And, because of the possibility of loan default during a Valjean’s reentry period, an investor assumes a high risk.

“We do not want Valjeans to get in over their heads with these loans, so there will be a system established to make sure that both the investor and Valjean are protected,” Caraballo says.

This program could address at least a portion of released criminals, offering them another, legal way to gain financial independence and help ease the financial burden on taxpayers and the prison system. The possibility of loan eligibility could encourage inmates to behave more constructively during incarceration—pursuing education, obtaining work within the facility, and earning loan eligibility points for good behavior with other inmates and staff.

“The Valjean program allows the released to dream, and possibly dream big,” Caraballo says. “Hopefully, the inmate feels that the world is not against him—since it is funding him—and that a different life is really possible.”—Kenneth J. Moore

Sources: Angelo Caraballo, University of California, Berkeley, www.haas.berkeley.edu.

Vera Institute of Justice, “The Price of Prisons” report, 2012, www.vera.org.

Games for Character And Mindfulness

Richard Davidson, University of
Wisconsin–Madison

New techniques are sought for teaching middle schoolers about kindness and empathy.

Many adults remember their own middle-school years (ages 11 to 14) as filled with traumatic episodes of hormonal rage, self-loathing, and aggressiveness. As grown-ups, educators, parents, and child development specialists may well hope for better experiences for today’s and tomorrow’s youth.

Video games may have their critics, but they could turn out to be a vital ally in developing a variety of beneficial skills, such as empathy, cooperation, mental focus, self-regulation, compassion, and kindness, according to Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

“By the time they reach the eighth grade, virtually every middle-class child in the Western world is playing smartphone apps, video games, and computer games,” says Davidson, who is the William James and Vilas Research Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at UW-Madison. “Our hope is that we can use some of that time for constructive purposes and take advantage of the natural inclination of children of that age to want to spend time with this kind of technology.”

Davidson has teamed with Kurt Squire, an associate professor in the School of Education and director of the Games Learning Society Initiative, and received support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to design two prototype games: one for improving attention and mental focus, and another focusing on social behaviors such as kindness, compassion, and altruism.

Computer and video games have the advantage of being highly engaging, so that users focus on the activity at hand. The researchers hope to capitalize on this engagement, using insights from neuroscience research to observe changes in the brain while gamers are playing.

In the games for improving mental focus, users will learn breath awareness. Breathing is “very boring,” says Davidson, “so if you’re able to attend to that, you can attend to most other things.” In the games for improving social behaviors, users will learn to detect and interpret emotions in others through body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice.

“Skills of mindfulness and kindness are very important for college readiness,” says Davidson. “Mindfulness, because it cultivates the capacity to regulate attention, which is the building block for all kinds of learning; and kindness, because the ability to cooperate is important for everything that has to do with success in life, team building, leadership, and so forth.”

Source: University of Wisconsin–Madison, www.wisc.edu.

Tomorrow in Brief

Anti-Malarial Fashion Statement

MARK DAVID VORREUTER / CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Fashion-forward (and insecticide-laden) hooded
bodysuit offers an ­attractive weapon in the fight
against malaria.

Specially treated mosquito nets may be effective at combating malarial infections, but their protection is limited because they are primarily used over beds as users sleep. Now, fashion designers have come to the rescue with wearable protection.

At Cornell University, Matilda Ceesay—a fashion major from Gambia—and Frederick Ochanda—a post-doctoral fiber scientist from Kenya—have developed a colorful hooded bodysuit that takes the mosquito net concept to the next level.

The key to the anti-malarial garment is binding the mosquito-repelling chemicals to the mesh fabric at the nanolevel, so the fabric can hold three times more insecticide than normal nets.

Source: Cornell University, www.cornell.edu.

Disease Detection: Waiting to Exhale

SCREEN CAPTURES FROM NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION VIDEO

As Stony Brook University researcher Perena Gouma looks
on, technician demonstrates breath­alyzer device that
promises to detect signs of disease.

Blue ammonia molecules indicate ­kidney
disease in this illustration of the Single Breath
Disease Diagnostics Breathalyzer.

Instead of instructing us to breathe deeply and say “ah,” future doctors may simply have us exhale into diagnostic breathalyzers.

The Single Breath Disease Diagnostics Breathalyzer is being developed by a team of scientists at Stony Brook University in New York, led by materials scientist Perena Gouma. The device uses sensor chips coated with nanowires to detect chemical compounds that may indicate the presence of diseases or infectious microbes.

While the first such “medical breathalyzers” will be specific to one type of disease (for instance, to monitor diabetes), future handheld devices will allow individual users to self-monitor and detect diseases ranging from lung cancer to anthrax exposure.

Source: National Science Foundation, www.nsf.gov.

Trucking Down eHighway

SIEMENS CORPORATION

Hybrid truck switches from diesel to electricity
when it recognizes available power.

A scheme to electrify trucks and the highways they travel could help significantly reduce emissions. Siemens’ eHighway of the Future project, undergoing tests in Germany, involves hybrid diesel–electric trucks that are equipped to connect to overhead wires. The built-in software would recognize when the overhead electricity is available, then switch power mode to electric.

“When most people think of vehicle emissions, they assume cars do most of the damage, but it’s actually commercial trucks that are largely to blame,” says Daryl Dulaney, CEO, Siemens Infrastructure & Cities, United States. “Freight transportation on U.S. roadways is expected to double by 2050, while global oil resources continue to deplete. And by 2030, carbon-dioxide emissions are forecasted to jump 30% due to freight transport alone.”

Source: Siemens Corporation, www.industry.siemens.com.

Future Scope

As Tweeted: RIP Ray Bradbury

JIM HURON / AFP / GETTY IMAGES / NEWSCOM

Ray Bradbury in a 1990 photo.

Legendary science-fiction author Ray Bradbury died at the age of 91 on June 5, 2012, after a long illness. Futurists were inspired to tweet their reflections, tributes, and favorite quotations.

@io9: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles http://io9.com/5916175/rip-ray-bradbury-author-of-fahrenheit-451-and-the-martian-chronicles

@latimes (Los Angeles Times): Ray Bradbury, dead at 91, leaves a legacy as a writer who provided enduring speculative blueprints for the future.

@BBC_Future: “People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it.” Ray Bradbury, RIP.

@BBCWorld: “If you know how to read... then you know how to vote” - American writer Ray Bradbury dies in Los Angeles aged 91

@brainpicker (Maria Popova): “We have our Arts so we won’t die of Truth.” RIP, Ray Bradbury

@KelSmith: RIP Ray Bradbury, my favorite martian.

@cascio (Jamais Cascio): Thanks, Ray Bradbury, for making me who I am today. http://www.openthefuture .com/2012/06/becoming.html

@wendyg (Wendy M. Grossman): R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, author of so much wonderful science fiction, at 91. The images in The Martian Chronicles have stayed with me always.

@neiltyson (Neil deGrasse Tyson): Creative imaginative visionary. A dreamer, like so many of the best science fiction authors. Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), R I P

@UtneReader: Goodbye Ray Bradbury, thanks for expanding our minds

@bergopolis (Amy Berg): RT @redrighthand: Ray Bradbury is not dead. Go look at your bookshelf. He will outlive us all. | Retweeted by @BarryWellman

@nigelcameron: It’s a lot easier to burn #ebooks. #justsayin #Fahrenheit451 #Bradbury

@ByoLogyc: May he rest well, knowing he gave to us all a glimpse of the future.

@MargaretAtwood: So sad to hear of Ray Bradbury’s death. @Sam__Weller + I planned to visit him just before ComicCon. Shadow Show tribute made him happy...

@comicsreporter (Tom Spurgeon): thanks to Mr. Bradbury from me and every other reader who can still see his section of the local library in their mind’s eye; RIP | Retweeted by @MargaretAtwood

@paleofuture (Matt Novak): I had the immense honor of meeting Mr. Bradbury recently. Such a fascinating and kind man. He will be missed.

@changeist (Scott Smith): Bradbury was my main lit inspiration as a teen. Showed me how to look at technology through a social and political lens. RIP.

@trevver (Trevor Haldenby): RIP Ray Bradbury - #TheIllustratedMan and #SoundOfThunder taught me that emotions are the most unpredictable technology....

@RichLouv: Advice from the Late Great Ray Bradbury: Be an “Optimalist”

@TheFutureScout (Patricia Tynan): Thank U for helping us to see reality of the present & possibilities of the future. RT @raybradbury: A life’s work should be based on love.

@raybradbury: Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future. | Retweeted by @rdlankes

@raybradbury: You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. | Retweeted by @garrygolden

For more information about Ray Bradbury, visit his official Web site, www.raybradbury.com.

Follow the World Future Society on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WorldFutureSoc and THE FUTURIST’s deputy editor Patrick Tucker at http://twitter.com/TheYear2030.

A Leaderless World Order?

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World

A book review by Rick Docksai

New alliances and new cold wars are both possible as the era of superpowers is over, says policy scholar Ian Bremmer. The next few decades of geopolitics will be messy.

Coalitions of nations, such as the G7 and G20, convene and attempt to orchestrate solutions to global problems, but each attempt comes up short. This is an indicator that the world’s real situation is “G-Zero”: No country or group of countries is leading, or even capable of leading, the world, argues Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, in Every Nation for Itself.

“Many countries are now strong enough to prevent the international community from taking action, but none has the political and economic muscle to remake the status quo. No one is driving the bus,” he writes.

China, Japan, Europe, and the other global powers are each too weighted down with domestic troubles to exert strong leadership abroad, according to Bremmer. Even multinational global organizations, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, are lacking. They were designed originally to entrench American and European leadership, but now the emerging nations are demanding greater say within them, which not only undercuts the founding nations’ agendas, but also makes it more difficult for the organizations to approve clear plans of action. There are too many member states with differing interests.

Sanctions, for instance, will cease to be enforceable. Whatever rules a governing body such as the UN Security Council might impose upon a country, other countries will flout the rules, and there will not be a bloc of countries able to dissuade them.

Bremmer cautions leaders to accept that, in this geopolitical reality, no nation will be in control of events. Leaders everywhere must be agile, adaptable, and able to manage unexpected crises.

Individual nations may enforce order within their respective regions. Brazil might come to dominate Latin America, for example, and Saudi Arabia could be a force for political and economic stability in the Persian Gulf. However, there will no longer be any one or two world powers directing affairs across the globe, Bremmer forecasts.

Also, global trade frameworks will go by the wayside. Governments will move toward more economic protectionism—tariffs on imported goods, strict regulations on foreign companies that do business on their soil, etc.—to preserve domestic jobs and safeguard domestic producers. Most governments will be more inclined to enact exclusive trade agreements with one other country or regional bloc.

Nonetheless, it will be imperative for world leaders to cooperate to the greatest extent possible, says Bremmer. The United States and its industrialized-world allies must act in concert not only with each other, but also with China, India, and the other developing powers, to achieve any measureable progress on common problems.

“We have entered a period of transition from the world we know toward one we can’t yet map. Shifts on this scale never come without conflict,” he writes.

A concert of world leaders that includes China and the United States could emerge, and thus the world would have a true G20 at its helm—but this is not likely. Bremmer places more stock in either a “Cold War 2.0” future of economic rivalry and cyberwarfare between the United States and China or a world where multinational institutions become irrelevant and nations tend to their respective regions instead of the globe at large.

“It’s hard to imagine a crisis large enough to force lasting cooperation from most of the world’s established and emerging powers,” he writes.

While Asia will be the biggest contributor to global economic growth, it may also be the most unstable region on Earth. As U.S. influence in Asia wanes, China will exert more clout and may encounter pushback from Japan, South Korea, and other affluent neighbors. Meanwhile, China’s own domestic situation will grow more tentative as mass protests and global economic changes severely undermine its economic and political stability.

China can retain its preeminence, but only if it carries out dramatic social and economic reforms. The United States, meanwhile, must tackle its own burgeoning public debt, and that will necessitate some measures that are now politically difficult—cutting military expenditures, raising taxes, and trimming public health and retirement programs. U.S. leaders must additionally accept a more limited U.S. role in world affairs, while maximizing one surefire foreign-policy tool: wisely negotiated free-trade agreements.

Every Nation for Itself is a clear presentation of where the geopolitical scene might head later this century and the tangible steps that leaders may take to get there. Policy makers and policy analysts both would do well to add it to their libraries.

About the Reviewer

Rick Docksai is associate editor of THE FUTURIST magazine.

The Planetary Awakening

Birth 2012 and Beyond: Humanity's Great Shift to the Age of Conscious Evolution

The human race is the first species to knowingly be confronted with either evolution or extinction, and the time is now for us to embrace evolution, asserts futurist and social architect Barbara Marx Hubbard, president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution. In Birth 2012 and Beyond, she argues that we have the capacity to usher in a new age of unprecedented peace, interconnectedness, and global equity, if we choose it.

Human society is at a “chaos point”—we cannot resume the old ways of business and governance. Crises of overpopulation, environmental degradation, war making, and economic inequality have brought us to the brink. Individuals and groups the world over are earnestly seeking out better ways.

As old beliefs die and old structures crumble around us, new forms are emerging, Hubbard assures us. There is a new economic order about to take shape and myriad groups of young activists, “universal humans,” who are connecting across cultural and geographic boundaries through social media.

More fundamentally, a new evolutionary worldview, one that affirms the unity of the whole planetary system, is catching on: increasing empathy, deepening spirituality, and an ever-expanding awareness of the world’s societal and ecological crises. Hubbard explains all of this and then describes how each individual reader can realize the evolution personally and contribute to the world’s ultimate progress.

Birth 2012 is a powerful and, at times, poetic statement of humanity’s untapped potential. It is to be recommended for readers and seekers of all walks of life.

Law and Digital Records

Burdens of Proof: Cryptographic Culture and Evidence Law in the Age of Electronic Documents

Paper documents were the standard of proof in law, business, and everyday life throughout the twentieth century, but the fairly recent conversion of nearly all of our written records into digitized data stored in computers is a whole new paradigm with some never-before-seen challenges, according to UCLA information-studies professor Jean-François Blanchette.

In Burdens of Proof, Blanchette looks at the inherent problems of “digital signatures” and the continuing challenge of ensuring that they are as secure and credible as the paper documents that they have replaced.

Legal experts have grappled since the 1980s over how to verify beyond reasonable doubt that an electronic document—whether it’s a birth certificate, driver’s license, passport, or anything else—is authentic. Numerous opportunities for document fraud exist. Further difficulties persist over the electronic voting systems that have replaced paper ballots in many electoral jurisdictions; allegations of machine errors and human ballot tampering have arisen in several U.S. election cycles.

Blanchette reviews the development of electronic documentation over the last few decades and assesses the present-day status. Although engineers have resolved many technical issues, to this day, an electronic signature does not in itself prove that a document is trustworthy. A person who views the document has to ultimately trust that the software architecture is sound and that no one has hacked into the system and tampered with the document in any way.

The author offers an overview of some technological solutions that may make for better cryptography and better security over records from fraud and abuse.

Burdens of Proof is a thoroughly analytical and highly technical read. It is well-suited for students and professionals in software engineering, law, and other related fields.

What If European History Repeats Itself?

The Prosperity of Vice: A Worried View of Economics

The globe’s steepest risk this century is the emerging higher standards of living and material consumption throughout the developing world, argues French economist Daniel Cohen in The Prosperity of Vice. China, India, and other once-impoverished nations are assuming the lifestyles of Western countries, and the globe cannot possibly sustain it.

Cohen finds these socioeconomic trends all the more disconcerting in light of history. As Europe and North America’s nation-states evolved, numerous social upheavals, wars, and occasional genocides took place—World War II and the 1990s disintegration of Yugoslavia being two extremely destructive examples.

The developing world is now copying Europe’s historical emergence, but in the course of decades rather than centuries. The same social inequalities and ethnic or religious animosities that have plagued Europe also exist in the developing world, and could in turn give rise to more domestic, societal, and international violence.

The interconnectedness of global commerce and culture makes the situation even more dangerous. Dysfunction in any one corner of the world may disrupt everyone’s lives. Cohen calls on the global community to work together to live peaceably within the resource limits of our finite planet.

The Prosperity of Vice draws heavily from the past to issue a warning about the world’s future. Readers of any general audience are likely to find it an approachable and persuasive critique of where human civilization has come from and where it is going.

[Editor’s note: For an opposite take on the world’s socioeconomic future, consider reading The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker (Viking Press, 2011). Whereas Cohen anticipates rising violence and instability, Pinker argues that the world has been trending toward progressively more peace and civility over the last few centuries and will continue to do so, to the point where warfare will practically disappear.]

A New Paradigm for Older Women

Visionaries Have Wrinkles: Conversations with Wise Women Who Are Reshaping the Future

In Visionaries Have Wrinkles, an anthology on womanhood and maturity, professional futurist and gerontologist Karen Sands notes that women have more power to drive business, politics, and society than at any known time in history. However, many older women grapple with self-image, partly due to longstanding negative stereotypes: Women’s magazines ignore them and prize youthful beauty, and popular fairy tales portray them as wicked witches.

Yet, ancient folklore offers an entirely different image of mature womanhood: the “crone” as a respected elder whom people turn to for healing, guidance, and wisdom. Sands calls upon older women everywhere to “realize their inner crones” and affirm new roles as mentors and cultivators. She then profiles successful older women who have embraced “cronehood.”

World Future Society member and popular conference speaker Helen Harkness gets personal mention in the book. Her accomplishments include founding the career counseling firm Career Design Associates and authoring, after age 67, several bestselling books on career guidance.

Also profiled are Carole Hyatt, a leader of women’s professional-development organizations; Carolyn Conger, a psychologist and psycho-immunologist whose practice incorporates secrets of dream interpretations, energy fields, and intuition that she learned from tribal shamans; Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, a children’s book author who draws from her Native American ancestry to produce stories that present positive images of native peoples; and many others.

Harkness and her fellow interviewees reflect on their personal futures and on the value of embracing change, listening to intuition, and living with purpose. They also share their hopes that progress is truly unfolding for the roles of women in the workplace and in culture’s views of seniority.

Visionaries Have Wrinkles is an uplifting evaluation of life and the meaning that women anywhere can find in aging. Conversational and personal in tone, women—and men, too—everywhere may find it an inspirational read.

Armageddon Might Be Closer Than We Think

X-Events: The Collapse of Everything

Modern society is increasingly complex and, consequently, increasingly fragile, according to systems theorist John Casti. He examines the world’s resource bases, energy grids, information systems, geopolitical scene, and the other human-made systems that constitute civilization, and he finds vulnerabilities throughout them all to “X-events”—extreme, dramatic, and typically disastrous phenomena.

X-events are happening more frequently in this present era, he states, and society’s susceptibility to being horrendously disrupted by them is at an all-time high. Present ways of living, for example, could completely exhaust food and water supplies. It would not take much to cause the entire Internet to fail, thereby paralyzing communication, commerce, and social interaction across the globe, and possibly precipitating massive riots. Likewise, the world’s electricity grids are susceptible to debilitating, region-wide failures that would be difficult to fix.

It is also possible, though less likely, that an electromagnetic pulse phenomenon could instantaneously destroy all the world’s electronics, or that nuclear war could break out. Further into the future, unchecked technological progress could give rise to robots that turn against humanity, or self-replicating nanobots that spiral out of control and reproduce so rapidly that they drown Earth in “gray goo” and crowd out all carbon-based life.

Casti explores these and other potential X-events and their likely impacts. Then he advises on how to see an X-event in the making and avert it, or at least manage its outcome.

Some of Casti’s X-events are already well known: Media commentators speculate about pandemics repeatedly, for instance. Others may surprise many readers, who otherwise think that nuclear war hasn’t been a danger since the end of the Soviet Union or that an out-of-control engineering experiment destroying civilization could only happen in science fiction. X-Events is an eye-opening guide to world-threatening hazards and how we can guard against them.

The Abundance Builders

J. Craig Venter

portrait of Vint Cerf

portrait of Koshnevis

portrait of Bass

portrait of Anita Goel

By Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Networks and Sensors: The Connectors

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Manufacturing and Infinite Computing: The Makers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Medicine: The Healers

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

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

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

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

Nanomaterials and Nanotechnology: The Transformers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building Abundance for All

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

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

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

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

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

About the Authors

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

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

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

The Secret Life of Data in the Year 2020

By Brian David Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mysterious Resident of Glencoe and Wren Roads

The intersection of Glencoe and Wren

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Algorithm: More Human than a Human?

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

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

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

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

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

Science Fiction and the Literary Origins of Android Data

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

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

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

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

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

The Android Is Your Data

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

Intel futurist Brian David Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

Do Algorithms Dream of Electric Sheep?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Author

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

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

The Individual in a Networked World: Two Scenarios

By Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scenario 1: Collaborative Agents In Augmented Reality

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

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

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

His agent also warns him about his health.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scenario 2: A Walled and Surveilled World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Possible Futures of Networked Individuals

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

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

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

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

About the Authors

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

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

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

From Smart House to Networked Home

By Chris Carbone and Kristin Nauth

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

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

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

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

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

10 Technology Trajectories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Societal Drivers Influence Technological Advancements

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

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

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

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

Homes Will Become Aware and Adaptive

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

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

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

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

Digital Natives Will Drive Home-Tech Adoption

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

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

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

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

Technological Advances Will Change Society and the Home

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

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

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

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

About the Authors

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

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

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

Building and Connecting Communities for the Future

By Center for Communities of the Future

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

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

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

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

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

How Economies Have Changed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the list goes on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reinventing Economic Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Place Marketing to Community Building

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transformational Learning

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

Key ideas of Transformational Learning are:

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

Mobile Networked Governance for the Creative Molecular Economy

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

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

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

Master Capacity Builders

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

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

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

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

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

Looking Ahead

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

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

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

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

About Center for Communities of the Future

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

Contributors to this article include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creative Molecular Economy Innovation Model: McAllen, Texas

McAllen Chamber of Commerce Creative Molecular Economy Model

By Steve Ahlenius

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Ahlenius

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

Integrated and Innovative: The Future of Regions

By John M. Eger

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

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

It will not be easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regional Goals and Government Roles

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

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

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

The Rise of Regions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Developing Creative Regions

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

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

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

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

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

About the Author

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

Revolutionary Health: Local Solutions for Global Health Problems

By Rick Docksai

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

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

Pay-What-You-Can Medicine In India

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Larger-Scale Hospital Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community-Centered Medicine in Latin America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cost-Savvier Consumers in North America

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

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

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

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

Prospects for Resuscitating Health Care around the World

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

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

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

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

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

About the Author

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

Preview of Future Inventions—Futurists: BetaLaunch 2012

By Kenneth J. Moore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Author

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

Tomorrow in Brief

Bullets That Change Direction on the Fly

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

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

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

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

Licorice Root May Combat Diabetes

picture of licorice root

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

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

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

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

WordBuzz: Upcycling

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

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

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

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

Future Scope

Progress against E-Waste

photo of facility for recycling electronic products

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

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

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

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

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

By Edward Cornish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Major Innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Author

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

Knowledge of Evolution Is Power

Evolving: The Human Effect and Why It Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Leaders Who Make The Future

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

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

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

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

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

Alternatives to Alternative Energy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Future-Driven Life Adventure

Memories of the Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Reviewer

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

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

portrait of Geoffrey Colon

By Geoffrey Colon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harvesting Vehicles’ Waste Heat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whose Economy Is It, Anyway?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biofuels Miss the Mark—So Far

portrait of Wallace Tyner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defusing the Megacity "Bomb"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waterways to Connect Communities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doing Right By Robots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sensing Brain Injuries

Smarter helmets could lead to rapid detection of concussions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Patrick Tucker

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

Tomorrow in Brief

Clean Water, New Industry

The world’s 2 billion people without access to clean, safe water may have a simple solution soon at hand: a ceramic filtration device made using local clay and sawdust.

The PureMadi filters (madi is the Tshivenda South African word for water) are coated with silver nanoparticles that can filter out 99.9% of waterborne pathogens, including E. coli.

The filters were developed by the University of Virginia in partnership with University of Venda in Thohoyandou, South Africa, and the nonprofit FilterPure Inc. The project’s first goal is to establish a dozen factories in South Africa to produce 100,000 filters a year, with profits returned to local communities.

Source: University of Virginia, www.virginia.edu.

Robotic "Pack Mule" Offers Military Support

The modern warrior may need 100 pounds or more of gear—a load that can cause fatigue and impair performance. To lighten the load, DARPA is developing a pack-mule-like robot that would be integrated with a squad of Marines or Army soldiers.

The Legged Squad Support System (LS3) will be able to carry 400 pounds on a 20-mile hike without refueling. Sensing technology will enable the LS3 to hear, see, and respond to commands. And it will be nimble enough to follow the squad through rugged terrain and will serve as a mobile auxiliary power source.

Source: DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), www.darpa.mil.

Arctic Plants at Risk

Genetic variations within species will determine which plants fare well in warming Arctic habitats and which may struggle.

Species that are able to disperse their seeds via birds or the wind are less likely to lose their genetic diversity when their habitats are altered by climate change, according to a study by the University Centre in Svalbard, Norway. Trees and taller shrubs will likely fare better than species that have little opportunity for gene flow between populations.

The study may affect how species are identified for protections, since loss of habitat may not necessarily threaten a particular species, the researchers conclude.

Source: The University Centre in Svalbard, www.unis.no.

Future Scope

Chemical Tools for Treating Alcoholism

A new study of the brain identifies how alcohol addiction starts—and stops.

There is a saying, “once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic,” and for many people who suffer from alcohol abuse, it rings true: The proclivity to abuse alcohol is lifelong and requires a lifelong commitment to keep it in check. But radical new approaches in prevention and treatment are in the works.

Researchers are uncovering the exact mechanisms within the human brain that are responsible for alcoholics’ urges to drink excessively. These findings, the researchers hope, will lead to treatments that not only ease the symptoms of alcohol dependence, but could actually erase the addiction itself.

A study conducted at the Scripps Research Institute of the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) and published December 2011 in the journal Biological Psychiatry identified interactions between CRF (corticotrophin-releasing factor) and nociceptin, two naturally occurring peptides that are active in every human brain’s amygdala—the part of the brain that regulates moods and emotions. CRF triggers feelings of anxiety and fear, and in so doing seems to fuel alcoholics’ urges to drink.

“CRF in the amygdala is recruited in the development of alcohol dependence and promotes anxiety in alcoholics,” says Marisa Roberto, a Scripps associate professor who led the study. “Thus, in a way, the CRF system is an aggravating trigger on its own during the development of alcoholism.”

Researchers have known about CRF’s effects since the 1980s. Roberto’s study’s contribution, however, was a discovery about the second peptide, nociceptin: It negates CRF, and thereby prevents the negative mood-inducing effects. It also blocks some of the effects of alcohol itself.

According to Roberto, Scripps researchers are now investigating compounds that might either adjust a recovering alcoholic’s nociceptin levels or act like nociceptin and neutralize CRF. Roberto hopes that such future treatments could blunt recovering alcoholics’ alcohol cravings before they turn into relapses.

“Our studies demonstrated that the nociceptin system is a promising target for the treatment of alcoholism,” she says. “Luckily, there are also nociceptin modulators in clinical development. Hopefully, one of these compounds will be tested in alcoholics, which may happen soon.”

Drugs already exist to help recovering alcoholics abstain from alcohol. A nociceptin-related treatment might go a step further, however. Roberto says that they could possibly curb the abuse itself, even allowing an abuser to consume alcohol safely.

If nociceptin treatments mitigate the effects of alcohol, as well, they might additionally help people who suffer from allergies or have other negative reactions to alcohol. Roberto cautions, however, that the benefits of nociceptin treatment would vary from patient to patient.

“Alcoholics represent a heterogeneous patient population; that’s why there are different drugs. Usually, some alcoholics will respond better to one drug than another drug,” she says. “The more therapeutic options we have, the better.”

Why We Drink

The peptide CRF serves a healthy purpose: preparing us to respond to danger in our environment, says George Siggins, a Scripps institute professor of molecular and integrative neuroscience. We experience it as the “fight-or-flight response,” and without it, our hominid ancestors might never have survived the wilderness.

“It [CRF] speaks to the cortex and helps regulate that structure to get the hell out of here, stop what you’re doing, whatever is required in the situation,” Siggins says.

For alcoholics, however, that same fight-or-flight response can be a destructive force: External stresses trigger alarms in the brain, and alcohol becomes the mechanism for shutting the alarms off.

“We feel that a large percentage of alcoholics and alcohol-dependent persons are drinking because they are driven to drink by anxiety triggered in the amygdala,” Siggins says.

Siggins took part in a study that fed lab rats daily doses of alcohol and measured their brains’ CRF reactions. That study found that, as the animals continued to regularly consume alcohol, their brains’ reactions to CRF intensified: The nerve receptors that pick up CRF would grow more numerous, and the animals would experience stronger CRF reactions.

That means that the subjects would progressively feel more anxiety and depression on a daily basis. In a human subject, Siggins says, that would translate to more pervasive and powerful cravings, day after day, for alcohol.

“It’s a vicious cycle where the more you drink, the bigger the response to CRF,” he says. “The brain gets more responsive to CRF: more fearful, more anxious.”

Siggins hails Roberto’s findings on nociceptin as critical because they identify nociceptin and chemicals related to it as powerful antidotes. Nociceptin could treat other addictions and mood disorders, as well. He notes that researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany, are now studying nociceptin’s potential use in mitigating anxiety in general. Other researchers in the United States are exploring nociceptin’s treatment potential for cocaine and methamphetamine addictions.

Predicting Propensity for Addiction

Since CRF is in every human brain, researchers wonder why it incites alcohol abuse in some people in the first place. Siggins hopes that some answers may arrive through study of genes: In people who are predisposed to becoming alcoholics, the genes that code for CRF or for nociceptin might have irregularities.

According to Adi Jaffe, a UCLA psychologist who specializes in substance abuse, medical tests indicate a variety of brain and genetic irregularities that could predispose individuals to becoming an alcoholic. For example, abnormalities in the brain’s serotonin and dopamine—two neurotransmitters that also regulate moods—can induce powerful cravings to drink to excess.

“There is a collection of these predisposing biological influences,” says Jaffe. “The more of the influences you have, the more your biological system is predisposed.”

Jaffe is frank about the complexity that alcoholism treatment presents, however. Although doctors agree that some people are more biologically prone to becoming alcoholics, no one can determine conclusively whether a given patient is. Likewise, there is no sure forecasting whether an individual who exhibits excessive drinking will progress eventually to full-scale alcohol dependence.

“I know if a client is meeting criteria for dependence now, but that doesn’t give me any certainty that they will meet the criteria for dependence in 10 years,” says Jaffe. “I can do a blood test and have a pretty good idea of whether someone has cancerous tumors, but we don’t have that sort of test yet for addiction.”

Jaffe anticipates that many of the mysteries will be solved in the years ahead as research uncovers more information about how human body systems work. More knowledge will lead to treatments that are better targeted toward all the unique conditions that may fuel a patient’s addiction.

“I think that the notion that there will be a specific one that will eliminate addiction is far-fetched,” says Jaffe. “There are many factors that contribute to addiction—but we can use all the help we can get.”

Prospects for Prevention

Roberto’s findings about nociceptin are a potentially great help, in Jaffe’s opinion, since they offer new insights into the workings of the amygdala.

“The amygdala and stress have been known to play a role in substance abuse for a long time. But this study exposes an extra level of the specificity in how they play a role,” says Jaffe. “This just helps explain the mechanism so that we can try different ways of interfering with it. And the more you understand about a mechanism, the more you can do to alter it.”

If, as researchers suggest, certain biological irregularities might make someone more predisposed to becoming an alcoholic, then, hypothetically, medications that eliminate the irregularities might eliminate the addiction disorder at the roots. Then the patient might no longer need to abstain from alcohol; safe consumption would be a feasible goal.

Jaffe notes that, even today, recovery takes many pathways. Abstinence from alcohol is the goal that almost all substance abuse counselors urge. But of the patients who relapse, approximately 40% successfully take up moderate drinking. He encourages substance abuse counselors to recognize that safe drinking is attainable for some patients.

“When clinicians look for what to recommend, the safest approach that they see is abstinence. But that’s like saying the safest way to avoid a car accident is not to drive a car,” Jaffe says. “You can be an addict meeting severe criteria, or one meeting mild criteria. And to say that they should both have the same treatment is like saying that someone with full-blown severe diabetes and someone with pre-diabetes symptoms both need the same treatment regimen.”

Nociceptin and related compounds could lead to treatments that support all recovering alcoholics’ recovery goals, be they abstinence or moderate use. Some patients, for instance, might need to refrain from drinking for periods of time—not permanently—so that they can undergo counseling and resolve any stresses, thought patterns, or emotions that were driving their urges to drink. A treatment that cancels out CRF and thereby mitigates the stress that fuels alcohol cravings could make that recovery period easier.

“If we can use a medication to improve people’s functioning, especially in early recovery so that they can use conjunctive behavioral treatments to support early recovery, then it’s another tool in their tool kit,” Jaffe says.

Siggins agrees that treatments based on nociceptin might help many people who struggle with alcoholism. But he cautions against expecting that a successful nociceptin treatment will work for all patients.

Alcoholism is “a multi-genetic disorder,” he explains. Several brain regions and dozens of genes can be involved. The specific ones differ from person to person.

Siggins expects that different drugs—targeted toward different genes and brain areas—will work for different patients. Also, many patients will need combinations of several drugs. CRF is just one of the treatment targets, albeit a potentially very important one.

“We’re chipping away at the tip of the iceberg. What lies below is anybody’s guess. But CRF is a good place to start,” says Siggins.—Rick Docksai

Sources: Adi Jaffe, UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs, www.uclaisap.org. Marisa Roberto, Scripps Research Institute, www.scripps.edu. George Siggins, Scripps Research Institute, www.scripps.edu.

“Rateocracy” and Corporate Reputation

Real-time ratings will raise stakeholders’ expectations of businesses.

By Robert Moran

Today, consumers rate sellers on eBay, restaurants on Yelp, and local companies on Angie’s List, providing detailed product reviews online. Job hunters and employees can read and rate employers on Glassdoor.com. College students rate their professors on ratemyprofessors.com. Neighbors and friends can view each other’s reputations (and their own) at honestly.com. And Facebook’s more than 800 million users can endorse a product or organization by “liking” it.

Soon, we will also rate corporations on their behavior and have real-time mobile access to the aggregated, stakeholder-generated reputation scores of nearly every corporation on the planet. We will use this information to reward and punish companies by buying their products or spurning them. We will have entered into a completely new era of corporate reputation, one in which reputation is radically transparent and extremely valuable.

I call this new era Rateocracy because it will combine real-time ratings within a transparent and democratic structure.

All the necessary technologies and building blocks are in position to create a real-time, reputational rating system for corporations. Current rating systems will be knit together, and “ratestreams” will become as significant as “clickstreams” are today.

Corporations will closely track the rise and fall of their reputational “credit rating.” They will begin to draw the link between their numerical reputational rating and growth, profitability, and employee retention.

Corporate reputation, something that has been traditionally tracked on an annual basis, will have entered an entirely new era—the Rateocratic era.

Rateocracy will be numeric and transparent, providing real-time data that push corporations to “live their purpose.” It will also increase public expectations, creating a virtuous “race to the top,” forcing businesses to compete in areas they may have never competed in before.

Corporations in the Rateocracy Age

While there will be many unforeseen impacts from this new age of corporate reputation, there are at least nine implications that will flow from Rateocracy. These are:

1. The New Balance of Power. Customers, suppliers, and employees will gain power in this new era of Rateocracy. And, relative to these groups, the corporation will lose power as it controls relatively less of its own reputation.

2. Role of Corporate Leader. The CEO of the future will need to work harder to align the corporation, its employees, and stakeholders around a shared vision. It will be increasingly difficult to sweep customer service and employee morale problems under the rug. CEOs of the Rateocratic era will have nowhere to hide, so they will have to be strong communicators and even better listeners. They will have to be as transparent as the new era.

3. 24/7 Reputation Management. While corporate reputation grows in strategic importance for firms, the tactical, day-to-day management of reputation will become critical. Corporations will build reputational dashboards that aggregate multiple rating sites and information flows, including customer relationship management (CRM) data. The key will be managing reputation in real time by improving the quality of interactions with the firm and intervening before unhappy stakeholders voice their concerns on rating sites. This will undoubtedly boost the size of the current reputation management industry.

4. Feedback Loop. Much has been made of Peter Senge’s ideas around a “learning organization” and Henry Mintzberg’s “strategy as learning.” Life in this new age of corporate reputation will present the corporation with the tightest possible feedback loop across its entire stakeholder footprint. Some corporations will find unique ways to harness this information for competitive advantage, using their rapid learning as a core competency.

5. Employees as Leading Indicators. With employees already participating in rating their employers on sites like Glassdoor.com, we can assume that these internal rating systems will only intensify and that other stakeholders will look to these internal ratings as a leading indicator of business health. Employee assessments will function as the canary in the coal mine. This is already beginning to happen. As just one example, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has a 78% job approval from the 1,011 Oracle employees who have rated his performance on Glassdoor.

6. Statistical Projectability. How close will these aggregate ratings of a corporation’s reputation track with statistically representative survey data? Given limited participation in most rating sites at the moment, we can only assume that this data is not yet robust enough to match rigorously collected survey data. But, as participation in these sites increases, the data should begin to converge. Even then, however, survey-based stakeholder data will still be needed to track a corporation’s reputation among critical, but small, stakeholder communities and as an independent check.

7. Great Expectations. Stakeholder expectations of corporate behavior will likely play a large role in the scores corporations receive. But expectations will vary by industry, region, and situation. For example, consumers have very different expectations of quick service versus formal dining restaurants, and those expectations will be factored into their ratings. Moreover, we already know that people in different cultures rate subjects in surveys differently. We can anticipate that aggregated, open-source corporate reputation data will reflect these cultural differences. And finally, we can expect that the macroeconomic situation as well as the track record of the company will impact its ratings.

8. Information Trends. As these reputational information sets evolve and converge, corporations will need to better understand seasonal trends (e.g., retailers getting a reputational bump from consumers during back-to-school shopping, but taking a reputational hit during the Christmas rush), reputational cycles, and event-driven data spikes. For example, in the future, corporations will ask why a one-week rise in employee ratings occurred. The data will show a spike, but the cause or causes will need to be determined. Was it positive earnings news announced by the CEO, the new announcement on operations safety, the preceding three-day weekend, or a combination of each?

9. Rateocracy Meets Augmented Reality. At some point late in this decade, corporate reputation ratings systems and augmented-reality layers will begin to merge. Layar, the Amsterdam-based creator of the world’s first mobile augmented-reality browser, is already turning mobile phones into devices that enrich the visual environment of the user. When augmented reality and Rateocracy merge, corporate reputation data will be superimposed onto a company’s geographically based assets.

Consumers will be able to purchase many different augmented-reality layers that enrich the visual overlay on their smartphones. These layers will “paint” companies’ buildings based on aggregated reputation scores. For example, imagine an augmented-reality layer available on a smartphone that aggregates all Yelp restaurant rating data at the corporate and individual store level. This augmented-reality layer will flash red for a restaurant with poor reviews and an abundance of health department citations, but will flash green for a restaurant with stellar reviews. This will play out across all storefront businesses.

Game Changer?

Some will contend that Rateocracy is an entirely new ballgame for corporations. But, in many ways, it is a very old ballgame and one that predated the large industrial societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As anyone who has grown up in a small, rural town can tell you, a local business’s reputation is very well known. There aren’t many secrets in small-town life. It was only since the advent of large cities, national markets, and labor force mobility that a level of anonymity arose.

Rateocracy can be viewed as a tectonic power shift toward technology-empowered stakeholders, but it can just as easily be viewed as the construction of a digital village in which a business’s reputation returns to the immediacy of small-town life.

Robert Moran is a partner of the Brunswick Group, an international corporate communications partnership. He may be reached at rmoran@brunswickgroup.com.

Rising Temperatures Stress Farmlands

Climate change may mean more pesticide pollution, a German study warns.

Pesticide contamination of the world’s waterways will be one likely byproduct of global warming, warns a study by Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research. The study’s authors conclude that, since rising global temperatures will trigger the spread of crop-killing pests throughout farmlands, farmers will deploy more pesticides, which will result in more pesticide pollution of rivers and streams.

“To obtain the same level of protection from pests, the farmer will have to use more pesticides,” says Matthias Liess, a study co-author.

The study projects that, by 2090, average pesticide use across Europe will be twice the 1990 average, with some individual countries’ pesticide usage increasing to 23 times their 1990 levels. Streams in as much as 40% of Europe’s land mass will suffer insecticide pollution, the study predicts.

Pollution already occurs because the chemicals seep from the farmlands into nearby waterways. Climate change will add to the mix, however, since the warmer climate will have heavier rainfalls, which will wash more pesticide residues into the waterways more quickly.

Compounding this, warming climate will encourage Europe’s farmers to farm more, in general. There will be extended cultivation periods and tilling of whole new land areas.

The study identifies northern European countries, especially the Nordic and Baltic states, as facing the greatest risks: Warming temperatures will bring about comparatively bigger changes in their climates. Whereas Sweden, for example, is now colder than many insects would like, it will become suddenly more insect-friendly. Sweden’s farms will suffer unprecedented new infestations, and farmers will respond in force. The shock would be less for an already-warm (and pest-ridden) country, such as Italy.

Pesticide runoff is already taking a steep environmental toll, according to pesticides expert Tomas Brückmann, a project manager for conservationist organization Friends of the Earth Germany. Populations of bees and butterflies have been decimated in much of Germany over the last 20 years, he says. So have populations of several species of birds, including the grey partridge, northern lapwing, and crested lark, since many birds feed on butterflies.

“This is the chain,” he says. “The first to die are the butterflies. And then we have lower fitness of the birds. And if the birds are not fit, they are not able to produce young, or at least produce enough young.”

Human communities, too, are impacted, according to Brückmann. He cites rising incidence of cancers, hormonal disorders, and other health problems in many parts of the world, and few explanations for the increases in cases except for the higher concentrations of chemicals in our environment.

“We have doctors in Germany and elsewhere saying that patients are ill through the use of pesticides,” he says.

As a remedy, Liess and his colleagues recommend digging “buffer zones”—strips of exposed soil, about 10 meters wide—along any waterways that run near farmland. Denmark has created extensive networks of buffer zones that work very effectively to this end.

But the world will also need to cut back on pesticides, he adds. The result may be less food, but we could offset this if we just waste less food. Liess notes that, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, about one-third of all the food that the world produces every year is either thrown away or lost while in storage, transit, processing, or packing.

“If we are able to reduce our expectation of the crop yield, we can reduce greatly the pesticide use,” says Liess.

Brückmann approves of buffer zones. But he supports also the adoption of natural farming methods such as crop rotation—growing different crops in the same field season by season. He says that, by replacing the crops at the end of each season, farmers leave insects fewer opportunities to settle and breed in the plants.

And it may be possible to grow bountiful harvests without pesticides, or practically any chemicals. Just ask the worldwide conservation federation Friends of the Earth International (FOEI), parent organization of Brückmann’s group. FOEI spokesperson Charly Hultén notes that, according to research by Swedish ecologist Artur Grandstedt, plants that receive chemical fertilizers grow larger and more quickly, but their immune systems and body parts are weaker and more susceptible to pests.

So plants that are not treated with chemical fertilizers will better resist bugs and will need fewer pesticides in the first place. FOEI encourages farmers to grow healthy plants naturally by substituting organic fertilizers and by implementing crop rotation, raising companion crops, using mechanical pest control, and working the soil to maximize distribution of soil nutrients.

“Borders on fields can never be an adequate solution to the problem of pesticide pollution. The core of the problem lies on the systems level: Healthier soils, hardier plants, achieved through a different approach to agriculture,” says Hultén.

—Rick Docksai

Sources: Matthias Liess, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, www.ufz.de. The paper “Climate Change, Agricultural Insecticide Exposure, and Risk for Freshwater Communities” was published in Ecological Applications, 21(6), 2011.

Tomas Brückmann, Friends of the Earth Germany, www.bund.net.

Charly Hultén, Friends of the Earth International, www.foei.org.

Nanobots to Fight Cancer

Built from DNA, robots may deliver medicine where no doctor has gone before.

Medical nanorobots may soon be leaving the Petri dish and making their way to a drugstore near you. A team of researchers from the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering has created a DNA-based nanorobot that can safely carry molecule-sized payloads, detect cancer, and attack that cancer with medicine.

The bot itself is less of a drone and more of a complex piece of fabric. Hundreds of short, single-stranded DNA pieces wrap themselves around a scaffold, “like the warp and weft in weaving cloth,” according to researcher Shawn Douglas.

The mechanism for depositing the payload isn’t an electronic actuator, as you would find in a conventional robot, but a chemical reaction. When the nanobots meet up with a particular protein that can indicate cancer (in their experiment, Douglas and his team used a leukemic cell marker), the nanostructure unlocks itself and releases a cancer-fighting antigen. The process is similar to the way viruses attack cells; the primary difference is that Douglas’s nanobots don’t hijack the cell to reproduce, as natural viruses do.

“Viruses (made of various combinations of protein, nucleic acids, and lipids) offer a good template for what materials work for performing complex interactions and manipulations of cells,” said Douglas in an email.

The research follows (but does not necessarily build upon) the work of New York University chemistry professor Nadrian Seeman, credited with pioneering the field of DNA-based nanostructures to perform complicated tasks.

But do these bio-based nano-creations still qualify as robots, or are they simply complex drugs?

“There isn’t any established definition of a ‘nanorobot,’” said Douglas. “We asked robotics expert Rob Wood at Harvard about the term, and he said to describe what it does in general terms. We said that it senses friend or foe, and when a foe is sensed, it changes shape and attacks. He said this sounded similar to some military robots, and didn’t think the term was unjustified.”

Writers and futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Robert Freitas have suggested that, in the year 2030, nanorobots will carry more oxygen to our blood, repair cellular damage, rid our bodies of toxins, and help us reverse-engineer a human brain. Specifically, in his landmark book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, 2005), Kurzweil remarked that, in the 2020s, we could use complex nanomechanisms to “eliminate the accumulation of DNA transcription errors, one major source of the aging process. We could introduce DNA changes to essentially reprogram our genes. … We would also be able to defeat biological pathogens … by blocking any unwanted replication of genetic information.”

Douglas says he “would be very surprised” if the more bold predictions of Kurzweil and Freitas came to pass.

“We probably need a much better understanding of the basic science before we can achieve such sophisticated manipulations of our biology,” he said.

Douglas’s own aspirations for the future of the field are relatively restrained in comparison. He expressed cautious optimism that, within 20 years, “there will be at least one FDA-approved treatment that employs nanoscale devices that can perform actions approaching the sophistication of simple viruses (cell targeting, payload delivery, or reprogramming the cell). I think reprogramming and repurposing existing viruses also sounds like a promising approach.”

—Patrick Tucker

Sources: “A Logic-Gated Nanorobot for Targeted Transport of Molecular Payloads” by S. M. Douglas, I. Bachelet, and G. M. Church, Science (February 17, 2012).

Shawn Douglas (interview), Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, http://wyss.harvard.edu

A Thousand Years Young

By Aubrey de Grey

An “anti-aging activist” identifies the medical and biochemical advances that could eventually eliminate all the wear and tear that our bodies and minds suffer as we grow old. Those who undergo continuous repair treatments could live for millennia, remain healthy throughout, and never fear dying of old age.

Let me first say very explicitly: I don’t work on longevity. I work on health. People are going to live longer as a result of the therapies I will describe, but extended longevity is a side effect—a consequence of keeping people healthy. There is no way in hell that we are going to keep people alive for a long time in a frail state. People will live longer only if we succeed in keeping them healthy longer.

The problem of aging is unequivocally humanity’s worst medical problem. Roughly 100,000 people worldwide die every day of it, and there’s an awful lot of suffering that happens before you die. But I feel that the defeat of aging in the foreseeable future is a realistic proposition. We will have medicine that will get aging under control to the same level that we now have most infectious diseases under control.

This article will describe what aging is, what regenerative medicine is, and what the various alternative approaches are to combat aging and postpone the ill health of old age. I’ll then go into the details of the approach that I feel we need to take and what my expectations are for the future.

Regenerative medicine is any medical intervention that seeks to restore some part of the body—or the whole body—to how it was before it suffered some kind of damage. It could be damage that happened as the result of an acute injury, such as spinal cord damage. But it could also be damage that accumulated as a chronic condition over a long period of time.

Aging is a side effect of being alive in the first place. Metabolism is the word that biologists use to encompass all the aspects of being alive—all the molecular and cellular and systemic processes that keep us going from one day to the next and from one year to the next.

Ongoing lifelong side effects of metabolism—i.e., damages—are created throughout life. For whatever reason, damage is not repaired when it occurs. So damage accumulates. For a long time, the amount of damage is tolerable, and the metabolism just carries on. But eventually, damage becomes sufficiently extensive that it gets in the way of metabolism. Then metabolism doesn’t work so well, and pathologies—all the things that go wrong late in life, all the aspects of age-related ill health—emerge and progress.

Geriatrics versus Gerontology

Traditionally, there have been two themes within the study of aging that aim to actually do something about this process. One is the geriatrics approach, which encompasses pretty much everything that we have today in terms of medical treatments for the elderly.

The geriatrics approach is all about the pathology. It focuses on old people in whom the pathologies are already emerging, and strives to slow down their progression so that it takes longer for those pathologies to reach a life-threatening stage.

The gerontology approach, on the other hand, says that prevention is better than cure. This approach assumes that it will be more effective to dive in at an earlier point in the chain of events and clean up metabolism so that it creates these various types of damage at a slower rate than it naturally would. The effect would be to postpone the age at which damage reaches the level of abundance that is pathogenic.

The two approaches both sound pretty promising, but they’re really not. The problem with the geriatrics approach is that aging is awfully chaotic, miserable, and complicated. There are many things that go wrong with people as they get older, and they tend to happen at much the same time. These problems interact, exacerbating each other, and damage accumulates. Even later in life, as damage continues to accumulate, the pathologies of old age become progressively more and more difficult to combat.

The geriatric approach is thus intervening too late in the chain of events. It’s better than nothing, but it’s not much better than nothing.

So that leaves us with the gerontology approach. Unfortunately, the gerontology approach has its own problem: Metabolism is complicated. What we know about how metabolism works is completely dwarfed by the utterly astronomical amount that we don’t know about how metabolism works. We have no prospect whatsoever of being able to interfere in this process in a way that does not simply do more harm than good.

A Maintenance Approach

There are some Volkswagen Bugs that are 50 years old or more and still running. And the reason is because those VW Bugs have been extraordinarily well maintained. If you maintain your car only as well as the law requires, then it will only last 15 years or so. But if you do a lot more, then you can do a lot better. Maintenance works.

Now what does that tell us about the human body? Well, quite a lot, because the human body is a machine. It’s a really complicated machine, but it’s still a machine. So there is a third way of combating aging by postponing age-related ill health. This is the maintenance approach. We go in and periodically repair the damage that metabolism creates, so as to prevent that damage from accumulating and reaching the level that causes the pathology of old age to emerge and to progress.

Maintenance is a much more promising approach than either geriatrics or gerontology. First, the maintenance approach is preemptive, so it doesn’t have this problem of this downward spiral of the geriatrics approach.

Second, the maintenance approach avoids the problem of the gerontology approach because it does not attempt to intervene with metabolism; we merely fix up the consequences. In other words, we let metabolism create these various types of damage at the rate that it naturally does, and then repair the damages before they cause pathology. We can get away with not understanding very much at all about how metabolism creates damage. We just have to characterize the damage itself and figure out ways to repair it.

That’s pretty good news, but it gets better. It also turns out that damage is simpler than its causes or its consequences. All the phenomena that qualify as damage can be classified into one of seven major categories:

• Junk inside cells.
• Junk outside cells.
• Too few cells.
• Too many cells.
• Chromosome mutations.
• Mitochondria mutations.
• Protein cross-links.

By “junk inside cells,” I am referring to the molecular byproducts of normal biologic processes that are created in the cell and that the cell, for whatever reason, does not have the machinery to break down or to excrete. Those byproducts simply accumulate, and eventually the cell doesn’t work so well. That turns out to be the main cause of cardiovascular disease and of macular degeneration.

“Junk outside cells” means things like senile plaques in Alzheimer’s disease. This creates the same molecular damage, but in this case it is in the spaces between cells.

“Too few cells” simply means cells are dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other cells. This is the cause of Parkinson’s disease, the particular part of the brain in which neurons happen to die more rapidly than in most parts of the brain and they’re not replaced. When there are too few of them, that part of the brain doesn’t work so well.

But here’s the really good news. We actually have a pretty good idea how to fix all of these types of damage. Here is the same list of types of damage, and on the right is the set of approaches that I feel are very promising for fixing them:

Stem-cell therapy replaces those cells that the body cannot replace on its own. That includes joint degeneration and muscular-skeletal problems. For example, arthritis ultimately comes from the degeneration of the collagen and other extra-cellular material in the joints, which happens as a result of insufficient regeneration of that tissue.

For some other medical conditions, such as Alzheimer’s, we need to restore the functions of those cells that are already there by getting rid of the garbage accumulating outside them. Toward that purpose, there are phase-three clinical trials for the elimination of senile plaques in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. This is a technology using vaccination that we at the SENS Foundation are extending to the elimination of other types of extracellular garbage.

In fact, we now have an enormous amount of detail about how we’re going to reverse each of the seven categories of age-related damage, so that’s why I feel that my estimates of how long it’s going to take to get there are likely to be borne out accurately.

Case in Point: Cleaning the Cellular Garbage

I’m going to talk about one example: the garbage that accumulates inside cells. I’m going to explain what transgenic microbial hydrolases are.

White blood cells, called macrophages, sweep along a healthy adult’s artery walls to clean up miscellaneous detritus, typically lipoprotein particles that were transporting cholesterol around the body from one place to another and that got stuck in the artery wall. Macrophages are very good at coping with cholesterol, but they are not so good at coping with certain derivatives of cholesterol, such as oxysterols. These contaminants end up poisoning macrophages. The macrophages become unable even to cope with native cholesterol, and then they themselves break down, lodging in the artery walls. This is the beginning of an atherosclerotic plaque. The results are cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, or strokes. In the eye, this phenomenon causes macular degeneration.

To combat this problem, we might adapt bioremediation technology from environmental decontamination. The technology that is used to break down pollutants in the environment could be adapted for biomedical purposes, breaking down the body’s contaminants.

If we could apply this bioremediation process to our own cells, we could combat the initial process that turns young people into old people in the first place. A very simple idea. The question is, does it work? Bioremediation for getting rid of pollutants works really well: It’s a thriving commercial discipline.

There are a number of oxidized derivatives of cholesterol, but the nastiest in abundance and toxicity is 7-ketocholesterol—public enemy number one in atherosclerosis. We have tried “feeding” it to many different strains of bacteria. Most of them can’t do anything with it, but we’ve found two strains of bacteria that gorge themselves on it. After only 10 days, the material is completely gone.

The next step is to figure out how these bacteria are able to do this from a genetic basis. From there, we could try to turn 7-ketocholesterol back into native cholesterol. But there are other steps that we can use—remember that I said we’re looking to avoid the problem of things neither being broken down nor excreted. There are modifications that we can make to compounds that are toxic that simply promote their excretion rather than promoting their degradation.

So that’s all pretty good news. But don’t get me wrong. This is really hard. This is a very ambitious, long-term project. The processes we hope to develop must work in vivo. What we are seeking is a truly definitive, complete cure for cardiovascular disease and for other pathologies caused by the accumulation of molecular garbage inside cells.

Escape Velocity: From Longevity To Immortality?

I do not claim that any of the work I’ve just described is going to be a “cure” for aging. I claim, rather, that it’s got a good chance of adding 30 years of extra healthy life to people’s lives. I call that robust human rejuvenation. And 30 years is better than nothing, but it sure does not equate to defeating aging completely. So what’s the rest of my story?

The rest of the story is that it’s not something that’s going to work just on people who haven’t been conceived yet. It’s stuff that is going to work on people who are already middle-aged or older when the therapies arrive.

This is fundamentally what it all comes down to. The maintenance approach is so cool because repairing damage buys time.

At age zero, people start off with not much damage. Time goes on, they age, damage accumulates, reserve is depleted, and eventually, they get down to a certain point—the frailty threshold—and that’s when pathologies start to happen. Then they’re not long for this world.

Now take someone who is in middle age. You have therapies that are pretty good, but not perfect, at fixing the damage. They can be rejuvenated, but not all the way. These therapies do not reduce the rate at which damage is created. Aging happens at the normal rate.

Then we reapply the same therapies again and again. But consider that the interval between the first and second applications of these therapies to some particular individual may be 15 to 20 years. That’s a long time in biomedical technology, and it means that the person is going to get new and improved therapies that will not only fix the types of damage that they could fix 15 years previously, but also fix some types of damage that they could not fix 15 years previously.

So after the second rejuvenation, our hero is not only more thoroughly rejuvenated than he would be if he’d gotten the old therapies, but he’s actually more rejuvenated than he was when he got the old therapies, even though at that point he was chronologically younger. Now we see this phenomenon where we don’t hit diminishing returns on additional therapies. People over the long term will be getting progressively younger as they’re getting chronologically older. They’ll remain far away from reaching the frailty threshold, however long that they live. They will only be subjected to the risks of death and ill health that affect young adults. They never become more susceptible to ill health simply as a result of having been born a long time ago.

There’s some minimum rate at which we have to improve the comprehensiveness of these therapies in order for the general trend in increased life span to be upwards rather than downwards. And that minimum rate is what I call longevity escape velocity. It’s the rate at which these rejuvenation therapies need to be improved in terms of comprehensiveness following that first step—the first-generation therapies that give robust human regeneration—in order to stay one step ahead of the problem and to outpace the accumulation of damage that they cannot yet repair.

So is it realistic? Are we likely actually to reach longevity escape velocity and to maintain it? We are. Consider powered flight as an illustrated example: There are very big differences between fundamental breakthroughs and incremental refinements of those breakthroughs. Fundamental breakthroughs are very hard to predict. Mostly people think they’re not going to happen right up until they already have happened.

Incremental refinements, meanwhile, are very much more predictable. Leonardo da Vinci probably thought he was only a couple of decades away from getting off the ground. He was wrong. But once the Wright brothers got there, progress was ridiculously rapid. It only took 24 years for someone to fly solo across the Atlantic (that was Lindbergh), 22 more years until the first commercial jet liner, and 20 more years until the first supersonic airlines.

Can we actually give more direct evidence that we are likely to achieve longevity escape velocity? I believe that we can.

An Age-Busting Virtuous Cycle

A few years ago I worked with others on a computer simulation of the aging process to see what the impact would be of these interventions coming in at a realistic schedule. We started by imagining a population of adults who were all born in 1999. Everyone is alive at age zero and almost everyone survives until age 50 or 60, at which point they start dropping like flies; hardly anyone gets beyond 100.

Next, we imagined another population whose intrinsic risk of death at any given age is the same as for the first, but who are receiving these therapies. But they only start receiving them when they are already 80 years old. That population’s survival rate will actually mostly coincide with the first population’s survival rate, because obviously half the population or so is dead by age 80 and those who are still living are already in a reasonably bad way.

But what if population number two started getting these therapies 10 years earlier, when they’re only 70? Initially, the same story is the case—there is not a lot of benefit. But gradually, the therapies get the upper hand. They start to impose genuine rejuvenation on these people so that they become biologically younger and less likely to die. Some of them reach 150, by which time they have very little chance of dying of any age-related cause. Eventually, there is exactly no such risk.

And if they’re 60 years old when the therapies begin? Then almost half of them will get to that point. So we calculated, group by group.

Here’s the real kicker: I was ludicrously over-pessimistic in the parameters that I chose for this simulation. I said that we would assume that the therapy would only be doubled in their efficacy every 42 years. Now, 42 years: That’s the difference between Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and the Concorde! But even then, we unambiguously see longevity escape velocity.

So it’s inescapable. If and when we do succeed in developing these rejuvenation therapies that give us those first couple of decades more of health and the postponement of age-related ill health, then we will have done the hard part. The sky is the limit after that.

Here is what it means. At the moment, the world record for life span is 122. We won’t be getting anyone who is 150 until such time as we do develop these technologies that give us robust human rejuvenation. But we will have done the hard part, so people not much younger than that will be able to escape aging indefinitely, living even to age 1,000.

A thousand is not pulled out of the air. It’s simply the average age—plus or minus a factor of two—that people would live to if we already didn’t have aging, if the only risks of death were the same risks that currently afflict young adults in the Western world today.

Should we be developing these therapies? We are ignorant about the circumstances within which humanity of the future will be deciding whether to use these technologies or not. It could actually be a no-brainer that they will want to use them. And if we have prevented them from using them by not developing them in time, then future generations won’t be very happy. So it seems to me that we have a clear moral obligation to develop these technologies so as to give humanity of the future the choice. And the sooner, the better.

About the Author

Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist and chief science officer of the SENS Foundation (www.sens.org). He is the author (with Michael Rae) of Ending Aging (St. Martin’s Press, 2007) and editor-in-chief of the journal Rejuvenation Research. This article draws from his presentation at WorldFuture 2011 in Vancouver.

Engineering the Future of Food

By Josh Schonwald

Tomorrow’s genetically modified food and farmed fish will be more sustainable and far healthier than much of what we eat today—if we can overcome our fears and embrace it. Here’s how one foodie learned to stop worrying and love “Frankenfood.”

Adapted from the book The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food by Josh Schonwald. Copyright © 2012 by Josh Schonwald. To be published on April 10, 2012, by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

The Plant Transformation Facility at the University of California, Davis, has been the scene of more than 15,000 “transgenic events,” which is the term molecular biologists use when they blast DNA from one life form into another. In room 192 of Robbins Hall, a brick building not far from the student union, thousands of microscopic plantlets grow in Petri dishes bathed in pink and fluorescent blue light.

Here, molecular biologists can mix what were previously sexually incompatible species together using a gas-pump-like tool called the Helium Particle Delivery System. Using bullets (literally) made out of gold, they fire genes from one species into another in a bombardment chamber. The Davis lab has given birth to grapes spiked with jellyfish, tomatoes spiked with carp, transgenic squash, transgenic carrots, transgenic tomatoes.

Another important site in genetic engineering history, an innocuous office building about a ten-minute drive from Robbins Hall, is the birthplace of the most audacious plant in the history of high-tech plants. Among biotech people and anti-biotech people, this plant, a tomato, needs no introduction. The so-called Flavr Savr was supposed to be the game changer—longer shelf life, better yield, better taste. Calgene, the company that created the Flavr Savr, claimed it could bring “backyard flavor” to the supermarket tomato.

Achieving “backyard flavor” in an industrial-scale, California-grown tomato has long been one of the holy grails of the $4 billion–plus tomato industry. During the pre-tomato launch hype-a-thon, the president of Calgene claimed that genetic engineering could not only bring us the tomato of our childhood dreams, but also remake the taste of the tomato, tailored to our every desire: “Eventually we’re going to design acidic tomatoes for the New Jersey palate and sweet tomatoes for the Chicago palate.”

The Flavr Savr turned out to be the Edsel of the produce world, a spectacular failure not just for Calgene, but for the whole biotech industry. This purportedly longer-shelf-life tomato became the lightning rod for much of the anti-genetically modified organism (GMO) movement. People learned about other transgenic crops—a potato with a chicken gene, tobacco with a firefly gene, and, perhaps most notoriously, a tomato with an Arctic flounder gene, which provided an image for a Greenpeace anti-GMO campaign. Nongovernmental organizations cried foul. Consumers were alarmed. It was an op-ed about the Flavr Savr where the term Frankenfood first appeared. As for the tomato’s taste, most reports said that, far from achieving backyard flavor, it was not that great.

By 1997, supermarkets stopped stocking the bioengineered tomato. The Flavr Savr was a financial disaster for Calgene.

But that was almost fifteen years ago.

One fall day, across campus from the Helium Particle Delivery System, I went to visit Kent Bradford, the director of UC Davis’s Seed Biotechnology Center and presumably among the best-positioned people at Davis to answer my burning question: Whatever happened after the Flavr Savr?

The Culinary Potential of Frankenfood

Genetic engineering obviously didn’t stop with the Flavr Savr debacle; the use of GMOs has exploded. Many genetically engineered foods can be found throughout our food supply. Genetically modified soybeans and canola dominate the market, which means that most processed food—everything from your spaghetti to your Snickers bar—has GM ingredients. More than 90% of American cotton and 80% of corn crops come from GM seed. All of these crops, though, are what are called “commodity crops.” They’re not what you pick up at your local greengrocer. They’re industrial crops, secondary ingredients. Not what interested me.

What I wanted to know is what was happening with the quest to achieve “backyard flavor”? And what I couldn’t get out of my head was this claim that tomatoes could be engineered for precise tastes—“acidic tomatoes for the New Jersey palate and sweet tomatoes for the Chicago palate.”

What was going on? Did they just stop working on “sweet tomatoes for the Chicago palate”? Wouldn’t the Flavr Savr creators be intent on redemption, going back to the bench to try again? Or did everything just stop?

Strangely, Bradford, a plant geneticist who has been at UC Davis since the early 1980s, shared my curiosity about the post–Flavr Savr world—he just had a different way of explaining it.

“Yes. Where are all these output traits?” he said. (Input traits are breederspeak for what’s so often critical to agriculture—disease resistance, insect resistance, adaptability to particular environments. An output trait is breeder parlance for what I was looking for—traits that improve taste and texture, traits that could change the dining experience of the future.)

Bradford had observed that, almost twenty years after the biotech revolution began, there were few signs of any “Second Generation” crops. The First Generation was the commodity crops: soybean, maize, cotton, canola, sugar beets. Most expected that, after the first wave of crops proved their worth, the next wave would be more consumer focused—better tomatoes, tastier lettuce. But biotech specialty crops (that’s the crop scientist term for produce) hadn’t appeared. In fact, a GMO specialty crop hadn’t been commercialized since 1998. Even Bradford, a longtime biotech believer, considered, “Maybe the genes weren’t working?”

A few years ago, Bradford and his collaborator Jamie Miller set out to find out “what was going on” with bioengineered specialty crops. They surveyed the leading plant science journals and tracked GM crop field trials—all subject to government regulation—from 2003 to 2008. Searching for citations related to specialty crops, they found that research not only had never stopped but was thriving.

“There was research on 46 different species,” says Bradford. “More than 300 traits were being tested.” A lot of it was on input traits (disease, weed resistance), but breeders had also experimented with output traits. “It was happening at the research level, but it just didn’t move to the next step. It just stopped there.”

There was an obvious explanation, Bradford says, sighing. “It was regulatory.”

Post Flavr Savr, in response to growing consumer concerns about transgenic breeding, a regulatory process was created that treated genetically modified foods differently from conventionally bred crops. If you have iceberg lettuce, using classic plant-breeding techniques (crossing, back-crossing), the assumption is that the resulting lettuce is safe. There’s no requirement for pretesting. You just introduce the product into the market. But with GMOs, Bradford says, the attitude was that “it’s guilty until proven innocent.”

A genetically engineered crop must pass review by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration before it is commercialized. The cost could range from $50,000 to tens of millions of dollars to win regulatory approval. For every “transgenic event,” the genetic engineer must show exactly what genes went into the plant and how they function, and then prove how the plant makeup has been altered. That research is costly. So is plant storage. Once a transgenic creation is spawned at the Plant Transformation Facility, it is whisked to the UC Davis Controlled Environment Facility, where it will stay in a tightly secured warehouse. Or it will be airmailed to some other place, where it’ll live out its life in another intensely biosecure environment.

The process is costly and time-consuming, which partly explains why biotech crop development is largely in the hands of the agribusiness giants—the Monsantos, Syngentas, and Bayer CropSciences of the world—who have the resources to undertake the process. With such high approval costs, big companies have favored commodity crops with market potential for hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, not tens of millions.

We talked about the reasons for what Bradford calls “the bottleneck” for the biotech specialty crops. It was NGOs such as Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists that were the bogeymen, in his view. Big Organic, a $20 billion industry, had a vested interested in stopping GMOs. Back in 2000, when the USDA was developing the National Organic Program standards, the first draft did not prohibit genetically modified foods, but then activists launched an anti-GMO campaign, flooding the USDA with a tidal wave of letters—275,026, to be exact. The USDA then determined that genetically modified organisms would not be included under the standard for organic produce. Being deemed unkosher in the organic world is a hard stigma to overcome.

The anti-GMO movement hasn’t lost momentum; the Non-GMO Project has become the fastest-growing food eco-label in North America, with sales eclipsing $1 billion in 2011. As for Europe: After a 12-year moratorium on GMO crops, the European Union greenlighted a GMO potato—but not for human consumption. It would be used to produce higher levels of starch, which is helpful for industries like paper manufacturing. In short, the European market is still overwhelmingly closed for genetically modified foodstuffs.

What If the World Embraced Agricultural Biotechnology?

According to the World Health Organization, 250 million children worldwide, mostly in the developing world, have diets lacking in vitamin A. Between 250,000 and 500,000 of these children go blind every year. Yet, there is a crop, developed more than 13 years ago, that is fortified with vitamin A compounds. If children unable to get vitamin A from other protein sources simply eat this crop, they will not go blind and die. It is named “golden rice” because of its yellowish hue, and every health organization in the world has declared it to be safe to eat.

But golden rice was not bred through traditional means; it was bred in a lab. So golden rice is, by its opponents’ definition, Frankenfood, and therefore, like many other GMO crops, it’s been ferociously opposed.

Now let’s say that golden rice does get approved (as some predict it will in 2013), and let’s say it saves millions of children from starvation and blindness in Asia. Or let’s say bioengineered crops slow down the creation of algal dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. Or a low-fat, anti-cancer potato becomes a smash hit at McDonald’s. Consumer worries about GMOs evaporate, becoming as anachronistic as fears of microwave ovens causing cancer. The regulatory barriers are gone; transgenic plants are treated the same as any other. The Monsanto juggernaut is over; small, boutique companies and open-source plant breeders in the comfort of a Brooklyn loft have a chance to contribute to the vegetable economy. Then what happens?

• Food will look different. There will almost surely be more varieties. Austrian heirloom lettuce varieties like Forellenschluss and heirloom tomatoes like the Brandywines and Cherokee Purples could become readily available. So many vegetables today aren’t commercially viable because of disease vulnerabilities or production inefficiencies. But in a genetically engineered future, all the flaws that make them ill-suited for commercialization become mere speed bumps.

“You could have disease immunity almost immediately,” says Bradford. “And it would be very easy to take care of these other variables. Instead of taking a decade to ready a crop for commercialization, it will take a matter of months.”

It’s possible that colors would change. You could find pink lettuce and blue arugula—maybe with a green orange slice for St. Patrick’s Day. Color becomes malleable because it’s often a single trait.

• Food will taste different. It is also likely, some geneticists say, that in 2035 some lettuces won’t taste anything like lettuce. The notion of tomatoes with customized flavor was a reckless ambition in the 1990s when the Flavr Savr debuted; modifying taste is among the most challenging tasks for plant geneticists. You can silence a gene in the potato genome, tuning down the bitterness or acidic quality, but it’s still a fractional impact on taste.

Taste is complex. A tomato, for instance, has between five and twenty compounds that influence flavor. Changing flavor requires not one gene, but packages of genes, and the genes must be placed precisely. Then there is texture, inextricably linked to flavor. Modifying taste eludes technologists today, but in the next ten years, that could change, as bioengineers will be able to choose from a genetic cassette—stacks of genes that together confer desired traits. With a few mouse clicks, geneticists say, they could choose from a range of flavors, textures, and colors.

“Think of it like Photoshop,” says C. S. Prakash, director of the Center for Plant Biotechnology Research at Tuskegee University. “At some point that won’t be a far-fetched metaphor.” It will be technologically possible, therefore, to create a Caesar salad without the Caesar dressing; the flavor of the Caesar could be bred into the lettuce.

Textures would also be far easier to change. You could bite into an apple that has the consistency of a banana. In a biotech-friendly future, fruits and vegetables would merely be another frontier for adventurous and often mind-bending culinary pioneers.

• We’ll see produce that doesn’t spoil. In a biotech future, the sell-by dates will be different; instead of rushing to eat your lettuce in a week, looseleaf lettuce could languish, unsealed, for a month or more. One of the huge problems in the produce industry is perishability, with close to one-third of all fresh fruits and vegetables produced lost to overripening or damage during shipment. But bioengineers are already making progress in changing the post-harvest behavior of plants. By having an enzyme shut off, an apple has been modified so that it won’t turn brown after it is sliced, and a banana has been engineered to ripen more slowly.

Although small organic farmers are often the most hostile to technologized solutions and may be the least likely group to adopt high-tech crops, it’s possible that GMOs could change the farmers’ markets in places like Chicago or Buffalo.

“In New York and Illinois, it’s pretty hard to grow a lot of crops because they’re going to freeze,” explains Dennis Miller, a food scientist at Cornell University. “But you could engineer in frost tolerance. You could extend the growing season and bring in more exotic crops into new regions. I don’t know if we’ll be growing bananas in upstate New York, but it would expand the options for locally grown fruits and vegetables.”

How Frankenfood Will Improve Health

Most breeders expect that the biggest change for consumers would be something that’s already familiar to any Whole Foods shopper. We already have calcium-fortified orange juice and herbal tea enhanced with antioxidants, but in an agbiotech-friendly world, the produce section would likely be overflowing with health enhancements. Orange potatoes enhanced with beta-carotene, calcium-enhanced carrots, and crops with enhanced antioxidants are already in the pipeline. By the 2030s, vegetables and fruits will be vitamin, nutrient, and beneficial-gene-delivery vehicles.

To illustrate how this would play out, Prakash points to the work of Cynthia Kenyon, a University of California–San Francisco molecular biologist, who extended the life span of a ground worm by six times by changing a gene called “def 2.”

While this is in the realm of basic science, Prakash also suggests that, if something like a “fountain of youth” gene is found to benefit humans, it could be bred into vegetables. By combining genetics and plant science, a whole new realm of products would likely appear.

Some geneticists envision a future in which crop development would become a highly collaborative process: Nutritionists, geneticists, physicians, chefs, and marketers would work to develop new fruits and vegetables aimed at various consumer wants.

Another Kind of Foodie Hero

A scientist in a white lab coat doesn’t conjure the same feelings as a micro-farmer in a straw hat. Growing fish in a warehouse isn’t quite as stirring as pulling them out of a choppy Alaskan sea. A meat-spawning bioreactor doesn’t have the same allure as a dew-covered Virginia pasture.

But it’s time to broaden the foodie pantheon.

Let’s continue to celebrate our heirloom-fava-bean growers and our grass-fed-goat herders. Let’s carefully scrutinize the claims of nutritional science and keep a wary eye on new technologies, especially those with panacea-like claims from multinational corporations with monopolistic aims and a history of DDT and Agent Orange production. But let’s not be so black-and-white; let’s not be reflexively and categorically opposed to any and all technological solutions. Savoring the slowest food and foraging for wild asparagus shouldn’t be viewed as at odds with championing lab-engineered vitamin A–enhanced rice that could save children from blindness.

Pairing a locally grown, seasonal mesclun mix from an organic microfarm with cobia, a saltwater fish grown in an industrial-sized warehouse, is not an incompatible, ethically confused choice.

I make this point because of the rising tide of food-specific neo-Luddism in America. While well intentioned and often beneficial in its impact, this foodie fundamentalism is unfortunately often associated with a dangerous antiscientism. If we’re going to meet the enormous challenges of feeding the world’s still-growing population, we are going to need all the ingenuity we can bring to bear.

My modest hope: Let’s keep an open mind. Let’s consider even the fringy, sometimes yucky, maybe kooky ideas. Let’s not miss opportunities to build a long-term sustainable future for our planet.

About the Author

Josh Schonwald is the author of The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches From the Future of Food (Harper, 2012). He will be speaking at WorldFuture 2012, the World Future Society’s annual conference, to be held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Unlimiting Energy's Growth

By Tsvi Bisk

As costs decline and sophistication increases, smart materials could help unlock limits to growth.

The embryonic revolution in material science now taking place—specifically “smart materials” and superlight materials—offers strong evidence that there are no limits to growth. So-called smart materials, as defined on Wikipedia, “are materials that have one or more properties that can be significantly changed in a controlled fashion by external stimuli.” They can produce energy by exploiting differences in temperature (thermoelectric materials) or by being stressed (piezoelectric materials). Other smart materials save energy in the manufacturing process by changing shape or repairing themselves in response to external stimuli.

These materials have all passed the “proof of concept” phase (i.e., are scientifically sound), and many are in the prototype phase. Some are already commercialized and penetrating the market.

For example, the Israeli company Innowattech has placed piezoelectric materials under a one-kilometer stretch of highway to “harvest” the wasted stress energy of vehicles passing over and converting it to electricity. This is called “parasitic energy harvesting.” The company reckons that Israel has stretches of road where the traffic could efficiently produce 250 megawatts. If this is verified, consider the tremendous electricity potential of the New Jersey Turnpike or the thruways of Los Angeles and elsewhere. Consider the potential of railway and subway tracks. We are talking about tens of thousands of potential megawatts produced without any fossil fuel.

Thermoelectric materials can transform wasted heat into electricity. Some estimate that the wasted heat from industrial processes alone could provide up to 20% of America’s electricity needs—this would make cogeneration even more efficient. Cogeneration is already making headway around the industrialized world and still has tremendous unexploited potential; again, this would yield a tremendous savings in fossil fuels.

Smart glass is already commercialized and can save significant energy in heating, air conditioning, and lighting—up to 50% savings in energy in retrofitted buildings (such as the former Sears Tower in Chicago). New buildings designed to take maximum advantage of this and other technologies could save even more. Since buildings consume about 40% of America’s electricity production, this technology alone could over time reduce electricity consumption by 20%.

Even greater savings in electricity could be realized by replacing incandescent and fluorescents with LEDs, which use one-tenth of the electricity of incandescent and half of the electricity of fluorescents. The United States could flatline its electricity consumption—gradually replacing fossil-fuel electricity production with alternatives. Conservation of energy and parasitic energy harvesting, as well as urban agriculture, would greatly cut the planet’s energy consumption and air and water pollution.

Waste-to-energy technologies could also begin to replace fossil fuels. Garbage, sewage, and all forms of organic trash, agricultural, and food-processing waste are essentially hydrocarbon resources that can be transformed into ethanol, methanol, biobutanol, or biodiesel. These can be used for transportation, electricity generation, or feedstock for plastics and other materials. Waste-to-energy is essentially a recycling of carbon dioxide already in the environment and not the introduction of new CO2.

These technologies also prevent methane from entering the environment. Methane, a product of rotting organic waste, contributes just 28% of the amount that CO2 contributes to global warming but is 25 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas. Numerous prototypes of a variety of waste-to-energy technologies are already in place. When their declining costs meet the rising costs of fossil fuels, they will become commercialized and, if history is any judge, replace fossil fuels very quickly—just as coal replaced wood in a matter of decades and petroleum replaced whale oil in a matter of years.

Superlight Materials

But it is superlight materials that have the greatest potential to transform civilization and ultimately help introduce a “no limits to growth” era. I refer, in particular, to carbon nanotubes—alternatively referred to as buckyballs or buckypaper (in honor of Buckminster Fuller). Carbon nanotubes are between 0.01% and 0.002% the width of a human hair, more flexible than rubber, and 100 to 500 times stronger than steel per unit of weight. Imagine the energy savings if planes, cars, trucks, trains, elevators—everything that needs energy to move—were made of this material and weighed 1% of what they weigh now. Present costs and production methods make this unpractical at present, but that infinite resource—the human mind—has confronted and solved this problem before. Let us take the example of aluminum.

One hundred fifty years ago, aluminum was more expensive than gold or platinum. When Napoleon III held a banquet of state, he provided his most-honored guests with aluminum plates. Less-distinguished guests had to make do with gold plates. When the Washington Monument was completed in 1884, it was fitted with an aluminum cap—the most expensive metal in the world at the time—as a sign of respect to George Washington. It weighed 2.85 kg. Aluminum at the time cost $1 per gram (or $1,000 per kg). A typical day laborer working on the monument was paid $1 per day for 10–12 hours a day. In other words, today’s common soft-drink can, which weighs 14 grams, could have bought 15 ten-hour days of labor in 1884.

Today’s U.S. minimum wage is $7.50 an hour. In other words, using labor as the measure of value, a soft-drink can would cost $1,125 today (or $80,000 a kilogram). Then, in 1886, a process discovered independently by two chemists—American Charles Marten Hall and Frenchman Paul Héroult—turned aluminum into one of the cheapest commodities on earth. Aluminum now costs $3 per kilogram, or $3,000 per metric ton. The soft-drink can that would have cost $1,125 without the process now costs four-tenths of a cent, or $0.004.

Today, industrial grade carbon nanotubes cost about $50–$60 per kilogram. This is already far cheaper than aluminum in 1884 in real value, if we use the cost of labor as the measure of value. Yet, revolutionary methods of production are now being developed that will drive the costs down even more radically. For instance, researchers at Cambridge University in England are working on a new electrochemical production method (in the prototype stage) that could produce 600 kilograms of carbon nanotubes per day at a projected cost of around $10 per kilogram, or $10,000 a metric ton.

This cost-saving process will do for carbon nanotubes what the Hall–Héroult process did for aluminum. Nanotubes will become the universal raw material of choice, displacing steel, aluminum, copper, and other metals and materials. Steel currently costs about $750 per metric ton. Nanotubes of strength equivalent to a metric ton of steel would cost $100 if this Cambridge process (or others being pursued in research labs around the world) is successful. Imagine planes, trucks, buses, cars, and elevators that weigh 5%, 2%, or even 1% of what they weigh today. Imagine the savings in conventional energy. Imagine the types of alternative energy that would be practical. Imagine the positive impact on the environment of replacing many industrial and mining processes and thus lessening air and groundwater pollution.

The most promising use of nanotubes is to turn them into paper. “Buckypaper” looks like ordinary carbon paper. It appears flimsy but will revolutionize the way we make everything from airplanes to cars to buildings to household appliances. It is 100 times stronger than steel per unit of weight, and it also conducts electricity like copper and disperses heat like steel or brass.

Ben Wang, director of Florida State University’s High-Performance Materials Institute, claims, “If you take just one gram of nanotubes, and you unfold every tube into a graphite sheet, you can cover about two-thirds of a football field.” Since other research has indicated that carbon nanotubes could be a suitable foundation for producing photovoltaic energy, consider the implications of this statement. Several grams of this material could be the energy-producing skin of new generations of dirigibles—making these airships energy autonomous. These energy-neutral airships could replace airplanes as the primary means to transport air freight.

Beyond the Limits

Is this a futurist fable, or is it entirely within the scope of development in the next 20 years (or even 10)? Modern history has shown that anything human beings decide they want done can be done in 20 years if it does not violate the laws of nature. The atom bomb was developed in four years from the time the decision was made to make it; putting a man on the Moon took eight years from the time the decision was made to do it.

It is a reasonable conjecture that, by 2020 or earlier, an industrial process for the inexpensive production of carbon nanotubes will be developed, and that this is the key to solving our energy, raw materials, and environmental problems.

The revolution in material science will help enable us to become self-sufficient in energy. It will enable us to create superlight vehicles and structures that will produce their own energy and obviate the need to pump oil or mine many resources. Carbon nanotubes will replace steel, copper, and aluminum in a myriad of functions. Whatever residual need we might have for such materials will be satisfied by the recycling of existing reserves already in the system.

Such developments will help overcome the limits of growth and enable human civilization to become a self-contained system.

About the Author

Tsvi Bisk is director of the Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking and author of The Optimistic Jew: A Positive Vision for the Jewish People in the 21st Century (Maxanna Press, 2007). He is also the THE FUTURIST’s contributing editor for Strategic Thinking. E-mail bisk@ futurist-thinking.co.il.

VISIONS: Futurists Review the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show

By Patrick Tucker and Thomas Frey

Two Futurist editors rate the gadgets that may soon make a big difference in our lives.

In January, the future descended on the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES). FUTURIST magazine deputy editor Patrick Tucker and Innovation editor Thomas Frey took a look at the most interesting, future-relevant innovations on the floor. In the following dispatch, they share some of their favorite picks from the event and cast an eye toward what the future of the Consumer Electronics Show could hold.

Smart Clothing and Wearable Sensors

Patrick Tucker’s pick, the Zomm Lifestyle Connect: This is a light, Bluetooth-enabled fob that dialogues wirelessly and transfers data from (also enabled) heart monitors, glucose monitors, and other devices. In the event of signal disruption, the heart monitor calls a “personal safety concierge,” who then calls the wearer, the wearer’s loved ones, doctors, etc., via the Lifestyle Connect.

Creator Henry Penix gave a great live demonstration. He strapped the heart monitor to a wristband and disconnected it to simulate a signal block. Suddenly, a voice rose up from the Connect device (amplified through a speaker). It was a concierge calling from Tulsa inquiring about his health and offering to ring his family. The Lifestyle Connect also allows you to call your personal safety concierge by pressing a button. ZOMM publicist Kiersten Moffatt calls this the device’s “intended usage.”

Tom Frey’s pick, AIQ Smart Clothing with soft padding that stiffens upon impact, monitors heart rate and blood pressure: CES has a few examples of smart clothing companies like AIQ, but for most exhibitors their so-called smart clothing has little more than pockets for smartphones or space for video nametags. As part of our ongoing effort to monitor our own biological functions, it may be possible to design a fabric that serves as an optical lens into our inner selves. Think of this as a wearable CAT scan system with variable-adjust focal point settings, zoom powers down to a near-nano scale, and flexible built-in data-capture sensors. The fashion options here will be incredible.

Robots and Drones

Tucker’s pick, TOSY SketRobo: The TOSY SketRobo will take your picture and draw you a sketch of yourself (for release in September). I love this because it represents a real step forward in visual recognition capability for consumer robotics. Getting bots to make sense of what they see has long been one of the biggest challenges in the field and one of the main obstacles to more common use of robots. Most AI cars see with the aid of big SICK LMS-200 laser range finders. This robot’s eyes (though still infrared sensors) are far smaller, and the picture it draws isn’t bad, either. Nice actuator control.

Frey’s pick, AR Drone: I happen to be a big fan of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and already own an AR Drone. Unveiled at CES, the new Drone 2.0 features a 720p front-facing camera so that you can capture your flights in HD. There’s also a whole raft of new sensors, including an on-board magnetometer, so that it can always tell where the pilot is in relation to its flight path, and a new air-pressure sensor that allows it to be more stable when hovering.

That said, these drones have very short battery life (10 minutes, maximum), and so far have little application outside of the hobbyist community. That will change when drones can take on more responsibilities.

Interfaces

Tucker’s pick, SoftKinetic: This was supposed to be the year of the interface at CES. We’re going to find ourselves interacting with computers in a lot of different ways in the next decade, well beyond thumb texting. The Microsoft Kinect, part of the Xbox 360 game system (released last year), uses three infrared sensors to measure movement, allowing users to operate the computer via gesture and voice. The European group SoftKinetic had a similar device at CES that uses just one infrared sensor.

Frey’s pick, the Leonar3Do 3: A 3-D modeling system developed by Hungarian company, Leonar3Do, the Leonar3Do 3 is the easiest way I’ve seen for you to create and visualize 3-D objects in space while sitting at your desktop. This integrated software and hardware platform offers a unique, truly immersive virtual-reality experience, in that you are able to see and interact with your virtual objects as you create them.

The idea of “smart” contact lenses, the kind that can superimpose information on the wearer’s field of view, has been around for a while. But contact lenses are also being developed that use embedded sensors and electronics to monitor diseases and to dispense drugs. Such devices may eventually be able to measure the level of cholesterol or alcohol in your blood and flash up an appropriate warning. The first iteration of smart contact lenses are already on the market, but they were not seen at CES.

Cars

Tucker’s pick, Ford Evos: For motorists who subscribe to an Italian aesthetic when it comes to cars, the Ford Evos is breathtaking. The Evos is full of cutting-edge software and connects the driver to his or her “personal cloud.” Like some sort of KITT (the talking car from TV’s Knight Rider) made real, the car learns about your life, where you live and work, and then adjusts performance on an ongoing basis to better accommodate and serve thee. The lithium-ion battery has a 500-mile range when charged. The seat monitors your cardiac activity while you drive, and the Evos watches the road and reads the position of other cars while in traffic, acting as its own co-pilot.

Thomas Frey’s pick, holding out for future drones: Ford jumped on the cloud-computing bandwagon with the new Evos concept car. But behind the flashy surfaces, chrome wheels, and tech trimming lies some far bigger opportunities.

The next revolution in transportation will be self-driving cars, and the adoption of this technology will change virtually everything in the field of transportation and urban planning. Google’s self-driving-car project has already racked up more than 200,000 driverless miles on highways. Before we have driverless passenger cars sold in any sizable quantities, we will see ground-based delivery drones hauling point-to-point cargo. Better to practice without passengers onboard to perfect the technology. Railroads and trucking companies should be worried, as this will displace much of their industry.

Genome Sequencing

Tucker’s pick, the Life Technologies Ion Proton™ Sequencer: This device can read your genome (all 3 billion base pairs) in one day for $1,000, according to Mel Davey, software group leader for Ion East. Human genome sequencing isn’t new, but that time frame and price point is.

“A genome sequence for $1,000 was a pipe-dream just a few years ago,” said Richard Gibbs, director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at the Baylor College of Medicine (in a press release on the Life Technologies Web site). “A $1,000 genome in less than one day was not even on the radar, but will transform the clinical applications of sequencing.”

The Ion Proton looks toward a very near future where a lot more people will be able to have the nuances of their genomes revealed, which further portends a health boom for consumers. More importantly, the amount of available information on genetics and congenital illness is about to increase exponentially, as more people get their genome read and thus contribute to the knowledge base on genetic disorders. That will further accelerate the development of new and perhaps genetically specific cures.

That’s why this was my favorite invention at CES this year. In the next two decades, most of us won’t remember the gadgets and iPhone accessories that Samsung or Nokia tried to push on us in 2012. But if the human race is living a lot longer and healthier, it may be because of this device.

Frey’s pick, Qualcomm Tricorder (not present): On the first day of CES, the X Prize Foundation announced the Qualcomm Tricorder challenge to build a tool capable of capturing key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 different diseases. The $10 million prize will go to the first person that can create a Star Trek-like medical tricorder. Sequencing is the first step. Once we have this information, can the StarTrek tricorder be far off?

Final Thoughts

Tucker: The products that most impressed me were the ones that epitomize the biggest technology trend of the next 10 years—devices that make use of the data you provide, even when you don’t know you’re providing data. A lot of the publicity about CES this year focused on the fact that Apple would not be debuting any new products, and even Microsoft won’t be attending next year. Big companies are finding the expo less valuable than they did in the past. But there are still a lot of small companies here doing great and innovative work, much of it far more relevant to the future.

Frey: After spending the past three days scouring the showroom floors at CES, watching people become overwhelmed by what they saw, I tended to be more underwhelmed by what I didn’t see.

About the Authors

Patrick Tucker is deputy editor of THE FUTURIST and director of communications for the World Future Society.

Thomas Frey is THE FUTURIST’s contributing editor for Innovation. He is the senior futurist and executive director of the DaVinci Institute, www.davinciinstitute.com.

The Future of the Commercial Sex Industry

By Emily Empel

As new technologies impact the products and services of the sex industry, other businesses will find new opportunities in the world’s oldest professions.

My interest in the commercial sex industry began while choosing a theme for the “World Futures” course I was taking in 2011 at the University of Houston. I stumbled on a Wired article, “How Tech Tools Transformed NY’s Sex Trade,” by Sudhir Venkatesh, who presented a fresh perspective on the sex industry.

His findings were fascinating. For instance, the most common investment of a New York City sex worker—after breast augmentation, dying her hair blonde, or befriending the hotel concierge—is buying a BlackBerry. Sex workers who own BlackBerrys are perceived as more professional and less likely to have sexually transmitted diseases.

Additionally, the far reach of social media has changed the way prostitutes solicit business. In 2003, social media were in their infancy, and there was no such thing as Facebook; by 2008, prostitutes acquired as much as 25% of their clients from this channel. Technology transformed New York City sex work from an on-the-streets business to an online business that provides a safer, higher-paying, and more stable work environment for sex workers, according to Venkatesh. This shift in work practices in turn has lowered crime in the city.

But instead of focusing on prostitution in the United States, I decided to expand my research to forecast the commercial sex industry more broadly. My definition of the “global sex industry” includes services and goods on a worldwide scale. Sex services include any offering that is contact-based, such as prostitution, massage parlors, or lap dancing. Sexual goods are mainly made up of the pornography and the sex toy market sectors. (And note, we are excluding from these definitions the billion-dollar online dating industry.)

In truth, authoritative figures about the sex industry are difficult to obtain, simply because much of the industry is underground, and the data is dispersed and not necessarily compiled by impartial parties. Most existing research on commercial sex observes the industry from either an empowerment or an oppression paradigm model, both of which have an element of advocacy. My research approach was to try to be as objective as possible. I merely hope to encourage futurists to take the subject seriously.

The commercial sex industry remains an enigma within the developed world. Despite its pervasiveness, it is considered by many to be a “deviant enterprise.” According to a 2008 survey of more than 1,000 individuals in England, two-thirds of the population believes that paying for sex exploits women. At the same time, an estimated 80% of city workers in the United Kingdom take their clients to strip clubs annually as part of work entertainment.

Multiple surveys conservatively estimate that 10%–15% of men in the developed world pay for sex. In Asia, the number of men paying for sex is closer to 40%. A reasonable conclusion to make based on these figures is that the consumption of sex services in Asia is more culturally accepted than in the United States.

While the United States is typically considered the center of the global sex industry, sex workers in Asia contribute significantly to both employment and economic growth of their countries. In 1994, the International Labor Organization reported that the sex industry accounted for 2%–14% of GDP in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Additional studies report that sex workers add value to the development of their larger communities by financing certain infrastructure development projects.

In order to understand how sex work may look in the future, the remainder of this article will focus on three trends that in my opinion will drive the commercial sex industry toward 2030.

Trend 1: Client Preferences Are Dependent on Worker Region

Male clients are seeking different sexual experiences in the developed versus developing world. In the United States, demand for the “girlfriend experience” is thriving. In other words, clients want more than sex from their sex workers. Supplemental sexual experiences can create the perception of “love and affection.” Writer/blogger Jon Millward recently published an infographic, “Dirty Words: A Probing Analysis of 5000 Call Girl Reviews.” Millward derived his data set from UK sex worker advertisements and subsequent ratings (like Yelp ratings for sex workers). The keywords that he identified are almost indistinguishable from those listed on an online dating profile.

According to 5,000 escort reviews, Millward found that clients “care most about the location being clean, discreet and with safe parking.” He also found that “oral-without-protection” still ranked highest out of services requested, but the “girlfriend experience” ranked above the “porn-star experience” and other specific requests. Additionally, “Johns” (i.e., men who pay for sex) often show affection toward their sex workers. As of 2010, indoor sex workers within prostitution were more likely to be caressed, kissed, and to receive mutual pleasure from a client.

On the other hand, men engaging in the Southeast Asian sex tourism industry travel from abroad for sex in order to leave Western “female empowerment” behind. Global sex tourism represents the darker facet of sex work fueled by Westernized nations. Globally, women willing to perform unprotected sex are often more highly compensated. Sex workers who choose to use protection typically earn approximately 79% less than their counterparts. According to the Commission on AIDS in Asia, “Men who buy sex are the single-most powerful driving force in Asia’s HIV epidemics.”

In Asia, there are seven times as many clients as there are workers. Yet, while a gap remains over the experience of sex workers and consumers in the developing and developed worlds, both regions are experiencing increasing value from the commercial sex industry.

Trend 2: Legitimate Organizations Realize the Economic Value of the Sex Industry

From an economic standpoint, a greater number of venture capital firms and legitimate businesses like the Bank of Ireland, DirectTV, and Ackrell Capital are investing within the pornography industry. Even PETA, known for its racy “I’d Rather be Naked than Wear Fur” advertisements, recently announced plans to launch an .xxx site promoting animal rights through pornography.

Feminist scholar Sheila Jeffreys notes that the economic benefits of sex work also extend to individuals or companies not explicitly participating in the industry, such as “hotels and airlines, taxi drivers, bouncers, valets, clothing/makeup businesses, and alcohol companies.” In 2003, lobbyist Bill Lyon noted, “The porn industry employs an excess of 12,000 people in California … [and] pays over $36 million in taxes every year.” Though sex work is often dismissed in the eyes of the average person, the business sector is starting to give it serious consideration based on its potential to increase revenue.

Economic value is evident in more than just private-sector businesses in the developing world. Philippine tourism benefits from the 40% of male tourists who visit the country each year for sex. Countries in the developing world are building their infrastructures from revenue realized from sex work. For example, the number of phone sex calls in San Tome received from the United States increased from 4,300 in 1991 to 360,000 in 1993—an increase of more than 8,000%. The island taxed and used that revenue to build a new telecommunications system.

Advocates for the legitimacy of sex work note that there are many positive ways countries can use the monetary resources to establish a higher standard of living for their constituents.

Trend 3: Technologies Expand the Definition and Influence of Commercial Sex

Sex-based services and products have become more private pursuits since the popularization of the Internet. More consumers are able to participate in the industry from the comfort of their own homes. Individuals engage with sex-based technologies in other private environments, too. According to the Adult Video Association, 55% of films rented in hotels are pornography titles.

At the same time, sales and rentals of X-rated DVDs decreased by 15% in 2006 as a result of cost-free pornography alternatives available through other media channels such as the Internet. Increasing competition has forced more pornography companies to explore alternative solutions in order to gain back lost revenue and market share.

Technological innovations are also enhancing the experience of remote sex, robotic sex, and virtual sex worlds. In Japan, the Love Plus handheld device, which is similar to a Gameboy, is changing the definition of what constitutes a relationship. Some men are using these devices and traveling to Atami, Japan—a town trained to accommodate these visitors as if they were two real lovers—for lover-moons. Restaurants serve mini-cakes for the “female” avatar guests, and each hotel room has a jumbo screen with a superimposed image of these female avatars near the bed.

Additionally, advancements in teledildonics allow virtual sex experiences to feel real, and virtual sex worlds create a sex environment that is, at least in theory, risk-free.

Baseline Scenario

If these trends continue, it is probable that 2030 will encapsulate a world in which sex work is pervasive in both the developed and the developing worlds. Sex workers in the United States and Europe will require their customers to provide mutual pleasure and other nonmonetary benefits to complement traditional payment, such as love and affection.

In the developed world, the “girlfriend experience” will be complemented by the “boyfriend experience” for male clients. Smart technologies will help sex workers create safer, more profitable work environments.

The growth of “me” marketing will allow individual workers to take ownership over their sex industry name and brand. At the same time, investments within technology will force sex workers to provide a type of sexual intimacy that cannot be replicated by technology tools. Sex workers will have to not only develop new on-the-job skills, but also expand their social sensibilities and unique service offerings. Expect sex workers to engage in current retailing trends like collective discounts, online reviews, and strategic partnerships.

By 2030, the emergence of new technologies will create new opportunities within the commercial sex industry, and may even expand sexual experiences beyond current standards. Technological innovations will encourage societal questions such as, “What is a relationship?” or “What constitutes cheating?” The legal system will continue to define what society considers to be appropriate virtual and real-life sexual behavior.

Individuals may believe they are entering a virtual interaction independent of judgment from the “real” or physical world, but engaging within this space will continue to hold social stigma. “Virtual sex lives” will cater to all sexual preferences and will feature goods and service add-ons to enhance each experience.

There will be increased partnerships between virtual and real businesses, more across-border entities, and increased cooperation among commercial sex work sectors. The online space will create a greater demand for sex-based products and services, rather than eliminate the more traditional commercial sex sectors.

As more mainstream companies invest within the commercial sex industry, the public face of sex work will shift from one that is nebulous and dark to one that portrays sex workers as real people. By 2030, legitimate investment will not only include pornography, but also expand into other profitable sectors, such as phone sex and some forms of prostitution.

Mainstream funding will create an environment that is less dominated by criminal syndicates and more focused on producing legitimate sex work. Companies will become involved in product placement within pornography or the sponsorship of sex workers. Business enterprises will acknowledge that commercial sex is an untapped opportunity for global brands to capture the attention of consumers to spur growth.

Customers who prefer uninhibited, unprotected sex will continue to travel in order to fulfill their desires. As a result, some governments, especially those concentrated in Southeast Asia, will feel increased global pressure to prevent the spread of disease by implementing safe-sex laws and then imposing fines for noncompliance.

The International Labor Organization may ultimately legitimize sex work in Asia. Sex worker health will become a priority in order to combat the HIV epidemic. Foreign governments will face a growing conundrum as the mistreatment of women (as judged by Western standards) increases, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases continues—a counterforce to the sex industry’s undeniable impact on development.

Closing Thoughts

Whether you approve or disapprove of the moral aspects of commercial sex work, or are simply indifferent, this fringe industry can hardly be discounted in the future. As investment firms and other organizations fund more complex research studies, there will be a subsequent call to account for the commercial sex industry across intersecting domains.

Sociologist Laura María Agustin, author of Sex at the Margins (Zed Books, 2007), advocates for researchers to consider the unique experiences surrounding sex work in order to promote a more accurate understanding of how this industry affects global issues. Systematic research, coupled with an increased interest in commercial sex, will make sex work considerations more relevant within futures.

About the Author

Emily Empel is a trend spotter, marketing disciple, and futurist. This article draws from her presentation at WorldFuture 2011. Learn more about her interest areas by following her on Twitter, @localrat, or visiting her blog, www.localrat.com.

Anticipating an "Anything Goes" World of Online Porn

By Roger Howard

Increased exposure to more-intensive pornographic imagery and content online will make future generations less sensitive to its effects.

The Internet has become synonymous not only with the diffusion of information and the exchange of ideas, but also with the arousal of darker, more primeval human instincts. The Web is saturated by pornography, catering to every conceivable personal taste, attracting millions of worldwide followers, and generating billions of dollars in revenues for their sponsors. Such images are easily accessible and immediately available at the click of a mouse and in the privacy of one’s own home.

Such a powerful, pervasive, fast-growing, and highly addictive phenomenon is already having enormous repercussions on every level. Research reported in Psychology Today has shown that it could be creating a new generation of young men who are so desensitized by extreme online images that they are wholly unexcited by ordinary sexual encounters.

On a somewhat different level, allegations have also been made that Internet porn addiction has played a part in causing the current economic collapse: In 2010, The Atlantic reported that senior officials at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission were busy accessing pornographic sites rather than monitoring the financial system prior to the collapse of leading banks. The influence of Internet porn is also seeping into our everyday world in all sorts of others way, changing the images that are used in advertising, the references made in conversation, and pushing all pop culture further toward a “pornographic” level of imagery.

In the years ahead, Internet porn will be even more influential than at present, bringing with it a number of social dangers that need to be recognized if they are to be avoided.

Why Internet Porn Will Become More Pervasive

One reason why Internet pornography is likely to become ever more pervasive in the future is that Internet usage in general is becoming heavier. More and more people across the world are either going online for the first time as basic, often second-hand, computers become more readily available and their prices fall, or else are using the Internet for a wider range of purposes, such as shopping, than ever before. Correspondingly, their exposure to Internet pornography increases in proportion to the time they spend online.

In technical terms, the Internet is still also in its relative infancy and will become readily available on a much wider range of devices, such as mobile phones. In its next generation of development, the Internet could make its way onto a wider range of instruments, all of which will offer viewers far sharper images, a much quicker connection, and a more reliable service than at present. The introduction of 3-D images would be one such development, and what Aldous Huxley termed, in the Brave New World, “the feelies”—when the audience physically experiences some of the sensations depicted in the images—are not unthinkable.

Finally, and more controversially, the boundaries of what is and is not deemed to be acceptable are constantly shifting as people become accustomed to what surrounds them. Today, most of us have become used to images and language that would have been shocking even twenty years ago; in the same way, future generations will become exposed to images that are, by contemporary standards, beyond the limits of decency. From this premise it follows that, in the years ahead, there will be even more pornographic images than at present, even if some of those images elicit not outrage, as they would at present, but just mild disapproval. Perhaps they will not even be noticed at all.

So the influence of Internet pornography is likely to be much more profound on every level than has been widely recognized. It will continue to influence people for the same reason that advertising influences people: Human nature is highly susceptible to the power of images and messages, even if some individuals are more susceptible than others. Appealing to deep instincts in human nature, the influence of Internet porn will continue to be particularly profound and be felt worldwide. And generating such vast incomes for governments, businessmen, and shareholders, it will also be an unstoppable force, even if the technological means do ever exist to effectively curb it.

Accentuating the Gender Divide

One consequence of the pervasive influence of Internet pornography will be to accentuate the gender divide between men and women. Although there are women who look regularly at such images, the overwhelming majority of followers are men, of all ages, background, and personality types. According to a study led by Brigham Young University family life scholar Jason S. Carroll, 87% of young men report using pornography, compared with 31% of young women. In addition, women who do regularly look at Internet porn are less likely to be drawn to more extreme varieties.

On the premise that people’s behavior is influenced by the images they see, like those used in advertising, it follows that men are likely to be drawn toward “varied” sexual practices that they have viewed online, while women maintain more “mainstream“ tastes. One consequence of this divide could be a rise in rates of divorce and separation, as women abandon partners whose sexual interests they feel unable to satisfy, or as men look further afield—to prostitutes or to online communities—to find compatible partners. The Internet has already been blamed for a rise in divorce as people search social networking sites to contact former partners (or find new ones), and this destructive trend is likely to continue. Conversely, there may be an increase in the number of heterosexual women cohabiting (platonically) with other heterosexual women, or with homosexual men, as the habits of increasing numbers of heterosexual men become, in the eyes of these women, threatening and disturbing.

Widening the gender divide will also have political repercussions in countries where women’s rights are repressed. If women have limited, or perhaps nonexistent, legal rights to escape relationships that are in some way abusive, then the influence of Internet porn on male sexual behavior could have a number of consequences. One is that more women will flee those relationships and take refuge, although that is not an option if they do not have the means to do so. But another possibility is that the victims will find ways of putting pressure on the cultural and legal norms that restrict their freedom.

The most obvious example is the contemporary Islamic world, such as in Pakistan, where women currently have limited rights. In 2002, Mukhtar Mai, a young Pakistani woman who was gang-raped, fought back by testifying against her attackers, becoming a leading advocate of women’s rights, and founding a refuge for vulnerable women. The case has triggered a huge debate within Pakistan about women’s rights, and in 2006 prompted the lower house of Parliament to moderate rape laws that were heavily weighted against victims. As the influence of Internet porn becomes more pervasive, such controversies are likely to become more common, not only within particular countries but beyond: The Mai case attracted huge international publicity and criticism of Pakistan, and President Musharraf tried to keep the case quiet because he did not “want to project a bad image of Pakistan.”

Eroding the Distinction between “Man” and “Beast”

While the increasing influence of Internet porn will accentuate the gulf between the two genders, it will erode other fundamental differences, notably the distinction between “man” and “beast.” This will necessarily have far-reaching implications for everyone.

Porn erodes this distinction because it portrays humankind in its most primitive, animal-like condition, one in which copulation is removed from the wider context of emotions and responsibilities that have evolved over time and upon which civilization depends. In the animal kingdom, sexual instincts are simply satisfied by creatures that are hardly in a position to consider the possible consequences of their action or to gauge each others’ feelings or best interests. By contrast, in a state of human civilization, these instincts have been traditionally placed within a theoretical context of “consent” and “relationships,” in which “responsibility,” “commitment,” or, in most societies, “marriage” stand at the very center.

But the animalization of humankind will inevitably have consequences that stretch well beyond the screens upon which we view Internet porn. Not only will those who participate in online action be labeled with such terms, but those labels will shape how we see each other. If each of us increasingly sees others more as “animal” than “human,” then it follows that our mutual respect is similarly eroded. Human well-being is traditionally protected by a framework of morals and manners that simply does not protect animals—other than sacred animals—and human life is sacred in a way that animal life is not.

It is no accident that, when great atrocities have been committed, the perpetrators have never tired of degrading their victims, robbing them of their dignity, and undermining any respect that their persecutors might otherwise have for them. The most obvious example is of course Adolf Hitler, who infamously portrayed the Slavs as Untermensch—“inferior people” or “subhuman.” “Are Jews not worse than animals?” concentration camp guards would ask new recruits when they arrived at Auschwitz. Other perpetrators of mass killings have carried out comparable dehumanization of their own enemies, whether defined by class, religious beliefs, or other criteria: Stalin, for example, sought to eliminate the Kulaks and other “state enemies” on the grounds that they were merely “vermin.”

It follows that, as the distinction between “man” and “beast” becomes increasingly blurred, crime levels will inevitably rise. And as people increasingly treat each other “like animals,” so, too, will the severity and brutality of those crimes. Individual women and children are the most obvious victims, but killings on every scale and of every type of victim are likely to become more common when our mutual respect is eroded.

Purging Feelings of Guilt

In the coming years, Internet porn will also continue to arouse feelings of guilt among some or even most of those who experience it. When it does so, there is a real possibility that some people could try to purge their feelings of guilt in a way that potentially leads to persecution and culminates in violence and bloodshed.

The relationship between porn and guilt is a problematic one, because in some cultures and for some individuals, there is nothing remotely shameful about any pornography—even varieties that are, by contemporary standards, quite extreme. This is true, for example, in places like the Netherlands and among younger age groups who reportedly see nothing wrong with such a practice. But it is also true that a significant number of consumers will be affected by feelings of guilt, even if they are perhaps unaware of them.

This may be because many viewers progressively graduate from relatively moderate images to those that are increasingly extreme, finding that they have become immune to those they started with. This means that the Internet will still retain an indefinite power to shock and thrill, even if the senses of many viewers do become progressively and proportionately cauterized. As a result, just as many future viewers will still be as susceptible as their contemporaries to feelings of guilt about what they have seen.

Another reason is that the religious framework within which many of those individuals exist is likely to retain its grip on public ideas and attitudes long into the future. In many societies, traditional religious teaching is likely to retain its strong disapproval of Internet porn, making its followers and addicts feel guilty about their actions. This is true not just of the Christian influence in the West, but also of the Islamic world. While some Christian countries have much more liberal attitudes than others to pornography in particular, and to sex in general—the Netherlands is in this sense very different from Britain—this underlying framework will still be strong enough to induce feelings of guilt in some people.

Feelings of guilt, however, can often be a dangerous thing. Sometimes they can push people into fits of moralistic behavior, as they seek to clear their conscience by indulging in, for example, sudden acts of religiosity, or generosity toward charitable causes. If such actions are taken too far—for example, if they are exploited by potential beneficiaries—then they can be extremely damaging to those who undertake them. But there are other times when a guilty conscience poses dangers toward others.

This is when a “moral pecking order” eventuates. When one person feels guilty about something he or she has done, then it makes them feel less guilty to look down at someone else who they deem to be morally beneath them. This is why, in prisons, sex offenders in general and child abusers in particular are typically sectioned off for their own safety from their fellow inmates, who exculpate themselves by victimizing others. By the same simple logic, it was the harlots of London who came into the streets to dance with joy and jeer at Oscar Wilde after his conviction in 1895 for gross indecency with another man. It is also significant that a staunchly Protestant government minister in Northern Ireland, 60-year old Iris Robinson, made strongly homophobic remarks at the same time that she was involved in an extramarital affair with a 19-year-old man.

It is just such a moral pecking order that will easily arise in the years ahead as Internet porn becomes more prevalent. It is likely that there will be periodic outbursts of quasi-moralistic behavior that serve to alleviate guilty consciences, as well as witch hunts against vulnerable minorities. A parallel could be drawn with the public hysteria, culminating in violence, against pedophiles that broke out on both sides of the Atlantic in the course of 2000: In August of that year, mobs targeted the homes of individuals—some quite innocent—who were deemed to be “pedophiles.” It is conceivable that such outbursts of violence and hysteria could coexist, or alternate, with periods of religious fervor, comparable to the Evangelical Revival of the mid-nineteenth century, as people find other ways of clearing their guilty consciences.

Internet Pornography and Its Impacts

There is of course a huge irony about the impact of Internet porn. The Internet is a triumph of supreme human rationality, a medium of astonishing technical sophistication that is the creation of human ingenuity and intelligence. But at the same time, it is unleashing forces that are entirely irrational and emotive, because so much of its content is appealing not to mankind’s thinking power but only to our deepest and darker instincts.

However, there is nothing inevitable about any of the possible eventualities that Internet pornography can bring about in the decades ahead. It is possible that we can avoid the animalization of our innate nature, and of the world around us, if we are more aware of some of the dangers that Internet pornography poses. For example, even a modest amount of self-regulation on the part of Internet users might play some part in curbing these dangers.

At the very least, it is more important than ever, given such potential dangers, that extensive research is undertaken into the effects that Internet images can have on human behavior. At the moment, many experts deny that there is any such link at all, even though there is ample testimony—not least from the huge sums of money invested by corporate sponsors—in the power of advertising. This needs much more research, and if we are better informed about just how strongly porn can influence us, then we may be better prepared to consider the dangers it brings and to work out how we can meet them.

At the very least, it is necessary to challenge the frequently proffered notion that anything each one of us views on the Internet, whether pornographic or not, is just a private concern that has no bearing on anyone else. The power of the Internet has already eroded any distinction between private and public boundaries, and in the future will do so even more.

About the Author

Roger Howard is the author of four books on contemporary affairs, including The Arctic Gold Rush: The New Race for Tomorrow’s Natural Resources (Continuum, 2009). He is also a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, and numerous other publications. His previous article for THE FUTURIST was “The Politics of Climate Change,” November-December 2009. Email howard1966@btinternet.com.

To Predict or to Build the Future? Reflections on the Field and Differences between Foresight and La Prospective

By Michel Godet

A pioneer from the French school of la prospective discusses the development of futures-studies methodologies and the imperative of making methods accessible to all.

La prospective, similar to the concept of “strategic foresight,” is the discipline devoted to shedding light on action in the present by using the power of possible and desirable futures.

The father of the discipline in France, industrialist and statesman Gaston Berger (1896-1960), used a highly appropriate image: The faster you drive, the farther ahead your headlights should shine. La prospective acts like a spotlight designed not to forecast the future but to illuminate actions to take now, in the present. It really focuses on the now first.

Berger said that the attitude in la prospective relies upon five principles: see wide, see far, see deeply, think of the human factor, and take risks. To these principles, let me add my twist, three new ambitions:

First, “see differently,” which means think outside the box, beware of clichés, and become aware of collective mirages.

Second, “see together,” which is important now because in Berger’s day the idea was to enlighten the “prince” or decision maker. Even if there was collegiality among intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen who occasionally exchanged ideas, the vision was rather aristocratic. Futures exercises were not participatory with the meaning of integrating the actors, or stakeholders.

And third, “have rigor for an intellectual non-discipline.” There are five conditions for rigor: pertinence, consistency/coherence, plausibility, importance, and transparency.

Of course, to be a prospectivist (or futurist), you have to be a bit cheeky, nonconformist, and multidisciplinary, but you need methods, too, that help reduce the collective inconsistencies. These methods have to be both rigorous and simple enough to be appropriated—that is, used by as many others as possible.

Throughout my career, the easiest thing was to make complicated methods, like scenario probabilization, whereas the hardest thing was to create simple methods that everyone could understand, e.g., prospective workshops.

Methods and Experience

For some, including Berger himself, la prospective could be summed up in an attitude; for others, it absolutely required methods. Many people reject methods because they don’t understand them. Yet it is possible to show them the advantages of the methods—for example, their use in revealing variables that would not have been noticed otherwise.

In 1972, during a nuclear energy study mandated by the French Atomic Energy Commission, the group took into account 51 variables. The structural analysis highlighted the importance of the variables of “sensitivity to external effects” and “site problems for the locations of plants.” This raised the issue of the importance of social acceptability in developing nuclear energy. It showed the problems that the EDF (French Hydro-electric Corporation) would actually have in trying to set up a nuclear plant in the municipality of Plogoff, where local protests (1978-1981) led to the project being canceled.

Another challenge is to get people to think about the unthinkable. Basically, people tend not to hear what disturbs them. In other words, everything that pleases us is correct and what bothers us is wrong.

In 1990-1991, a futures-thinking exercise for the French iron and steel sector in 2005 yielded six pertinent and consistent scenarios. The use of the Prob-Expert software that we developed showed that these six scenarios covered only 40% of the field of probable futures and actually revealed three new, far more probable scenarios that the experts had not even identified because those three went against conventional thinking.

This case shows the advantage of “probabilistic interaction methods,” which take into account the interaction between events and verify whether the scenarios studied cover a reasonable part of the field of probable futures.

Even though I introduced methods into the field of futures studies, I think that scenarios are overdone. Making scenarios is fine, but so what? Once a scenario is drafted, what do we do to take action, to make whatever we want to happen or not to happen? We should really be turning them into a project-based approach. The tools should be used appropriately.

Methods are necessary, but to paraphrase the late French intellectual and surrealist André Breton, we must use all the levers; in other words, rigor, imagination, rational knowledge, emotional knowledge, left and right brain.

I also believe that, if my impact has been through methods, it is probably because so few people have worked on them. I didn’t really try to develop new methods, because the existing toolbox already allows me to approach all problems.

For me, the development of methods does not mean inventing new ones, but rather creating new frontiers where those methods may be disseminated and appropriated. And people have appropriated this teaching in different countries, adding their own culture each time.

Without a lot of fanfare, I raised the funds to put the Prob-Expert prospective software online through the Entrepreneurs of the Future Circle. I managed to get all the tools uploaded so people can download them for free. Since 2003, the software online has been downloaded 40,000 times.

I hope that my legacy to the field is that I trained people and “infected” many with the healthy prospective virus. I have copied the model of the Catholic Church of training foreign students who became teachers in their own countries.

While there is great maturity in the field, la prospective is not a solid field in France; every year, newcomers arrive who do not know its history. All prospectivists or futurists should know a minimum amount of the history, development, and thinking of futures studies—foresight or la prospective—to avoid going back to square one. This way they can avoid some of the pitfalls.

What Is the Difference between Foresight and La Prospective?

On an international level, la prospective is not a stable, uniform field at all. The same disciplines are not used in prospective research in all countries.

In Great Britain, political scientists are the experts. It changes according to country, too. In the United States, practitioners have stayed close to the science of the future in the same way as there is a science of the past—history.

An enormous problem today is the Anglo-American domination in the field, especially in Brussels. Obviously, we missed the chance to structure la prospective on a European scale and thus form a European community of la prospective.

Several times I did try, unsuccessfully, to change things, but the European Commission in Brussels views la prospective through the prism of technology foresight. This type of prospective falls into the technological mirage that I have long been denouncing.

We have to link fields, rather like a sociologist-demographer, who takes into account family and social factors. We do not want to have only a technological viewpoint; instead, we need to be multidisciplinary, using different levers. This always reminds me of the dream of the hammer, or the popular expression that for the hammer every problem resembles a nail. Life is not like that. The same tool does not work on every problem.

In the English-speaking world, foresight, as it is usually called, often remains based on the Delphi method (consulting experts in a given field), based on technology, and with the ambition of foreseeing the future. The original sin of la prospective remains a temptation: Experts, consciously or unconsciously, want to play the part of oracle.

We should remember that one meaning of foresight is actually intuition; i.e., the future is to be guessed. For us in the field, the future is to be built; in other words, a completely different approach from guessing or prophesying. The break between these approaches is significant, because the idea of a future to be created puts us initially in the situation of actors.

So there is no international academy of la prospective or futures studies, and I doubt there ever will be.

But this also means that la prospective is no longer a solitary pleasure. That’s new. Another positive step forward is how widespread the field has become. The newcomers tell the seniors that their practices are outdated because they think they need new methods; in other words, the ones that they themselves bring.

The need for new methods remains to be seen. However, the trend toward using qualitative measures to understand phenomena is good. And using creativity sessions is a positive development for prospectivists/futurists. You have to put creativity in the workshops and to remember that what counts is not the final report but the process that leads to the report. A department manager at a store can create his future just as much as an executive can.

Another trend in la prospective is that the issue of sustainable development has become dominant among futurists. The differences between the fields of sustainable development and futures studies have shrunk, because the goal of sustainable development is to keep the future open, to make choices in the present that are not to the detriment of future generations. In other words, thinking about humankind in a responsible manner.

La prospective and sustainable development are sister concepts. Maybe the word prospective will even disappear from our vocabulary. Regardless, the idea of responsibility with respect to the long term is included in sustainable development.

What Legacy Do I Leave?

Can I make a difference? And what do I leave behind? These two key questions reflect the times and nature of futuring. Obviously we hope for positive answers.

Today, more than before, I am following the political scene. It’s normal to be both a futurist and a “public intellectual,” because thinking for oneself by oneself doesn’t make much sense.

Like the lookout during his watch on board the Titanic upon seeing the iceberg, my ambition is not to say “We hit an iceberg!” but to warn everyone so as to avoid collision. Good forecasts are not those that occur but those that lead to action. I feel that I am a player, too. I try to warn the leaders and citizens so that we can avoid problems. A problem well presented is already partly solved.

I am sounding the alarm now on the problems of integrating increasing numbers of immigrants and stemming the demographic catastrophe on the horizon due to aging populations and rising dependency ratios in Europe. There rarely is consensus on the key or priority questions, so the objective of participatory futures exercises is to generate, through debate, more consensual priority decisions.

My personal growth, which has been almost a round-trip back to square one, has meant being less interested in the future and more interested in the present, plus giving meaning to action.

History constantly rewrites itself according to the needs of the present, so the ambition of la prospective is to illuminate present action in light of possible futures. La prospective is focused on the present, giving meaning to action, for action without a goal has no meaning.

I also realized along the way that the goal is not everything. Going through the process all together is important. The goal is a pretext to the collective journey that creates ties among participants. The meaning of life comes through those ties. Wealth is really educated, fulfilled people in a society that has confidence plus projects: This phrase sums up my entire personal and professional path, a result of the attitude of la prospective.

You can see the coming together of my thoughts as a practitioner, citizen, man of action, project starter on the ground in terms of entrepreneurship and local development.

Paradoxically, I also noticed that, besides accelerating change, inertia plays an important role. The greatest changes often come from inertia, a factor that has been underestimated.

The world changes, but the problems remain, because they are linked to an invariable: human nature. Over time, men retain very similar drives that lead them to behave in a comparable manner in comparable situations. In short, they are predictable.

As a consequence, we have to study human nature to understand phenomena. For me, la prospective has been and will always remain a passion. I tried to not only do it as a business, unlike some practitioners whom I criticize for not caring enough to pass on their know-how.

The prospectivist, or futurist, commits to action, with a project, a dream. Already, the language denotes a sensitive knowledge: “dreams fertilize reality.” However, rigor and methodology are also needed. In short, both left and right brain must be activated. I pay attention to this intellectual blend. Without reason, passion is blind; without passion to fuel a project, reason leads nowhere.

About the Author

Michel Godet is an economist and professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, where he holds the chair of Strategic Foresight. He is the founder and facilitator of the Entrepreneurs of the Future Circle, a joint program of the National Center for Entrepreneurship and the Foundation Prospective et Innovation. He is co-author, with Philippe Durance, of Strategic Foresight: For Corporate and Regional Development (UNESCO, with Entrepreneurs of the Future Circle, 2011). He is also a member of the French Academy of Technology. Email: michel.godet@laprospective.fr.

This article is adapted from an interview in the French online journal Grand Lyon, conducted by Cédric Polère, available at www.millenaire3.com.

India's Innovation Potential

By Rick Docksai

India itself will strive to keep pace with its quickly modernizing economy. Two economists foresee India becoming a new global innovation center.

India Inside: The Emerging Innovation Challenge to the West by Nirmalya Kumar and Phanish Puranam. Harvard Business Review Press. 2012. 177 pages. $25.95.

To many global businesses, India is a good site for outsourcing basic services and operations. With time, however, India could gain a whole new reputation as a global innovation center that generates myriad new products and services of its own. London Business School professors Nirmalya Kumar and Phanish Puranam express this hope in India Inside.

“The challenge is to move from ‘outsourced and made in India’ to ‘imagined and owned in India,’” the authors write.

Negative stereotypes about India persist in some circles, according to the authors. Certain Western business leaders say that Indian entrepreneurs “provide services” but “don’t do innovation.” In fact, as the authors show, Indian innovation is flourishing and can continue to do so to greater and greater degrees.

The number of patents that Indian developers filed in 2010 under the International Patent Cooperation Treaty topped the prior year’s number by 36.6% and beating by vast margins the worldwide average gain of 5.7%. Moreover, “escalating” numbers of Western companies, including Cisco, AstraZeneca, and General Electric, are opening research and development centers on Indian soil.

Indian innovation differs in kind from typical Western innovation, however. Western firms win acclaim for “visible” innovation: tangible consumer products, such as iPads and the Google search engine. Indian innovators’ greatest strength is “invisible innovation”: not so much new products but, rather, changes to the innovation and design process itself. Indian businesses display a unique aptitude for finding ways to make R&D and production more efficient and less costly.

For example, Indian business analytics start-up DenuoSource patented Location Analyzer, a software tool that a business can use to assess whether or not to open a new store and what locations would offer the biggest return on the investment. Additionally, a business can consult the software to decide on whether to remodel or relocate existing stores.

With entrepreneurial innovation coming of age, the decades-long “brain drain” of Indian university graduates leaving for jobs overseas has begun to decline. Growing rates of Indian college graduates are staying, and those who have already emigrated are coming back, thanks to contemporary India’s expanding economic opportunities and quality of life.

India’s future success depends on three variables, however: its talent pipeline, its intellectual property system, and the venture-capital sector. First, the Indian government will need to modernize the national school and university systems. India currently has few world-class universities and few linkages between universities and industries. Consequently, too few adults graduate with critically needed job skills.

The government will also have to assure foreign companies that intellectual-property rights are safe and sound. And both government officials and private-sector entities will need to devise better resources for funding new entrepreneurial ventures.

Infosys and other Indian IT firms are stepping up to the challenge and helping to bring universities and their curricula up to speed. Some firms are even founding their own master’s degree programs and campuses.

Meanwhile, start-up venture-capital firms are advancing Indian product development: Venture capital loans enabled tech start-up Zoho to develop new software tools to maximize office productivity, InMobi to devise new apps for mobile Internet advertising, and both FusionCharts and InfoSoft Global to develop new innovations in graphic data visualization.

Each chapter of India Inside details not only the areas of progress taking place within India, but also what these developments mean for non-Indian policy makers and multinational business leaders who plan to conduct business in or with India. The authors relate, for example, how multinational corporations can navigate weaknesses in Indian intellectual-property protections and find qualified workers.

The authors do not say for sure how successful India will be, but aver with certainty: “Developed” countries’ current dominance over creative product development is over.

“The capacity for innovation per se will not distinguish the West from the East,” the authors write.

The contemporary economic success of this “BRIC country” is well known and has generated much speculation in the global media. Kumar and Puranam assess the growth trends up close to help readers see what India’s modern-day economic growth is, what it is not, and what it could eventually be. India Inside is an authoritative source that any reader with a serious professional interest in India might want to consult.

About the Reviewer

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

Books in Brief

Edited by Rick Docksai

Humanity Grows More Civil

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker. Viking. 2011. 802 pages. $40.

Humanity is becoming more peaceful, and the proof is all around us, asserts Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, he retraces the last few millennia of human history to show a clear evolution across the globe away from violence, war, and exploitation, and toward nonviolence, compassion, and equality.

Armed clashes were endemic millennia ago, Pinker notes, and they typically entailed massive genocides and abuses of the defeated nations’ civilians. Even in peacetime, life was far from kind: Women and children were oppressed, animals were mistreated, and ethnic and religious minorities lived in constant dread of persecution. And slavery, torture, and public executions were routine practices.

But over the last thousand years, concepts of human rights and egalitarianism took root. Today, humanity is far more civil than it was even one century ago, Pinker argues. Rates of violent crime are far lower, and cruelty toward one’s spouse, children, or household pets is no longer tolerated. The same goes for attacks against people of different ethnicities or religions.

Wars are now a rarity, and when they do occur, they are far briefer and claim immensely fewer casualties. Although terrorism, slavery, and other offenses against human life persist, they are no longer socially accepted.

Pinker outlines the forces behind this great shift. Reading, commerce, and democracy all exert humanizing influences. But more fundamentally, societal values have changed. Whereas past societies prized “honor” and the willingness to fight to defend it, above all else, contemporary society has come to recognize life itself as the highest good. He is hopeful that the civility trends will continue.

Many people today assume that human nature does not change. Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature makes a compelling counter-argument, and a scholarly case for hope that better days may truly lie ahead.

A More Crowded and Turbulent Planet

Forces of Nature: Our Quest to Conquer the Planet by Barry A. Vann. Prometheus. 2012. 327 pages. $26.

Human population trends have always been at the mercy of Earth’s climate, says geographer Barry A. Vann. Since prehistoric times, nomadic people have migrated to where food and water were plentiful. When scarcities made hunting and gathering no longer an option, they would then settle and commence farming. Even then, they would adapt the layouts of farms, villages, and eventually cities to the climate conditions.

Vann anticipates that throughout this century we, like those earlier generations, will have to adapt where we live and how we build to Earth’s climate. He sees trouble ahead due to climate change and population growth.

Much of Latin America will be overcrowded by mid-century. Populations will double in 13 countries, among them Mexico and Panama. Since rising sea levels will engulf coastal areas, more people will amass onto North and South America’s inlands. Vann fears mass destruction of remaining rain forests to make way for farmland, and overall exacerbations of poverty and malnutrition.

Communities will need to rely on technology to survive, Vann says, including disaster-proof building construction design, tornado early-warning systems, and underground storm shelters. Development in South America will be safer if planners exempt more rain-forest areas from building. And no construction should take place on floodplains.

The United States has long been a magnet for immigrations, but it will impose restrictions as its capacity to accommodate more immigrants declines and world population growth continues, Vann believes. More would-be immigrants will have to remain in their native countries, which will force those countries to improve their economic and domestic conditions and to develop vital building-design and natural-disaster-preparation technologies.

Vann shows a keen eye for the patterns of history and what they can tell us about the future. Historians and futurists alike will find Forces of Nature an engaging read.

Persistence of Faiths

The Future of God in the Global Village: Spirituality in an Age of Terrorism and Beyond by Thomas McFaul. AuthorHouse. 2011. 190 pages. Paperback. $18.04.

Religion thrives at the start of the twenty-first century, despite a plethora of predictions that it would die out a century ago, according to retired religion professor Thomas McFaul. In The Future of God in the Global Village, he looks at the myriad faith traditions that flourish today and the reasons for their continuing strength.

For indigenous peoples, in particular, faith is a bedrock of identity and perspective amid the turbulence of twenty-first-century societal change. For people of all backgrounds, religion is a means to spiritual nourishment, community, and self-improvement—personal needs that McFaul asserts people will continue to feel and that no amount of technological innovation or improvements to material living standards will in themselves satisfy.

McFaul also notes the religious pluralism that, he states, is one of the major trends of our age. Today’s globalized world brings different religions into regular contact with each other to a degree never seen before. Furthermore, new religions are forming all the time and will probably continue to do so.

Yet, McFaul observes, religious toleration is still far from universal. Extremists of every major faith tradition incite their followers against those of other faiths. Religion-on-religion strife in our age is much milder than that which transpired in past eras, thanks in part to the institution of secular democracy, but it remains to be seen whether new generations of theocratic leaders might undo democratization’s progress.

It is imperative that the world’s religions learn to coexist, McFaul concludes. There will not be peace among the nations, he says, unless there is first peace among the religions.

McFaul’s The Future of God in the Global Village is an ecumenical look at how religion, like human society itself, continues to evolve. Religious and non-religious readers both will find much of interest within this book.

Harnessing Heavenly Power

Space Solar Power: The First International Assessment of Space Solar Power: Opportunities, Issues and Potential Pathways Forward edited by John C. Mankins and Nobuyuki Kaya. International Academy of Astronautics. 2011. 248 pages. PDF available for download from www.iaaweb.org (in Published Studies and Position Papers).

The world’s array of alternative-energy systems is great, but it will not suffice to feed the enormous new energy demands that humanity will face in coming decades, forecasts the UN-chartered nongovernmental organization International Academy of Astronautics. This report’s authors see a better alternative awaiting us in “space solar power”: Earth-orbiting satellites and Moon-based robot stations that would gather the Sun’s heat and light energy and beam it down to Earth.

Individual authors have discussed space solar power since the 1960s. But this report, which brings together researchers from Canada, the United States, and Europe, is the first-ever comprehensive international assessment of the concept.

The authors explain, with richly colored photographs, diagrams, and charts, how these space-based systems would work, and why they could generate far more power than solar-energy generators on Earth. Solar satellites are feasible, they state, and much of the necessary technology already exists. If private companies and governments both commit to further invest in them and test them, we could deploy them in just another 20 years.

The opportunities are vast, the authors argue. Not only could space-based solar arrays churn out huge new reserves of affordable electricity for life on Earth, but they could also power human outposts on the Moon and Mars, new Earth-to-space transportation services, and whole new in-space industries of robots that assemble and maintain space satellites and space stations directly in low-Earth orbit. The solar-power satellites might also provide the boost needed to fly human crews to the ends of the solar system.

The authors make a compelling case that space-based solar power could be just what humanity needs to break free of fossil fuels and life on Earth’s surface at the same time. Space Solar Power is an authoritative look at a radical solution to the world’s energy problems.

As Tweeted: 3-D Printing, Lunar Manufacturing, and LEGO Dreams

What havoc might amateur garage manufacturers wreak? And what great new gadgets might consumers come up with?

Twitter is an excellent medium for thinking “aloud.” One day, we were wondering about what the future might really look like once people start manufacturing their own stuff via 3-D printers—and making the inevitable mistakes along the way.

@WorldFutureSoc: What’s the first thing you would make with a 3-D printer? (My guess: a mistake. So what happens to the toss-outs?)

@zapgadget (Paul Bristow): That’s why you should use PLA [polylactic acid —Ed.] for your first #3d #printer tries. You can throw it in the compost heap!

@thechaz (Chaz Carlson): New cell phone. Mistakes are put back into the replicator for recycling. Er... guess I’m getting ahead of myself.

@WorldFutureSoc: Sounds like 3-D printing as a consumer manufacturing technology needs to include resource recovery/reuse.

@frabuck (Francis Rabuck): Even IF you do 3D printing right, much material is wasted and NOT recyclable. Ask vendors about material reuse.

@zapgadget: There’s also a project to recycle 3D printed objects in ABS [acrylonitrile butadiene styrene —Ed.]. Take a look at Filabot www.kickstarter.com/projects/rocknail/filabot-plastic-filament-maker

@WorldFutureSoc: Cool! Would love to see innovations like this entered in our Futurists:BetaLaunch 2012 competition www.wfs.org/content/worldfuture-2012/futurists-betalaunch-2012 #wf12

@WorldFutureSoc: #Futurist question of the day: What’s the first thing you’d make with a #3D #printer? (I’ve got “a hot mess” covered...)

@finalcontext (Jamie Stanton): A “Venus of Willendorf” seems appropriate.

@WorldFutureSoc: Alrighty: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf

@brianlmerritt (Brian L. Merritt): with my #3D #printer I would make a portable lapstation for an iPad and wireless keyboard. No one makes a decent one!

@ThFuturePerfect (Philippa Aldrich): Trabasack? bit.ly/w3Vlnf [www.thefutureperfectcompany.com/ also www.trabasack.co.uk/ —Ed.]

@thechaz: Just let me know when 3D printers can create some nanobots that can replicate and produce biomechanical limbs.

@zapgadget: Everyone does the same thing - spare parts for their #3D #printer & often extra parts for a friend who’s broken his #reprap

@WorldFutureSoc: Great answers for “What’s the first thing you’ll make w #3D #printer?” Anything that hasn’t been invented yet?

@Geofutures (Josh Calder): 1st thing w/ a 3D printer? A missing part for one of my son’s toys.

@zapgadget: The other classic is Impossible lego bricks that you can’t buy #3d #printer #lego

@WorldFutureSoc: And a time machine so I can go back and finish my childhood fantasy LEGO castle!

@zapgadget: You are the WFS. Should be easy :-)

@futurecheck (Marcel Bullinga): I would 1st make my own energy source, then a present for my lover

@ianbremmer (Ian Bremmer): Meta-LEGO #allrightsreserved

@WorldFutureSoc: There should be #3D #printers on the Moon so all we’d have to send to the lunar manufacturers is the raw chemicals, not “stuff.”

@ryonck (Richard Yonck): Moon regolith is oxygen, silicon, iron, calcium, aluminum, magnesium etc. Shapeways now uses Aluminide in #3D #printer

@thechaz: Just make those printers able to convert moon rock, cosmic/solar radiation into useable materials.

@sooz89 (Susannah Lindsey): still enthralled by @WorldFutureSoc ...

@WorldFutureSoc: Thanks!! =D

Follow the World Future Society (@WorldFutureSoc) and THE FUTURIST magazine (@TheYear2030) on Twitter at twitter.com.

Tomorrow in Brief

Cars That Generate Power

Future car buyers may be quizzing the dealer not on how much fuel a vehicle consumes, but rather on how much energy it produces.

A scheme envisioned at the Technology University of Delft proposes the development of electricity plants in parking garages and other facilities. Not only could electric vehicles be easily charged there, but also their fuel cells would be used to convert biogas or hydrogen into more electricity when the cars are parked. As a bonus, car owners would be paid for the electricity that their vehicles produce.

Another project at the university is the Energy Wall, a motorway whose walls generate energy for roadside lighting and serve as a support for a people mover on top.

Source: Delft University of Technology, www.tudelft.nl.

Childhood Cancer Survivors’ Children

Aggressive treatment for cancer during childhood may not put the survivors’ future offspring at a greater risk of birth defects than the children of survivors who did not receive such treatment.

Radiotherapy and chemotherapy with alkylating agents may damage DNA, but it now appears that the damage may not be passed along to offspring, according to a large retrospective Childhood Cancer Survivor Study led by Lisa Signorello of Vanderbilt University.

“We hope this study will become part of the arsenal of information used by the physicians of childhood cancer survivors if reproductive worries arise,” says Signorello.

Source: Vanderbilt University Medical Center, www.mc.vanderbilt.edu. The study was published in the December 12, 2012, issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Open-Source Robot Blueprints

Robot development may accelerate, thanks to a new open-source hardware-sharing system launched by Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.

The Robotic Open Platform allows participants to share their designs so that other developers can adapt or improve on them. For example, Eindhoven’s AMIGO caregiving robot would cost €300,000 to €400,000 to purchase, but because the designs are being made available, future researchers could build AMIGO’s successor for just €10,000.

Source: Eindhoven University of Technology, www.tue.nl.

Big Tobacco’s Future: Up in Smoke?

China accounts for 40% of the world’s production and consumption of cigarettes, but it may become the first country to bar their sale, predicts Stanford University historian Robert Proctor.

The cigarette industry will not die easily, as it is incredibly profitable—not just for the manufacturers, but also for governments relying on revenue from tobacco taxes, Proctor observes in his book, Golden Holocaust.

But smoking is also incredibly costly to societies, especially in terms of lost productivity. Proctor bets that China will be among the first to recognize these costs and to do something about it.

Source: Stanford University, www.stanford.edu.

WordBuzz: Mistweetment

The term mistweetment, referring to an ill-conceived, misdirected, erroneously attributed, or simply sloppy tweet (with comical or catastrophic impacts), is almost as old as Twitter itself.

In 2009, a minister in India botched his report on a meeting with an Australian minister, perhaps by leaving out the word no when suggesting that he left his guest “with doubt” about his stance on the issue under discussion.

Other opportunities for mistweetment come when groups inadvertently borrow other groups’ hashtags for their discussions, as happened recently when a group of futurists and a group of food service industry professionals were both chatting about #fsed (futures studies education and food service equipment distribution, respectively).

Source: Tharoor story reported by the Lowy Institute for International Policy, www.lowyinterpreter.org.

Follow THE FUTURIST magazine, @TheYear2030, and the World Future Society, @WorldFutureSoc.

Future Scope

Religious Awakening in China

Religious practices and spirituality among the Chinese may get a boost, thanks to forthcoming mandatory changes in China’s central government when the 18th Congress of the Communist Party meets later in 2012.

Bans on certain religions and strict regulations of those that are allowed (Buddhism, Catholicism, Taoism, Islam, and Protestantism) have resulted in the creation of black and gray “markets” to fill spiritual needs illegally, such as practicing qigong (breathing techniques and exercises) or holding Sunday school classes for Christian children. An estimated 85% of Chinese citizens engage in supernatural beliefs or practices.

As different local officials enforce the laws differently, spiritual life in China has become more ambiguous, according to Purdue University sociologist Fenggang Yang. “Ironically, the more restrictive and suppressive the country’s religious regulations, the larger the gray market grows,” he notes.

China may be viewed as a bellwether for shifts in other countries where Communism has historically encouraged atheism and suppressed religion, says Yang. Moreover, such shifts are likely to have long-term effects. “This is not really merely about China anymore, because what China becomes will affect the world in many spheres, such as economy, politics, and culture,” he concludes.

Source: Purdue University, www.purdue.edu. Fenggang Yang, professor of sociology, is author of Religion in China: Survival and Revival Under Communist Rule (Oxford University Press, 2011).

The Road Ahead for Gasoline-Free Cars

In a few years, one out of every two cars on the road could be a hybrid or electric.

By Jim Motavalli

Until recently, most people experienced clean-energy cars at auto shows, in the pages of magazines, or as image advertising—they weren’t tangible. All that’s changed now: You can actually see electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles on the street, picking up groceries with early adopters at the wheel, taking the kids to Little League, and—lo and behold—even charging up at public stations.

The basic types of clean-energy cars are as follows:

• Battery electrics. These cars have electric motors and battery packs, and no other means of propulsion. The range is generally 100 miles, but that’s not likely to remain the standard for long. The Tesla Roadster can deliver 245 miles on a charge.
• Plug-in hybrids. The plug-in hybrid car acts like an electric car for the first 15 to 50 miles, but then can switch to an on-board internal-combustion engine that, in many cases, acts as a generator instead of directly driving the wheels. The Chevrolet Volt is an example of the plug-in hybrid, as is the Fisker Karma.
• Hybrids. Hybrids either use their electric motors as assists for the gas engine, or allow short bursts of electric-only driving. The Toyota Prius and Ford Fusion hybrids are examples of this car type.
• Hydrogen fuel-cell cars. The fuel cell, which produces electricity from hydrogen, replaces the battery pack. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe; we’ll never run out of it. The main challenge is not having enough hydrogen filling stations.

Nearly every major auto maker is planning new clean-energy models. Ford, for instance, intends to roll out five new models in 2012. Roland Berger Strategy Consultants forecasts that 10% of new cars globally will be electric by 2025, and the larger category that includes hybrids and plug-in hybrids will have grabbed 40% of the market by then. That would mean that half of new cars heading into showrooms around the world would be at least partly electric, but it’s a pretty optimistic forecast—what ultimately rolls out depends to a great extent on what happens with gas prices.

Hydrogen fuel-cell cars should be ready for mass use in just a few more years. In addition, four car companies—Daimler, Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai—plan to roll out tens of thousands of hydrogen-powered cars by 2015.

The near-term challenge is the lack of a hydrogen infrastructure. There are currently fewer than a hundred hydrogen stations in all of the United States, and only a handful are public. Some entrepreneurs are attempting to change that. Tom Sullivan, the founder of Lumber Liquidators, has just started SunHydro, a private chain of hydrogen fueling stations along the U.S. east coast.

As it stands, though, the upcoming hydrogen-powered cars may end up being sold in Europe, South Korea, or Japan, where public commitments on hydrogen infrastructure are much stronger than in the United States. The U.S. government has had an on-again, off-again relationship with hydrogen-powered cars.

That’s not to say that American consumers don’t like electric cars. Demand is higher in the United States than anywhere else. But demand in China could surpass U.S. demand very quickly. China will likely become the world’s largest electric-car market: It has put in place some of the world’s best incentives for electric cars, and quite a few manufacturers are lining up to sell them to Chinese buyers.

Demographic trends might also help the electric car market, as more people move to cities. Electrics will help fill the need for vehicles that can take people short distances at low speeds due to traffic and pedestrians. The obstacle for electric vehicles as “city cars” is the problem of charging them. In cities like New York, we’re not likely to see on-street parking and charging units for electric vehicles.

What we will probably see are EV charging units in garages and buildings, but the rules and protocols have yet to be developed. Suppose you own a condo, and you want to install a charging station on the condo grounds. You have to bring in the condo association on it, and it’s going to slow things down. There need to be guidelines for apartment dwellers to charge electrics. Right now, that doesn’t exist.

But smart meters do. A smart meter, installed on the side of your house, enables you, on your computer at work, to dial up software that shows you exactly how much juice each of your appliances is using, and allows you to shut some of them down remotely during peak power demand times.

Smart meters are a huge advance and are fortunately going mainstream at the same time that electric cars are hitting the road. The two can work together closely. When it’s plugged in, your electric car is just another household load—and a pretty big one, sometimes doubling electricity consumption. If we get really smart about this, we can create home networks that empower consumers to manage and reduce their power needs—and save money in the process. The smart home is finally coming to America, and it’s making huge strides in Japan.

I visited Panasonic’s Eco Ideas House in downtown Tokyo, and there was a plug-in hybrid Toyota Prius in the driveway. As I learned, the car and the house form a singularly green home energy management system. The house combines a five-kilowatt solar panel on the roof and a one-kilowatt hydrogen fuel cell in the backyard to generate electricity, and a stationary five-kilowatt lithium-ion battery to store it. Holistic systems that use sophisticated power management electronics like this are all the rage in Japan, thanks to a combination of a growing green consciousness, corporate commitment, and financial support from the government.

In Japan, Panasonic now sells home fuel cells that can supply 60% of a family’s power needs. General Electric, in cooperation with a company called Plug Power, had planned to sell its own home fuel cells to Americans in the early 2000s. But without federal subsidies, the economics weren’t there—the fuel cell would have produced electricity at a cost higher than that of grid power.

There are some good reasons to be optimistic for electric cars’ future. At first, a fairly small percentage of people will buy electric and plug-in hybrid cars solely because they expect to save money on them. Most will be motivated by environmental concerns, but oil prices could certainly affect the popularity of electrics.

It is true that the auto makers face major challenges to transitioning to electricity. But they are taking a chance with these new clean-energy cars. The revival of the electric car is now well under way, pushed forward by technological leaps, the imperatives of global warming, and the sobering prospect of peak oil. Electric cars are going to jumpstart our lives and do good things for the planet, too.

Jim Motavalli is an environmental writer and the author of High Voltage: The Fast Track to Plug In the Auto Industry (Rodale, 2011). Web site http://jimmotavalli.com

A Competition for Lunar Enterprise

A serial entrepreneur is aiming for the final frontier.

NASA’s original Apollo program, which put a human presence on the Moon, cost the U.S. government $145 billion in today’s dollars and took nine years to accomplish. Entrepreneur Naveen Jain is hoping to get back to the Moon at a cost of no more than $70 million and to do so within a three-year time frame.

Jain is co-founder, with Bob Richards, of Moon Express, a Silicon Valley–based start-up. It’s one of 26 teams competing for the Google Lunar X Prize, which will award $20 million to the privately funded team that places on the Moon, before 2015, a robot that is capable of exploration (moving at least 500 meters) and broadcasting video back to Earth. (The awardable amount changes if a government lands a robot on the Moon first.)

Other teams competing for the prize include Odyssey Moon, founded by Rick Sanford, Cisco’s former chief operating officer for Internet routing in space, and Next Giant Leap, led by Jeffrey Alan Hoffman, a former astronaut and current faculty member at MIT.

In an interview with THE FUTURIST, Jain said he was undaunted by the competition: “We’ve built a great team, one of the best in the world to make this happen. Bob Richards was also part of the Mars Mission when I was in Canada. [We have] Tom Gardner, the mission manager for the Mars Mission. We have the entire Mars Rover team. When their NASA funding was cut, we hired the whole team.”

Jain’s previous ventures in Internet search and e-commerce, Infospace* and Intelius, made him a billionaire and put him on the Forbes 400 list during last decade. Infospace also landed Jain in court on charges of insider trading (he paid $65 million without admitting wrongdoing). Intelius has been the subject of hundreds of complaints to the Better Business Bureau for its practices. Jain expects his new company to attract less controversy and return a profit in the tens of billions of dollars through the harvesting of rare minerals like platinum on the Moon’s surface.

He admits that, before he can begin harvesting minerals from the Moon, he has to find them. Spectrographically and topographically, the Moon has been more closely studied than any other body in space, says Jain. “But no one has ever said [that] the spectrographic data, the topographical data, suggests the existence of platinum here, or this mineral there. So the Moon has never been explored from the perspective of an entrepreneur.”

The amount of heavy metals like platinum on the Moon’s face is a matter of some dispute among scientists. Jain contends that, since these minerals are present in asteroids and since asteroids strike the Moon regularly (and since the asteroids don’t burn up prior to impact as they commonly do when encountering Earth’s atmosphere), the Moon should hold an abundance of valuable rock, especially near craters, which signify asteroid impacts. Other commercial applications for the Earth’s nearest neighbor include broadcasting messages and images, even wedding proposals.

“Once you build the platform, the only limit to the possibilities is the human imagination,” says Jain.

The company’s public investors include the Founders Fund (started by PayPal’s Peter Thiel) and Netopia founder Reese Jones, who likens the Moon Express effort to the building of the first transcontinental railroad and the development of the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure—ventures that once seemed overly ambitious to many, but that went on to “change our world and humanity in myriad beneficial ways. Moon Express has assembled a world class team and the technologies most likely to turn this concept into viable commercial reality.” Jain claims: “We’re the only company with a real business model. When you tell people, ‘You can be part of a private enterprise aimed at Moon exploration,’ people get very excited. Some are skeptical that a private company can do it, so we’re trying to show them it can be done.”—Patrick Tucker

Source: Naveen Jain (interview). For further reading, see Moonrush: Improving Life on Earth with the Moon’s Resources by Dennis Wingo (Apogee Books, 2004).

Note: Venture capitalist and Moon Express founder Naveen Jain will be appearing along with angel investor Reese Jones at WorldFuture 2012: Dream. Design. Develop. Deliver.

Partnership for a Freer World

An alliance of established democracies helps newly emerging democracies take wing.

Lithuania and Mongolia successfully transitioned from authoritarian rule to democracy in the twentieth century, and they are working to help other developing nations do the same in the twenty-first. As leading members of the governing council of the Community of Democracies (CD), an association of nations committed to advancing global democracy, the two countries have been receiving acclaim for bringing coalitions of governments and nongovernmental organizations together to assist democracy movements and fledgling democratic governments everywhere.

“If you had to invent the perfect time for countries as enthusiastic and committed as Lithuania and Mongolia to assume the chairmanship of the Community of Democracies, you would have chosen this two-year period of time: the time of the Arab Spring and so much change and transition around the world,” said Samantha Power, U.S. special assistant to the president and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights. She was speaking at a forum in November 2011 at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C.

The Community of Democracies formed in 2000 in Warsaw with 106 signatory member nations. It suffered, however, from lack of clarity about what membership entailed and how the members were to work together to promote democracy, Power observed.

“The CD was slow to show real-world results, and as a result, attention, the level of participation from governments, the curiosity of those who are not actively part of the Community of Democracies about getting into the Community—all that faded pretty substantially,” she said.

Things took a huge turn for the better, however, after the chairmanship, which changes hands from one country to another every two years, passed to Lithuania in 2009. According to Evaldas Ignatavicius, vice minister of foreign affairs for Lithuania, his republic committed the CD like never before to assisting new democracies everywhere. It also prioritized bringing more governments into the organization and engaging more civil society organizations. Its efforts bore fruit over the next few years as Nigeria, Sweden, Costa Rica, and other new nations joined.

“The Community for Democracies is expanding. It’s no more a club of Western democracies. [It’s] becoming [an] ownership of different regions worldwide, and it’s really a good feeling,” he said.

Lithuania also oversaw the launch in June 2011 of the Global Partnership Challenge, a “race to the top” initiative that invites national governments to submit proposals detailing reforms that they have undertaken and areas in which they intend to enact reforms in the future. The CD will select two applicants each year and work directly with them to help them reach their desired reform goals.

The winners for 2011 were Moldova and Tunisia. Having selected them, the CD then appointed task forces, one to work directly with each country to develop action plans for it on the areas of needed reform that the country identified. For example, Moldova said that it was in serious need of judicial reform, since average citizens placed little trust in judges. So the task force began working with Moldova on programs to enforce ethics within the judicial system.

Mongolia gained the chairmanship in July 2011 and continued where Lithuania had left off. First, it co-launched with South Korea the Asian Pacific Partnership Initiative for Democracies, an alliance of all democracies in Asia. Mongolia and the Asian Pacific Partnership will organize a mission to Myanmar in 2012 to encourage its government to be more open.

Suren Badral, ambassador-at-large of Mongolia, told THE FUTURIST that he looks to Myanmar (also known as Burma) as a promising area of operations because its military-ruled government has been gradually allowing more political freedoms, such as permitting opposition political parties to form. With time and encouragement, he said, Myanmar could eventually progress toward being fully free, with representative governance.

“Myanmar is emerging as a possible target because it started to become more open. We would like to use this as an opportunity to speed up Myanmar’s transformation to democracy,” Badral said.

In 2012, Mongolia will host in its capital city of Ulaanbaatar an international seminar on education. Participants will draw up high-school-level and college-level course materials on democratic ideas and values.

“We need to educate people at a young age about democratic values,” Badral said.

Later in the year, his country will host a larger conference in India, with representatives of governments and the private sector, on how they can all work together to promote democracy. Other initiatives and events will follow until July 2013, when the chair passes to El Salvador.

“Mongolia happens to be at the right place at the right time,” Badral said in his speech. “We have been honored to chair the Community of Democracies when [it] is becoming a more vibrant, more live organization.”—Rick Docksai

Sources: “Is the Community of Democracies Coming of Age?” held November 17, 2011. Note: Event transcript is available from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, carnegieendowment.org.

Presentations and interviews: Samantha Power, White House, www.whitehouse.gov. Evaldas Ignatavicius, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania, www.urm.lt. Suren Badral, Community of Democracies, www.community-democracies.org.

Growing Pains Ahead For China and India

Demographic change will challenge the world’s two most populous countries.

China and India have been flourishing economically over the last decade, but they will have to tackle significant challenges of demography, infrastructure, and standards of living if they want to ensure steady prosperity in decades to follow, according to a RAND Corporation study, “China and India, 2025: A Comparative Assessment.” The report compared the two countries on population growth, economics, science and technology development, and defense, and it assessed where they might trend in each area between now and 2025.

“Each country’s role on the world stage will be affected by the progress that it makes and by the competition and cooperation that develop between them,” the study states.

India’s workforce is enviably young and growing, thanks to steady population increase: With a population growing at twice the rate of China’s, India may eclipse China’s population by 2028, the study predicts. And India’s population will continue to grow after 2050, while China’s population slowly shrinks.

To capitalize on this population growth, however, India must improve its education system and expand career opportunities for women. It must also raise overall living standards and the quality of health care, so that skilled young professionals do not emigrate out.

“Whether India’s demographic advantages will be a dividend or drag on future economic growth will depend on the extent to which productive employment opportunities emerge from an open, competitive, innovative, and entrepreneurial Indian economy,” the report states.

China has the edge technologically, and its workforce is considered to be better educated, according to the report, which forecasts that China’s GDP will continue to exceed India’s through 2025. But China’s elderly population is growing at an ominously faster rate; unlike most industrialized countries, China does not have an extensive social security or retirement pension system in place to help retirees support themselves in their later years. The country could eventually have too many dependent retirees for its working population to support.

This aging trend could also push China’s health-care costs to unsustainably high levels. The country’s per capita health expenditures already doubled between 2000 and 2006. India’s grew by a smaller but still significant 50%. Both nations’ health expenditures are expected to keep growing, but China’s will grow much more.

“China’s projected demographics are creating a challenge for its economic development—a potential econ