Exploring_Tomorrow

Exploring Tomorrow Keys to Success in a Rapidly Changing World We are very pleased to be able to offer this extraordinary collection of timely and useful articles on a set of highly relevant subjects. And by relevant, I mean of immediate utility to World Future Society members and the general public in their professional, financial, and personal roles and responsiblities, offering strategies, guidelines, and tips of a practical nature. One of our commitments at the Society is to provide value to our larger community, and this set of first-rate articles is just one small part of that effort. Besides offering guidelines for strategic creativity, this collection touches on cutting-edge communications trends, solutions to the growing energy crisis, and professional challenges looming in the workplace. Complex new industries, such as nanotechnology, are also explored and explained. We believe you will find this compilation of practical use and encourage you to share its insights with your colleagues, friends, and family.

Timothy C. Mack President World Future Society

Tomorrow’s Job Titles .....................................................................................page 2 7 Strategies for Generating Ideas ...................................................................page 3 Nanotech Advances in Next 15 Years .............................................................page 8 The Digital Dynamic ........................................................................................page 9 Hydrogen and the New Energy Economy.......................................................page 15 How to Succeed in the Hyper-Human Economy ............................................page 22 Molecular Nanotech ......................................................................................page 28

© 2005 World Future Society • 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, MD 20814, U.S.A. • All rights reserved.

Tomorrow’s Job Titles Our future jobs will define our culture. © PHOTODISC INC.

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abor-market forecasters believe that tomorrow’s new jobs will increasingly be found in the service sector, particularly in work related to health, communications, and computers. But the new jobs will have unfamiliar titles, such as visualization specialists, social network analysts, parenting counselors, and corporate jesters,

who will get paid to tell their leaders the important truths they don’t want to hear.

The services and distribution sectors will easily see the most new jobs, according to the U.S. Department of LaNew job title: “whisperer” to soothe the savage bor’s Bureau of Labor Statiscustomer. tics (BLS). Areas related to personal appearance and physical health, communications, the jobs she identifies involve serand travel will be particularly fertile, vices, about a quarter of which are BLS notes in a recent report, “New related to health care. and Emerging Occupations.”

More than half of us will be workThe BLS report suggests that 25% ing at jobs that don’t exist yet, Popof the industries with new and corn argues, and many that exist emerging occupations are involved now will vanish. She cites business in health, social, and educational ser- analyst Tom Peters’s forecast that vices, while another 15% provide 90% of white-collar jobs will be personal business and recreational either “destroyed or altered beyond services. recognition in 10–15 years.”

Work related to personal appearHealth-service jobs that Popcorn ance and physical conditioning is be- foresees include bioinformationists coming more prominent, BLS re- —scientists who work with the ports. More jobs will be available in abundant genetic information being generated and serve as a bridge exercise instruction, for example.

In the business sector, there is a between the scientist and those decontinuing trend toward jobs that veloping drugs and clinical techhelp companies keep pace with ad- niques. She also predicts the emervances in communications. Webmas- gence of geomicrobiologists, who ters and Web site designers will be in will piece together bits of geology, demand, as will specialists who can environmental science, and microbihelp provide visualizations for ology to study how microorganisms online catalogs and training pro- might help make new medicine or grams. Trend analyst Faith Popcorn clean up pollution.

Popcorn also foresees the growth calls them explanation graphic designers. of experimental therapy experts, In her new book Dictionary of the who would connect patients with Future, Popcorn defines some 50 pos- the right new therapy, and hospitalsible job titles of the future. Most of ists, a type of ombudsman who can 2

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guide the patient through the maze of hospital services.

In business, social network analysts will study the real flow of power through a company, and simplicity experts will simplify and streamline a corporation’s technology, Popcorn says.

On the Internet, she projects the need for cybrarians to monitor the evergrowing Internet, Web gardeners to maintain Web sites, and e-mail counselors to help employees with poor writing skills who are struggling with the “compressed, immediate, and risky nature of e-mail.”

To manage our new jobs, personal career coaches will become increasingly important, as will retirement counselors and “gap year” counselors to help young people handle what Popcorn predicts will become a common period of exploration before college.

Terrorism analysts will gain status, as will cool consultants to help product marketers or city planners determine what might become trendy. And customer-relations departments will employ whisperers who are particularly adept at calming even the most irate customer or client.

“In a society that defines who we are by what we do, what could be more important than understanding what we will be doing next?” Popcorn asks. “Another way to put it: Job descriptions are the subtitles of the culture.”

—Jim Paterson Sources: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2 Massachusetts Avenue, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20212. Web site www.bls.gov.

Dictionary of the Future by Faith Popcorn and Adam Hanft. Hyperion. 2001. 414 pages.

Available from the Futurist Bookstore for $24.95 ($22.95 for Society members), cat. no.

B-2401.

7 STRATEGIES FOR GENERATING IDEAS Ideas are the lifeblood of all organizations, whether the mission is to invent a breakthrough product or solve a perplexing problem.

A leading innovation futurist describes seven ways that vanguard organizations are reinventing their idea factories.

By Robert B. Tucker

H

ow do organizations come up with new ideas? And how do they use those ideas to create successful new products, services, businesses, and solutions?

To answer these questions, a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York spent time observing radical innovation projects such as IBM’s silicongermanium devices, GE’s digital X-ray, GM’s hybrid vehicles, and DuPont’s biodegradable plastics.

Their key finding? Most of the ideas behind these projects came from “happy accidents” rather than some ongoing process to generate ideas.

In more than a few cases, individuals or small groups were simply “freelancing,” working on ideas on their own initiative rather than being directed by some “new venture” board or other idea-management system.

“Almost without exception, these idea-generation methods have been applied sporadically, rather than systematically, continuously, and strategically,” the Rensselaer researchers concluded. “In no case [we know of] has an ongoing process been set up that regularly requests such ideas.

What we observed were one-time acts, or new systems put in place whose staying power remains unproven.”

It is little wonder that so many good ideas never even come to the attention of management. Or that so

many die short of development— and miles from commercial success.

In most companies today, the “practice” of innovation can be likened to the mating of pandas: infrequent, clumsy, and often ineffective. Its practice is largely unchanged from 20 years ago. While the world has changed drastically and organizations pride themselves for having a process for everything, the process of innovation remains ad hoc, unsystematic, piecemeal, seat of the pants, and, as the Rensselaer researchers confirmed, heavily dependent on luck.

Creative, game-changing ideas will always have an element of serendipity to them and will never be producible on demand. But today’s present economic climate of stalled growth and fewer ideas (growth in the number of patent requests have stagnated in recent years) has caused a small but growing group of organizations to rethink how ideas happen and to examine what they can do to implement better innovation processes.

Fortifying the Idea Factory Three-fourths of companies are consistently disappointed in their innovation results, according to global surveys of executives. But a minority of organizations—the innovation vanguard—recognize the need for change if their results are to improve.

Put simply, if good ideas don’t get hatched, they won’t get launched.

The “vanguard organizations,” 23 of which we studied for a recently released book, create stronger idea factories by cultivating the conditions whereby “happy accidents” are more likely to occur. The vanguards are, in essence, reinventing inventiveness.

They are paying much more attention to the “fuzzy front end” of innovation where possibilities first come to light. And they are managing these notions in vastly different ways so that large quantities of ideas eventually fill the pipeline and emerge as tangible results.

In reviewing the unconventional methods of these vanguard organizations, we found that, while innovation and breakthroughs can never be commanded from the top, leaders can do much to increase throughput of significant ideas. And indeed they must. We see these leading-edge organizations using seven key strategies for fortifying the idea factory: 1. Invite everyone in the quest for new ideas.

2. Involve customers in the process of generating ideas.

3. Involve customers in new ways.

4. Focus on the needs that customers don’t express.

5. Seek ideas from new customer groups.

6. Involve suppliers in product innovation.

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7. Benchmark idea-creation methods.

Clearly the customer plays an important role in these strategies for strengthening the organizational idea factory. It only makes sense.

The goal is to create ideas—the building blocks of new products, services, processes, and strategies—the users of which are customers.

Ideation Strategy 1: Invite Everyone in the Quest for Ideas While suggestion boxes have been around for over a hundred years, innovation-vanguard organizations are wiring their suggestion boxes so that they become a powerful, energizing force for corporate creativity.

Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), a global pharmaceutical firm, does not restrict its definition of innovation to activities related to finding the next breakthrough drug. Rather, it sees the need for new ideas in much broader terms and involves employees constantly in the quest. BMS has developed a series of ideation campaigns for internal customers under the leadership of “idea searcher” Marsha MacArthur and her boss Mark Wright, vice president of U.S. market research and business intelligence.

When the patent was about to expire on Glucophage, an oral medication for type 2 diabetes, MacArthur

helped coordinate a campaign to solicit ideas on how to get more people to use the drug in the meantime.

Rather than classifying this as a marketing problem and letting the people in that functional area work on it, the ideation campaign was a sort of call for ideas to all corners.

The campaign was publicized by employees walking around wearing sandwich boards declaring, “We’re waging war on diabetes and we need your help!” Town Hall meetings were set up for the team to describe the problem in greater detail: How do we drive patients to their doctors’ offices? How do we get patients to switch from the medications they’re currently using?

Tip lines were then set up on BMS’s intranet site so employees could submit their ideas. One idea was to run a national campaign declaring war on diabetes. Another, to create a museum for diabetics.

“I was really proud of everybody and the ideas that were submitted,” says MacArthur. “They weren’t obvious ones like, ‘talk to doctors.’ We already do that. They were quite well thought out.”

That single ideation campaign generated 4,000 inquiries from 429 e m p l o y e e s a l l ove r t h e w o r l d .

In a t ypical year, idea searcher MacArthur coordinates 20 to 30 such campaigns, both at the division level and enterprise-wide.

PR NEWSWIRE

Lesson: Organizations can enlarge their pool of ideas by including more employees in the process of new product and service ideation and in solving vexing organizational problems. Start by encouraging them to listen to customers. Don’t allow managers, technical specialists, or purchasing, finance, or human resource professionals to participate in new product/service/market development decisions unless they spend at least 20% of their time with current (or future) customers and suppliers.

Ideation Strategy 2: Involve Customers in Your Process New products are most often initiated by ideas from customers, rather than from in-house brainstorming sessions or developed internally by research and development, according to a study by business researchers Robert G. Cooper and Elko J. Kleinschmidt of McMaster University in Ontario.

If you immediately think “focus groups” when the subject of involving customers comes up, better think again. Vanguard firms are going well beyond such techniques as they seek more powerful insights and ideas.

To maintain its market positioning as the “ultimate driving machine,” Munich-based BMW must constantly seek new technologies and design features that keep it slightly ahead of the pack. To accomplish this objective, BMW tossed conventional wisdom to the roadside and created what it calls a Virtual Innovation Agency (VIA) to listen to customers directly. Car buffs worldwide can access the VIA Web site and join online discussions to share their ideas with other enthusiasts around the world —and with the BMW Group.

The VIA submission process allows anyone with Internet access to submit ideas—and the ideas are protected. If the idea has potential, it’s routed to the appropriate working

PT Cruiser was redesigned after DaimlerChrysler designers heard customers’ desires for a vehicle that looked more protective and less like a toy.

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BRITISH AIRWAYS / FEATURE PHOTO SERVICE

group at BMW for follow-up. Within the first week after VIA was launched, 4,000 ideas had been received.

Lesson: The traditional focus group needs more focus. Form advisory boards of key customers to serve as sounding boards for ideas. Identify customers who tend to buy the latest versions of your products. These “lead adopters” can provide you with insights about where the market may be headed and how your organization can best position itself.

Ideation Strategy 3: Involve Customers in New Ways Organizations evolve and embrace new ways of doing things at different rates. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ways they listen to customers. For instance, customer surveys may be old hat to retailers but they blow the lids off homebuilders.

KB Home, a market-leading homebuilder based in Los Angeles, began surveying customers in the late 1990s; in a very short time it gained insights on new ways of doing business. In Denver, KB Home built houses with fireplaces and basements, assuming that’s what everyone wanted. But some buyers weren’t biting. CEO Bruce Karatz eavesdropped on a sales pitch to prospective buyers who wanted to save money. The couple said they didn’t need a basement, but the salesman kept pushing them to accept it as everyone else had.

Karatz decided then and there to survey customers. Their answers shattered KB Home’s preconceived notions about what homebuyers wanted. In Denver, people were more than willing to do without basements when omitting them cut the price by as much as 20%. In Phoenix, where covered porches were thought mandatory, fewer than half of the buyers said they cared about them.

By polling for preferences, KB Home opened up its business to budget-minded buyers. But it also discovered other, more-desirable amenities that customers were willing to pay for: coffee bars in the master bedroom, built-in home offices,

Beds on board British Airways give first-class and business-class passengers a restful ride. The beds were developed following extensive customer research and sleep studies with ergonomic experts.

and higher-quality windows, for example. This “amenity customization” proved popular for buyers— and traumatic for competitors still locked in to the one-size-fits-all housing approach.

DaimlerChrysler used a more experiential approach to try to divine what fickle car buyers wanted next, turning to anthropology and ethnography for a process known as “archetype research.” The development team created a prototype model of a vehicle mixing retro and futuristic design elements. But instead of then testing the prototype with traditional focus groups, such as young men ages 18 to 24, they chose people that represented the entire national culture and studied their emotional responses to the prototype.

The designers realized that participants were looking for protection from “the jungle out there.” The retro/futuristic prototype was too playful, too toylike; they seemed to be saying, “Give me a big thing like a tank.” The revised design: the PT Cruiser, which was an instant success when it was introduced in North America.

Lesson: Look outside your own field or industry for ideas on how to

get customer input. Automakers, retailers, and consumer electronics manufacturers, for instance, are on the leading edge of customer surveying and are often considered the early adopters of ideational techniques.

Ideation Strategy 4: Focus on the Unarticulated Needs of Customers Another reason traditional focus groups are inadequate idea generators is that they provide feedback only on existing ideas. How do you get feedback on ideas that don’t exist?

One approach growing in popularity is to probe the unarticulated needs of customers, asking them to consider hypothetical products and prototypes to see how they would respond.

Consider the microwave oven.

Asked why they like it, most people would say it’s because it heats food up faster than conventional ovens.

Asked how they actually use it, most people might say “to heat up my coffee” or “to pop popcorn.” What they don’t say—their unarticulated feelings—is that when they try to use their microwave to make a “real meal,” such as a roast or a steak, Exploring Tomorrow

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GENERAL ELECTRIC COMPANY

the results are ugly, gray, and unappetizing.

GE probed just such unarticulated needs and came up with Advantium, a speed cooker for roasts, steaks, and other items. A white hot halogen bulb browns the outside part of the meat while microwaves cook the inside. The result: homecooked meals that are fast and good.

Another great innovation vanguard is Callaway Golf, creator of the Big Bertha. Callaway’s innovators went out to country clubs and public courses and observed how golfers approached the game, quizzing them on how they felt about their skills.

The observers discovered that many golfers felt frustrated and intimidated by the game. The unarticulated need was simply to succeed at something they loved doing.

Callaway’s breakthrough Big Bertha club features a large and forgiving “sweet spot” and a longer shaft, making it easier for golfers to hit the ball—and to hit it farther. As a result, new players took up the sport—and old players traded in their drivers for Big Berthas. By focusing on customers’ unarticulated needs, Callaway’s innovators created a blockbuster.

Lesson: Learn from customers by observing what they are not doing, listening to what they are not saying.

Recognize the sources of their frustration and find potential ways of eliminating it.

General Electric’s Profile Advantium oven offers speedy cooking for roasts and other meals that microwave ovens often fail to prepare to users’ satisfaction.

Ideation Strategy 5: Seek Ideas from New Customer Groups

Most organizations should have a good idea of who their customers are. But if you expand your definition of customer, you can also expand your ability to generate winning ideas.

The medical products division of Holland-based Philips Electronics had assumed its only customers were doctors in hospitals, since they were the ones making decisions about medical supplies.

But Philips managers looked more deeply at changes in the healthcare industry and saw that more services were Big Bertha golf clubs being provided in nonput more power into drives. The traditional environcompany’s innovators observed that many ments, such as in outpaamateur players were frustrated by their tient clinics, in homes, inability to succeed at the game. The Big and even on the street Bertha has a large “sweet spot,” helping for homeless people. amateurs to connect and drive a ball farther.

By asking themselves what these customers in CALLAWAY GOLF COMPANY non-hospital environ6

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ments might need, Philips came up with such products as a stethoscope with improved acoustics to filter out voices, traffic, and other background noise, making it easier for caregivers in chaotic settings to hear heart murmurs or breathing problems.

Lesson: Look at your customers’ customers and your competitors’ customers. Instead of looking at only the present, look also at the past (former customers) and the future (anyone you haven’t done business with yet). Ask how you might meet those customers’ needs.

Ideation Strategy 6: Involve Suppliers in Product Ideation Suppliers can be key partners in the idea-creation process, but many organizations are reluctant to share information with suppliers (who, after all, might be partners with the competition as well). Other obstacles include cultural differences, lack of cooperation, lack of resources, and lack of vision—an inability to conceptualize new opportunities.

The chief global purchaser for a leading consumer products company used to visit suppliers and try

to solicit ideas by saying, “If you have any new ideas or technologies you think we’d be interested in, be sure to let us know.” Result: zero new ideas.

Now, he brings his problems to his suppliers: “What I need to know, for example, is whether you might have an adhesive that would work well on elderly skin, sensitive skin, bruised skin, diseased skin, and five other kinds of skin that we’ve identified.” This approach encouraged suppliers to contribute to the company’s idea-creation process, the manager reported. “Even one of our notoriously noncreative suppliers developed two proprietary materials for the company in the last 12 months. It’s unbelievable how excited some of our suppliers get when we ask them to be creative on our behalf.” And the seemingly routine procurement process added value to other departments in the organization, from R&D to marketing.

Lesson: Just as you look to your customers for new ideas (such as by detecting their unarticulated needs), think of your organization as your suppliers’ customer. You, too, have unarticulated needs. Try articulating them and get your suppliers’ ideagenerating capacity working in concert with yours.

Ideation Strategy 7: Benchmark Ideation Methods Innovation-vanguard organizations actively manage the ideation process by examining its effectiveness and questioning how the ideasto-results process might be improved. Ideation is not something that should be left to chance.

Ideation specialists can be called on to teach new techniques, shake things up, and inject maverick thinking into the process. One leadingedge ideation specialist is Doug Hall, a former product manager at Procter & Gamble who runs idea sessions at Eureka! Ranch outside Cincinnati, Ohio, for companies like Celestial Seasonings.

Hall’s replicable, quantifiable process for inventing breakthrough ideas involves a combination of play, “sensory overload,” and analytical rigor. The goal is to generate as many new product ideas as possible: No idea is too radical, he tells his groups. “Breakthroughs are going to contradict history, so you have to break rules,” he says. Eureka! Ranch sessions promise clients 30 commercially viable ideas in three days.

Lesson: Organizations that rely on innovation need to seriously examine the climate in which ideation BUSINESS WIRE PHOTO

Below: Vlasic product development director Frank Meczkowski inspects his invention: pickle slices big enough to cover an entire hamburger. Innovative companies often look to secondary or tertiary customers, such as restaurants’ customers, to glean ideas for new product innovation.

VLASIC / FEATURE PHOTO SERVICE

Above: A Pioneer Electronics voicerecognition system is taken for a test drive. The system was developed in response to a study suggesting that other in-car navigation and telematics systems may pose a hazard by distracting drivers.

takes place and put someone in charge of making the process better, more productive, and more innovative. Innovation-adept firms invest in ideation sessions, read books, attend seminars, and constantly seek to improve their skills.

Monday Morning At the Idea Factory As the world changes at a faster and faster pace, ideas and ways of operating that were adequate only yesterday no longer suffice. Given the torrid pace of change, the rapid commoditization of products, and the convergence of strategies, firms that rely on yesterday’s ideas, yesterday’s products, and yesterday’s assumptions are clearly vulnerable.

Organizations need a constant stream of new ideas if they are to create exciting and prosperous futures. Yet, in most organizations, there is resistance to change the approach to innovation lest it upset the status quo. Most companies today have allowed their methods of encouraging, nurturing, and acting on new ideas to languish while they focused on more immediate concerns, such as taking costs out of existing processes and products and services.

Yet because of the present economic climate, firms are increasingly willing to rethink their most central of processes: how they accomplish innovation.

■ About the Author Robert B. Tucker is the author of Driving Growth through Innovation: How Leading Firms Are Transforming Their Futures (Berrett-Koehler, 2002, $27.95), from which this article is drawn. (Order his book online from www.wfs.org/specials.htm.)

A popular keynote speaker, Tucker is president of The Innovation Resource, a consulting firm based in Santa Barbara, California, that assists companies in implementing innovation for growth. His e-mail is rtucker@innovationresource.com; Web site www.innovationresource.com.

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Nanotech Advances in the Next 15 Years Big changes are coming soon from the inconceivably small.

ARGONNE CENTER FOR NANOSCALE MATERIALS

T

he nanocosm—the realm of the infinitesimal—has not generated much solid technology yet. But science and technology author William Illsey Atkinson predicts staggering nanotech gains in the near future. Look for noninvasive surgeries, bulletproof armor, and painted video displays in as little as 15 years.

“Some very big changes in business and leisure are about to come to us by way of the very small,” he writes in his new book, Nanocosm.

Today’s technological world Scientist Millie Firestone measures nanowill seem positively primitive structured biomolecular materials to be used not in 50 years but in 15. Fifty in developing nanomachines for energy storage years ago, the American busiand conversion. nessman woke up to an analog clock and drank percolated coffee heated on the stove before biomaterials specialist Rizhi Wang, driving to work. Today, he’s likely to Simon Fraser University chemistry wake up to a cell phone’s ring from a professor Neil Branda, and IBM client in another time zone, down physicist Thomas N. Theis. He also coffee timed to be done brewing by studied breakthroughs made by the time he’s showered, and answer pioneers such as K. Eric Drexler. The dozens of e-mails before arriving at list of life-altering future technolothe office. gies Atkinson compiled includes: In 2015, the same businessman won’t be dependent on a clock at all Two to five years from now • Car tires that need air only once and can do work from just about anywhere. He may have been awake a year.

• Self-assembly of small electronic and functioning for more than 30 hours, kept alert and refreshed by parts based on artificial DNA. • New artificial semiconductors time-released medication in his bloodstream. Every square inch of based on proteins.

• Instant, error-proof pregnancy his bedroom will be covered with paint that is actually a rolled-on tests.

• Complete medical diagnostic display screen 100 microns thick.

He can gather data from all over laboratories on a single computer the world, and the people he does chip.

• Go-anywhere concentrators that business with may or may not produce drinkable water from air. be real.

To generate a list of imminent nanotechnologies, Atkinson inter- Five to 10 years • Erasable and rewritable paper viewed such prominent scientists as 8

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for programmable books, magazines, and newspapers.

• Powerful computers you can wear or fold into your wallet.

• Bulletproof armor based on nano-biomimicry of mother-ofpearl.

• Light, efficient ceramic car engines.

• Intelligent hearing aids that duplicate the ear ’s ability to distinguish speakers.

• Drugs and drug-delivery systems that turn AIDS and cancer into lower-level manageable conditions.

• Smart buildings that selfstabilize during earthquakes or bombings.

• Pharmaceuticals tailored to the individual.

10 to 15 years • True artificial intelligence too sophisticated for you to tell if you’re communicating with a human or a machine.

• Paint-on computer and entertainment video displays.

• Guyed structures 20–100 miles high for satellite launches and direct communication.

• Instant and automatic heating, cooling, and materials sorting at zero-energy cost from semi-intelligent devices that sort single molecules.

• Elimination of invasive surgery, since bodies can be monitored and repaired almost totally from within.

—Clifton Coles

Source: Nanocosm: Nanotechnology and the Big Changes Coming from the Inconceivably Small by William Illsey Atkinson. AMACOM, www.amacombooks.org. 2003. 368 pages. $24.95. Available from the Futurist Bookshelf, www.wfs.org/bkshelf.htm.

By M. Rex Miller PHOTOS.COM

The Digital Dynamic How Communications Media Shape Our World As digital media become the dominant means of communication, they will usher in a new paradigm, transforming how we think, behave, relate, and create. A business consultant and communications theorist offers a method for understanding the changes we will face—and for better managing those changes.

Marshall McLuhan famously declared, “The medium is the message.” Watching a war on television is very different from reading about the war in a newspaper.

Television began entering homes less than 60 years ago and swiftly changed almost every aspect of human life—from business and education to politics and sports. Now, digital communications—computers, PDAs, the Internet, Blackberries, etc.—are bringing another communications revolution that is likely to produce an even more radical transformation of our lives.

For clues to what may happen in the years ahead, let’s look at what occurred as a result of two previous revolutions in the dominant medium of communications—the shift from Exploring Tomorrow

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oral communications to printed media in the fifteenth century and the very recent shift from printed media to broadcasting.

The Print and Broadcast Revolutions When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type about 1454 and printed the Bible, he initiated a revolution in communications. Gutenberg’s Bible became a best-seller, and the art of printing spread rapidly.

Within 70 years, Europe had more than 1,000 printers, and books were widely available. Later, newspapers and magazines proliferated.

Printed words, unlike speech, remain fixed in space and motionless over time. This permanence allows readers to return to the same words again and again—a process that perPHOTOS: PHOTOS.COM

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mits thoughts to be examined and tested from many different perspectives.

The dominance of print communication created more-analytic, rational minds that see the world as parts assembled in an orderly whole, like the words in a sentence. So printed literature enabled linear, “rational” thought to largely supplant the “irrational” thought of the oral world. Understanding through analysis began replacing understanding through dialogue. With printing, the West exploded with new discoveries. Books nourished the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, science, and much else.

Print continues to play a critically important role in communications— just as does speaking—but it lost its dominance in about 1950 to television, which now feeds more information into people’s minds than does print.

Television showed the world to itself. Hundreds of millions of people sitting at home could watch stirring events in faraway places and see the world’s leaders more frequently and up closer

than their next-door neighbors. Television broke down barriers that had separated people from each other.

Poor people now could see how rich people actually lived. Whites and blacks could see the realities of racial segregation. The American people could see the horrors of the Vietnam War, and their government could not explain away its failures.

Print had made reason king and stimulated reflective thinking, but now broadcast elevated desire and emotion and encouraged reflexive thinking—the kind of thinking we do while driving a car. Television demands only our attention and reaction, requiring of us no analysis, no historical perspective, and no connection to any other event.

Printed words drive us toward reaching a conclusion or having a perspective, but TV images leave information open to many meanings.

They encourage us to keep our options open and “go with the flow.”

The Print Era lasted for 400 years, coming to an end within the lifetime of people still alive. The Broadcast Era will have a much shorter run.

Already, broadcast’s dominance is yielding to the digital media, and they will likely become the dominant media of communication by about 2010.

The Emergence of A Digital Culture Digital media combine text, graphics, sound, and data in such a way that we experience things in a much more integrated format—multisensory, multimedia, and multinetworked. As a result, boundaries separating disciplines, organizations, structures, and people begin to dissolve. We see convergences of things that once were sharply separated.

The message and the messenger become a holographic reality capable of infinite change and complexity.

In a digital environment, things that might take decades to surface within natural systems can show up within minutes. The threat of a terrorist attack or an outbreak of a deadly disease reverberates globally, systemwide.

As a result of digital media, our basis of knowing and understanding is shifting to an interactive, global, anytime, anywhere, multimedia experience with countless sources to explore and test. This experience is quite different from the intellectually passive experience of watching television or the emotionally distant experience of reading. Consequently, our minds and bodies will undergo a rewiring to support this different sensory experience.

Convergence is perhaps the key characteristic of the coming Digital Era. Convergence is an inherent property of our digital medium of information and communications, because all its many forms (text, image, data, sound) can exist on a single medium, such as a disc, and reproduced through a common digital language of bits and bytes. Digital data makes no distinction between Romeo and Juliet and that snapshot of your child on a pony, between geological calculations and the sound of a Bach cantata. They are all merely sequences of zeros and ones.

In the digital world, the boundaries that once separated physics, poetry, metaphysics, and other disciplines are beginning to blur. Nanotechnology is emerging as a worldtransforming science, bringing together physics, chemistry, and biology. AT&T Broadband, AOL,

About the Millennium Matrix Author M. Rex Miller has spent the last 25 years researching social change through the lens of communications. Three of his passions—communications, religion, and business—powerfully shape his book, Millennium Matrix: Reclaiming the Past, Reframing the Future of the Church.

The book presents the matrix he developed to show how institutions transformed during the successive shifts in the main communications media. Miller focuses primarily on applying the matrix to the Christian church and offers rich insights into how religion has shifted through the centuries and is likely to shift in the future.

The Millennium Matrix (2004, 279 pages, cloth, $23.95) was published by Jossey-Bass and may be ordered through the Futurist Bookshelf, www.wfs.org/bkshelf.htm.

and Time Warner Inc. all began as separate businesses—a phone company, an Internet service provider, and a publisher; each was based on different technologies (telephone wire, cybertechnologies, printing press). But digital technologies provided them all with a common platform, and they merged.

The new digital world is characterized by seven qualities: 1. Interconnection: We used to live in a “domino world,” in which one change logically caused the next.

N o w w e h a ve e n t e re d a c h a i n reaction world of exponential shifts.

Interconnection means that our problems and opportunities are intimately linked. Emerging networks— virtual communities based on common interests—have begun to level our hierarchical organizations.

2. Complexity: Complex systems behave in complex ways. Simply changing a line of computer code can cause ripple effects that move through the systems in many different ways. Faced with such complexity, old analytical tools cannot anticipate the potential consequences of actions. A single word from Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan may cause financial markets to collapse and even governments to fall.

3. Acceleration: Each new technology and concept leads to faster change, so that change compounds and accelerates the pace of human

life. The increasing speed of communications accelerates business transactions, which accelerates production and marketing, which accelerates capital growth, which accelerates investment, which accelerates further the development of new technologies.

4. Intangibility: In the new digital environment, we have little or no connection to the original sources of information and things we buy, use, or believe. We’re moving away from a world we can touch and hold to a world that operates on intangibles like information and reputation.

Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm, offered some tangible services such as accounting, but it also offered intangibles, such as its credibility and reputation. When its client Enron imploded in scandal, Andersen’s reputation went up in smoke.

5. Convergence: Print, graphics, sound, and data can all reside in a digital medium, such as a CD or DVD, in the form of bits and bytes of zeros and ones. In digital media, the past boundaries of knowledge and organizations blur, crumble, and eventually integrate in new ways.

6. Immediacy: Digital media shrink the time allowed between question and answer, request and fulfillment.

We are now expected to respond to the world with a speed similar to that required of fighter pilots in combat. An F-16 pilot must master a different set of rules for decision makcontinued on page 14 Exploring Tomorrow

11

Four Communications Eras The following chart by M. Rex Miller shows how shifts in communications media can affect other aspects of human life.

Oral Era

Print Era

Collective Memory

Bard. Play, recitation, ritual, ceremony, family, elders, and genealogy provide continuity with the past.

Book. History, indexing, encyclopedias, dictionaries, libraries, catalogs, museums, schools, and organizations help preserve the past.

Sense of Identity

Tribal village. Each person is a composite of the community. Interaction is restricted to a small, localized population.

Independent individual. Concepts and principles inform character.

People come in contact with a wider range of individuals through the thoughts and ideas of teachers and through books from around the world. Individuals feel autonomous and can think private thoughts.

Truth

Relational. Truth’s credibility is tied to the messenger’s credibility, because message and messenger are tied together.

Principle. Truth is based on the content of the message alone, because written language developed structure and rules (logic, history, analysis, expert opinion, and other tools of deduction) to determine meaning.

Reasoning Process

Dialectic. Open-ended form of question and answer. This method does not aim for a fixed conclusion but attempts to reach equilibrium between two juxtaposed concepts.

Logic. Linear thought arrives at an either–or conclusion. Print reaches its destination with greater efficiency than open-ended conversation, and logic offers closure.

Perception of Reality

Revelation. Understanding comes from revelation, direct experience, and knowledge handed down over generations. Knowing something is linked to understanding the internal nature of a thing.

Law of identity. Understanding begins by recognizing the objective reality of things. Knowing is linked to seeing external distinctions.

Learning

Process-centered. The search for truth and understanding comes by sitting at the feet of a master or guru. Learning is a preparatory process, and the skills of learning and inquiry are often the focus of the teacher and his or her student(s).

Content-centered. The orientation is toward standardized learning.

Students are batched according to age or learning level. The material is taught consistently to all, and students work to achieve tangible milestones.

Work

Farm. Focus is on the land and the goal is to grow the crop. Harvest is the reward.

Factory. Goal is to produce more at lower cost. Reducing things and labor to their simplest components along with a logical process of assembly will lead to productivity.

Building Wealth

Land. Acquiring land and developing its use.

Capital and manufacturing. Wealth acquisition centers on the use of capital and labor to produce goods and services.

Sense of Time

Present or presence. Time is a continuous present because we have no recorded history, only retold stories. The retelling of experience makes past events seem current.

Past or objectification. The past is separated from the present. Print creates a sense of passing time because we have the means of comparing past words and descriptions with current thought and reality. Time marches on. A word read is a word in the past. The contrast between past words and current thoughts creates a sensation of progress— moving forward from the permanent record.

Management

Steward. A steward acts as a caretaker for the entire household, taking the perspective of the owner and fulfilling not only his functions but his intentions.

Manager. Economic entities are characterized by command and control, division of labor, vertical integration (owning all the resources and means of production instead of outsourcing). Management is based on the premise that people need to be structured and tightly supervised in order to be effective.

Value

Reliability. There is value in what is tried and true.

Productivity. Productivity is valued. To get it, break work down into its smallest tasks and focus effort to accomplish each task as quickly as possible.

Production

Meeting the need. People will take what they get.

Improving standards. People take what they need.

Medium of Exchange

Barter and trade. The ethic of reciprocity in one-on-one valuations.

Currency. A rational means of standardizing valuation and providing a flexible, efficient means of exchange.

Art

Symbolic. Art is a means of interpreting the meaning of life and the sacred. Intricate and disciplined symbolic language is developed to reveal the multidimensional reality behind the stories and characters of faith and lore.

Perspective. Art seeks to become visually true or accurate. Art also is expressed from the artist’s perspective, whereas the symbolic language of early art removed the vantage point of the artist in order to portray a mystical reality.

12

Exploring Tomorrow

Source: Adapted from The Millennium Matrix by M. Rex Miller (Jossey-Bass, 2004).

Broadcast Era

Digital Era

Documentary. Excerpts from newspapers, magazines, television programs, news audiotape, and videotape help viewers research and relive the past.

Database. Networking, user groups, FAQs (frequently asked questions), search engines, databases, and virtual communities help to examine the past and model it toward the future.

Crowded stranger. Image and impressions inform character in a fluid, ephemeral world. We interact with an even wider range of people through television and radio. These unattached and often unselected sources aim at a broad audience. The individual as spectator participates vicariously.

Cybersoul or anonymous intimacy. Individuals design separate identities for different roles and contexts. Identity comes from the multitude of interactions from around the globe. We can be a member of numerous communities and experiment with numerous identities.

Existential. Truth is validated through experience, the force of conviction, or some tangible outcome. The concrete reality of the moment takes priority over distant and abstract concepts.

Contextual. Truth is malleable and relevant within particular contexts of meaning. Community (virtual or otherwise) tests and validates reality.

Fluid logic. Thought is a process that flows like water, leading to many possible outcomes. Conclusions are not fixed and will change, and the results can take quantum leaps. So the answer to any logical question is, “It depends.” Context and bias are part of the equation.

Systems thinking. Understanding how the parts of a particular system interrelate and how the system works over time leads to determining probable outcomes. Reality is complex and interconnected. Individual events appear random. Instead of a causal chain, multiple potential outcomes are measured by probability.

Uncertainty principle. Understanding reflects the unique and intimate interplay between the observed and the observer and is no longer considered fixed.

Chaos theory. Understanding reflects the fact that reality is fluid, highly complex, and interconnected. It behaves as a system rather than as discrete events and is understandable by means of general patterns.

Experience-centered. Text learning is supplemented with movies and videos. Group presentations, participation, and life experience are often factored in. The focus is on individual students and their unique needs. This creates a proliferation of curricula and services to address those needs.

Context-centered. Teachers create a collaborative learning community. The collective experience takes priority over individual and private needs.

Service. The goal becomes to use information about consumers to make products they want or to create demand. This shifts the focus to collecting and using information in the design, production, and delivery of goods and services.

Federation. Work is organized in networks of independent producers that collaborate in production. At the same time, the consumers and producers collaborate in the production and delivery of goods.

Distribution and debt. These tools accelerate growth. The shifting tastes of a culture shaped by broadcast create opportunities for companies that can quickly respond to those tastes. This shifts the focus toward more efficient means of distribution.

Creativity and community. The intellectual content of product is now more valuable than the material itself. This creates volatile markets.

Building a loyal and interactive following is the key to building longterm wealth.

Future or impermanence. History is dead, and the future does not exist. A sound-image captures awareness but leaves nothing to connect it to. Broadcast media wipe out past references. There is no past—only a fleeting present.

Virtual or time travel. The world is simultaneously seen, heard, felt, and experienced. The future as well as the past can be seen in the present due to highly realistic representations of past events and scenarios of possible future events.

Leader. Leadership becomes more important than management. The focus is on how to release the potential of individual workers as opposed to how best to control them.

Interweaver. Networks, virtual teams, and virtual corporations characterize the new economic system. Managers become facilitators or weavers of networks. Management takes on a less definable structure and behaves more like a web of collaboration.

Quality. Quality of services is prized; both the process and the whole are important. Lower cost and improved performance are not contradictory.

Creativity. Creativity is valued in the interactive relationship of consumer and producer.

Creating want. People take what they want.

Creating fulfillment. People design what they want.

Credit. Accelerates the cycle of transactions. Allows for local and global transactions to occur with equal ease.

Techno-barter. Different mediums of exchange are employed, including forums such as eBay, standardization of the euro, frequent-user currency, affinity programs, reverse auctions.

Concept or process. The artist moves away from a focus on content to a focus on process, approach, and medium. Familiar expressions are deconstructed (as in Cubism) and irrational patterns of chance are explored (as in Jackson Pollock’s work).

Interaction or participation. The observer must be drawn into the artistic experience and own the artist’s perspective through participation in it. The line between artist and observer blurs. Art within a digital medium is completely malleable. The artist may become more of a facilitator of real-time experiments in altered perspectives stimulated by the content and the observer’s unique response, as in Camille Utterback’s installation art.

continued from page 11 ing, because there is little or no time for reflection in an environment that changes at high speed in an irregular, disorderly, and unpredictable manner.

7. Unpredictability: Complex, highly interactive systems behave unp re d i c t a b l y. A s a re s u l t , w e l l intentioned attempts to improve conditions may actually worsen them. A legal system that heavily penalizes physicians who make mistakes may cause the doctors to give up their practices, thus increasing the number of people who are sick or incapacitated.

Rethinking Our Institutions The digital media require us to rethink our institutions. Our educational institutions, for example, are likely to rely increasingly on the digital media—and for good reason. So many of the challenges that schools currently face—from rising costs and textbook obsolescence to flexible schedules and parental involvement—have solutions in the new technologies.

Today, children not yet in school are adeptly using computers to send messages to their friends and downloading MP3 music files from the Internet. The kids soon learn how to use search engines such as Google to get information and put together multimedia presentations for class projects. These digital kids are learning to think and work differently from the TV kids a generation ago.

In the emerging digital culture, children do not grind out their lessons by rote memorization. They no longer sit passively in front of a television and say “Huh?” when asked what they learned. Children now are absorbed in an interactive-game environment, pursuing treasure hunts of knowledge over the Web. They integrate what they learn, expand far beyond the assignment, and retain a high level of enthusiasm.

Youngsters using digital media are pushing education toward self-learning, and it’s likely that self-directed learning will become more and more the norm. Teachers will move away from being grade specialists to becoming general facilitators handling 14

Exploring Tomorrow

several grades at a time. In a virtual little red schoolhouse, technology will afford a shift back to the teaching relationship. Continuity will lead to greater effectiveness, and that effectiveness will create opportunities for mentors and higher levels of fulfillment for all concerned.

But there is a danger to this new form of learning. What happens when our play allows us to simulate and rehearse reality? We applaud simulation training for pilots or physicians—in fact, we demand it.

We want them to be able to handle the chaos of a crisis with icy coolness. However, when this simulation technology seeps into the hands of our youth, we can unwittingly create cold-blooded killers, as we saw with 14-year-old Michael Carneal, the boy who methodically carried out his murders at a school in Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997. Carneal killed each victim by one accurate shot. Investigators found he liked to play a video game that required shooting “human” targets. This was like the training soldiers receive to kill the enemy.

Facing the Digital Challenge Clearly, managing the transition into the Digital Era will not be easy or problem free. We must expect challenges in most of our institutions, so we need to rethink them and build them well for what lies ahead.

A few years ago, I spent several hours with an oil company executive charged with designing and constructing the firm’s oil tankers. This helped me construct my own mental picture of how to build for an environment of turbulent change.

Building an oil tanker is an amazing feat. The number of details is mind-boggling, and the obstacles are incredible, especially if it is being designed to face the North Atlantic, the most treacherous environment of all.

Remember the Titanic!

North Atlantic tankers must be able to withstand a head-on collision with an iceberg at seven knots. Without dropping anchor, they must maintain a stable position while buffeted by 50-foot waves. To cope with such a turbulent, hostile environ-

ment, the North Atlantic tankers have multiple redundant systems acting as safeguards and backups.

They have powerful stabilizers on their sides to keep them in position even while enormous waves crash over them.

The North Atlantic tankers give us a phenomenal metaphor for today’s institutions to consider as they rebuild themselves for the challenges of the Digital Era. Today’s institutions must navigate stormy seas of social and technological change. Unfortunately, we are still building the social equivalent of vacation cruise liners: large, slow structures made for calm, balmy seas and friendly ports of call. These “cruise-liner” institutions may be a little more userfriendly, but they are built for calm seas and a sunny horizon. And that is not what we are likely to get.

Today, we need institutions built like North Atlantic tankers to meet the colossal waves of largely unpredictable social change. They need to be highly agile and fast-changing, with extra capacity, awareness of the environment, powerful stabilizers, and buffering, like the double hulls of the tankers.

Redesigning our institutions for stresses and opportunities of the Digital Era is now the greatest challenge we face.

■

About the Author M. Rex Miller is vice president of sales and chief concierge for Spencer Furniture and author of The Millennium Matrix (Jossey-Bass, 2004). He is a successful businessman with degrees in theology and communications theory.

His address is 1409 Dartmouth Drive, Southlake, Texas 76092. Telephone 1-214498-3055; e-mail rmiller@millenniummatrix. com; Web site www.millenniummatrix.com.

Hydrogen and the New Energy Economy Why We Need an Apollo Mission for Clean Energy SHELL HYDROGEN

S

hifting the global economy away from dependence on rapidly

Creating a whole new

depleting supplies of oil to renewable, clean-burning

economy—one that no

hydrogen must happen sooner rather than later. Any thought

longer depends on oil—

that the transition can be gradually implemented over the next 40 to 50 years mistakenly assumes that there will continue to be enough cheap oil for the foreseeable future and that new discoveries and tech-

will require the best thinking from the

nological innovations can always fill in any gaps. Such assumptions

brightest minds. Two

are seriously flawed and imperil national and international stability.

energy researchers

In 1956, Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert predicted that U.S. oil

detail why this mission

production (barrels pumped per year) would peak in the early 1970s.

is urgently needed and

Most geologists at the time rejected Hubbert’s analysis until 1970

outline what it will take

when oil production peaked within the lower 48 states. Since then, numerous respected geologists have refined Hubbert’s methodology and have applied it to worldwide oil production, country

Hydrogen fuel-cell powered vehicle zips by the U.S. Capitol. In a joint project of Shell Hydrogen and GM, the first combination hydrogen and gasoline refueling station in North America was recently opened in Washington, D.C. Governments need to lead the way to build the needed Hydrogen Economy, argue authors Julian Gresser and James A. Cusumano.

to build a Hydrogen Economy.

By Julian Gresser and James A. Cusumano Exploring Tomorrow

15

SYLVESTER GARZA FOR SHELL HYDROGEN / PR NEWSWIRE

by country. They concluded that world production of oil will peak between 2004 and 2008. Today, as in 1956, many industry and most political leaders either reject this analysis or ignore its projected consequences.

Most geologists estimate that about 2 trillion barrels of oil were formed in the earth over millions of years. To date we have pumped out about half of this supply. Despite years of generous government subsidies and continuing worldwide investments by the global oil industry to accelerate technological innovation, the rate of discovery of new oil sources began declining decades ago and has never recovered. British Petroleum (BP) reports that proven oil reserves increased from 0.7 trillion barrels in 1981 to 1 trillion barrels in 1991 to only 1.03 trillion barrels in 2001. BP, as do most oil companies, uses the R/P method to measure how much oil is left worldwide. It divides known reserves (R in barrels) by the production rate (P in barrels per year) and this gives the “years of oil left in the ground.” Using this method, BP predicts 40 years of oil left in the ground.

The problem with this approach is it implies things will be fine until we pump the last drop of oil out of the ground 40 years from now. But things won’t be fine, according to Hubbert’s analysis. Economic dislocations will begin to occur exponentially once we reach the halfway point (the peak) in consuming the oil in the ground. A policy of relying on things to be fine seems dangerously naïve. To understand why things may not be fine, it is useful to ask what has changed and what could ensue if we reach an oil-price tipping point.

Changes in the Oil Economy

Some 30 years ago, we had a taste of what can happen with soaring oil prices. In the fall of 1973, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed oil restrictions, and increased the price by 70% to $5 per barrel. Protesting U.S. support of the Yom Kippur War, OPEC raised the price again to $7 per barrel in 1974 (a 130% increase within 12 months). With the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the Iran-Iraq War, 16

Exploring Tomorrow

oil prices escalated to $40 per barrel in 1981. This is equivalent to $70 per barrel in current dollars. Gasoline lines appeared across the United States, and inflation rates reached more than 20%. Over the next five years, governments developed nonOPEC sources of oil, expanded nuclear power installations, and implemented intensive conservation measures. The price of oil fell to $10 per barrel in 1986. An artificially cre-

Water, water everywhere—the only emission from hydrogen fueled vehicles, as this publicity campaign for Shell Hydrogen illustrates.

ated economic crisis was temporarily avoided.

Today, oil supplies 40% of the world’s energy needs and 90% of its transportation requirements. Global economic growth over the next 15

Shell’s first retail hydrogen refueling station opened in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2003.

Iceland was among the first countries—along with Japan, Canada, and Germany—to jump on the hydrogen bandwagon, according to authors Gresser and Cusumano.

PHOTOS: SHELL HYDROGEN

Fuel cell fits snugly in model GM vehicle used to launch new hydrogen/gasoline station in Washington, D.C., in 2004.

years will increase petroleum’s share of energy generation to 60%, most of this demanded by the transportation sector when the number of cars increases from 700 million to 1.25 billion. The annual economic growth rate of rapidly industrializing nations such as China (10%) and India (7%) will greatly intensify the pressure, while at the same time proven reserves will continue to be drawn down at four times the rate of new discoveries.

If the world were constant and only the demand for oil increased— without the concomitant decrease in production that we project—a significant rise in the price of oil could be managed solely as an energy supply problem as it was in the 1980s. But the world has become far riskier and uncertain, and the coming sharp spikes in the price of oil could have severe impacts.

For one thing, the world’s financial, economic, energy, environmental, and other systems have become increasingly integrated. If the integrity or robustness of any of these systems is significantly compromised, the stresses may well be rapidly transferred to other systems, leading to global chaos.

A sharp rise in the price of oil will also fall most heavily on the most impoverished countries and the poorest people in industrialized societies, substantially increasing their suffering. Systems based on suffering of this magnitude eventually become unstable.

The systemic chaos ensuing from this predicted oil crisis could pose psychological trauma because throughout most of human history the rate of change has proceeded in a linear, if not entirely orderly, way.

Today in virtually every sector of the industrialized world, the rate of change is becoming exponential. We are poorly adapted psychologically and emotionally for this shift and will be prone to panic in times of crisis.

Such panic could quickly escalate to catastrophe, with weapons of mass destruction now widely available, inexpensively produced, and easily deployed. That possibility is all the more threatening as the number of terrorist groups actively seeking to acquire these weapons and to cause havoc, murder, and mayhem multiplies.

When tightly coupled systems become as stressed as they currently are, and when these stresses do not

abate, but rather compound as now seems likely, there is a tendency for these systems to reach a tipping point—when a single event, though not catastrophic in itself, has the potential to unleash a cascade of disorder and turbulence. Most policy makers overlook the oil-price tipping point because they do not appear to understand—from a systems perspective—the linkage of oil prices to other destabilizing trends.

Here is how that cascade of disorder could come about: Current rates of production must increase to meet global energy requirements for growth, so oil-producing nations that cannot readily increase production, such as the United States, Russia, Norway, China, and Nigeria, will cease to be relevant producers over the next 15 years. During this same period, countries in the Middle East will achieve control of 80% of all global oil reserves.

Currently, more than 20% of the world’s oil is in the hands of nations known to sponsor terrorism, and are under sanctions by the United States and/or the United Nations. As a result, oil-producing nations in the Middle East will gain an influence on world affairs previously unthinkable by energy and political strategists. These nations will continue to increase their arms, leading to greater instability in that region and worldwide. Massive wealth will flow to terrorist organizations as the free world indirectly rewards their sponsors through the purchase of oil at increasingly higher prices. Fixed supplies, stalled discoveries, and sharply increased consumption will drive prices in the near future to an oil-price tipping point.

The wisest way to anticipate and mitigate this risk would be to implement an immediate “quantum jump” into energy conservation and hydrogen development. This will help us avoid, or at least minimize, the dislocations of the oil-price tipping point, while achieving an orderly and smooth transition to a Hydrogen Economy in later stages of the program. To be sure, even this quantum jump strategy will likely require 15 to 20 years to achieve broad displacement of current oil sources by hydrogen.

Exploring Tomorrow

17

Launching the Hydrogen Age: A Three-Step Strategy A mission for hydrogen development on the scale of the U.S. Apollo Project of the 1960s should include the following steps.

automakers, oil companies, and consumers. Oil companies complete their transformation into energy companies.

Phase I—Deploy Existing Technologies and Capabilities (2005–2010)

2. Expand the number of fueling stations across the country that are based on hydrogen produced from electrolysis.

1. Immediately design and implement an extensive energy conservation program that focuses particularly on transportation fuels.

2. Establish financial incentives such as tax refunds, investment tax credits, performance incentives, emission charges, a gasoline tax, and bond financing.

3. Install new facilities powered by advanced wind generators, solar photovoltaic cells, and other renewables for efficient, economical generation of “green” hydrogen by electrolysis.

4. Convert most large sea vessels to run on fuel-cell power.

3. Market existing fuel cells to businesses and homes.

5. Construct hydrogen pipelines where necessary in metropolitan areas.

4. Conduct extensive R&D to expedite building the first large-scale fuel-cell plants to bring production costs down.

6. Build new high-capacity hydrogen storage tanks based on breakthroughs in nanomaterial research.

5. Install fuel cells initially to run on hydrogen from natural gas.

Phase III—A Nation on Hydrogen (2015–2020)

6. Following BMW’s and Ford’s strategies, offer current model internal combustion engines that run on hydrogen (HICE).

1. Electric utilities increasingly become power distributors and much less power generators, as homes and businesses supply greater levels of power to the grid.

7. Expand the number of hydrogen filling stations in metropolitan areas and lease prototype fuel-cell powered vehicles in these areas.

8. Lease transit and business HICE fleets that return to a garage each day for access to a central hydrogen generator unit.

9. Expand current research in nanomaterials for hydrogen storage; initiate research for hydrogen generation from solar photocatalysis and genetically modified organisms (biohydrogen).

Phase II—Expand Hydrogen Infrastructure Beyond Core Metropolitan Areas (2010–2015)

1. Release prototype fuel-cell automobiles made readily affordable by financial incentives provided to

18

Exploring Tomorrow

2. Consumers “plug in” their fuel-cell vehicles when idle to supply electrical power to the grid at peak-cost periods. This helps defray the cost of their vehicle.

3. Hydrogen is provided by businesses to employees as a benefit.

4. Most service stations are converted to produce hydrogen via solar photovoltaic-powered electrolysis, or by access to the hydrogen pipeline system.

5. New technologies for generating and storing hydrogen emerge, including hydrogen via solar photocatalysis and via genetically modified organisms such as algae (bio-hydrogen).

—Julian Gresser and James A. Cusumano

An International Hydrogen “Apollo Project”

The U.S. Energy, Commerce, and Defense departments already have in place programs to promote hydrogen. These programs are all based on the smooth-transition assumption and are not nearly comprehensive or timely enough to meet the challenges before us.

What is required is a program on the scale of the Manhattan Project or NASA’s Apollo Program, with two essential elements: (1) massive and immediate energy conservation to reduce oil dependence, and (2) an international, entrepreneurial, multipronged initiative to accelerate global economic growth and prosperity based on hydrogen.

Energy Conservation and Oil Independence

Among the immediate steps that could be taken to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil by a significant amount are: • Commercial and residential buildings must be retrofitted with known state-of-the-art, energy-efficient systems for lighting, appliances, and heating/air-conditioning systems.

• Oil usage in transportation—for cars, trucks, buses, trains, and even aircraft—should be substantially reduced within three to five years.

• Tax breaks and other incentives must be made available to consumers who purchase energy-efficient vehicles such as gas-electric hybrid cars.

• Public utilities must be required by law, as in Japan, to deliver a meaningful percentage of electricity derived from sustainable energy sources.

To be sure, the biggest impact will come from cutting back on the 13 million barrels per day (out of a total of 20 million barrels per day) of oil that drives the U.S. transportation system.

The benefits will be immediate and massive, including reduced vulnerability to terrorist attacks against oil storage and transportation lines in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. And thousands of new jobs would be created as workers flock to new oppor-

tunities in the Hydrogen Economy.

Internationally, there are precedents for such a massive, “Apollo” level undertaking. During the 1980s, China’s efficiency program reduced overall energy usage within a decade by 50%, while China’s economic growth led, and continues to lead, the developing world. In the 1980s, Denmark began a crash program in wind-generated electricity. Today, wind provides 10% of Denmark’s power while that country makes 60% of all the wind turbines sold in the world. India’s Renewable Energy Development Agency launched a similar set of initiatives beginning in 1987, and today India is the world’s largest user of photovoltaic systems for generating distributive electrical energy.

The United States has also succeeded in the past in energy conservation. Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards more than doubled the average mileage of U.S. automobiles between 1975 and 1985. Efficiency programs sponsored by the Department of Energy returned $20 for every $1 invested, making them one of the best investments in the economy even before a change in national energy strategy, according to economics writer Robert Freeman. The Worldwatch Institute reports that energy efficiency measures enacted since 1975 saved the United States an estimated $365 billion in 2000 alone.

Crucial Questions for the Hydrogen Alternative

Immediate energy conservation must be tightly coupled to a coherent plan to expedite the transition to a viable, global alternative—hydrogen. Four questions are crucial: Why hydrogen? Is hydrogen a timely and viable option? Is hydrogen safe? Can hydrogen become an engine for global growth and prosperity?

Why Hydrogen?

Hydrogen solves simultaneously an assortment of problems, from political to environmental to medical.

In addition to reducing global dependence on Middle Eastern oil and the oil infrastructure’s vulnerability to terrorist attacks, a Hydrogen

Economy would democratize energy generation so that all nations can have equal access to the benefits of electricity. It would reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and toxic air contaminants, since hydrogen generated by wind or solar power results solely in water as a byproduct. It would reduce diseases such as asthma, emphysema, and asthmatic bronchitis, which are closely associated with air pollution from fossil fuels. And the Hydrogen Economy would mitigate, and in time possibly prevent, disruptive climatic changes, including global warming, which are now widely recognized as caused by sharply rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

Is Hydrogen a Timely And Viable Option?

Present U.S. industrial policies favoring a petroleum-based economy have cost the American people $3.4 trillion over the last 30 years, according to a study by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. Oil imports account for one-third of the total U.S. deficit and therefore are a major source of unemployment. The true social costs of a fossil fuel-based economy should also include the billions upon billions of dollars of damage to health, property, and the environment.

Thus, hydrogen’s economic viability needs to be examined in the context of the current, distorted, subsidized price for oil. For example, if the petroleum industry were required today to bear the full costs of its health, property, and environmental damages, the present price of gasoline at the pump would easily rise to more than $15 per gallon, and the price of electricity would increase from 3¢ per kilowatt-hour to more than 30¢, according to Peter Hoffmann, author of Tomorrow’s Energy (MIT Press, 2001). Additionally, this price would rise substantially higher if it accurately reflected numerous other hidden costs—for example, more than $50 billion per year even before the 2003 Iraq war in military personnel and equipment required to protect U.S. oil interests in the Middle East. The current price of $2.50–$5 per gallon-equivalent of ultra-clean

hydrogen, produced by solar or wind-powered electrolysis, would be immediately competitive.

Hydrogen technologies are remarkably robust and near to becoming economically viable today. Hydrogen is already a highly desirable alternative when we consider the economics of the entire system. For example, the present wellhead-towheels efficiency of the gasoline internal combustion engine is 14%— i.e., 14% of the energy extracted from oil in the ground ends up powering your car. If we use natural gas as the interim source of hydrogen until solar/wind electrolyzers are more available with higher efficiencies, the current wellhead-to-wheels efficiency of a hydrogen fuel-cell car is 42%, or three times greater. The comparative efficiencies of hydrogen over gasoline are also apparent in cars with hydrogen internal combustion engines, which could provide a short-term transition strategy.

Hydrogen generation, storage, and distribution could also take place locally, thereby deconcentrating vulnerable power supplies and strongly encouraging local energy independence, self-reliance, and innovation.

Hydrogen pipeline investments should be deferred to the future when the Hydrogen Economy is well under way, and this investment makes economic sense.

If, as we propose, oil production will peak within this decade, the Hydrogen Economy is our only shortterm and long-term option. The basics of hydrogen science have been known for many years, and technological breakthroughs can be further accelerated and optimized by sharply focused industry and government research programs. Coal and nuclear fission have significant environmental challenges, and nuclear fusion will not likely be viable until the latter part of this century.

Is Hydrogen Safe?

Hydrogen is sometimes associated with the Hindenburg disaster, which occurred at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937. However, a detailed analysis by former NASA scientist Addison Bain found that this incident would have occurred in much the same Exploring Tomorrow

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manner even if the dirigible had been filled with nonflammable helium gas.

The fire started in the diesel engine room and quickly spread to the dirigible’s outer coating, which was a highly flammable material similar to that used in rocket propellants. It is unlikely that anyone was killed by a hydrogen fire. (There was no explosion.) One-third of the passengers died by jumping from the cabin; the others survived by riding the dirigible to the ground as the ultralight, rapidly diffusing hydrogen gas burned harmlessly above them.

For the same given volume, the explosive power of gasoline is 22 times more potent than that for hydrogen gas. Furthermore, the global hydrogen industry has an impeccable safety record.

Hydrogen as an Engine for Global Economic Growth and Prosperity

Perhaps the greatest political appeal and the most immediate beneficial impact of the Hydrogen Economy is the emergence of hydrogen as a strategic business sector and an engine of global economic growth within the decade and for the remainder of the twenty-first century.

Throughout history, certain industries experiencing breakthroughs in technology have served as engines of economic growth. Economic growth occurs when gains in productivity in the strategic business sector are rapidly transferred through innovation and the convergence of the key technologies to other industries and sectors. Among the most famous examples are the canals and railroads in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and the United States, machine tool making in New England in the early nineteenth century, and the German chemical dye industry in the late nineteenth century. Japan’s post–World War II industries—steel, autos, household electronics, semiconductors, computers, telecommunications, and robotics—illustrate how economic leverage can multiply when innovations in one strategic sector trigger breakthroughs in the next.

Because the public benefits of 20

Exploring Tomorrow

SHELL HYDROGEN

Hydrogen bus in Amsterdam gets refueled. Conservation through mass transit—in addition to alternative fuels—could help cut the world’s dependence on dwindling supplies of petroleum. But a massive effort is needed to create the Hydrogen Economy, argue the authors.

strategic technologies and industries are significant, as are the commercial risks, governments have usually played a critical role, especially during the early stages, in nurturing and accelerating their development. For example, rural electrification in the United States would have taken generations without strong government support during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. Today, the state of California has taken the lead in implementing the Hydrogen Highway Network Action Plan, and will build

150–200 hydrogen fueling stations throughout the state, approximately one every 20 miles on California’s major highways. California’s Hydrogen Highway is an “economically strategic instrumentality,” which, like the railroads in the nineteenth century, will drive economic growth in a wide spectrum of user industries.

Florida has also launched an imaginative program to promote hydrogen as a strategic sector. Florida’s Hydrogen Strategy is based on alliances among private companies,

state and local government organizations, universities, environmental groups, and select groups from the space program. Initial areas of focus are fuel cells, internal combustion engines retrofitted to run on hydrogen, hydrogen storage, and powergrid optimization. Financial incentives include tax refunds, investment tax credits, performance incentives, quick response training programs, and enterprise bond financing.

Japan, Germany, Canada, and Iceland all understand that hydrogen’s development is economically strategic, as it will drive innovations in nanomaterials, biotechnology, solar photocatalysis, and even the Internet through local, distributed generation. These countries are vigorously supporting their transition away from oil.

An Apollo Mission For Hydrogen

The United States needs to build rapid political consensus for a Hydrogen Economy. To start, the U.S. government should assemble a task force that includes the nation’s leading hydrogen scientists and technologists, inventors, environmental and natural resource lawyers, experts on public finance, and specialists on public/private alliances. Their assignment should be to produce within six months a draft “Strategic Hydrogen Alliance Reform and Enterprise Act” (SHARE), which will reward manufacturers, motivate customers, and amplify support for basic and applied research. Public/ private alliances can be the engine to gather the nation’s entrepreneurial energies behind hydrogen.

As hydrogen becomes a strategic economic driver for the United States and the major industrialized nations, it can serve this same function for many other countries, rich and poor. The size and commercial risks of some hydrogen projects make them ideal candidates for international collaboration. As new countries enter the hydrogen consortium, each can develop special domains of leverage and comparative advantage based on its unique skills and resources. An international initiative for hydrogen is needed that emulates the vigor, imagination, and

support of humanity’s most visionary endeavors, such as the Human Genome Project or President Kennedy’s Apollo Project, the vision to land a man on the Moon.

Alliances can act as powerful drivers of innovation. The international initiative should strongly encourage such public/private hydrogen alliances with a focus on special domains of leverage—for example, accelerating cost breakthroughs in hydrogen storage, or generation by wind and solar power—where an investment of time, effort, capital, and creativity could produce scientific and technological breakthroughs with huge commercial and public returns.

The cornerstone of the program and its financial engine is the International Hydrogen Innovation Fund (IHIF), which could be capitalized with investments from national and international governments, corporations, and nonprofit foundations. It should be managed by an international team of experienced business and social entrepreneurs with demonstrated records of success.

The IHIF would aim to achieve a superior rate of return within five years for its shareholders (including governments and other public entities), based on its investments in early, middle, and late stage projects.

If imaginatively conceived and effectively implemented, this international hydrogen initiative can be financially self-sustaining from the outset. Moreover, the IHIF’s asset portfolio can be further strengthened as the IHIF negotiates rights in patents and other properties of the public/private alliances it spawns and supports. This strategy in itself will constitute a significant innovation for many government leaders who today ardently wish to support worthy public ventures but lack the financial means to do so.

Entering the Hydrogen Age

A curtain is rising on the next act in the human story. We are each protagonists and playwrights in this drama. The likely scene is a tragedy: intense competition and conflict over rapidly depleting oil reserves; devastation of remaining ecologically fragile, oil-rich areas; panicked decisions

to shift to coal or nuclear options that will further pollute the earth and destroy its beauty; and grinding poverty, despair, and hopelessness for most of humanity.

There is another, brighter scenario.

It is based on hydrogen, when clean and self-sustaining energy replaces established, exploitative technologies, and citizens everywhere use their unique talents to fashion the world anew. The transition will not be easy, but a few courageous and farsighted leaders working with the international community can take the tide at its flood and begin to lead the world to a better fortune.

■

Gresser

Cusumano

About the Authors Julian Gresser is chairman of Alliances for Discovery (www.breakthroughdiscoveries. org), a nonprofit organization based in Santa Barbara, California, dedicated to accelerating breakthrough discoveries, inventions, and innovations for humanity. He has served as an adviser to the U.S. State Department, the Prime Minister’s Office of Japan, and the European Commission, as well as many U.S., European, and Japanese companies on their international alliances. His most recent book is Piloting Through Chaos: Wise Leadership/Effective Negotiation for the 21st Century (Five Rings Press, 1996). E-mail jgresser@aol.com.

James A. Cusumano is founder and retired chairman of Catalytica Inc. and Catalytica Energy Systems Inc. He is a former research director for Exxon, with numerous publications and patents, and is currently vice chairman of the World Business Academy (www.worldbusiness.org).

He is also chairman of Chateau du Catalyst s.r.o., which owns and operates Chateau Mcely (www.chateaumcely.cz), a holistic executive training center in Prague, Czech Republic. E-mail Jim@Catalyst.cz.

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How to Succeed in the Hyper-Human Economy

By Richard W. Samson

White-collar work is increasingly being automated, or “off-peopled,” just as happened with farming and manufacturing work. To survive, workers will need to develop skills that can’t be performed by machines.

uman mental processes are being systematically “off-peopled”—that is, transferred into computers, microchips, networks, and mechanical devices of all types.

Think of it as a great global brain drain, the most critically pivotal— either empowering or suicidal— trend of our times. Yet it is underreported by the media and virtually invisible to the public eye. It’s not yet on policy makers’ radar screens.

It could create a golden age for everyone but threatens—if current social and business practices continue—to force millions of blue- and white-collar workers below the poverty line while making the rich richer.

The Industrial Revolution offers a useful precedent, because we’re starting to feel the same empowerment but suffer the same trauma experienced by laborers, farmers, and craftsmen when machine power extended muscle power but removed sources of livelihood from labor. Except now it’s mind power that’s flowing into our tools.

People adjusted to the Industrial Revolution by moving from laborintensive jobs to know-how jobs.

That won’t work this time, because know-how tasks are the very kind being usurped. We need a new strategy for the new transition, and we

H

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should not expect an improving economy to restore the quantity and mix of yesterday’s employment.

Farming, too, offers a precedent.

As recently as 1900, it took almost 40% of America’s workforce to grow the nation’s food. Today, thanks to progressive mechanization, it takes less than 2%. Factory work has retraced much of farming’s downward trajectory. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), goodsproducing workers decreased from 38% of the non-farm workforce in 1940 to 17% in 2003, and it’s not hard to imagine goods production soon joining farming in the less-than-2% club. At that time, the service sector would, by today’s definition, theoretically boast more than 98% of the non-farm workforce.

But there’s a problem. As information technology automates whiteand blue-collar functions alike, most of the remaining jobs as we know them are being transferred into allelectronic systems. By 2100, it is possible that fewer than 2% of the U.S. non-farm workforce will be needed to handle today’s know-how functions in factories, offices, stores, professional suites, hospitals, research labs, and universities.

If know-how work is being taken over by ever more-sophisticated tools, what’s left for people to do?

Hyper-Human Work A new class of jobs has yet to be named: work involving hard-toautomate hyper-human skills that go beyond know-how.

We can divide today’s servicesector workforce into two types— know-how and hyper-human. Knowhow service workers are likely to plummet to less than 2% of the workforce by the end of the century, but hyper-human service workers may zoom to over 90%.

According to BLS, many servicesector jobs lost people during the 1993–2003 decade, when they should have gained 19% just to stay even with the overall increase in the workforce. Examples include travel agents (down 7%), gas station attendants (down 4%), personnel in commercial banking (down 1%), and book publishing employees (down a fraction of a percent).

Industries gaining more jobs in the decade included radio and TV broadcasting (up 16%) and legal services (up 15%). But the percentage increase of jobs could not keep pace with labor-force growth of 19%. The reason: automation of know-how, allowing more do-it-yourself services ranging from pumping your own gas to filing your own will, publishing your own book, and placing your own orders.

PHOTOS: PHOTOS.COM

Some job categories outpaced overall labor-force growth during the decade, but professionals in these fields should not feel immune from brain-drain forces. Accounting and bookkeeping services, for example, gained 39% new jobs. The increase would be even greater were it not for fast-improving do-it-yourself accounting and tax-preparation software. The complexity of accounting, requiring human intervention, stems in large part from the changing constraints of nitpicking laws. Once sophisticated software systems negotiate the intersection of law with accounting and bookkeeping procedures, the need for human number crunchers will wane.

Other know-how professions seeing gains include physicians and medical office personnel (up 42%), which always require human caring and consciousness, and people working in colleges and universities (up 46%), which need live people for motivation and creative interaction.

White Collars in the Cross Hairs In today’s major corporations, white-collar jobs are being targeted with a vengeance. The reason, of course, is to increase productivity and the bottom line in order to remain competitive and to provide ever-increasing value to customers and stockholders, not to mention senior management.

It is possible that we are less than 5% into the Information Age in terms of the mental functions that may be usurped by electronic intelligence. Internet 2, now in development in research and academic organizations, is expected to offer data

transfer speeds up to a thousand times faster than today’s commercial Internet. The future Internet could resemble a gigantic intellectual utility that can operate without human oversight. Expert systems—already practical in fields such as oil exploration—could soon begin rivaling college professors, career counselors, biotech researchers, investment advisers, and economists in the expertise they can deliver.

“Self-aware computing” is being developed by IBM and DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet).

Complex electronic systems monitor their own performance, self-correct,

formation officer (CIO) jobs are in jeopardy.

Three trends are either eliminating IT jobs or sending them overseas: • Mergers and restructuring combine multiple programmer, analyst, or CIO positions into one.

• Improvements by enterprise software and platform providers simplify installation, operation, and maintenance, so smaller IT staffs are required.

• IT functions are being jobbed out to service providers such as IBM. This reduces not only in-company IT staffs, but also overall IT employment, since service providers introduce economies of scale to remain

“Know-how service workers are likely to plummet to less than 2% of the workforce by the end of the century, but hyperhuman service workers may zoom to over 90%.” and self-maintain—without human intervention. The impact on human workers could be moderate or very great. When nanotechnology becomes practical as a production and data tool, will automation accelerate at warp speed? Only time will tell.

Through a mix of developments that cannot be mapped precisely, the nature of work is changing rapidly.

Look for know-how services to join agriculture and manufacturing in the less-than-2%-of-the-workforce club well before the end of the century.

While information technology (IT) is a key cause of the jobless recovery, it has become, ironically, its most prominent new victim. Even chief in-

competitive. One of these economies is offshoring of the IT work, expected to siphon off a significantly higher percentage of IT service firm jobs than other white-collar jobs, according to Gartner Inc.

Job Creation Is Not Automatic “When technology eliminates jobs, it creates new, better ones.” This old saw has been largely true until now.

Technology did replace blue-collar jobs with new white-collar positions.

But the future does not always mimic the past.

New jobs are being created, but they are not always a step up from Exploring Tomorrow

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the disappearing kind. For example, during the 1993–2003 decade, 1.7 million new jobs in the United States were created in eating and dining places, an increase of 26%. That’s great if, when you lose your IT job, you want to wait tables or cook french fries—and even those jobs may become scarcer. If technology can automate grocery check-outs it can also automate burger serving.

and displacing us. The benefits can be great, but two drawbacks loom.

They’re the same drawbacks that prevailed as our muscles got augmented and replaced in the transition from the agricultural to the industrial age: (1) the trauma of transition, and (2) the prospect of unintended bad consequences at the mature end of the transition.

The present trauma of transition is likely to vex all of us and will severely oppress many. We can expect increasing occupational churn even during periods of rising employment, given the pace of technological change. What are we supposed to do? What’s the right career path for today’s travel agent or VP of marketing? The infiltration of electronic methodology is widespread and relentless. Safe havens are becoming harder and harder to identify; whitecollar, professional, and management people are being challenged even if their job type hasn’t changed much, thanks to technology-driven restructuring that has morphed stable companies into volatile, shortterm employers.

Unless we consciously intervene, the trauma of change, already acute for many, will get worse as the transition to global electronic intelligence accelerates.

The Right Strategy for Now

Knowledge workers need to develop social skills that can’t be automated.

Already, fast-food restaurants have streamlined food preparation and conditioned customers to fetch their own tableware, napkins, and drinks.

The reason that technology no longer creates new and better jobs is that electronic technology is an entirely different animal. Work itself needs to be redefined, and new forms of work need to be invented.

Like machinery in the transition to the industrial age, electronic systems are simultaneously empowering us 24

Exploring Tomorrow

As know-how gets easier and easier to store and apply through networks and automatic systems, the winning strategy is to move up from know-how work to “hyper-human” or “meta-mental” work, which consists of those functions that computers cannot easily replicate, so humans are still required. Balance off-peopling by calling more heavily on our most human qualities.

Computers and electronically powered systems are inherently better than humans at such tasks as number crunching and routine logic, mass data storage and retrieval, remote sensing and control, structured or routine decision making, and the like. Humans can’t expect to win out against electronics at any of these things, though we can struggle at it

for a few years. So where are we inherently superior?

We’re alive and electronic systems aren’t. Aliveness makes a big, vital difference—one that may be overlooked by decision makers under competitive pressures. Consider what aliveness involves: • Conscious perception and motor control.

• Wanting, valuing, intending.

• Pursuing ethical objectives.

• Love, friendliness, and other positive feelings and behaviors.

• Creativity and imagination.

• Subjective decision making.

• Hypothesizing.

• Social skills.

Aliveness, in its best mode, also includes a vital overall ingredient: reflection or metaconsciousness. In our brightest moments, we’re not just conscious, but conscious of our consciousness. Reflection or selfawareness defines the properly functioning, responsible human.

In moving to hyper-human work, we need to start tracking the workforce using different words. We need to divide today’s service sector into two strands: know-how service work, which is rapidly being taken over by technology, and hyper-human service work that requires people. We also need to track hyper-human forms of manual work that are performed with creativity, pleasure, and life. Examples include urban agriculture, specialized engineering, local production, artistic creation, and many varieties of nurturing.

In addition, we need to acknowledge our informal economy, in which we share things and services with family, friends, and colleagues without resorting to cash. This “free” economy could expand greatly as hyper-human activity gains sway.

Some believe the United States is transitioning from an industrial society to something higher in the occupational pecking order: an “idea economy.” Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan has spoken of an America where value is no longer derived by creating and moving things, but by creating and moving ideas. Surely this is a sound direction if “ideation” is appropriately de-

Transitioning to the Hyper-Human Economy Among the occupations that will lose the most jobs within the next decade are serviceoriented tasks that are increasingly being automated out of existence, according to the latest Occupational Outlook Handbook. To make these jobs future-friendly, workers will need to develop their hyper-human skills, such as creative problem solving, imagination, intuition, caring, and a general knowledge of the world combined with specialized applications. A few examples:

Future telemarketers may become “business/customer liaisons.”

fined. Ideation needs to be cultivated as more than ivory-tower thinking or boardroom maneuvering.

But it’s important to recognize that ideas spring up close to where things happen—in agriculture, manufacturing, and get-your-hands-dirty service work as well as in basic research, big-iron engineering, biotech development, or global marketing. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has warned that outsourcing could suck the innovative life out of America’s industrial base. Ideas for improvement come from the factory workers, engineers, and managers where the work is done. As more and more white-collar jobs, especially high-tech forms, are offshored, sources of the new ideas and intellectual property are likely to go with them. Intel founder and CEO Andrew Grove has predicted that tomorrow’s most advanced engineering could come from India or China.

Ideas generation needs to remain strong locally for any country’s economy to thrive. In fact, it should grow stronger along with an accentuation of other hyper-human skills.

Hyper-human skills flourish in active pursuits—including food pro-

Service Economy Job

Hyper-Human Economy Job

Hyper-Human Skills Needed

Word processors/ typists

Document-quality coordinators; information-dissemination managers

Awareness of usefulness and meaningfulness of specific information; ability to optimize presentation of information

Secretaries

Administrative response specialists

Intuition about the needs of clients; anticipation of problems; creative problem solving and situation management

Stock clerks/order fillers

Customer fulfillment technicians

Intuition about the unarticulated needs of customers (listening, interpreting); oversight of automated inventory control (anticipating problems; troubleshooting)

Loan clerks/interviewers

Personal finance counselors; mortgage concierges

Big-picture knowledge of financial instruments combined with focused understanding of individual customers’ financial backgrounds and needs

Computer operators

Cyber-concierges

Technical troubleshooting; database optimization; intuition for customers’ unarticulated problems and needs; creative problem solving

Travel agents

Experience designers; travel facilitators

Personality and lifestyle assessment of clients; global geopolitical and cultural awareness

Telemarketers

Business/customer liaisons; marketing information coordinators

Psychological, cultural understanding of customers; storytelling ability; persuasiveness

duction, making things, and helping others—where we engage our bodies, physical elements of the environment, feelings, and human interactions, not just airy thinking.

Hyper-human work will shift our attention back to the local and tem-

per our focus on the global. Selecting goods that are best produced a mile away rather than a continent away or growing and purchasing food grown within walking distance rather than flying distance, for example, are hyper-human approaches Exploring Tomorrow

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that counter mindless globalization, which too often creates enormous wealth for a few while destroying communities, distorting economies, taxing the environment, and disrupting employment.

In order to move to a hyperhuman future, we need to mobilize hyper-human skills right now: clear, sensible thinking as well as caring, responsible goal setting, planning, and determination.

Transition Tactics As a practical matter, how can we get to the hyper-human economy without getting lost in the transition?

Here are some sensible steps that may be taken by corporations, governments, and individuals.

Strategies for Corporations • Offshore if survival depends on it, but prepare for employee backlash, including union organizing.

• Reevaluate the wisdom of disrupting a stable workforce. Companies generally can downsize, offshore, and cut human costs only so

far. At some point, a weakened middle class will lose buying power.

A consumer engine without steam, plus alienated employees, could spell the death of many companies.

• Add hyper-human functions to existing tasks through job redefinition and training. For example, restructure customer-service departments that merely field complaints into customer concierge services that follow through until each unique customer problem is satisfactorily solved.

• Automate know-how to support hyper-human functions, not replace people. Pursue off-peopling with a

parallel people-empowering plan.

For example, as customer-service departments automate their complaintfielding functions, make sure that your Web site, Web services, and automated telephone menus reliably answer basic current questions and redirect customers to real people in the right departments rather than sending them into frustrating, impersonal loops. This requires technical-support workers equally proficient in technology and people skills, as well as creative problem solving.

• Put increased emphasis on “mental models” that promote practical reflection in areas such as product development, sales and marketing, intrapreneurship, and management.

We have demonstrated that a mental model triggering creativity or causefinding at the right moment can save millions of dollars or many years of lost opportunity.

CEOs of large firms had better lead the revolution by creating new and better jobs. Otherwise, they will be the victims of union resurgence, professional associations turned militant, legislative constraints, and activism of all sorts. Vandalism by angry employees is already a concern of corporate security departments, as is cybervandalism.

Running a large company is not just about making money or making stockholders happy, and not even just about making customers happy.

It’s about serving society, building community, improving the general lot of everyone. Surely that includes serving the needs of employees and

“In order to move to a hyperhuman future, we need to mobilize hyper-human skills right now: clear, sensible thinking as well as caring, responsible goal setting, planning, and determination.”

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“Look for more jobs recast to include the ‘aliveness’ qualities exhibited by entrepreneurs, inventors, authors, composers, teachers, and others who like to be creative, do good, and empower others.” building sound corporate cultures.

The future may belong to companies like GE, 3M, and IBM that— recent aberrations aside—have traditionally placed a high value on customer service, innovation, teamwork, and constant improvement with minimum human casualty.

Look for a new emphasis on humancentered business practices, training and development, and electronic systems that empower—rather than harass—employees and customers alike. Call it “corporate aliveness.”

Look for more jobs recast to include the “aliveness” qualities exhibited by entrepreneurs, inventors, authors, composers, teachers, and others who like to be creative, do good, and empower others.

Strategies for Governments and Concerned Citizens • Beef up the hyper-human content of educational programs. In grammar through grad school, put more emphasis on creativity, discovery, ethics, entrepreneurship, and flexible problem solving.

• Rebuild the local. Balance globalization by putting a new emphasis on cohesive communities, in the United States and abroad. Promote “ i n t e rc o m m u n it i e s ” — p h ys i c a l analogs of Internet nodes in which living, earning, learning, and culture coexist and reinforce one another in close proximity. [Ed. note: For examples of budding intercommunities, visit www.eranova.com/ intercommunity.]

• Use investment and philanthropy to revive local-job-creating small businesses. Encourage the wealthy to invest a fraction of their wealth in a small-business superfund.

Strategies for Individuals • Gradually move to work high on the hyper-human scale. In the near term, there will be money in knowhow jobs for many; over the longer term, smart zippy systems will prevail. If a form of work takes creativity, goal-focus, ethical behavior, responsibility, and social skills, it’s likely to have a future and generate

income eventually, if not right away.

Entrepreneurship will be in demand for a long time, as will intrapreneurship within companies. So will scientific research requiring “aha’s,” health care, education, and social services of all types. If an endeavor requires vision and caring, if there’s a need for it and you love it, it may be just the thing that makes you money at some point.

• Constantly hone your hyperhuman skills. Be a generalist and get better and better at all the things that make people special, from caring to innovation to persuasion. That will help your bottom line in any kind of work at any time.

• Cut back, simplify. Don’t count on corporate or social policy to protect your livelihood. In the absence of reform, you may need to compete with professionals in other countries willing to work for a few thousand dollars per year. In the United States, employers will increasingly use the pressure of foreign pay scales to negotiate lower pay domestically. Find ways to live beautifully on less. (Not easy, but it may be essential.)

The winning strategy for the hyperhuman economy is to inject “aliveness”—including deliberate reflection—into everything we do, and let electronic systems take over the dull, dead stuff.

■ About the Author Richard W. Samson is director of the EraNova Institute, Mountain Lakes, New Jersey 07046. Telephone 1-973-3353799; e-mail dicksamson@ eranova.com; Web site www.eranova.com. This article draws from his book, Mind Over Technology: Coming Out on Top as a Wired World Starts to Run on Automatic (Global Book Publisher, 2004). Order from the Futurist Bookshelf, www.wfs.org/bkshelf.htm.

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Molecular Nanotech: Benefits and Risks Welcome to the nanofactory, a tiny plant that makes products atom by atom.

By Mike Treder Illustrations by Phillip Thorne

T

he future shock of rapid chines, and products at the atomic million times smaller and working a change and technology level—putting them together mole- million times faster, with parts and run amok described by cule by molecule. With parts only a workpieces of molecular size.”

Alvin Toffler in his 1970 few nanometers wide, it may become Unlike any machine ever built, the best seller has perhaps been possible to build a supercomputer nanofactory will be assembled from less debilitating for most smaller than a grain of sand, a t h e b o t t o m u p , c o n s t ru c t e d o f people than predicted, but even Tof- weapon smaller than a mosquito, or specifically designed and placed fler could not have envisioned the a self-contained nanofactory that sits molecules. Drexler says, “Nanotechtidal wave of change that will hit us on your kitchen counter. nology isn’t primarily about miniawhen nanofactories make the scene.

“Picture an automated factory, full turizing machines, but about extendImagine a world with billions of of conveyor belts, computers, and ing precise control of molecular desktop-size, portable, nonpolluting, swinging robot arms,” writes scien- structures to larger and larger scales. cheap machines that can manufac- tist and engineer K. Eric Drexler, Nanotechnology is about making ture almost anything—from clothing who first brought nanotechnology to precise things big.” to furniture to electronics, and much public attention with his 1986 book Virtually every previous technomore—in just a few hours. Today, Engines of Creation. “Now imagine logical improvement has been acsuch devices do not exist. But in the something like that factory, but a complished by making things smaller years ahead, this advanced and more precise. But as the form of nanotechnology scales at which we work get could create the next Indussmaller and smaller, we aptrial Revolution—or the proach limits imposed by world’s worst nightmare. physics. The smallest unit of The technology described matter we can build with is in this article is molecular the atom, or combinations of nanotechnology (MNT). This atoms known as molecules. is a big step beyond most of The earthshaking insight of today’s nanotech research, molecular nanotechnology is which deals with exploring that, when we reach this and exploiting the properscale, we can reverse direction ties of materials at the and begin building up, nanoscale. Industry has bemaking products by placing gun using the term nanoindividual atoms and moletechnology to cover almost cules exactly where we want any technology signifithem. cantly smaller than miEver since Richard Feyncrotechnology, such as man enunciated MNT’s basic those involving nanoparconcepts in 1959, and espeticles or nanomaterials. This cially since Drexler began debroad field will produce tailing its amazing possibiliimportant and useful reties in the 1980s, proposals sults, but their societal effor building products in varifects—both positive and ous ways have been put negative—will be modest forth. Some of these have The nanofactory at work. A nanofactory will be somewhere compared with later stages been fanciful and many have between a desktop printer and a washing machine in size. of the technology. been impractical. At this Inside, individual molecular assemblers manufacture a single MNT, by contrast, is about point, it appears that the idea product measuring up to four inches. (Based on a design by constructing shapes, maof a nanofactory is the safest Chris Phoenix, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.)

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and most useful method of building general-purpose products by molecular manufacturing.

device that can combine individual molecules into useful shapes. An early plan for molecular manufacturing imagined lots of free-floating assemblers working together to build a single massive product, molecule by molecule. A more efficient approach is to fasten down the assemblers in orderly arrays of chemical fabricators, instruct each fabricator to create a tiny piece of the product, and then fasten the pieces together, passing them along to the next level within the nanofactory.

A human-scale nanofactory will consist of trillions of fabricators, and it could only be built by another nanofactory. But at the beginning, an assembler could build a very small nanofactory, with just a few fabricators. A smaller nanofactory could build a bigger one, and so on. According to the best estimates we have today, a fabricator could make

its own mass in just a few hours. So a small nanofactory could make another one twice as big in just a few days—maybe less than a day. Do Inside a Nanofactory that about 60 times, and you have a The inner architecture of a nanotabletop model. factory will be a stunning achieveBy the time the first working asment, outside the realm of anything sembler is ready, the blueprint for a previously accomplished. Nanobasic nanofactory may already be factories will make use of a vast prepared. But until we have an asnumber of moving parts, each desembler, we can’t make a nanofactory. signed and precisely constructed to Building an assembler is one of do a specific job. Some of these parts the ambitious research projects of will be visible to the human eye.

Zyvex, a Texas firm that bills itself as Most will be microscopic or even “the first molecular nanotechnology nanoscale, smaller than a human company.” Zyvex has gathered many cell. An important feature of a leading minds in physics, chemistry, nanofactory is that all of its parts mechanical engineering, and comwill be fixed in place. This is signifiputer programming to focus on the cant because it greatly simplifies delong-range goal of molecular assemvelopment of the device. Engineers bler manufacturing technology. won’t have to figure out how to tell Along the way, the company has deeach little nanobot in a swarm where veloped some of the world’s most to go and how to get there, and none precise tools for manipulating and of the parts can get lost or testing materials and strucgo wild. tures at the nanoscale. NumerPerhaps the easiest way to ous other projects at research envision the inner workings of universities and in corpoa nanofactory is to picture a rations around the world large city, with all the streets are contributing valuable laid out on a grid. Imagine that knowledge to the field. in this city everyone works toHow far are we from having gether to build gigantic proda working assembler? A 1999 ucts—ocean liners, for inmedia report on nanotech said, stance. To build something that “Estimates vary. From five to big, you have to start with 10 years, according to Zyvex, small parts and put them too r f ro m e i g h t t o 15 y e a r s , gether. In this imaginary city, a c c o rd i n g t o t h e re s e a rc h all the workers stand along the community.” streets and pass the parts along And how long will it take to each other. The smallest from building a single assemparts are assembled on the narbler to having a fully funcrowest side streets, and then tional nanofactory? The report handed up to the end of the continues, “After that, it could block. Other small parts from be decades before we’ll be able other side streets are joined toto manufacture finished congether to make medium-sized sumer goods.” This reflects the parts, which are joined tocommon wisdom, but it’s gether to make large parts. At wrong. Very wrong. the end, the largest parts conThe Center for Responsible verge in one place, where they Nanotechnology (CRN), a nonare joined together to make the profit think tank co-founded finished product. A nanofacby this author, published a detory performs in this way, with tailed study in summer 2003 of Factory products can be engineered to expand into multiple assembly lines operthe work required to progress larger configurations, and to join seamlessly into yet ating simultaneously and from a single assembler to a larger constructions or objects. The walls of these playsteadily feeding into each full-fledged nanofactory that cubes have a foamlike structure made of only a few other. can create a wide variety of microns of a material 100 times stronger than steel.

The first and hardest step in low-cost products. The starEach lightweight cube uses tiny anchors to keep it from building a nanofactor y is tling conclusion of this report blowing away like tumbleweed; similar mechanisms join building an assembler, a tiny is that the span of time could the cubes together into a play-castle.

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be measured in weeks—probably less than two months. And what will the first nanofactory build? Another one, and another one.

Each nanofactory will be able to duplicate itself in as little as a few hours, or perhaps a half a week at most. Even using the most conservative estimate, in a couple of months you could have a million nanofactories, and a few months after that, a billion. Less than a year after the first basic assembler is completed, every household in the world conceivably could have its own nanofactory.

Creativity Unleashed Before a tidal wave strikes, another dramatic event—usually an earthquake or major landslide— must occur to trigger it. The first generation of products to come out of nanofactories—inexpensive but high quality clothing, furniture, electronics, household appliances, bicycles, tools, building supplies, and more—may be like that: a powerful landslide of change, but only a portent of the gigantic wave that is to follow.

Most of these early products will probably be similar to what are current at the time nanofactories begin production. Because they are built by MNT, with every atom precisely placed, they will be better in every way—stronger, lighter, cheaper—but they still will be built on existing models.

The world-changing shock wave will hit when we realize that we no longer need be restricted to existing models—not when a supercomputer smaller than a grain of sand can be integrated into any product, and not when people everywhere—young, old, male, female, technical, nontechnical, practical, artistic, and whimsical—will have the opportunity to be designers.

MNT product design will be eased

by CAD (computer-aided design) programs so simple that a child can do it—and that’s no exaggeration.

New product prototypes can be created, tested, and refined in a matter of hours instead of months and without the expense of traditional production facilities. No special expertise is needed beyond the skill for using CAD programs—only imagi30

Exploring Tomorrow

nation, curiosity, and the desire to create.

Within months, conceivably, even the most up-to-date appliances, machines, communication media, and other electronics will be outmoded.

Imagine embedding “smart” gadgetry into everything you own or might want to have. Demand for these new products will be intense.

The cost of manufacturing them may be almost negligible.

To maximize the latent innovation potential in nanofactory proliferation, and to help prevent illicit, unwise, or malicious product design and manufacture, CRN recommends that designers work (and play) with modular nanoblocks of various compositions and purposes to create a wide variety of products, from consumer goods and educational tools to building supplies and even new modes of transportation. When combined with automated verification of design safety and protection of intellectual property, this should open up huge new areas for originality and improvement while maintaining safety and commercial viability.

Working with nanoblocks, designers can create to their hearts’ content.

The combination of user-friendly CAD and rapid prototyping will result in a spectacular synergy, enabling unprecedented levels of innovation and development. Among the many remarkable benefits accruing to humanity from nanofactory proliferation will be this unleashing of millions of eager new minds, allowed for the first time to freely explore and express their brilliant creative energy.

It becomes impossible to predict what might be devised then. The smart components and easy design systems of the nanotech revolution will rewrite the rules.

Benefits and Dangers This all adds up to change that is sudden and shocking and could be extremely disruptive.

On the plus side, MNT could solve many of the world’s problems.

Simple products like plumbing, water filters, and mosquito nets— made cheaply on the spot—would greatly reduce the spread of infectious diseases. The efficient, cheap

construction of strong and lightweight structures, electrical equipment, and power storage devices will allow the use of solar thermal power as a primary and abundant energy source.

Many areas of the world could not support a twentieth-century manufacturing infrastructure, with its attendant costs, difficulties, and environmental impacts, but MNT should be self-contained and clean.

A single packing crate or suitcase could contain all the equipment required for a village-scale industrial revolution.

Computers and display devices will become stunningly inexpensive and could be made widely available.

Much social unrest can be traced directly to material poverty, ill health, and ignorance. Nanofactories could greatly reduce these problems.

On the other hand, all this sudden change—the equivalent of a century’s development packed into a few years—has the potential to disrupt many aspects of society and politics.

When a consumer purchases a manufactured product today, he is paying for its design, raw materials, the labor and capital of manufacturing, transportation, storage, marketing, and sales. Additional money— usually a fairly low percentage— goes to the owners of each of these businesses, and eventually to the employed workers. If nanofactories can produce a wide variety of products when and where they are wanted, most of this additional effort will become superfluous. This raises many questions about the nature of a post-MNT economy: Who will own the technology for molecular manufacturing? Will it be heavily restricted, or widely available? Will products become cheaper?

Will major corporations disappear?

Will new monopolies arise? Will most people retire—or be unemployed? What will it do to the gap between rich and poor?

It seems clear that molecular manufacturing could severely disrupt the present economic structure, greatly reducing the value of many material and human resources, including much of our current infrastructure.

Despite utopian postcapitalist hopes,

it is unclear whether a workable replacement system could appear in time to prevent the human consequences of massive job displacement.

MNT manufacturing will allow the cheap creation of incredibly powerful devices and products.

Stronger materials will allow the creation of much larger machines, capable of excavating or otherwise destroying large areas of the planet at a greatly accelerated pace. It is too early to tell whether there will be economic incentive to do this. However, given the large number of activities and purposes that would damage the environment if taken to extremes, and the ease of taking them to extremes with molecular manufacturing, it seems likely that this problem is worth worrying about.

Some forms of damage can result from an aggregate of individual actions, each almost harmless by itself.

For example, the extreme compactness of nanomanufactured machinery may lead to the use of very small products, which can easily turn into nanolitter that will be hard to clean up and may cause health problems.

Collection of solar energy on a sufficiently large scale—by corporations, municipalities, and individuals— could modify the planet’s albedo and directly affect the environment.

In addition, if we are not careful, the flexibility and compactness of molecular manufacturing may allow the creation of free-floating, foraging self-replicators—a “gray goo” that could do serious damage to the biosphere by replicating out of control.

Molecular manufacturing raises the possibility of horrifically effective weapons. As an example, the smallest insect is about 200 microns; this creates a plausible size estimate for a nanotech-built antipersonnel weapon capable of seeking and injecting toxin into unprotected humans. The human lethal dose of botulism toxin is about 100 nanograms, or about 1/100 the volume of the weapon. As many as 50 billion toxin-carrying devices—theoretically enough to kill every human on earth—could be packed into a single suitcase. Guns of all sizes would be far more powerful, and their bullets could be self-guided. Aerospace

Building with Nanoblocks nside a nanofactory, each fabricator will make nanoblocks. A good size for a nanoblock might be a cube 200 nanometers on a side (the distance your fingernails grow in three minutes). This is small enough to be made by a single fabricator in a few hours, but large enough to contain a small CPU, a microwatt of motors or generators, or a fabricator system flexible enough to duplicate itself if given the right commands. In other words, each fabricator could make a substantial piece of nanofactory functionality—and the same modular pieces would be reused in other products.

Once the nanoblocks are made, they would be assembled by simple and reliable robotics. The surfaces of each block will be covered with mechanical fasteners, so that simply picking up two blocks and pushing them together will make them stick. Eight cubes will fit together to make one twice as big: A factory that makes 8 trillion nanoblocks can

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hardware would be far lighter and offer higher performance; built with minimal or no metal, such craft would be much harder to spot on radar.

The awesome power of MNT may cause two or more competing nations to enter into an unstable arms race. Increased uncertainty of the capabilities of an adversary, less time to respond to an attack, and better targeted destruction of the enemy’s resources during an attack all make nanotech arms races less stable than a nuclear arms race. Also, unless nanotech is tightly controlled on an international level, the number of nanotech nations in the world could be much higher than the number of nuclear nations, increasing the chance of a regional conflict expanding globally.

Criminals and terrorists with stronger, more powerful, and more

push them together to get a trillion larger, but still very tiny, cubes. This process is repeated about 20 times, until at the end a very solid and somewhat blocky product is produced.

The product that comes out of a nanofactory will be a mostly solid block or brick. But it would then unfold like a pop-up book or inflate like an air mattress. The mechanical joints between the blocks can make temporary as well as permanent connections, so the unfolding process can be as complex as necessary.

With this system, a designer of nanotech products would not have to know any chemistry. Computeraided design programs will make it possible to create state-of-the-art products simply by specifying a pattern of predesigned nanoblocks.

Nanoblocks will be thousands of times smaller than a cell, so designs specified at the nanoblock level will still have ample flexibility.

—Mike Treder

compact devices could do serious damage to society. Chemical and biological weapons could become much deadlier and easier to conceal.

Many other types of terrifying devices are possible, including several varieties of remote assassination weapons that would be difficult to detect or avoid. If such devices were available from a black market or a home factory, it would be nearly impossible to detect them before they were used; a random search capable of spotting them would be a clear violation of current human rights standards in most civilized countries.

Surveillance devices could be made microscopically small, lowpriced, and very numerous—leading to questions of pervasive invasions of privacy, from illicit selling of sexual or other images to ubiquitous Exploring Tomorrow

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A single hinge-type nanoblock. Fabricated by a molecular assembler, the 200-nanometer cube contains a 50-nanometer electrostatic motor, able to move thousands of times its own weight. The cube’s surface is covered with ridge-like mechanisms to bond tightly to adjacent blocks, plus small connectors to transmit data and power. A finite selection of nanoblocks allows the crafting of larger mechanisms and products. (Based on descriptions

by Chris Phoenix.)

3.2 m m

6.4 m m

12.8 m m

200 nm

Inside the nanofactory, nanoblocks expand and assemble into successively larger structural cells, as illustrated in the middle and bottom drawing. New cells can even reconfigure themselves into new positions, as shown in the bottom illustration. Though the drawing is only two-dimensional, this expansion occurs in three directions to create a complex lattice. Each nanoblock is only 200 nanometers in width.

covert government or industrial spying. Attempts to control all these risks may lead to abusive restrictions, or create a black market that would be very risky and almost impossible to stop, because small nanofactories will be very easy to smuggle and fully dangerous.

Searching for Solutions If you knew that in one year’s time you would be forced to walk a tightrope without a net hundreds of feet above a rocky canyon, how soon would you begin practicing? The analogy applies to nanofactory technology. Because we know it is possible—maybe even probable—that everything we’ve reviewed here could happen within a decade, how soon should we start to prepare?

A report issued by the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics in February 2003 calls for serious consideration of the ethical, environmental, economic, legal, and social implications of nanotechnology. Report co-author Peter Singer says, “Open public discussion of the benefits and risks of this new technology is urgently needed.”

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There’s no doubt that such discussion is warranted and urgent. But beyond talking about ethics, immediate research into the need, design, and building of an effective global administration structure is crucial.

Unwise regulation is a serious hazard. Simple solutions won’t work.

“A patchwork of extremist solutions to the wide-ranging risks of advanced nanotechnology is a grave danger,” says Chris Phoenix, research director for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. “All areas of society stand to be affected by molecular manufacturing, and unless comprehensive international plans are developed, the multiplicity of cures could be worse than the disease. The threat of harm would almost certainly be increased, while many extraordinary benefits could go unrealized.”

We have much to gain, and much to lose. The advantages promised by MNT are real, and they could be ours soon. Living conditions worldwide could be dramatically improved, and human suffering greatly diminished. But everything comes at a cost. The price for safe introduction of the miracles of nanofactory technology is thorough, conscientious preparation.

Several organizations are stepping up to this challenge. For example: • The Foresight Institute has drafted a set of molecular nanotechnology guidelines for researchers and developers. These are mostly aimed at restricting the development of MNT to responsible parties and preventing the production of freeranging self-replicating nanobots.

• The Millennium Project of the American Council for the United Nations University is exploring various scenarios for safe and socially conscious implementation of molecular manufacturing and other emerging

technologies.

These scenarios depict the world in 2050, based on various policy choices we might make between now and then.

• The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology is studying all the issues involved— political, economic, military, humanitarian, technological, and environmental—and developing wellgrounded, complete, and workable proposals for effective administration and safe use of advanced nanotechnology. Current results of CRN’s research lead to the conclusion that establishing a single international program to develop molecular manufacturing technology may be the safest course. The leading nations of the world would have to agree to join—or at least not to oppose—this effort, and a mechanism to detect and deter competing programs would have to be devised.

It will take all this and more. The brightest minds and clearest thinkers, the most energetic activists and committed organizers, the smartest scientists, most dedicated ethicists, and most creative social planners desperately will be needed.

Will it be easy to realize the benefits of nanofactory technology while averting the dangers? Of course it will not. Is it even possible? It had better be. Our future is very uncertain, and it’s very near. Much nearer than we might have thought. Let’s get started.

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About the Author Mike Treder is executive director of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN), a nonprofit research and policy group based in New York City.

Treder is a business professional with a background in technology and communications company management.

His address is 9508 Fourth Avenue, Suite 319, Brooklyn, New York 11209. E-mail mtreder@CRNano.org.