WFS-July-August 2001 Forecasts

A magazine of forecasts, trends, and ideas about the future.
July-August 2001, Vol. 35, No. 4

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Online Indexes:
Author Index A-L
Author Index M-Z
Index of News Articles

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Top 10 Forecasts From Outlook 2001 Report

Current Forecasts

Special to Web visitors, here are a few of the editors' favorite forecasts from the July-August 2001 issue of The Futurist:

Universities will become Web-connected universes. "Webcentric" universities will use the Internet to make it easy for all of a campus's constituents to stay connected--faculty, administration, students, alumni, and parents, as well as business and research partners, donors, and the public at large. Those universities that fail to do so won't survive, warns Samuel L. Dunn of Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho. ("The Webcentric University," page 34 of the print edition)
Picture phone's future is now! At last the picture phone may find its niche--on Web-connected cell phones. Tiny digital cameras like those attached to PCs will enable callers to see each other and anything in their environment--good news for shoppers lost in the produce aisle calling home for instructions. (Tomorrow in Brief)
Cubicle-bound workers will get a new (virtual) window on the world. The next Internet, Internet2, will merge virtual reality and teleconferencing to immerse future office workers in multiple connected environments. (World Trends & Forecasts: Technology)
Globalization could make foods less safe. As more food is imported from far-flung local producers, national food-safety standards will become harder to enforce. Growing demand for fresh foods year-round makes refrigeration and other safe-transport issues more of a concern. (World Trends & Forecasts: Demography)
The auto-population boom shows no signs of abating. The U.S. car population grew six times faster than the human population between 1969 and 1995, causing us to pollute the air, pave over more land to build more roads, and spend more time on those roads. Lower-emission fuels do little for us when there are more cars doing the emitting, points out Worldwatch researcher Molly O'Meara Sheehan. ("Choosing the Future of Transportation," page 50 of the print edition)

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