THE FUTURIST, July - August 2014 by World Future Society

Forecasts, Trends, and Ideas about the Future

www.wfs.org

What If... Conference Preview Looking at the Future through A Cartoonist’s Eyes, page 14 Technolife of Romeo and Juliet, page 24 Forest Futures in the Anthropocene, page 34 What Does Moore’s Law Mean For the Rest of Society? Page 40 And much more! PLUS: WORLD TRENDS & FORECASTS

Inventing Tomorrow’s Jobs Making Waves in the Cosmos Cities Helping Cities Mexico’s Dying Languages

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July-August 2014

THE FUTURIST magazine is … “empowering” … “insightful” … “useful” … “visionary” THE FUTURIST magazine—just one of the benefits of membership in the World Future Society—covers the key trends that are converging now and shaping the future. Written and edited for an educated, curious, and highly diverse audience, THE FUTURIST scans the horizon for significant developments in science and technology, environment and resources, society and culture, demographics, economics, policy and governance, and even the methods for studying the future itself. We don’t take a stand on what the future will or should be like—that’s your job! But through World Future Society membership, you’ll find the tools, resources, and partners to build the best future possible.

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July-August 2014 Volume 48, No. 4

A magazine of forecasts, trends, and ideas

about the future

Spirituality of place. Page 27

ARTICLES 14 Looking at the Future through a Cartoonist’s Eyes Written and illustrated by Steven M. Johnson

Missile-mail fail explained. Page 44

Capturing inspiration from “what if,” an artist turned his imagination into a lifetime of serious futuring. Here’s how he does it.

20 Visualizing the Future By Gray Scott

From printable foods to rights for robots, science fiction and science fact are becoming harder to distinguish. Both begin in the mind’s eye.

DEPARTMENTS 2

Tomorrow in Brief

Future Scope

World Trends & Forecasts

• Inventing tomorrow’s jobs, by Thomas Frey • Making waves in the cosmos, by Richard Yonck • Cities helping cities • Mexico’s dying languages

49 Consultants and Services 52 Reviews

• Future Jobs, Gordon • 2013-14 State of the Future, Glenn, Gordon, and Florescu • Computing with Quantum Cats, Gribbin • Data Crush, Surdak • The Future of the Mind, Kaku • The Knowledge, Dartnell • Overpowered, Blank

60 Future Active: International Future Day

24 Technolife of Romeo and Juliet In 2035 By Elina Hiltunen and Kari Hiltunen Rather than attempting to predict future technologies—which will emerge (or not) amid myriad unforeseeable social, environmental, and other forces—futurists can offer stories that dramatize the possibilities ahead.

27 Terra Nova: The Religious Quest for Tomorrow By Jay Gary

Religious imagination first reframed our quest toward tomorrow. Can it still move us in the twenty-first century to recreate our worlds?

32 Backing into Eden, Gardening The World: A Parable By Brenda Cooper

The story of humanity’s domination over nature has reached a critical turning point. As we increasingly recognize the perils ahead, we must also understand the opportunities (and risks) of intervening with nature.

34 Forest Futures in the Anthropocene: Can Trees and Humans Survive Together? By David Bengston And Michael J. Dockry

Threats to forests range from megafires to urban encroachment. Two futurists for the U.S. National Forest Service provide insights on the major issues and potential game changers for the world’s woodlands.

40 What Does Moore’s Law Mean For the Rest of Society? By Clay Rawlings and Rob Bencini

Technology is advancing exponentially. Beware the disruptions to legal systems, society, and the economy, warn the co‑authors of Pardon the Disruption.

44 Deconstructing the Future: Seeing beyond “Magic Wand” Predictions By Karl Albrecht Whether it’s “rocket mail” or selfdriving cars, predictions about the future need to be built on a deep understanding of context and consequences in order to inspire confidence. A business futurist offers insights on how to put wishful thinking, whims, and fads aside in favor of a process of structured inquiry.

64 Future View: Abandoning Ship Titanistad By Jim Tull

Picture the Titanic, grafted on top of the slave ship Amistad—the powerful and wealthy sailing on the backs of the miserable. Once this unwieldy ship falters, all will suffer. Can a vision of paradise, a message of hope, provide a lifeboat for all?

COVER PHOTO: © FRANCK CAMHI / ISTOCK

© 2014 World Future Society. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part without written permission is prohibited. THE FUTURIST is a registered trademark of the World Future Society. Printed in the U.S.A. THE FUTURIST (ISSN 0016-3317) is published bimonthly by the World Future Society, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, Maryland 20814, U.S.A. Included with membership in the World Future Society (dues: $79 per year for individuals; $20 for full-time students under age 25). Subscriptions for libraries and other institutions are $89 annually. Periodicals postage paid at Bethesda, Maryland, and additional mailing offices. • POSTMASTER: Send address changes to THE FUTURIST, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, Maryland 20814. • OWNERSHIP: THE FUTURIST is owned exclusively by the World Future Society, a nonpartisan educational and scientific organization incorporated in the District of Columbia and recognized by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as a nonprofit taxexempt organization under section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code. • CHANGE OF ADDRESS: Write or call Membership Department at the Society. 1-800-989-8274.

Tomorrow

in brief

UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE

Dream:ON app uses specially designed soundscapes to evoke pleasant dreams.

Designer Dreams With the help of a little aural accompaniment, scientists at University of Hertfordshire have developed an app for pleasant dreams. The Dream:ON iPhone app plays carefully selected sounds to evoke soothing experiences, such as a walk in the woods or a sunny afternoon at the beach. Psychology professor Richard Wiseman has collected millions of dream reports since developing the app in 2010, and users acknowledge having morepleasant dreaming experiences. “Having positive dreams helps people wake up in a good mood, and boosts their productivity,” observes Wiseman. “We have now discovered a way of giving people sweet dreams, and this may also form the basis for a new type of therapy to help those suffering from certain psychological problems, such as depression.” Source: University of Hertfordshire, www.herts.ac.uk.

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

Rain Light? Rainwater may soon be used to generate light for lowincome households. Like the power of dams on a much smaller scale, a system called Pluvia feeds rainwater to microturbines to recharge portable 12-volt batteries. While this is only enough electricity to power LED lamps and small appliances, the developers hope to scale the project up to provide power for households. The Pluvia project is the work of students of the Technological University of Mexico and has undergone trials in a poor community in Iztapalapa, in Mexico City. Source: Technological University of Mexico, www.unitec.mx. UNITEC

Age-progression algorithm automatically predicts changes in a threeyear-old’s face at different points.

Rapid Age-Progression Imaging A new age-progression technique promises to help forecast how very young children may look as they age up to 80 years in the future. Current age-progression imaging programs require a starting age of at least seven years, and preferably 15 or older. Now, an algorithm developed at the University of Washington allows for projected imaging of children as young as age

three. The technique involves averaging the way thousands of faces of the same age and gender change from each age bracket, then automatically applying these calculations to an individual. The technique could be a boon for missing children cases. Source: University of Washington, www.washington.edu.

Living Materials

Rain light? The Pluvia system developed by students at the Technological University of Mexico uses rainwater and microturbines to recharge portable batteries.

Unlike nonliving things, live cells respond to their environment, grow, and reproduce. Unlike living things, nonliving materials can do things like conduct electricity and emit light. Material engineers at MIT are now creating hybrid materials that combine the properties of living and nonliving things. In one project, the researchers engineered the bacterium E. coli with peptides that are

able to capture nonliving materials like gold nanoparticles, producing biofilms that are conductive and that have quantum mechanical properties. The new “living materials” could produce highly efficient energy systems, self-healing structures, and even the scaffolding used for tissue engineering. Source: MIT, www.mit.edu. YAN LIANG / MIT

Preserving Musical Scores Early efforts to digitally preserve the great musical scores of the past made a critical mistake: The pages of sheet music were scanned as image files, which could not easily be used or amended by future musicians, arrangers, and conductors. These “locked” masterpieces are now being unlocked thanks to an initiative called Optical Music Recognition from Multiple Sources, led by Lancaster University professor Alan Marsden. The goal is to

make the notes and phrases contained in the music searchable in the same way that words and phrases may be searched in text. The project will be a boon not just to future musicians, but also to scholars (and all music lovers) searching for specific musical passages or comparing works of different composers through the ages. Source: Lancaster University, www.lancaster.ac.uk.

Artist’s concept of bacterial cell engineered with nanofibers incorporating quantum dots (red and green spheres) and gold nanoparticles.

About

this

Issue

A Publication of the World Future Society

Editorial Staff Edward Cornish Founding Editor

Cynthia G. Wagner Editor

Rick Docksai Senior Editor

Keturah Hetrick Staff Editor

Lane Jennings Research Director

Lisa Mathias Art Director

Contributing Editors Clement Bezold, Government Tsvi Bisk, Strategic Thinking Irving H. Buchen, Training Peter Eder, Marketing and Communications Thomas Frey, Innovation Joyce Gioia, Workforce/Workplace Jay Herson, Futurist Community Barbara Marx Hubbard, Images of Man Joseph P. Martino, Technological Forecasting Matt Novak, Historical Futures Joseph N. Pelton, Telecommunications Arthur B. Shostak, Utopian Thought David P. Snyder, Lifestyles Gene Stephens, Criminal Justice Patrick Tucker, Editor at Large Timothy Willard, Biofutures Richard Yonck, Computing and AI

Contact Us Letters to the Editor: letters@wfs.org Subscription/Address Change: info@wfs.org Advertising: jcornish@wfs.org Submissions/Queries: cwagner@wfs.org Permission/Reprints: jcornish@wfs.org Back Issues/Bulk Copies: jcornish@wfs.org Press/Media Inquiries: info@wfs.org Partnerships/Affiliations: tmack@wfs.org Conference Inquiries: swarner@wfs.org Anything Else: info@wfs.org THE FUTURIST World Future Society 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450 Bethesda, Maryland 20814, USA Hours: 9 a.m.–5 p.m. eastern time, weekdays except U.S. holidays Telephone: 301-656-8274 or 800-989-8274 Fax: 301-951-0394 www.wfs.org/futurist

Visionaries and Their Visions I depart from my usual introduction to this issue of THE FUTURIST to report our Founding Editor’s decision to retire. Edward Cornish has served as the World Future Society’s lead visionary, founder, first President (1966-2004), and Editor of this magazine (1967-2010). Since stepping away from daily editorial management, he has remained on the WFS Board and has been our Futurist in Residence, contributing book reviews and essays on “Futurists and Their Ideas.” And he’s come to the office faithfully every day. In the early 1960s, in the seemingly safe suburbs of crisis- ridden Washington, D.C., I as a child was being taught to secure my future through the radiation-protecting maneuver known as “duck and cover.” A few neighborhoods away, a journalist raising his own young family, and equally terrified for their future, knew there had to be a better approach to addressing the many problems our world faced, from nuclear war to polluted landscapes to social injustice. Expressing his fears to friends and colleagues, Ed realized he was not alone. As his vision for uniting others with shared concerns began to form, Ed developed an idea for a publication devoted to the future. Articles and reports would analyze trends and prepare rational forecasts that would help individuals, organizations, and even nations to understand and better direct the future toward peaceful outcomes. And to realize that vision, a nonprofit, nonpartisan scientific and educational organization was created: the World Future Society. For more of this fascinating story, read “The Search for Foresight,” Ed Cornish’s six-part series on the founding of the World Future Society, at www.wfs.org/search-for-foresight (from the home page, click on About WFS > History of WFS). Many early “converts” to futurism also remain very much active, including some who will be at the World Future Society’s conference this July—like Barbara Marx Hubbard, a founding Board member, and independent futurist Hazel Henderson, whose visions of a Solar Age economy have appeared in THE FUTURIST since 1971. Another longtime Society friend is futurist-cartoonist Steven M. Johnson, whose whimsical inventions began appearing on our pages in 1974. He’ll be a keynote speaker at WorldFuture 2014: What If, and you can see a preview of his presentation on page 14 (“Looking at the Future through a Cartoonist’s Eyes”). In fact, all of the articles in this issue are previews of coming attractions in Orlando! We hope you’ll be inspired by these visionaries and join us there. See pages 58-59 for details about the conference. —Cynthia G. Wagner, Editor cwagner@wfs.org

Future Scope Trend scanners notebook Health | Humanity

Shorter-Term Strategies to Break Addiction Individuals who are prone to addiction typically discount the future by choosing instant gratification (e.g., drugs) over a long-term benefit (e.g., health). Ironically, those with higher rates of future discounting may be more responsive to treatment to improve self-control. In a study of people addicted to stimulants, heroin, or tobacco, participants with greater concern for the future were less responsive to training to delay gratification; the reverse was found for those who “live in the moment.” The key appears to be to improve an addicted individual’s working memory, which can enhance self- control, according to Warren Bickel, director of the Addiction Recovery Research Center at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. “A simple cognitive test that measures the degree to which individuals live in the moment might help us personalize treatments for their addictions,” he said in a press statement. Source: Association for Psychological Science, www.psychological science.org. The study “A Quantitative Signature of Self-Control Repair: Rate-Dependent Effects of Successful Addiction Treatment” by Warren K. Bickel et al. was published in Clinical Psychological Science, March 27, 2014.

Climate Change | Earth

Bracing for Rising Seas Freshwater sources may turn to saltwater, wetlands that helped prevent erosion may disappear, and valuable beachfront property may be constantly flooded. These are a few of the possible effects of climate change that places like Miami need to begin preparing for, according to Florida International University scientist Rene Price and other climate researchers. How soon, how fast, and how much sea levels will rise by the end of the century are still unanswered questions, but reliable long-term predictions may be available within the next five years, researchers believe. VIRGINIA FOURQUREAN / NSF

Miami skyline. Scientists anticipate more-precise forecasts for future sea-level increases.

“In Miami, we’re at the forefront of sea-level rise,” Price says. Globally, sea levels are rising at about 2.8 millimeters a year, and climate models project that the rate will accelerate. By 2100, sea levels could rise anywhere between 0.3 meter and 1 meter. A more-precise forecast would help planners to prepare. “That means we’ll know what to expect and have 70 years to plan,” says Price. “In a subject that has so much uncertainty, this gives us the gift of long-term planning.” Source: National Science Foundation, www.nsf.gov.

Management | Commerce

IT’s Next Challenge: “Bring Your Own App” Workers are increasingly using not just their own devices, but also their own favorite applications. This increased self-sufficiency comes as a surprise to IT managers, who grossly underestimate the practice, according to a recent survey by LogMeIn Inc. and Edge Strategies. The study’s authors suggest that the trend is a result of two major drivers in IT: a profusion of cloud services and the “consumerization” of professional services. In other words, instead of asking the office IT manager for help sending large files to a client, employees are opting for services like Dropbox. Since employees are bypassing the IT department’s solutions, some businesses may begin to question the need for an IT department. So, IT professionals, take heed. “We believe that the role of IT needs to be fundamentally redefined if IT professionals want to regain their strategic voice,” warns W. Sean Ford, CMO of LogMeIn. Source: LogMeIn Inc., www.logmein.com.

Medicine | Sci/Tech

WordBuzz: Nanotheranostics We are rapidly entering the “age of nanotheranostics,” says Raj Bawa, president and patent agent for Bawa Biotech LLC and an adjunct professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Medical nanotechnology deployed for both diagnosing and treating disease gives us nanotheranostics. These novel, “combination drugs” will blur the lines between physical devices and chemical drugs, he says, and offer opportunities for progress in medical specialties such as oncology, neuroscience, cardiology, and i mmunology. Bawa will be speaking on nanomedicine at WorldFuture 2014: What If, the World Future Society’s annual conference, in July. ❑

Officers

Staff

President: Timothy C. Mack

Business and Advertising Manager: Jeff Cornish

Treasurer: Kenneth W. Hunter

Conference Director: Sarah Warner

Secretary: Les Wallace

Conference Coordinator: Tom Warner

Directors Edward Cornish founder and former president, World Future Society

Nancy Donovan senior analyst, U.S. Government Accountability Office

Joyce Gioia president and CEO, The Herman Group

John Gottsman president, The Clarity Group

Kenneth W. Hunter (chair) senior fellow, Maryland China Initiative, University of Maryland

Timothy C. Mack president, World Future Society

Eric Meade senior futurist and vice president, Institute for Alternative Futures

Robert P. Moran partner, Brunswick Group

Clement Bezold

Julio Millán

chairman and senior futurist,

president, Banco de Tecnologias, and

Institute for Alternative Futures

chairman, Grupo Coraza, Mexico

Arnold Brown

Joergen Oerstroem Moeller

chairman, Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.

visiting senior research fellow, ISEAS, Singapore

Adolfo Castilla

Ramez Naam

economist, communications professor, Madrid

computer scientist and author

Marvin J. Cetron

John Naisbitt

president, Forecasting International Ltd.

trend analyst and author

Hugues de Jouvenel

Burt Nanus

executive director, Association

author and professor emeritus of management,

Internationale Futuribles

University of Southern California

Yehezkel Dror

Joseph N. Pelton

professor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

founder and vice chairman,

Esther Franklin

Arthur C. Clarke Foundation

executive vice president and director of cultural

Timothy M. Persons

identities, Starcom MediaVest Group

chief scientist, U.S. Government Accountability Office

William E. Halal

John L. Petersen

professor of management science and

president, The Arlington Institute

director of Emerging Technologies Project,

Mylena Pierremont

George Washington University

president, Ming Pai Consulting BV

Peter Hayward

Carol D. Rieg (Vice Chair)

program director, Strategic Foresight Program,

corporate foundation officer, Bentley Systems Inc.

Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Les Wallace

Barbara Marx Hubbard

president, Signature Resources Inc.

president, The Foundation for Conscious Evolution

Jared Weiner

Sohail Inayatullah

vice president, Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.

professor, Tamkang University, Taiwan

Global Advisory Council

Zhouying Jin

Stephen Aguilar-Millan European Futures Observatory

Raja Ikram Azam

president, Beijing Academy of Soft Technology

Francis Rabuck director, Technology Research, Bentley Systems Inc.

Paul Saffo managing director of foresight, Discern Analytics

Robert Salmon former vice president, L’Oreal Corporation, Paris

Marcio de Miranda Santos executive director, Center for Strategic Studies and Management in Science, Brasilia, Brazil

Eleonora Barbieri Masini professor emerita, Faculty of Social Sciences, Gregorian University, Rome

honorary chairman, Pakistan Futuristics Foundation

Sandra L. Postel director, Global Water Policy Project

Maurice F. Strong secretary general, U.N. Conference on Environment and Development

Graham May

Raj Bawa

principal lecturer in futures research,

president/patent agent, Bawa Biotech LLC, and

Leeds Metropolitan University, U.K.

adjunct professor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

The World Future Society is a nonprofit educational and scientific association dedicated to promoting a better understanding of the trends shaping our future. Founded in 1966, the Society serves as a neutral clearinghouse for ideas about the future; it takes no stand on what the future will or should be like. The Society’s publications, conferences, and other activities are open to all individuals and institutions around the world. For more information on membership programs, contact Society headquarters Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern Time. 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, Maryland 20814, U.S.A. Telephone: 1-301-656-8274, Toll free: 1-800-989-8274, Fax: 1-301-951-0394 Web site: www.wfs.org • E-mail: info@wfs.org

World Trends & Forecasts Jobs • Cosmology • Communities • Languages

Jobs | Commerce

Inventing Tomorrow’s Jobs Productivity-enhancing technologies may eliminate jobs, but innovation will create more.

By Thomas Frey By 2030, more than 2 billion jobs will disappear. This is not a doom and gloom prediction; it is a wakeup call for the world. Will we run out of work for the world? Of course not. But the challenge is having paid jobs to coincide with the work that needs to be done, and developing the skills necessary for future work. Our goal needs to be focused on the catalytic innovations that create entirely new industries, and these new industries will serve as the engines of future job creation unlike anything in all history. Predicting future jobs is an exercise that involves looking at future industries and speculating on ways in which they will be different from the workforce today. Business management, engineering, accounting, marketing, and sales are all necessary skills for the future, but the work involved will also be different. A few examples of job-inventing industries: • Personal Rapid Transit Systems: PRTs have the potential to become the largest infrastructure project the earth has ever seen, costing literally trillions of dollars and employing hundreds of millions of people. Jobs created will include station designers and architects, traffic-flow analyzers, command center operators, and construction teams. • Atmospheric Water Harvesting: An emerging solution to one of the earth’s most vexing problems, water harvesting will require site collection lease managers, system architects, and purification monitors. • The Sharing Economy: Not technically an industry, but a new way of living and working that is creating some amazing business models around the use of “other people’s stuff.” Jobs include sharability auditors— people who analyze homes and businesses for sharable assets—and corporate sharing managers.

• The Quantified Self: Big data is building a measurable information sphere around each of us. We will become far more aware of our deficiencies and the pieces needed to shore up our shortfalls, creating opportunities for quantified self-assessment auditors, data context ualists, deficiency analyzers, skill quantifiers, and guardians of privacy. • Commercial Drone Industry: As the FAA develops a plan to incorporate drones into U.S. airspace by S eptember 30, 2015, many in this new industry are chomping at the bit to get started. Jobs created will include drone standards specialists, drone docking designers and engineers, environmental minimizers—e.g., sounddiminution engineers and visual aesthetic reductionists—and backlash minimizers—those who deal with detractors. • 3-D Printing, named by Goldman Sachs as one of eight technologies destined to creatively destroy how we do business. Future jobs include material experts, design engineers, and organ agents for 3-D printed organs. • Internet of Things: Seventy-five billion devices will be connected to the Internet of Things by 2020, projects Morgan Stanley. That’s 9.4 devices for every one of the 8 billion people living just a few years from now. We’ll need lifestyle auditors, efficiency consultants, augmented reality architects, and avatar relationship managers. • Big Data: Social media, blogs, Web browsers, and companies’ security systems are all generating enormous quantities of data, and it all needs to be stored, managed, analyzed, and protected. Future jobs include data interface mavens, opportunity spotters, and waste data managers—those who streamline data storage, ridding our data centers of duplication and clutter. • Crypto Currencies and Alternative Financial Systems: In 2008, the entire world was beginning to panic as our global financial systems teetered ever so close to total meltdown. Out of a growing distrust of banks,

Wall Street, and our entire monetary system, the age of crypto currencies was born. Look for job opportunities for crypto currency bankers, regulators, and lawyers, as well as anonymity advocates and theft recovery specialists. • Driverless Everything: Over the next 10 years, we will see the first wave of autonomous vehicles hit the roads, with some of the first inroads made by vehicles that deliver packages, groceries, and fast-mail envelopes. Emerging career opportunities include delivery dispatchers; traffic monitoring system planners, designers, and operators; automated traffic architects and engineers; driverless “ride experience” designers; and emergency crews (for when things go wrong). • Bio-Factories: Based on using living systems, biofactories represent a new process for creating substances that are either too tricky or too expensive to grow in nature or to make with petrochemicals. The rush to develop bio-factories as a means for production promises not only to revolutionize the chemical industry, but also to transform the economy. Future jobs include gene sequencers, treatment monitors, and bio-factory doctors, strategists, and developers. • Micro Colleges: Colleges today cost far too much, and they take far too long. For this reason, a new wave of full-immersion skill training centers, or Micro Colleges, has begun to emerge. Tomorrow’s job titles include school designers, career transitionists, and goal counselors. • Senior Living: With almost 10,000 Americans turning 65 every day, the number of seniors who need specialized housing will only increase the need for more options and better solutions. Emerging careers include lifestyle housing designers, life-stage attendants, memorial designers, and legacists—those who manage people’s legacy. • Future Agriculture: As with all industries, there are many micro-forces driving the changes in future agriculture. Three dominant trend lines—precision, relevance, and control—will be driving this industry. Opportunities include bio-meat factory engineers, urban agriculturalists, and plant educators—trainers who will work with intelligent plants, which will be capable of reengineering themselves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s marketplace. Extreme Innovation Creates Innovative Jobs Outside of the multiple categories listed above are a number of unusual jobs, many still decades away. Here are just a few to whet your appetite. Extinction Revivalists—people who revive extinct animals. Robotic Earthworm Drivers. The most valuable land on the planet will soon be the landfills, because that is

where we have buried our most valuable natural resources. In the future, robotic earthworms will be used to silently mine the landfills and replace whatever is extracted with high-grade soil. Avatar Designers. Next-generation avatars will become indistinguishable from humans on a twodimensional screen. It is only a matter of time before they emerge from the computer and appear as visual beings, walking around among us. Gravity Pullers—the first wave of people to RUDALL 30 / BIGSTOCK unlock the code for influencing gravity. Clone Ranchers.

Raising “blank” humans will be similar in many respects to cattle ranching. But once a clone is selected, and the personality download is complete, the former clone will instantly be elevated to human status.

Body Part and Limb Makers. The Organ

Agents listed above Falling up? Gravity pullers may will quickly find themtake control of this force. selves in a different line of work as soon as we figure out how to efficiently grow and mass produce our own organs from scratch. Global System Architects. We are transitioning from national systems into global systems. Architects of these new global systems will play a crucial role in future global politics. Memory Augmentation Therapists. Entertainment is all about the great memories it creates. Creating a better grade of memories can dramatically change who we are and pave the way for an entirely new class of humans. Time Brokers, Time Bank Traders. Where do you go when you run out of time? Naturally, to the time-bank to take out a time-loan. Space-Based Power System Designers. At some point, the burning of Earth’s natural resources for power will become a thing of the past. Space-based systems will capture and transmit power far more efficiently than anything currently in existence. Brain Quants. Stock-market manipulators of the past meet the brain manipulators of the future to usurp control of marketing and messaging on Madison Avenue. Nano-Weapons Specialists. Many of the weapons of

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THE FUTURIST

July-August 2014

World Trends & Forecasts the future will be too small to be seen by the human eye. “Heavy Air” Engineers. Compressed air is useful in a wide variety of ways. However, we have yet to figure out how to compress streams of air as they pass through our existing atmosphere. Once we do, it will create untold opportunities for non-surface-based housing and transportation systems, weather control, and other kinds of experimentation. Amnesia Surgeons—doctors who are skilled in removing bad memories or destructive behavior. Geoengineers, Weather Control Specialists. We are moving past the age of meteorology and climatology to one where the true power brokers will wield the forces of nature. These are just a few of the new opportunities that could emerge from innovation in technologies and industries. Automation is no longer the domain of the elite few, and the quicker we can make the transition to all industries, the quicker everyone can participate. When we automate jobs out of existence, that doesn’t mean there is no work left to do. We are freeing up human capital, and this human capital can be put to work creating millions of new jobs in thousands of new industries. It will, however, require a whole new level of systems thinking to unleash these pent-up ambitions.

BICEP2 COLLABORATION FIGURE, COURTESY OF NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

Curly “B-mode” pattern (red and blue shading) observed with the BICEP2 telescope. Line segments show the polarization from different spots on the sky. “The swirly B-mode pattern is a unique signature of gravitational waves because of their handedness,” said Chao-Lin Kuo of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, one of the BICEP2 collaborators. “This is the first direct image of gravitational waves across the primordial sky.”

STEFFEN RICHTER, BICEP, COURTESY OF NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

Thomas Frey is executive director of the Da Vinci Institute and the Innovation editor of THE FUTURIST. This article is adapted from his post on the Futurist Blog (March 21, 2014). More about these and other future job titles and industries can be found at futuristspeaker.com.

Cosmology | Sci/Tech

Making Waves in the Cosmos What the detection of gravitational waves means for our understanding of the universe.

Sun sets behind BICEP2 and the South Pole Telescope at the National Science Foundation’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. “The South Pole is the closest you can get to space and still be on the ground,” said BICEP2 collaboration leader John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “It’s one of the driest and clearest locations on Earth, perfect for observing the faint microwaves from the big bang.”

By Richard Yonck Earlier this year, a research team rocked the world of physics when it announced that it had detected gravitational waves. This discovery has huge significance for many areas of study. However, its greatest impact will be on our understanding of the big bang that gave birth to our universe and of the very early stage in its evolution known as inflation. In order to appreciate the magnitude of this discovery, it helps to know a few things about cosmology.

THE FUTURIST

July-August 2014

•

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Cosmology is the study of the origin and evolution of the universe. Our understanding of it has been built on for millennia, from Ptolemy, who placed Earth at its center, to the incrementally more accurate understanding made possible by giants such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. It was subsequent work that really expanded our view—quite literally. In his general theory of relativity, Einstein introduced a cosmological constant in an effort

Even when inflation had ended, the universe still reto force a static universe from his equations. Later, he mained extremely hot. Only after it had cooled to retracted this when the work of Edwin Hubble and otharound 4,000°C—about 377,000 years after the big ers pointed fairly conclusively to an expanding bang—did the epoch known as recombination begin. universe. While photons existed prior to this, it was impossible But what is the universe expanding from? Based on for them to move any distance, due to the universe’s the standard model of physics, it’s possible to “reverse high state of ionization, so the cosmos wasn’t transparengineer” this expansion to within an instant of its outent to light. set—the very beginning of the big bang. This indicates everything began from a cosmic singularity, a point of near-infinite density and temperature. When it started to expand (it didn’t go “bang”), there was a pe“[An] urgent, compelling account of how 21st-century riod during which, according to recent theomedicine is being hampered by a regulatory regime built for ries, the universe grew far faster than the speed the science of the 20th century.”—Wall Street Journal of light. This was the period of inflation, when the universe grew 50 orn expert in science, technology and ders of magnitude in a public policy explains why the coming billion trillion trillionth age of molecular medicine will of a second. It’s theotransform our lives—but only if we confront the rized that this was out-of-date regulatory system that threatens to caused by inflatons— derail it. high-energy fields similar to dark energy and the Higgs field. After “An important new book… Huber writes that that, the universe shifted whatever sense current drug approval procedures to the rate of expansion once might have had, their day is done.” we see today. —The Daily Beast — The period of inflation would have flattened out the curvature we’d “[A] provocative, optimistic look at modern otherwise expect to see medicine… Huber’s challenge is sure to spark in the universe and controversy.” —Publishers Weekly smoothed out massive irregularities. Without this, our universe would “A must read for physicians, patients, biotech be very different, and investors, and healthcare politicians, The Cure we most certainly in the Code is the most important policy book of wouldn’t be here to arthe decade, and it could only have been written gue these finer details. by Peter Huber, a polymathic master of both the When thinking about deadly menace and huge promise of bioscience, and scathing critic of the blindness of healthcare the universe, remember bureaucracy.” —GEORGE GILDER, author of that the farther out we Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory search, the further back A City Journal Book of Capitalism we’re looking in time. The light from a galaxy that appears a billion A Member of the Perseus Books Group light-years away left it a billion years ago.

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World Trends & Forecasts This “wall” is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which registers to us as a nearly uniform field, 2.7° above absolute zero. It’s the farthest we are theoretically able to look back in time and make direct observations of our early universe. Anything earlier has been deemed impossible to detect. Until now. The second-generation Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP2) is based in Antarctica. Using extremely sensitive equipment, the team managed to extract patterns from the CMB that show a strong indication of being gravitational waves from the inflation epoch of the big bang. BICEP2 used a series of polarization-sensitive detectors to achieve this. Polarization is when the waves in an energy field are aligned perpendicular to their direction of travel. The study examined microwave frequencies, mapping the polarization left in place when the phase change that resulted in the recombination epoch occurred. If these observations are corroborated by subsequent experiments, this will be the farthest back in time we’ve ever managed to explore. We are witnessing events that occurred fractions of a nanosecond after our cosmos was born. This knowledge not only gives us a window onto a monumental event, but also provides us with new tools for exploring the universe in ways we never could before. The detection of gravitational waves is the last major untested prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, further solidifying one of the most thoroughly tested theories in all of physics. It also offers us a natural laboratory for high-energy interactions far beyond anything we could ever achieve using man-made par ticle accelerators. Finally, it may provide the knowledge needed to take the field of physics from the grand unified theory (which is essentially everything except gravity) to the holy grail of a theory of everything, which includes this most primordial force. Here on Earth, one very human issue that this work raises is who should get credit for it. In any one year, the Nobel Prize in Physics can be awarded to a maximum of three candidates, but as seems to be happening more frequently, it’s uncertain who these should be. The idea of inflation was initially attributed to MIT theoretical physicist Alan Guth, who conceived it in 1979, but Russian physicist Alexei Starobinsky was also working on the idea then. And several others also introduced variants in subsequent years. Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde developed a version known as chaotic inflation, which resolved some of Guth’s anomalies, though he wasn’t the only one to do so. Then there’s the team that developed BICEP2 itself. And how can we forget those who calculated the gravitational waves that the experiment de-

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tected, including Stephen Hawking? The fact is that many of our greatest achievements come not from individual efforts, but from works of collaboration. It’s easy to think of this discovery as ivory tower science, far removed from the realities of everyday life. Yet, so much of what’s behind it will continue to build our understanding of the universe’s most basic forces and allow us to create the new miracle devices of tomorrow. From microchips to moonshots, theoretical physics has driven our command of technology and our world. This amazing achievement will be no different. Of course, its major impact will be that it lets us better model our universe (or perhaps the multiverse), helping us gauge its continued evolution and final fate in that most distant future we’re all inevitably moving toward. Richard Yonck is a foresight analyst for Intelligent Future Consulting in Seattle and is the Computing/AI contributing editor of THE FUTURIST.

Communities | Governance

Cities Helping Cities to Build Better Futures A new Web site crowdsources solutions to urban challenges. As diverse as the world’s cities and towns are, many face similar problems—and many can use similar strategies to solve them. This is the thinking behind a new Web site, GreaterPlaces.com, which publishes success stories in urban design. A visitor to the site, which debuted February 14, can type an issue that his or her community is facing into the home page’s search box. Case studies of communities that developed unique solutions to that issue will appear. Every case study comes from a resident of that community, explaining a challenge that the community was facing and the solution that it devised, with accompanying graphs, maps, and photographs. One case study shows how San Francisco decreased bike thefts through bike registration. Another spotlights Singapore’s Master Plan, by which community officials use comics to share new transportation initiatives with citizens. Other case studies involve new uses for historical buildings, plans for making more affordable housing

available, and new street designs that put more amenities in walking distance or give bike riders more and wider lanes. “We’re constantly interviewing people and running tests, asking them what did they find useful,” says project co-founder Lisa Nisenson. “For me, it’s always about looking at what is a challenge or a problem, and solving for that. Cities need to know the spectrum of what’s out there, so they can make better decisions.” A new development project in any town can be a contentious issue, Nisenson acknowledges. She credits her site with giving residents in communities everywhere the chance to put ideas forward and consider their workability. Viewers can see for themselves what other communities are doing. Then they may find something that they might like to try in their own communities.

“A lot of times, there are fights about what development should look like, how tall the buildings should be, where parks and roads should be,” she says. “People say no because they don’t know what a yes should look like, so … it has to be visual. And people need to be honest about what went right, what went wrong, and what should have been done better.” The Web site lists 42 projects as of mid-April, all organized under 19 themes, such as “Affordable Housing,” “Economic Development,” “Participation,” “Publication,” and “Redevelopment.” Among the stories shared: • A depiction of the action plan that Lafayette, Louisiana, put in place to enhance its downtown’s amenities and neighborhood life. The plan encompassed park renovations, new transit options, and a comprehensive revision of the zoning laws.

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World Trends & Forecasts • A story on an Innovation District that took shape on Boston’s waterfront. The waterfront was a littleused part of town, according to the post, but it sprang to life after the city made it the site of District Hall, a large new public facility that offers meeting rooms and work stations for startup businesses and nonprofits. • A post showcasing research by University of Chicago urban-design professor Gordon Douglas on the numerous U.S. neighborhoods where residents saw the need for a public sign and put one up without waiting for the city to approve it. In this latter post, Douglas narrates several examples of citizen action in a short embedded video. There is the “No Parking on Sidewalk” sign that an anonymous resident tacked up on a lamppost on Hoyt Street in Brooklyn, and the seven-foot-long wooden footbridge that Queens, New York, residents built over a sidewalk that was chronically flooded by a leaky water pipe. A third example takes place in Raleigh, North Carolina. A resident named Matt Tomasulo put up signs at key intersections to guide visitors on where to find certain hard-to-spot streets or venues. “It is a Two Minute Walk to Orchard Street,” reads one sign that also displays a bold left-pointing arrow to indicate the way. “It is a Four Minute Walk to Broome Street,” reads another, which also points the way with a bold right-pointing arrow. “I researched how to go about getting permission to hang signs in Raleigh, and it was going to take six to eight months to get permission and $1,200 worth of liability insurance. So I just decided to install quick cheap and light signs around the city depicting how many minutes by foot it was to different destinations. And it took about an hour overnight,” Tomasulo states in the video. Nisenson receives more case studies constantly and is working now on several site modifications. She plans to add a discussion forum for city planners and policy makers to share expertise and guidance, and to organize the case studies in each of the theme subsets further into sub-subset, niche areas. “I’m seeing already where people are asking me very specific things about each of these categories. The whole architecture of the site needs to meet those needs,” she says. The site will likely also be showcasing more case studies outside the United States. Around 30% of GreaterPlaces’ Twitter followers are now international, according to Nisenson, who cites Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as being especially active. She additionally received a positive write-up in March on a blog in Russia. City design is a global challenge, after all. More than half of the world’s population is now urban-based, and

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most experts expect that percentage to rise further as the century wears on. Cities everywhere will look for ways to make life for all their growing populations more comfortable. A Web site that helps them to find viable ideas will surely be a valued asset. —Rick Docksai Sources: Lisa Nisenson (interview), GreaterPlaces, www.greaterplaces .com. “Do-It-Yourself Urban Design—New Research” by Gordon Douglas, GreaterPlaces.com (March 6, 2014).

Languages | Humanity

Mexico’s Dying Languages Spanish is overtaking many native tongues. One-third of the world’s languages are in danger of extinction, but in Mexico, the problem is even worse. Of 143 indigenous languages, 60 are in danger of extinction, according to a statement from the Center for Research and High Studies in Social Anthropology. Of those, 21 are considered critically endangered. More than 6 million of Mexico’s 120 million inhabi tants speak indigenous languages, but most are bi lingual. Students learn Spanish from a young age, and Spanish is the primary language used in the classroom and, often, in the workplace. Over time, there’s been a shift away from needing to speak indigenous languages. Part of that shift is taking place on the playground: Children whose families have moved from a different KETURAH HETRICK

Nahuatl Mazatec Chinantec Chocho Ixcatec Triqui

Mixtec Cuicatec

Mixe

Zoque

Zapotec

Amuzgo Chatino

Chontal

Huave

A map of indigenous languages found in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, based on Cali Chiu? A Course in Valley Zapotec by Pamela Munro, Brook Danielle Lillehaugen, and Felipe H. Lopez (Lulu.com, 2007).

region or country probably won’t know the native lanconcern? For linguists, the answer is simple: Without guage in their new town. The bilingual children they speakers, a language is harder to record and study. encounter are willing to accommodate children who Valuable data can easily become lost, and that can speak Spanish only, and children play and communimake academic research a lot harder. cate using Spanish instead of the native language. Language extinction also matters to the speakers In other cases, children and adults are able to speak themselves. Language is a part of its speakers’ identity, the region’s indigenous language but are more comfortheritage, and culture. A language’s death can represent able using Spanish. The divide is often generational, a larger triumph for colonialism and assimilation. with children and young adults more comfortable Languages also serve as records of human history speaking Spanish and older adults who speak a native and accomplishment. Though less tangible than other language almost exclusively. This can lead to communiforms of human achievement, such as the Parthenon or cation issues: It’s not uncommon for a grandchild to rethe Egyptian pyramids, “languages took hundreds of spond in Spanish to a question his grandmother asks in years to make, and it took the efforts of thousands of her native language. people,” says Daniel Suslak, an Indiana University anThe Mexican government is interested in preserving thropologist whose research focuses on the Mixe- the country’s indigenous languages. Schools that have Zoquean languages native to southern Mexico. tried to promote mother-tongue literacy have found it “They’re these magnificent human achievements, and difficult to institute a bilingual curriculum, because it would be really sad if they disappeared. Having said teachers often came from different regions and weren’t that, it happens all the time.” —Keturah Hetrick fluent in the respective native languages themselves. Sources: Investigacion y Desarrolli, www.invdes.com.mx/. “One-size-fits-all” approaches to indigenous lanMark Sicoli, Georgetown University, personal interview. guage literacy can also impede progress. Take, for ex❑ Daniel Suslak, Indiana University, personal interview. ample, the Zapotec language group. Although related, the dozens of varieties within the Zapotec group are mutually unintelligible to speakers of other varieties. Like many native Mexican languages, Zapotec languages are AND t o n a l — t h a t i s , e a c h w o rd ’ s pitches help to indicate its meaning. A word with falling intonation might have a different meaning from one that ends with an A Cosmic Vision for Our Future Evolution upward inflection. And the tones can vary dramatically across by Ted Chu, PhD Zapotec languages. When it comes to the lanwww.transhumanpotential.com guages’ written forms, tones add an extra layer of complexity. $26.95 cloth / $14.99 eBook 504 pages • Origin Press “[Tones] make the writing system very local. The next town “An elegantly written book that “An astonishing breadth of over or next region over is using a has, for me, the same status as Ray philosophical, religious, and different tone system, so the Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near.” technological reflection on the most words would be written differimportant questions we could ask.” —Michael E. Zimmerman, PhD, ently,” says Mark Sicoli, a GeorgeProfessor of Philosophy, —James Hughes, PhD, University of Colorado (Boulder) town University linguist whose Founder, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies; Trinity College bioethicist work focuses on Zapotec and and author of Citizen Cyborg other Otomanguean languages of Mesoamerica. However, Sicoli says, there’s A transhumanist and futurist, and the former chief economist of General hope that an orthographic system Motors, Ted Chu makes the provocative claim that the human race may in incorporating more tones could fact be a means rather than an end—that humankind will give rise to its evolutionary successors in the posthuman future. be created. Why is language extinction a

HUMAN PURPOSE TRANSHUMAN POTENTIAL:

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WORLDFUTURE 2014 Preview

Looking at the Future through a Cartoonist’s Eyes Capturing inspiration from “what if,” an artist turned his imagination into a lifetime of serious futuring. Here’s how he does it.

Written and illustrated by Steven M. Johnson I have trained myself to be a lateral thinker, and enjoy the chance to mull multiple options. At times, such a process seems interesting in itself, as if I could happily spend time simply thinking laterally, never selecting a particular configuration.

Only after I took work as an analyst in a four-person future trends “think tank” in 1995 at an auto company based in southern California did I start thinking of myself as a “futurist.” The department, one of several maintained by U.S. auto companies, was kept as a secret weapon, a form of insurance against being blindsided by cultural, economic, political, or environmental

trends that could affect their business. Earlier, in the ’60s and ’70s, I had done future-related work as an assistant urban planner working for several private and public city and regional planning firms. I found the work to be tedious and saved my most creative thinking for a growing sideline business as a magazine cartoonist. A competent illustrator, I

could imagine a future scene in a silly, whimsical, or satirical way and draw what I had imagined. My artwork began to appear in The Sierra Club Bulletin (renamed Sierra) and the Journal of the American Institute of Planners. In March 1974, an editor at The Bulletin asked me to imagine 16 future recreation vehicles for an upcoming four-page magazine spread, “RV-II.” He gave me

permission to make them look as strange and comical as possible. When I stopped sketching, I had filled a notebook with 109 images of faux RV models. The published future RV cartoons were sent around by wire service to national newspapers; four were published in THE FUTURIST magazine (“The Future of the Recreational Vehicle: A Fantasy Drawn by Steven M. Johnson,” October 1974). About to turn 36, I discovered I had an untapped ability to spin out

For the cover of the March 1974 issue of the Journal of the American Institute of Planners, I depicted the tension between the newly prosperous classes and impoverished Americans.

entists like Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, who foresaw future technologies. Verne, for example, had a deep understanding of the sciences of his time, coupled with a powerful imagination that allowed him to extrapolate technological trends far into the future. What kind of futurist am I? In an article about my work, New York Times columnist Allison Arieff praised my drawings of future products and scenes while noting that they are often willfully and intentionally “ludicrous.” Steve Heller, columnist for The Atlantic, has called me an “Accidental Futurist.” These assessments hint at my peculiar embrace and practice of futuristic thinking. I’m often asked where I “get” ideas. How did I succeed for nearly six years, 1989-1995, at imagining and illustrating ideas for future products in a weekly feature, “A Step Ahead,” while working as an artist at The Sacramento Bee, a northern California newspaper? Where do I go inside my head, and what is my method for crafting original concepts? Why do I like to design products that are foolish or flawed? What was I thinking when I designed “TVwatching pants”?

variations and combinations of existing and future products. Later on, I listed my occupation on my business card as “Possibilitist.” Looking back, I find it strange that my self-taught ability to “invent” silly products evolved and gradually allowed me to indulge in futuristic speculations.

Some Artists, Writers, and Scientists Are Futurists Futures studies is now a profession; the subject is taught at several universities. Yet, depending on one’s mental capacity, drive, and desire, the ideas generated while brainstorming inside one’s own mind can yield scenarios as rich, nuanced, or prophetic as those produced by trained futurists who sit around a table discussing scenario paths, convergences, triggers, tipping points, and so forth. Novelists have at times imagined scenarios that proved more prophetic than those of futurists. How was it possible in 1898 for writer Morgan Robertson to write a novella, Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, which described a huge ocean liner in the North Atlantic with a shortage of lifeboats, striking an iceberg, drowning approximately the same number of passengers, 14 years before the sinking of the Titanic? There have been talented science fiction writers like Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, and William Gibson, or sci-

My Work Habits and Idea-Generating Process One of the first things I do if I want to think up future inventions or scenarios is set aside time to be alone. I make sure I am not performing a task like planning my day, reading a book, arguing with my wife, or talking on the phone. I am essentially doing nothing. I get comfortable and move into a mental world, with only a vague awareness that there is a pen and notebook nearby. My most creative time for this work is when I am just waking up in the morning. Then, I consciously enter a thought-spinning mode, a kind of semi-dream in which my mind is actively engaged in contrasting and comparing images and concepts, tossing them as if they were juggling balls, flipping them like pancakes. The mental activity shares some

This 1974 drawing of The Vacationeur was one of my first whimsical product inventions.

TV-watching pants.

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In my imagination, if the large yellow object is being considered for “improvement” or modification, I test the effect of adding features (shown in different colors) to it.

The scattered, random flavor of my ideas is shown here by some odd, colored shapes. At the top, my mind has fixed on an interesting, yellow-orange flame shape, and I evolve versions of it.

c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s o f s t r e a m - o f - consciousness thinking and writing, though it takes place exclusively inside the visual part of the imagination. I am imagining physical things, mostly. Saying the process works best when I am half asleep may seem to contradict what I say next: One of the best places and times for my process of active imagination is when I am driving my car on a relatively empty, straight section of freeway. I’ve equipped several cars with a slanted, Naugahyde-covered “drafting board” that leans against the dashboard; this allows me to sketch on a pad placed high up on the board and positioned to minimize eye travel while I keep track of traffic.

Often my best ideas are produced when I intentionally delay the step to narrow down and finalize, so as to choose the “best” option. I allow ideas to boil up and multiply, as if they were in a pressure cooker.

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What Is My Motive for Doing This Work? My reason for creating pseudo- inventions and faux scenes has evolved over the years. Certainly I wanted to entertain myself and others by offering an image that elicits surprise or amusement, that depicts a new or unexpected use or context for a common product or invention. Possibilities for multiple uses interest me. An example of an amusing multiple-use product that I designed in my head while half asleep is “Parka Place.” The idea evolved from a simple speculation that a rainproof parka might be modified to serve as a backpacker’s tent. I liked the awkwardness of the resulting design: It suggested a heavier-than-normal parka and a skimpier-than-normal tent. While it suggested convenience, it also seemed like the kind of invention seen in books of funny U.S. Patent Office drawings. Clever-butdumb has often been the sweet spot for my cartoon-inventions. More recently, I have enjoyed depicting the later, long-term use and possible end point of a technology, sometimes in a surprising or shocking form.

My Artwork Has Depicted Silly, Outlandish, or Serious Concepts I continue to create new drawings for publication, ever since my work was first published in the late 1960s.

My art style has changed little over the past 45 years, though recently I began coloring the line drawings with Adobe Photoshop software. My published drawings have taken several directions: For The Sierra Club Bulletin and other environmental magazines, the drawings were satirical, employing exaggeration, unusual context, or odd juxtaposition to make a point. For In 1973, The Sierra Club Bulletin reported that oil companies example, a 1973 car- had plans for drilling in Everglades National Park. toon called attention to oil drilling proposed for the Evercrime. The book mixed silly, plau glades, depicting an oil-polluted sible future products with futuristic scene in a swampy area renamed images: Public Therapy Buses, InforEverglazed National Park. mation Specialty Bums, Solar Cook-AAfter discovering that I enjoyed Mats and Other Visions of the 21st Centhinking up unusual products, a tury. Of my published works, Public decade later I thought up silly Therapy Buses has been the most propseudo-inventions for a book, What phetic. Future systems and strange the World Needs Now: A Resource Book cityscapes were shown. An exfor Daydreamers, Frustrated Inventors, panded and unabridged edition of Cranks, Efficiency Experts, Utopians, the book was released in 2013, feaGadgeteers, Tinkerers and Just about turing 82 new pages of drawings Everybody Else (1983). Then in 1991, I from old sketches. created a book with captioned drawAmong the invention concepts ings that reflected a more serious displayed in Public Therapy Buses tone, with imagined systems and were ideas for a camera helmet. Such products that dealt with the wealth helmets are now worn by football gap, poverty, homelessness and players, police officers, skydivers,

Parka Place is a multi-use product that serves as either a waterproof jacket or small tent.

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Unusual in both design and appearance are communities with automated (no driver) home package delivery, mail service, garbage, trash, recyclables and clippings collection systems that run day and night. Moving quietly on tracks, utility Toilers halt at homes to make deliveries and take on trash.

and mountain-bike riders. In a section dealing with future crime, I showed bulletproof clothing for schoolchildren. Sadly, an actual product identical to what I had imagined became available in 2013.

Books by Steven M. Johnson

A New Book Describes My Thinking Process In 2012, a third book was published: Have Fun Inventing: Learn to Think Up Products and Imagine Future Inventions. The book describes my methods for churning images inside my mind to create unexpected, new concepts. It describes my successful and less successful predictions. On occasion I have stepped aside from my trademark silly images and speculated seriously about future technology. In 1992, for the now defunct magazine Desktop, I pondered future uses for Apple’s Newton. For the article, I depicted a device that looks similar to Google Glass. The study of the future is a practice that yields fascinating insights that can light up one’s mind: “Of course, that will happen!” These speculations at times affect or run parallel to unfolding events. Many thinkers and artists work as futurists unconsciously or unintentionally. Moviemakers, especially, are adept at hiring novelists and screenwriters who can tap into future trends in technology, or depict scenes that objectify our worst fears. 18

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A 1992 proposal for screen-image-viewing glasses, similar to Google Glass introduced 21 years later.

Even while working as a cartoonistinventor, I have wandered into areas that are more commonly the subject of big-budget studies by future studies think tanks. Perhaps I should call myself a cartoonistinventor-futurist! ❑ About the Author Steven M. Johnson is a cartoonist-inventor, former urban planner, newspaper artist, and auto company future trends analyst, who lives in Carmichael, California. This article is a preview of his keynote luncheon presentation, “An Artist-Inventor Sees the Future,” at WorldFuture 2014: What If, which will take place July 11-13 in Orlando, Florida. He is also offering a special two-hour preconference workshop on “How to Invent the Future.”

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• Have Fun Inventing: Learn to Think Up Products and Imagine F u t u re I n v e n t i o n s (BookSurge Publishing, 2012). How thinking sideways can yield imaginative yet plausible scenarios and inventions. • Public Therapy Buses, Information Specialty Bums, Solar Cook-A-Mats and Other Visions of the 21st Century: Second Edition, Unabridged (P atent Depending Press, 2013). How an imaginative mind can turn dark problems into inspired solutions. • What the World Needs Now: A Resource Book for Daydreamers, Frustrated Inventors, Cranks, Efficiency Experts, Utopians, Gadgeteers, Tinkerers and Just about Everybody Else: Third Edition (Patent Depending Press, 2012). Silly “what if” products that turned out to be highly marketable include cuddly animalshaped sleeping bags for children and multi-use furnishings like the flip-over desk.

REVOLUTIONARY

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WORLDFUTURE 2014 Preview

Visualizing the Future By Gray Scott From printable foods to rights for robots, science fiction and science fact are becoming harder to distinguish. Both begin with pictures in the mind’s eye.

What if visualization, imagination, and art could change the future? Life imitates art, and life is now imitating science fiction. Visualize this. Imagine a time in the future filled with “magical” technologies. Vertical farms, teleportation of 3-D printable food, and advanced biotechnology have eradicated hunger around the world. Age reversal has become possible, and human longevity has reached several hundred years. Automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and the new age of advanced self-replicating robots have freed humanity of the archaic idea of work. The word “job” has vanished from the human lexicon. Humans now spend their time in pursuit of higher realms of artistic, cognitive, and scientific exploration. Imagine a future where we have become a multi-planetary species, with colonies on Mars, Titan, and Europa. Rumors of the first successful time-travel jump are circulating, and humanity finalizes its constituWFS ILLUSTRATION / THUFIR, BIGSTOCK

tion of “Rules and Ethics of Time Travel.” Teleportation of people and goods has become common, and we are on the verge of becoming interstellar beings. We are projecting our consciousness into the cosmos. We are dancing among the stars. Sexbots have begun to demand digital rights, voting rights, and the right to unionize. Pure-bio women are electing to use artificial wombs to birth their babies, and an entire generation of women never know what natural childbirth is like. Advanced robotics and biotechnology in the future have allowed humans to create personal DNA replicant robots, known as clonebots. These clonebots act as representatives in our absence and have the same rights as the original human. Clonebots have been capped at three per person, except for celebrities, who can pay a clonebot tax for each additional clonebot. The rigid membrane of personhood begins to become more porous in the future. Man and machine have become almost indistinguishable, and we have become transhuman. This future is a post-privacy age of total cooperative and holistic transparency. Digitally assisted telepathy and brain–computer interface devices have forced hackers, corporations, and governments to drop the veil of anonymity. Nationalism is a thing of the past. The concept of the individual is rejected in many cultures in favor of digital hive mind. Freed from the burdens of maintaining the needs of the individual self, humanity begins to develop at an astonishing rate. Like any other evolutionary process, the future is becoming more complex.

Fiction or Fact? Dystopia Or Utopia? This future visualization I have just described may sound like science fiction to most people outside of the futures and foresight field, but the fact is, technologists and scientists around the world at this very moment are trying to make these futures a reality. Is this future visualization the future we want for ourselves? For some, the visualization described above may sound like a dreadful dystopian nightmare, but

shades of gold and purple. I could see the sunlight reflecting off the water of a brisk stream. I could see the leaves twisting in the fall wind. I began to “see” the finished picture in my mind in vivid detail. She finished the guided visualization and said, “Open your eyes and draw what you see.” Her words and this act of visualization changed the course of my life forever. I was 10 years old. Little did either of us know at the time, but she had just taught me to become a futurist. From that moment forward, I have used future visualization to see the outcome I prefer in my personal, professional, and social life. I have used it to visualize better future scenarios. The best predictor of future visualization is past visualization—sort of. Most innovators, artists, and futurists know a great secret: To change the world, you need to see things in a new way. You must turn the world on its head and invert the status quo. We must travel into undiscovered territories of the mind and become a student of risk. Seek out the underdog and find out everything they know. Study the geometry in nature. Look for the hidden connections in every obscure pattern. This undiscovered cosmos of information is all around us, and it is the key to visualizing the future we prefer. To visualize our future, we must bravely dialogue with our unconscious minds. We must jump off high intellectual ledges into the primal darkness. Not everyone will do this work and not everyone can survive this work, but if we ever hope to become an evolved species worthy of interstellar travel, our cosmos will accept nothing less. Black holes and supernovas be damned, we must visualize ourselves living long and prospering. It is this counterintuitive approach to the future that has given us great technological advancements, brilliant minds, and visionary leaders. But now we face a world in great peril. The climate is a mess, our oceans are reaching toxic tipping points, and our children are mass murdering each other in schools around the world. How do we teach future visualization, bravery, and in-

for others, it may sound like a true utopia. Governments, philosophers, and universities will be debating these scenarios for years. Wars will rage over what direction to proceed into the future, but one thing remains: The future begins to form by visualizing what we want, what we prefer, and what we fear. As philosopher Alan Watts once said, “Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.” Today, science fiction and science fact are becoming hard to distinguish. Science-fiction writers must almost play in the realm of fantasy to be ahead of our current science. Every new headline sounds like a parody or an April Fools’ joke. I often find myself checking the research from major news sources just to confirm that the stories are real. It feels as if we are slipping faster and faster into the future. So where do these future ideas emerge from? What is the connection between visualization and the material world? Can we use the power of future visualization to influence our future? I was first introduced to the concept of future visualization by a private art instructor—a gifted woman in her 60s with an amazing eye for light, color, and design. She talked of seasonal color and light reflected on hard surfaces. She talked of perception, contrast, and the mind’s eye. During our second session together, she leaned in over my shoulder to see what I was sketching and said, “You must see the finished image in your mind first. If you can’t visualize it in your mind’s eye, you will never be able to paint it.” She asked the students to stop drawing, close our eyes, and “see” the image in our minds’ eyes. I had never heard of the mind’s eye. I had no idea what she was referring to. She began to lead us into a guided visualization. I had never consciously sat and visualized beforehand a picture in my mind. Suddenly, as she was talking, I was able to control the light in the landscape. I could move the sun around. I could change the elevation of the mountains and turn the sky into deep www.wfs.org

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novation to our children? How do best known for creating the original we help our friends, clients, and par- Star Trek series. Even if you have never read a science-fiction novel, ents to understand this process? The best way is to develop pro- you know what Star Trek is. Roddengrams, classes, and workshops based berry helped culture around the on preferred future visualization. world to visualize the concept of a Why should we accept poverty, pol- tricorder, the wireless communicator, lution, and hunger as realities that and transporters that famously cannot be changed? Why not teach beamed our future space crew up our children to visualize futures they and down to alien worlds. However, the future visualizations want? Most inner-city children have never been asked to visualize a uto- from the original Star Trek as well as pian future for themselves. Sure, we Star Trek: The Next Generation are now becoming science ask them what colfact. For example, lege they want to atGRAY SCOTT the Star Trek food tend, what they replicator now exwant to be when ists. The 3D Systems they grow up, and ChefJet™ can print how much money geometric chocolate they want to make. candy and cakes on But when do we demand. Captain give them the freeKirk’s handheld d o m t o v i s u a l ize communicator mantheir very own utoifested as the firstpia and then ask generation mobile them to go out and m a k e i t h a p p e n ? An edible, 3-D cake created with a r e v o l u t i o n f l i p phones, and the Why do we limit our ChefJet printer. tractor-beam techimaginations when nology that capwe now know that GRAY SCOTT tured the Starship science fiction and Enterprise so often is fantasy are becombecoming a reality. ing realities? Physicists at New The future will be Yo r k U n i v e r s i t y built in the imaginahave been able to tion of the brave capture and move people who believe microscopic particles anything is possible. using a so-called optical conveyor tracScience Fiction Fact tor beam. Science-fiction “This is science writers have had an fiction made real,” enormous influence says NYU physics on science, art, and professor David the development of Grier, one of the cocultures around the authors of a paper world. Arthur C. on the optical conC l a r k e , I s a a c A 3-D printed abstract shape, like veyor. “This tractor Asimov, H. G. Wells, a Rorschach “hack” to energize beam moves objects creativity. Philip K. Dick, and back to its source, George Orwell are just like those in so just a few who once many sci-fi movies, envisioned technologies that we but with very small pieces.” This have developed today. Some of them technology may not be capturing tried to warn us of possible doom, alien warships anytime soon, but and others tried to inspire us to this is another great example of how achieve greater futures. science imitates science fiction. No one helped generalized future Science fiction acts as a philosophvisualization to the masses more ef- ical and psychological playground, a fectively than Gene Roddenberry, place to safely decode what I call the 22

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future maps of cultural echoes. These future maps begin in the imagination and psychology of each culture. If we want to visualize these future maps, all we need to do is listen to the patterns echoing over and over in culture. One pattern that echoes in every culture is the desire and drive to move information. The cosmos appears to be an infinitely regressive information system, and one of the rules of this system is to keep moving information. The echo here is simple: Move information, and move it fast. Science-fiction writers who see these echoes are the ones who write about teleportation, interstellar travel, and wormhole travel. Teleportation was once believed to be impossible. However, Juan Yin at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai claims to have teleported entangled photons over a distance of 97 kilometers (about 60 miles). We won’t be able to teleport ourselves to our next vacation destination in the next five years, but we will see advancements in this technology over the next several decades. Another example of cultural echoes is the explosion of social media. Before social networks like Facebook and Twitter, people felt unheard and unseen. Call it armchair protesting if you like, but social networks have given people a way to organize. We have witnessed toxic corporations, unjust governments, and occasionally nasty celebrities brought to their knees because of these social networks. Facebook tapped into that cultural echo and saw this future map. Mark Zuckerberg must have visualized a glimpse of this future map when he rushed to build Facebook from his Harvard dorm room. The echo was the need to voice a collective opinion (on the attractiveness of female students at the time). Zuckerberg heard the echo and created a future map from it. Today we have Google Glass, Muse (EEG brain sensing headband) by InteraXon, and driverless cars. All are reflections of ideas and fantasies found in science fiction and cultural echoes. I just keep imagining Gene Roddenberry at his typewriter clos-

ing his eyes and visualizing a new horizon, a new humanity, a new future. Simply put, these works of future visualization act as a receiver for our cultural unconscious and collective futures to emerge. Some are based on hard science, and some are based on fantasy. Both help to visualize our future. Both are relevant, and both are necessary to escape the suffocating void of the “give me proof” crowd. Someone must visualize what may be waiting on the horizon, provable or not, and futurists can do this through a deep understanding of cultural echoes and pattern recognition.

Hacking the Collective Neural Network Futurists, science-fiction writers, artists, and designers can actually “hack” neural pathways. That is, they can influence the growth of new neural networks within the human mind by using visualization. I often hear people say “mind blown” when they read about future technologies. What they really mean is “mind hacked.” Their brains are literally creating new pathways. Creating new associations among neurons, this play between the white and gray matter of the human brain affords future visualization its greatest power. If you change the brain and the culture, then the innovations—and eventually the world—will follow. Each of us lives under the influence of our own personal neural networks. People who believe anything is possible live in a neural network that is rich with future potential. These are the remarkable leaders and visionaries of our time. Yet, sadly, people who are under the influence of negative neural networks often foster and strengthen these negative networks in every decision they make. The “three-pound universe” they live in is a dystopian place filled with bad luck and unhappily ever-afters. Orwellian overlords, climate-change Armageddons, and Big Brother dystopias are the only future they can visualize. Yet, in the face of some of our greatest current challenges, we see incredible innovations and technolo-

gies growing at an exponential pace around the world. For example, a 17-year-old U.S. high-school student named Jack Andraka developed the first early test for pancreatic cancer. An 18-year-old girl named Eesha Khare created a supercapacitor that can charge a cell phone in 20 seconds. And in Istanbul, 16-year-old Elif Bilgin created a bioplastic made from banana peels. These are the neural networks, the utopian threepound universes, that will change our future. So how can we alter and hack into our neural networks? The fastest way to hack our personal and collective neural network is to visualize the future as we wish it to be. Visualize a future world. What is the climate like in this future world? What challenges can you imagine that this world will face, and what innovations need to be applied? What does it feel like to live in this world? What does the horizon look like? What is the environment like? Science-fiction writers call this scenario world building, but I call it future building. It is a powerful visualization that can be used in corporate, economic, and creative futurolo g y. S t e p p i n g a w a y f ro m t h e statistics can allow us and our clients to reboot and hack into a new level of pattern recognition and innovation. I’ve begun to produce 3-D printed abstract shapes as a way to energize my writing and my creative approach to visualizing the future. Think of them as 3-D Rorschach hacks for the neural networks. I can project my vision and imagination onto these objects and dive down into the details. I can imagine these objects as vertical farms, or turn them sideways and picture them as a future floating city. This exercise has sparked multiple ideas about architectural surfaces, environmental innovations, and rainwater purification. Using these real-world abstract shapes can inspire and rejuvenate our perceptions of time, space, and the future. Another way that we can tap into future visualization is by using augmented and virtual reality. The ability to project our imagination onto the real world will change the way we visualize the future. Imagine if www.wfs.org

the brilliant architect Zaha Hadid could put on a pair of augmented- reality glasses that enabled her to walk out into an undeveloped landscape and design within the environment. She could then transform and visualize her newest building in real time. She could construct her vision of the design and see it in this augmented state, then send the design to her team. The space-time between imagination and creation is getting smaller as we move toward smaller computers and wearable technologies. Google Glass may have been the first to make wearable smart glasses known to a wide audience, but the field is about to get very crowded. Smart glasses like MetaPro, Recon Jet, Telepathy One, Epiphany Eyewear, Vuzix M100, and GlassUp are just a few innovative smart glasses to emerge recently. All of these smart glasses will allow us to hack into our reality and our visualizations in the near future. In his latest book, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind, physicist Michio Kaku talks extensively about telepathy, telekinesis, mind reading, and a Brain Net to replace the Internet. All are fascinating ideas of how we will be able to hack into our collective neural network. I imagine that in the near future we will have the ability to record our visualizations and print them out into 3-D forms. Just send your vision of a new design or sculpture directly to your 3-D printer from your EEGenabled smart glasses, and in a matter of minutes you have a perfect visualized idea in your hands. From imagination to reality in the blink of an eye. This is the future. ❑ About the Author Gray Scott is a futurist, speaker, artist, writer, and editorial director of SeriousWonder.com. He is a contributing writer for The Futurist Blog and a professional member of the World Future Society. He lives in New York City. This article is a preview of his presentation at WorldFuture 2014: What If, the World Future Society’s conference to be held in Orlando, Florida, July 11-13.

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WORLDFUTURE 2014 Preview

Romeo and Juliet By Elina Hiltunen and Kari Hiltunen Rather than attempting to predict future technologies—which will emerge (or not) amid myriad unforeseeable social, environmental, and other forces—futurists can offer stories that dramatize the possibilities ahead.

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echnologies now surround us race. In the second, technological de- bellion against technology. People in our everyday life, and velopment has taken a linear path, avoid using high-tech products. technology itself has changed and in the third, technological develBecause of the major effects of cliour lives to a great extent. opment has been exponential—lead- mate change, the population—espeHow well did visionaries of ing to the Singularity in 2035. cially the middle class and poor the past predict this technoNarratives are a powerful tool for people—has turned poorer. City resilife? And how successful will today’s describing the future of technol- dents grow their own food; they canfuturists be in foreseeing the impacts ogy—this is why we have selected a not afford to eat meat or own cars, of tomorrow’s technologies? well-known love story, Romeo and and the technology that they are usHistorically, we can see that two Juliet, to describe the life of ordinary ing is old-fashioned due to lack of different kinds of forecasts have pre- people in these different scenarios. money. The number of climate immivailed: those that are completely As in the original story, Juliet is the grants in Veronice City has increased wrong and those that contain a small daughter of the rich Capulet family. dramatically. seed of truth. In hindsight, it is easy Romeo, unlike in the original story, Romeo belongs to the poorer class of to see the problems with unsuccess- is a petty thief from the Montague society. He makes his livelihood as a ful forecasts, which missed what we family. They are both living in a ficthief and repairing electronic devices. He now see as obvious changes happen- tional Veronice City. happens to meet Juliet at a party where ing in technology. he has sneaked in with his friends to On the other hand, when we look steal all the valuables of the guests. at the visionaries who have sucAs the youngsters meet, they inceeded in their forecasts, we might stantly feel like they belong together— wonder what their secret to without knowing anything about seeing the future is. The “sethe background of each other’s a powerful tool for describing the cret” talent of these successfamilies. It so happens that their ful visionaries may simply future of technology—this is why we have families are the worst of enemies. be good luck: Technology The disparities between Romeo selected a well-known love story, Romeo is linked to a wide variety and Juliet’s social-economic staof societal and market and Juliet, to describe the life tus and access to technologies apforces that can have unexpear insurmountable. of ordinary people in these pected effects on the integration of technology in society. different scenarios. ” An example is genetic manipulation of plants, a form of modern SCENARIO 2. Linear technology that is widely accepted Development of Technology in the United States, but not in EuSCENARIO 1. Failing of Technology is an essential part of rope, where the attitudes of the pubTechnology people’s everyday life. The price of lic and of politicians and legislators In this scenario, the Internet has electronics has dropped, and devices have prevented the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). turned into a playground for crimi- have shrunk in size, becoming invisEuropeans are afraid of the possible nals, which has caused major defects ible and integrated in everyday life. negative impacts of GMO products in the infrastructure of the city. Gov- Wearables are in common use. The on the ecosystem and people’s ernmental and company-based In- calculating capacity of computers health—even though, for example, ternet surveillance has caused has increased dramatically. Robots are a normal part of human an EU research report has stated that people to avoid using it. Ordinary plants that have been gene-manipu- people no longer have access to the life, as assistants and pets. People lated are no more harmful than Internet. There are closed informa- have learned how to clone extinct plants developed with traditional se- tion networks that can be accessed animals, stem cells are used to cure via libraries. Alzheimer ’s disease and cancers, lective breeding. M a j o r p r o b l e m s h a v e a l s o and genome sequencing and gene Because of these various forces affecting technology adoption in emerged in other fields of technol- therapy are standard procedures in society, accurate forecasts may be ogy. Nanotechnology has been health care. And 3-D printing is in impossible. Instead, we present po- found to be harmful to people (caus- everyday use. tential scenarios for the next 20 ing health problems similar to asbesIn this world, Romeo falls in love with years. In the following three scenarios tos), and problems with GMO prodJuliet. By using his spy droid, he discovfor the year 2035, the development ucts have turned people’s attitudes ers that Juliet also has a crush on him. completely against GMOs. Other paths of technology are different. They meet secretly in the virtual world In the first scenario, technology technological developments, such as and then in real life. They get married has practically failed the human cloning, have caused anger and a re-

“NARRATIVES ARE

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“Romeo falls in love with Juliet. ... They meet secretly in the virtual world and then in real life.”

cape punishment—the death penalty, with transfer of all memories into the digital graveyard of criminals. Juliet seeks help from Lorenzo, her trusted artificial intelligence entity. Lorenzo creates a scheme: He would implant a nonlethal version of neurovirus El Nath into Juliet’s brain, and she would fall into a coma during the few days when her marriage ceremony with Paris is scheduled. Paris would think that she has the lethal version of the El Nath virus; crushed, he would then fall into mourning. Meanwhile, a message would be sent to Romeo that Juliet is waiting for him, so that they could run away together to a colony on Mars. Unfortunately, Paris’s agents have hacked and altered the message to Romeo, who only hears the news about Juliet’s death caused by El Nath. To him, the only solution is to escape to Mars with the last transfer vehicle departing for the Mars colony. As Juliet awakens from the coma and discovers Romeo has gone, she is miserable, and asks Lorenzo to solve her problem. Lorenzo, with his own views of morality, solves Juliet’s tricky situation in a way that human beings would see as immoral: Lorenzo secretly uploads the lethal version of the El Nath virus on Juliet’s brain to release her from the pain of unachievable love.

OUTSIDERZONE / BIGSTOCK

secretly in a virtual chapel. Then, an unfortunate event occurs: Juliet’s cousin kills Romeo’s dear friend, and in consequence Romeo hacks Juliet’s cousin’s mechanical heart—and kills him. Now, Romeo has to escape with the help of Paris, a man who has a crush on Juliet and who wishes to get rid of Romeo. As a member of the cyberpolice, Paris uses his influence to help Romeo escape, then conspires to make Juliet his wife.

SCENARIO 3. Exponential Development of Technology Artificial intelligence has become reality. People are connected to a computer and artificial intelligence via neurodust inside their brain. People are monitored constantly by the intelligent Net, which gives them advice on how to live their lives properly. There is also a new field of synthetic biology: artistic synthetic biology, which aims to create artistic living creatures, like singing plants. People do not “die”; they are able to upload their feelings, memories, and experiences into the Net.

Envisioning the Changes Ahead

Romeo has disappeared, and Juliet is desperate. Paris has told Juliet about the murder that Romeo committed, and he suggests an exchange: If Juliet marries him, Paris would help Romeo es26

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In our new book, Technolife 2035— How Technology is Changing Our Future (currently available only in Finnish), we introduce various new •

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technological innovations in the fields of energy, traffic, material science, robotics, computer science, medicine, and space research. The book also looks at various forces that affect how a certain technology is integrated into our society. No matter how excellent this technological invention might be, market forces (for example, the price of the new technology and its attractiveness to people) and societal forces (legislation and people’s attitudes toward technology) affect how it is adopted in society. For these reasons, the precise development of emerging technologies cannot be forecasted But futurists can raise questions to the public about its possibilities and challenges. An effective way to do this is through storytelling. ❑

Kari (left) and Elina Hiltunen About the Authors Elina Hiltunen is a futurist, keynote speaker, consultant, and the author of the books Foresight and Innovation: How Companies are Coping with the Future (Palgrave, 2013) and Teknoelämää 2035 (Technolife 2035), published 2014, co-written with her husband, Kari Hiltunen. Contact her at www .whatsnext.fi; e-mail whatsnext@luukku.com. Kari Hiltunen is a doctor of technology and co-author of the book Technolife 2035. He has been working at Nokia for 15 years in a variety of fields of technology development. This article is a preview of their session at WorldFuture 2014: What If, to be held July 11-13 in Orlando, Florida.

WORLDFUTURE 2014 Preview

Terra Nova: The Religious Quest for Tomorrow © ALDO MURILLO / ISTOCK

By Jay Gary

Religious imagination first reframed our quest toward tomorrow. Can it still move us in the twenty-first century to recreate our worlds?

It is the year 2149. Overpopulation and pollution have overtaken our world. In search of a better tomorrow, scientists stumble upon a temporal rift, allowing for waves of human pilgrimages back in time to reshape the world anew—85 million years ago on Earth. Upon arriving at the colony, the Shannon family hears: “Welcome to Terra Nova. We are at the dawn of a new civilization!” They discover a world of rugged all-terrain vehicles, dinosaurs, high-powered weaponry, and conflict with a group of separatists, or so we are led to believe. Terra Nova only existed in the collective imagination on FOX Broadcasting for one season. The dream to recreate our world and reframe our quest toward tomorrow, however, has been alive for millennia across our globe. We are only now beginning to uncover its spiritual roots in the human past. Literally, terra nova means “new land” in Latin, Catalán, or Portuguese. On the southeastern plateaus of Turkey, a team of German archaeologists have unearthed what they claim is the world’s oldest temple, dating back to 10,000 B.C. Named Göbekli Tepe, or “Potbelly Hill” in Turkish, the stone megaliths of Gobekli Tepe predate Stonehenge by 6,000 years. Since 1994, four stone circles have been unearthed. Archaeologists indi-

cate that there are 16 more stone c ircles buried under and around these, the work of earlier generations. These earlier megaliths were intentionally buried by later generations as foundations for new megaliths. The stone megaliths of Göbekli Tepe have a consistent pattern of animal reliefs, including lions, boars, foxes, and vultures. At the center of each megalith, two taller T-shaped pillars preside over the circle as stylized humans or gods. Were these animal patterns and godlike pillars representations of spirits they saw during visionary trances? It is impossible to know at this point. But the little that can be known is that at Göbekli Tepe our earliest hunter-gatherer ancestors first called upon the heavens to transform life on Earth. Furthermore, this regional site was active as a pilgrimage destination for more than 25 generations. Over that span of time, the descendants of Göbekli Tepe ushered in a Neolithic Revolution that domesticated animals, invented the wheel, cultivated agriculture, and created pottery that brought about permanent human settlements across the Fertile Crescent. We may never know what fully compelled our Stone Age ancestors to seek Terra Nova, or transformation at Göbekli Tepe, but the evidence indicates that, because they

met there, their imagination as hunter-gatherers was so stretched as to transform all their tomorrows. And when they dispersed, their descendants kept the cultic traditions of Göbekli Tepe, which undergird the Agricultural Age. Now, as we engage the twentyfirst century, is the religious imagination for Terra Nova still strong enough to inspire us to create new worlds? Or has religion itself become so codified in ruling empires and economic systems that it has lost its creative quest for Terra Nova and beyond?

Forging Communities of Tomorrow Like the Göbekli Tepe pilgrims, Alex McManus dreams of a world made new, beyond the inhumanity that has gripped the modern age. Instead of constructing stone circles, for the past seven years McManus has been forming Creativity Lounges in local communities, as collaborations between activists and artists, patrons and promoters, “to make the world human again.” A resident of Detroit since 2009, McManus is the founder of Voxtropolis.com, a network of “creativity advocates.” Voxtropolis is a combination of vox (“voice” in Latin) and polis (“city” in Greek). Voxtropolis.com is a culture of mystics who live in both the cyber and concrete worlds as a

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TEOMANCIMIT / WIKIMEDIA

Above: Ruins of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. It is believed to be the world’s oldest temple, dating to approximately 10,000 B.C. The pervasive use of animal imagery (left) suggests a desire to detail stories about hunting, as well as domestication of beasts.

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way to create a new civilization. McManus is a native of El Salvador. When he was five years old, he remembers, his grandfather told him: “I want to live until the year 2000 because there will be dancing in the streets.” His grandfather lived to see the new century and dance in the streets, and McManus has been oriented toward the future ever since. Before McManus was seven, his mother immigrated to the United States. He was raised in Florida, where he took up the family name of his stepfather. As a social entrepreneur, McManus is not your run-of-the-mill Christian leader. He is as comfortable talking about human empowerment, artificial intelligence, or biotechnology as he is in discussing religion. And he has as much in common with U2’s Bono as he does with Billy Graham.

“My aim is to create conversations around the singular question of what it means to be human.”

COURTESY OF ALEX McMANUS, VIA FACEBOOK

—Alex McManus

Alex McManus, founder of M and Voxtropolis, virtual spaces promoting spirituality, creativity, and community.

With Voxtropolis, McManus hosts face-to-face immersion experiences and virtual classes each year to mentor a small cadre of leaders to engage culture and highlight local community needs. Those causes might be as small as fixing a single mom’s roof, teaching ex-prisoners construction skills, or creating produce markets from urban gardening. His International M Network (theimn.com) is part social network, part Idea Studio, part cyber-seminary, and part Bohemian chill. After seven years, it has “creativity advocates” in 20 communities, including Detroit, Toronto, Los Angeles, Miami, Johannesburg, and Sheffield, England. “I am naturally a highly conceptual person,” McManus confesses, “yet my discovery of Jesus has made me grounded in relationships. I seek out community.” Rather than making the world Christian, McManus sees that God is making the universe more human. “My aim is to create conversations around the singular question of what it means to be human. “When someone kills their neighbor, we call them ‘inhuman,’” McManus explains. “But you would never call a lion who killed his prey ‘inlion.’” The entire idea of “being human is an aspiration,” as if “the future is needed for our evolution.” McManus sees that future as unpredictable, open, dynamic, plural, and “orgathetic,” meaning a merging of organic and synthetic life, and he envisions the ways that will impact humans in community. To unpack how the world can be-

these early years of the human story decisive, a “season of transformative change.” Yet, in all of this, he is not deterministic. In faith, he says, “no matter which future arises, God is in all the futures before us, and within us in them, extending friendship.”

come human, McManus has just released Makers of Fire: The Art and Spirituality of Leading from the Future (2014). From 1998 to 2004 McManus served on the leadership team of Mosaic, an innovative church movement in Los Angeles, which his brother Erwin led. He was a key leader behind their leadership conferences, which grew to international stature. During that time, however, due to his open futures thinking, he earned the nickname of “Enigma” from his colleagues. With a smile, McManus admits, “I recognize something in them that is my tribe, but many haven’t recognized me as being part of their tribe!” Part of the enigma of Alex M cManus to some believers is his belief. He sees the story of redemption as open, and he envisions that “humans will inhabit the universe one day, even if that takes 14 billion years.” For McManus, that makes

Joining the Third Exodus If humans are part of an evolutionary journey, and have had an image of the future since the dawn of time, what does that mean for us? Tsvi Bisk and Moshe Dror, authors of Futurizing the Jews (Praegar, 2003), sought to answer this question for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. Like McManus, they see humanity at a turning point. While many celebrate the twentieth-century victories of Zionism that brought the Jews back to their homeland, Bisk claims a singular political confidence in Israel is misplaced. The real question is whether the Jew-

“Computers, genetic engineering, the conquest of space, nuclear energy, robotics and telecommunications are [now] having a greater impact on human destiny than the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions combined.” —Tsvi Bisk

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“Everything at one point was a future artifact, whether it was cave paintings, a religious text, or a medieval cathedral. All religions, philosophical schools, and technological camps were futurists, as the think tank of their times.… As I look forward, I see we live in this history, while we are creating our future.” —Kate McCallum

COURTESY OF KATE McCALLUM, VORTEXIMMERSION, C3: CENTER FOR CONSCIOUS CREATIVITY, VIA FACEBOOK

Kate McCallum founded c3: Center for Conscious Creativity, using the transmedia creation facilities of Vortex Immersion to turn storytelling into immersive communications experiences.

ish people are ready for what Alvin Toffler called a “Third Wave” civilization. Bisk writes that Jews find themselves in the midst of an unprecedented revolution. “Computers, genetic engineering, the conquest of space, nuclear energy, robotics and telecommunications are [now] having a greater impact on human destiny than the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions combined,” he says. While the secular inadequacies of the Renaissance-Scientific-Enlightenment-Industrial paradigm have been well chronicled, “the Industrial Revolution was [still] the greatest spiritual event in the history of the human race,” according to Bisk. He feels that Diaspora Jewry needs to forge a new planetary paradigm for the future. Only a new paradigm will enable the concept of Israel to become a world metropolis and fulfill its destiny as a light to the Gentiles. Rabbi Moshe Dror (1934-2011) spoke of this transmodern paradigm as a journey. Abraham, the first Jew, was commanded by God to go on a journey, to cross over the frontier. To Dror, the very word Hebrew carried the meaning of “move” or “go” across, from one physical space to 30

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another. He claimed that Abraham’s journey, like ours, was more than a physical journey. It was an invitation to move our consciousness, awareness, and mind. Crossing into this new metaphysical land, claimed Dror, will constitute a “Third Exodus” for the Abrahamic religions. It will reshape how faith relates to the transmodern age. In their present configuration, however, most religious institutions are not mobile. “We may know how to build structures of stone, but we have yet to learn how to relate to the sacred in virtual space, mediated through technology,” Dror asserted. Therefore, a new exodus is needed. According to Dror, the First Exodus of Moses became codified into the Law and Temple. The Second Exodus of Jesus, Rabbinic Judaism, and Mohammed became codified into synagogues, churches, and mosques. The Third Exodus of humanity now “seeks God beyond temple or synagogue walls and calls us to move into a new world, to inhabit the world of connectivity, creativity, and spirituality.”

From Stone Circles to Immersive Domes Like the fictional time travelers of Terra Nova, Kate McCallum has been •

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part of a modern pilgrimage. But instead of going back in time, she has gone forward as a transmigrant into sacred space, shaped by media technologies. McCallum is the founder of c3: Center for Conscious Creativity in Los Angeles (consciouscreativity .com). She is an artist, writer, musician, producer, and teacher, who operates her own transmedia production company out of the Los Angeles Center Studios. During her 20 years at Universal Studios and Paramount Television as a content creator and producer, M cCallum saw how millions of people began to “knock down the gates” of the entertainment industry. “Series and movies were no longer about a singular story, but an entire story world,” claims McCallum. Like Dror, she is now convinced that the temples of time are not just churches, but any medium where we create and share our stories, whether TV, movies, music, or the Internet. Not only are our stories migrating across platforms, but also “more and more, people are choosing to live in these new story worlds,” according to McCallum. Case in point: Jediism is a proto-religion, arising from the Stars Wars saga, for those who want to base their lives on the principles

of Jedi warrior knights. “We reach our fans on many different screens and experiences,” McCallum says. Transmedia “refers to this bottom-up communication.” Where once we painted on cave walls or created stone circles, today through digital technologies we are “generating new ways to conduct immersive storytelling for new audiences” to engage human beings at deeper levels. Part of her consulting work is to help writers and producers craft their story worlds, so they can spread across various media platforms, whether in merchandise, series, sequels, education programs, or philanthropic causes. Integral to McCallum’s immersive storytelling these days is the Vortex Immersion Dome (vorteximmersion .com), housed on the lot of the Los Angeles Center Studios. There, McCallum works with her business partner, Ed Lantz, to train artists in residence to create “full dome” immersive shows for up to 400 people. Over the last two years, they have produced a variety of events, from a “BollyDoll Fulldome” containing iconic Indian mythology, to an EDM (Electronic Dance Music) reality show pilot for MTV, to an “ExtremeFuture Festival” symposium exploring transhumanism. McCallum, however, is no technophile. While her outer life is grounded in the world of immersive media and technology, her inner life has risen from profound spiritual experiences that started at age 21. While studying communications and “self-actualization” at Western Michigan University, she encountered the “living presence of the divine.” Since neither her parents nor her minister could understand her epiphanies, she changed her major from education to communications, with a minor in philosophy and religion, and committed herself “to not talk about my spiritual experiences.” After graduation, McCallum moved to Los Angeles in 1980. “I worked in the Studios by day as an apprentice, but on the weekends I would study classes in philosophy and the esoteric arts” at the Philosophical Research Society, a modernday mystery school founded on the

In The Sacred Canopy, Peter Berger writes that religion, properly understood, “is the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant.” We might also add for emphasis, “as being humanly significant, in view of the future.” Terra Nova as a spirituality of the future, therefore, can be defined as the concern of all who feel drawn toward the fullness of humanity and, in turn, allow their lives to be transformed by their relationship with the Absolute, however it may be defined. This hope that humanity might learn from its experience and collective wisdom is affirmed in established schools of religion, but also in everyday lived spirituality, whether among lay people, indigenous people, or any religious movement for social justice. This canopy of Terra Nova is expanding as humanity develops its own myths. Tom Lombardo, founder of the Center for Future Consciousness, often speaks of science fiction as “the mythology of the future.” He maintains that science fiction “is clearly the most visible and influential form of futurist thinking in the modern world.” It involves plots, story lines, action sequences, different settings and dramatic resolutions. As feminist-poet Muriel Rukeyser put it, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” We may never be able to travel back in time as the TV pilgrims of Terra Nova, but we can follow our nomadic ancestors at Göbekli Tepe and embrace Terra Nova as a spirituality of tomorrow. In so doing, we can choose to believe that, far from ending, the human journey is only beginning, into a world without end. ❑

teachings of Manly P. Hall. It was there that McCallum learned “mindfulness and practical meditation” and how to “work in service to the One Life, one humanity, and live to make a better world.” She later went on to earn a Master of Arts in Consciousness Studies from the University of Philosophical Research, and launched her Center. Reflecting back, she states, “Everything at one point was a future artifact, whether it was cave paintings, a religious text, or a m edieval cathedral. All religions, philosophical schools, and technological camps were futurists, as the think tank of their times.… As I look forward, I see we live in this history, while we are creating our future.” For McCallum, the difference between us and our predecessors is “that we can go back and watch ourselves and decide what is needed, and strip away what separates us from our higher self.”

Portals of Tomorrow Anyone who has ever entered a temple, church, or mosque, or who was moved in a deeper way through music, theater, art, movies, or virtual reality, has stepped into a portal of tomorrow, a practice that traces its roots back to the Göbekli Tepe storytellers. It is through these portals that we hear stories of where we came from and where we are headed. But not all stories are equal. Though intended to bind people together, religion can also be used to tear apart the social or ecological fabric of our world. Not all stories enhance our personal or collective well-being. Religious fundamentalism, in particular, is pervasive today across all major world religions. It is a change-resistance movement to any transmodern narrative that envisions Terra Nova through human learning and enlightenment. This needs not to be the case. While religion is often used to justify violence in the name of God, or foster conflict between nations, such as the United States and Iran, its narratives and spirituality are also a resource for peacemaking, conflict resolution, and community transformation. www.wfs.org

About the Author Jay Gary is director of PeakFutures, an educational consulting firm that helps enterprises see further and climb higher. He serves as senior associate of the World Network of Religious Futurists. His Web site is jaygary.com. This article is a preview of his session at WorldFuture 2014: What If, which will also feature Alex McManus, Kate McCallum, and World Future Review managing editor Lane Jennings.

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Eden, Gardening BACKING INTO

THE WORLD: A PARABLE

BY BRENDA COOPER The story of humanity’s domination over nature has reached a critical turning point. As we increasingly recognize the perils ahead, we must also understand the opportunities (and risks) of intervening with nature.

owever humans came into being, they were once small and insignificant beside the powerful wild lands that surrounded them. They contended with fearsome predators and chased fast prey. They had little protection against the vagaries of weather and traveled as fast as their feet could carry them. The world was a harsh and beautiful place, and so very big that the touch of the first human hands fell lightly upon it. Humans roamed this world, hunting and gathering, loving and fighting, and creating. They learned new skills. They planted and farmed and created towns. They multiplied. Humans took animals like wolf and horse—which had been prey and predator alike—and turned them into servants, and fed and named them. Humanity moved and settled upon the Earth with new confidence. Air and water and wind flowed

around and through and alongside the humans, whose impacts had grown from a light touch to the heavy footprint of a giant. With time, towns spread and became cities. Resources moved between them. Food grown in one town followed rivers to be eaten in a city far, far away. Art and weapons traveled roads toward centers of human power. Humanity’s footprints upon the land became paths and roads and eventually metal tracks, which people rode upon in metal boxes powered by steam. Shortly, steam gave way to gasoline, and trains to cars. Humans created wings and flew over factories and farms and even around the world. The Earth began to feel like a smaller place—a place with less wilderness. Cities grew together and sprawled across vast distances, so that someone might wake up in the morning and travel by car for half a day and see human habitation punctuated by small wild places. The ribbons of concrete between cit-

ies multiplied and fattened. They separated forest from stream, savannah from mountain, and predat o r f ro m p re y. Wa t e r b e c a m e trapped and poisoned on its way to the sea, and wind flowing past human endeavors turned brown with toxicity. Humans learned to communicate with each other across the whole world. They noticed that their air and water and wind no longer moved cleanly and that this affected the wild in profound ways. Humans realized they had killed entire species of both predator and prey, and they mourned and felt sorry. At nearly the last moment, they began to understand that they were now greater and more fearsome than the world they came into, and that they must treat it as fragile. They began to take care of species, of lands, of water, and even of the air. They began to garden the Earth, for they had learned that if they did not tend to the wild they would die alongside of it.

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Writing the Next Chapters This brings our parable up to the current moment. The next paragraphs have not yet been written, but they will be written in our lifetimes and our children’s lifetimes. We understand that we are in crisis. Recent work by climate scientists suggests that the jet stream may be changing. Beautiful and iconic species like the elephant and tiger are in extreme danger. The air in Beijing is dangerous. Freshwater from major rivers is used up long before it reaches the sea. Fisheries are collapsing. Yet, all is not lost. Salmon runs are increasing in the U.S. Northwest. The bald eagle is no longer endangered. The population of snow leopards in Siberia is rebounding. Social movement is changing how we look at animals and animal rights. New technologies are giving us cleaner power. Real-time mapping and big data are together yielding far better analytical tools than we’ve ever had access to before.

As futurists, we understand that we are living in a time when the very rate of change is itself increasing. What we grow up knowing and what we will die knowing will be different. We recognize our peril, and we are in fact creating solutions. Of course, unlike the humans of the parable above, we are diverse in our responses and viewpoints about the world. People in different locations are governed by diverse laws, social structures, and goals, but are largely beset by the same global problems. We have changed the world in ways that prevent it from becoming a fully functional natural ecosystem that we can simply let be. Rather, we are going to have to intervene. Intervention can be a combination of actions: Think conservation, re-wilding, and animal rights, for instance. But also think genetic modification, vertical farming, and a quantified world. Think planting milkweed in the monarch butterfly’s path, and tagging elephants and protecting them with drones. Think tracking migratory birds and creating www.wfs.org

a bee that can withstand colony collapse disorder. Think transgenic animals and plants. These robust technologies are being released commercially, but they are surrounded by real ethical issues, comically poor misunderstandings, and fear. The fragility of our shared ecosystem is well known to us all, though we certainly look at it through different lenses. We have the opportunity now to develop frameworks for finishing the next part of the parable, so that it is not the end of the story. ❑ About the Author Brenda Cooper, author of The Creative Fire and The Silver Ship and the Sea, is a futurist, conservationist, and the chief information officer of the City of Kirkland, Washington. She writes the blog Backing into Eden, www.backinginto eden.com. This article is a preview of her presentation at WorldFuture 2014: What If, the World Future Society’s conference to be held in Orlando, Florida, July 11-13.

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WORLDFUTURE 2014 Preview

Forest Futures in the Anthropocene:

Can Trees and Humans Survive Together? BY DAVID BENGSTON AND MICHAEL J. DOCKRY

Threats to forests range from mega-fires to urban encroachment. Two futurists for the U.S. National Forest Service provide insights on the major issues and potential game changers for the world’s woodlands.

oresters and futurists share a long-range perspective. The lengthy growing cycle of trees has compelled foresters to plan decades and even hundreds of years ahead, in contrast to the short-term view of most fields. The interconnected nature of forest ecosystems has also given foresters— like futurists—a systems perspective. As the American naturalist John Muir said, “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” The world’s forests range from sparsely populated wilderness to urban forests, from lush tropical rain forests to the vast boreal forests of the North. Thirty-one percent of the Earth’s land area and 30% of the United States is covered by forests. Healthy forests provide a wide range of ecosystem services, natural assets that are vital to human wellbeing and livelihood. For example, forests sequester carbon from the atmosphere; contain about 90% of the Earth’s terrestrial biodiversity; provide a home for wildlife; protect watersheds; regulate the water cycle; create scenic landscapes; provide cultural, recreational, and spiritual opportunities; and produce goods such as timber, fuelwood, fodder, and other non-timber forest products. The list of forest goods and services goes on ad infinitum. Despite their importance, the future of forests is by no means clear in what some have called the “Anthropocene,” the epoch we are entering in which the impacts of human activities increasingly dominate Earth’s ecosystems. The actions of people have always influenced forests, but the increased pace and magnitude of change in human systems poses many challenges for these ecological life-support systems. This article looks at some of the major issues and factors affecting forests in the decades ahead: defor-

estation, mega-fires, urban forests and growing urban populations, the end of wilderness, and water. Potential “game changers” for forest ecosystems include bioenergy and wood-based nanomaterials, synthetic biology, and runaway climate change.

Major Issues Shaping Forest Futures • Deforestation and land use change. The future of forests at the

most basic level depends upon maintaining forests as forests and not converting them to agriculture, ranching, or urban and suburban land uses. After the last ice age, forests expanded to cover about half the world’s land area. According to the most recent UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, 31% of the Earth’s surface is covered by forests, amounting to about 4 billion hectares. The five countries with the most forest area today are Russia, Brazil, Canada, the United States, and China. These countries account for half of the world’s forests. Forests and deforestation play important roles in the carbon cycle and climate change. Some scientists estimate that forests sequester around 40% of human-made carbon emissions annually, but forests also release carbon when deforested. Globally, about 17% of carbon-dioxide emissions result from tropical deforestation and forest degradation— more than transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions. Between 2000 and 2012, 1.8 million square kilometers of forest globally were converted to non-forest use, while only 0.8 million square kilometers were converted back into forest. Cumulatively, forests are being replaced by non-forest land conversion across the globe. Tropical deforestation continues every year, despite the fact that deforestation rates have been decreasing. Africa, South America, and Oceania have the dubious distinction of the largest net loss of forest cover, while North America and Europe show modest increases or little change in forested area. Leading the world in the rates of planting forests, Asia shows strong positive change in forest

Member of the U.S. Forest Service’s Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) assessment team examines damage in a 2013 fire in the Santa Fe National Forest, New Mexico. U.S. FOREST SERVICE PHOTO

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cover. Planted forests are increasing globally and currently account for 7% of the forested area. The future of forests and deforestation is complex because it is a function of political, economic, ecological, technological, and social processes. If the net loss of forests continues, the world’s forests will continue to become degraded, with resulting decreases in biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and feedbacks that accelerate climate change. Another possible outcome could be the rise of the planted forest if the rest of the world follows Asia’s lead. Research is unclear on whether or not plantation forests decrease pressure on native forests, so it is uncertain if planted forests will replace native forests or if they will decrease the area deforested. One thing is clear: If more and more forest area is lost each year, there will be more opportunities for plantation forests to be established. • Rise of mega-fires. Wildfires have increased in frequency, intensity, and area burned in many areas around the world, including the U.S. West. A “perfect storm” of factors is driving future wildfires. First, climate change is creating hotter and drier conditions. Trends of rising temperatures, earlier springs, decreased soil moisture, and drying of biomass fuels are leading to longer and more severe fire seasons. Second, decades of rapid suppression of wildfires across the globe has

“The actions of people have always influenced forests, but the increased pace and magnitude of change in human systems poses many challenges for these ecological life-support systems.”

resulted in dense, overgrown forests and a massive accumulation of potential fuels for fire. Before the advent of aggressive firefighting in firedependent ecosystems, periodic low-intensity fires cleared out much of the forest understory, leaving most trees unaffected. Third, rapid growth in the number of homes and communities in forested areas will contribute to the risk of wildfire damage to homes and danger to people. In the United States, another 17 million housing units are projected to be built within 50 km of protected areas (national forests and parks, wilderness areas) by 2030. Of these additional homes in and around forests, 12.3 million will be in the U.S. West, a 111% increase since 2010. The fire problem is much more challenging with more people and homes on the landscape. Fourth, invasive species and diseases have altered forest composition and integrity. Insect outbreaks are weakening trees and leading to OREGON DEPARTMENT OF FORESTRY PHOTO BY J. PRICHER

widespread tree death in some regions, with the potential to significantly increase fire risk. Finally, the costs of wildfire management are rising and government budgets are declining. In inflationadjusted dollars, the U.S. government is spending less today on efforts to reduce potential fuels for wildfire around communities than it did in 2002. Fire-suppression budgets dwarf budgets to proactively reduce fire risks in the nation. All of these factors are leading to the rise of unusually large and destructive wildfires. These mega-fires are distinguished by the extraordinary scope and scale of their impacts. Only about 0.1% of wildland fires are classified as mega-fires, but they account for about 95% of total area burned and 85% of the total costs of firefighting. The substantial amount of carbon released into the atmosphere and reduction of sequestration capacity resulting from mega-fires is a likely feedback to accelerating climate change. Projections of future fires are alarming. In the U.S. West, for example, the median annual area burned is predicted to increase by a factor of two to five for just a 1°C (1.8°F) increase in global average temperature. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections for warming suggest a further 4°C to 6°C global warming by the end of this century. Regardless of the scenario, mega-fires will continue to shape the world’s forests in the decades to come. • Urban forests and growing urban populations. While many of us think of forests as being located in remote or rural environments, there is growing recognition of the existence and importance of urban forests. For the first time in human history, more than 50% of the world’s population lives in urban areas. By 2050, that could rise to 70%, or 6.4 billion people, largely in developing countries.

Fire crew works through the night against the Government Flat Complex Fire near The Dalles, Oregon, which was started by lightning on August 16, 2013. The fire consumed approximately 11,434 acres when the photograph was taken.

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U.S. FOREST SERVICE PHOTO

The Kelley Fire in the Sawtooth National Forest near Featherville, Idaho, was started by lightning on August 24, 2013, and had consumed approximately 17,346 acres when the photograph was taken.

Not only will urban forests continue to provide direct ecosystem services to the majority of the world’s population, but they also have the potential to foster human community and connectedness to nature. Many academics, indigenous people, and environmentalists argue that connectedness to nature is critical for adapting to and solving the environmental problems of the twenty-first century. The importance of urban forests cannot be underestimated. Urban forests are valued across the globe for their contributions to air pollution reduction, carbon sequestration, water runoff, and flood control, as well as for their ability to mitigate urban heat sinks. Urban forests provide habitat for animals and plants, and they foster human health and well-being. Urban foraging movements—that is, gathering food and medicine—are emerging across the globe. Urban forests of the future will be critical components of green infrastructure systems. New research is beginning to study cities as ecosystems that include not only ecological, but also social, cultural, institutional, technological, and economic dimensions. Urban forests are often cornerstones to our urban ecosystems. Research results are not yet consistent for the role urban forests play in biodiversity, but it is clear that urban forests are much more diverse than urban concrete jungles. More research is needed to understand the extent of urban forest cover, urban forest health, urban forest values, and human relationships to urban forests. • The end of wilderness? In everyday language, the term wilderness conjures up images of a wild and uninhabited forest. Wilderness also refers to areas that have been officially designated and protected for their relatively untouched natural state. Wilderness in this sense represents the last remnants of truly wild nature. The U.S. Wilderness Act was

dicted to shift outside of the protected areas they’re named after: Joshua Tree National Park may not support the Joshua trees, and the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks may not contain regenerating giant sequoias. Other wilderness stressors include invasive exotic species, habitat fragmentation in and around wilderness areas, and atmospheric pollution. Wilderness was identified as a “ d i s a p p e a r i n g f u t u re ” i n t h e September-October 2013 issue of THE FUTURIST. That forecast seems likely. Wild nature, with its unique values, will be increasingly replaced by a tamer form of nature with a much heavier and negative human imprint. • Water. Water is predicted to be one of the biggest emerging environmental issues of this century. As global climate patterns change, so does the water cycle. Climate models and recent experience show that precipitation patterns will become less predictable and more extreme—from unprecedented droughts followed by unprecedented rain and flooding. In recent years, there have been historic droughts in Asia, Africa, North and South America, and Australia. California is experiencing a drought that could rival the droughts of the Dust Bowl years. At the same time, historic flooding and storms have cascaded throughout the world. During the winter of 2013-2014, England experienced some of the worst flooding and storm surges in its history. Extreme

passed 50 years ago this year. This landmark legislation strongly emphasized the future of wilderness, reflected in language like “enduring,” “future generations,” and “for the permanent good.” The importance of wilderness now and in the future arises from the unique values provided by these ecosystems: scientific value as a benchmark of naturalness and how healthy forests function; heritage value as a repository of the primeval conditions that shaped us as a species and helped forge our national identities; bequest value as a natural legacy; spiritual and cultural values; and moral obligation to future generations. Despite common views that wilderness is untouched by humans, wilderness from Yellowstone to the Amazon rain forest has been shaped by human hands over millennia. But in the Anthropocene, human activities are increasingly harming even the most remote places on the planet. For example, glaciologists can pinpoint the upswing in China’s industrial growth by pollutants encased in ice cores in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the northeast corner of Alaska. A host of human-caused environmental stressors are also reshaping once-wild ecosystems. Foremost is climate change, wilderness’s greatest challenge. Accelerating climate change in coming decades will profoundly affect wilderness ecosystems. For example, the range of some emblematic species is prewww.wfs.org

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flooding and drought can cause food insecurity, decreased water availability, damage to infrastructure, human migrations, and conflicts over natural resources. No country is exempt from these trends. Extreme water events will only increase as climate change progresses. Forests, however, are the world’s water regulators. On one hand, forests are negatively affected by extreme precipitation events—trees die from droughts, forests blow down in hurricanes, and flooding washes vegetation down rivers and mountainsides. On the other hand, forests regulate watersheds, prevent water runoff, provide clean surface water, and help resupply underground aquifers. Forests and agroforestry cropping systems can stabilize and supplement conventional agriculture by making water more available for crops, reducing temperatures, and providing shade. Forests as part of green infrastructure systems could stabilize water supplies and protect against extreme precipitation events.

“Forest futures may also be shaped by a number of … wild cards, including wood-based nanomaterials, synthetic biology, and runaway climate change.”

materials. Forests and agricultural

plants have the potential to produce more than a billion tons of renewable, carbon-neutral biomass that could be used to transition into a new global green economy. Forests and forest products could be a fundamental component of the emerging green economy. Forests are truly a renewable resource—trees can be harvested and regrown and harvested again, over and over. Forest products are recyclable and compostable. Forests are carbon sinks, and the products are carbon-neutral. In recent years, especially for the United States, myriad problems have come together—climate change, invasive species, uncontrolled wildland fire, and changes in international trade—that make it difficult to use forest management to restore ecosystems, to make them more resilient to future environmental change, and to foster economically sustainable businesses. In essence, it is economically difficult to harvest

Potential Game Changers for Forests Forest futures may also be shaped by a number of potential game changers or wild cards, including wood-based nanomaterials, synthetic biology, and runaway climate change. • Advanced energy and materi-

als: Bioenergy and cellulosic nano-

MARISTERRA LEMES, INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE PESQUISAS DA AMAZONIA / NSF

trees at the scale necessary to restore ecosystems that have become overgrown with small trees and shrubs and are being killed by unprecedented insect and disease outbreaks. It simply does not pay to harvest low-value and low-quality trees, yet that is exactly what needs to happen to improve forest health and the struggling forest-products industry. A potential game changer that would remedy this situation would be the emergence of new markets for high-value but low-quality woody biomass. This is the promise of a forest-based bioenergy, wood-based nanomaterials, and green chemicals. For example, researchers are developing computer screens made from wood-based nanomaterials. Imagine waterproof smartphones that can be composted! Other researchers are looking to use wood-based nanomaterials to produce solar power and nanosensors in paper and wood products to detect forces, moisture, and chemical pollutants. Still others are working to develop stronger and lighter products that could go into energyefficient cars, stronger building materials, and coatings for novel and e fficient paper products. Forest products researchers and engineers are trying to develop efficient technologies that convert wood into electricity, fuel, and heat. One can envision the emergence of local energy systems based upon renewable woody biomass. There is new research going on throughout the world to bring many of these new technologies to market. If these efforts are successful, we will be able to produce our energy, chemicals, plastics, and electronics from renewable and carbon-neutral sources—trees. • Synthetic biology is an emerging field with great potential to positively and negatively affect forests and other natural systems in the future. Already moving out of the lab and into commercial applica-

In the Amazon, a mahogany tree is felled. Deforestation rates have decreased, but deforestation continues in South America, which has the world’s largest net loss of forest cover along with Africa and Oceania.

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Vegetation has replaced felled rain forests in much of the Congo basin. Less rain forest means less evaporation and increased warming. A study by researchers at University of Leuven, Belgium, concludes that deforestation could intensify climate change in the Congo basin by 50%.

tions, synthetic biology is the use of chemically synthesized DNA to create organisms with novel traits—or, as some have described it, “genetic engineering on steroids.” Some believe that synthetic biology will be one of the transformative technologies needed to address many of the most important challenges facing humanity, such as climate change, renewable energy, and sustainable food production. Potential environmental applications include saving endangered species and bringing back extinct ones, using engineered bacterial cells as biological sensors to identify the presence of toxins in the environment, and creating bacteria that can clean up oil spills and other pollutants. Reforestation could be promoted by using engineered bacteria to stimulate root growth and promote soil stability. It is easy to imagine creating trees with genes engineered to keep them free of disease or to produce desirable wood properties using novel nanomaterials. But the potential negative effects of synthetic biology have also created concern among some scientists, bioethicists, and public figures. The unintended ecological consequences of synthetic genomes, artificial cells, and engineered life forms are impossible to predict and could be dire. Despite the best efforts to control them, synthetic microorganisms could escape, persist, and spread into natural environments. They might disrupt ecological functions, alter habitats and food webs, or transfer their altered DNA into natural organisms. Some worry that an engineered virus could wipe out entire native populations and wreak havoc with biodiversity. Synthetic biology has great potential to help conserve forests and the ecosystem services they provide, but it also poses significant ecological risks. Once novel organisms are re-

such a temperature rise would be more like dystopian science fiction than scientific thinking about climate change to date. ••• The world’s forests provide ecosystem services vital for a healthy planet and human well-being. Many challenges will have to be faced to sustain future forests. Some of these challenges are similar to ones forest planners, managers, and policy makers have successfully dealt with in the past; others are new and daunting. Tackling these issues now with the help of foresight is needed to pass on this natural legacy. Planting a tree or conserving a forest is an act of hope for future generations. ❑

leased into the environment, the genie is out of the bottle. It is critical to assess the risks and effectively regulate the applications of synthetic organisms in order to avoid future ecological calamities. • Runaway climate change. In the prevailing “gradualist paradigm,” climate change is viewed as resulting in ecological changes that are cumulative and incremental. Such gradual climate change would result in profound ecological changes over many decades. An alternative view held by some scientists is that climate change might occur through a combination of gradual and abrupt changes as various tipping points are reached. Positive feedbacks would amplify changes within the climate system, creating a runaway climate change catastrophe not represented in any IPCC scenario. There are a number of possible tipping points that could lead to runaway climate change. One is the release of trillions of tons of methane from beneath the oceans. The release of methane trapped in frozen sediments is believed to have triggered the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, a period of extreme warming and mass extinction 55 million years ago. Rapidly warming oceans today could destabilize methane sediments and result in another massive release of methane that could raise global temperatures by more than 6°C (10.8°F). The ecological effects of www.wfs.org

Bengston

Dockry

About the Authors David N. Bengston is an environmental futurist and Michael J. Dockry is a social forester, both with the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station, Saint Paul, Minnesota. Web site www.nrs.fs.fed.us. This article is a preview of their conference presentation at WorldFuture 2014: What If, which will take place July 11-13 in Orlando, Florida.

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WORLDFUTURE 2014 Preview

What Does Moore’s Law Mean For the Rest of Society? By Clay Rawlings and Rob Bencini Technology is advancing exponentially. Beware the disruptions to legal systems, society, and the economy, warn the authors of Pardon the Disruption. © JESUSANZ / BIGSTOCK

Stare decisis is the legal principle that requires judges to respect precedents set by prior court rulings. It forms the heart of the U.S. judicial system—and it forces the law to move like a glacier. This can be a problem when technologies are changing our lives as quickly as they are now. The legal system places great emphasis on the idea that people know

the laws in advance, so they can engage in commerce knowing that courts will enforce a contract as the parties intended. The law was to be a tool of fairness, not a trap for the unwary. Massive changes in technology have complicated citizens’ ability to stay ahead of changes in the law. Patents, for example, were intended to give protection to inven-

tors, spurring their innovation. But in the twenty-first century, we see large corporations buying up thousands of patents to ward off competition. When new products are being considered, the possibility of a patent fight over intellectual property looms large. Apple recently won a billion-dollar judgment against Samsung for infringing on their patents on the iPhone. While not a knockout

blow to Samsung, this will make smaller manufacturers think twice before entering the cell phone arena. What was meant as a defensive measure—protection of inventors’ ideas—has now become an offensive weapon. Buy enough patents, and you can force out any competition by alleging they have infringed on your arsenal of patents. Genome companies are obtaining patents as fast as possible to freeze out competitors in whole areas of genomics. In June 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that natural human genes cannot be patented, but the legal landscape for genetic patenting is far from settled. The privacy of a person’s genetic makeup— what can be altered to lessen human suffering or improve performance— cropped up as a legal issue overnight. The modern legal system is not suited to fashioning remedies for novel problems that are changing at exponential rates. The Technology of Truth? Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—a technique for measuring and mapping brain activity— allows psychologists to observe the brain as it functions in real time. Two companies, No Lie MRI Inc. and Cephos Corporation, claim that they can use fMRI to determine conclusively whether or not an individual is telling the truth. The brain stores information in memory and is also capable of creating fantasies. The premise for a brain scan lie detector test is quite simple: You are placed under the fMRI scanning device, and while you answer questions, the scanner observes brain function to determine where the response originates. When you’re telling the truth, the brain accesses the area where memory is stored. When you’re lying, the brain uses the part responsible for generating fantasies. This methodology should be foolproof: You either have a real memory, or you do not. If your answer is based in fantasy rather than memory, it is almost certainly a lie. The scanning technology itself will become more accurate, and so will the algorithms that analyze brain

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disrupt virtually every aspect of our economy. Robotic cars will be available to the ordinary consumer, will drive themselves on public roads, and will completely replace traditional motor vehicles. Each year, there are approximately 33,000 fatal accidents in the United States, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. Numbers of deaths and catastrophic injuries will decrease radically when machine intelligence is in control of all transportation. We will have no accidents caused by human drivers who are drunk, fatigued, angry, distracted, in a hurry, too young, too old, reckless, suicidal, or just plain stupid. Professional drivers who operate 18-wheelers and delivery vans will also be replaced. Commercial vehicles will never need a per diem, health insurance, or payment per mile. An entire industry of professional drivers will go the way of the blacksmith. As a result, lawyers specializing in motor vehicle accident cases will move into other areas of the law. When there is no offense, there is no need for defense. Technology will remove the drunk drivers from the streets, relieve overcrowded jails, and clear overburdened court dockets. With robotic cars, everyone’s in the passenger seat. We will have engineered the ultimate designated driver. In the United States, about 5 million cars a year are totaled in crashes and need to be replaced. When vehicles are operated optimally by intelligent machines, collisions will decrease significantly. And with machine intelligence in control, we won’t abuse our cars by riding their brakes or jerkily accelerating and decelerating. With less to repair or replace, collision centers and parts suppliers will close, and manufacturing will suffer. While collisions will be dramatically reduced, people will still occasionally be seriously injured and killed. Since the operation of the vehicle is autonomous, a fault-based tort system would exonerate the owner, who was nothing more than a passenger. If the manufacturer knows at the inception that it will be held legally responsible for all inju-

“Algorithms that analyze brain function … may replace random groups of 12 jurors as ‘finders of facts.’” function. At some point, this technology may replace random groups of 12 jurors as the “finders of fact.” We will know with certainty whether someone is telling the truth. No one has the right to lie while testifying in court. If technology can tell us with scientific certainty whether a person is telling the truth, why not place a scanner above the witness stand? As witnesses testify, the court will be able to see in real time whether or not the testimony is true. Protecting us from lying defendants is one potential benefit of scanning technology, but defendants and witnesses aren’t the only ones this technology will affect. The police, too, will no longer be able to fabricate probable cause. The court and jury will know whether a cop’s alleged probable cause is coming from memory or is a clever fabrication meant to deceive. The exclusionary rule—that evidence collected in violation of a defendant’s rights is inadmissible— would suddenly have real teeth. By making the system completely truthful in every respect, we would initially free a large number of guilty criminals, their convictions overturned due to police misconduct. It would not take long for police to realize they could no longer cheat on probable cause. Sharing the Roads with Robotic Vehicles The proliferation of vehicles operated by machine intelligence will www.wfs.org

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creative class, and cluster development is not working. Former North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue, almost accidentally, may have shown a fuller understanding of the true reality of productivity than most elected officials have. As the then-newly inaugurated governor in 2009, she was a featured speaker at the North Carolina Economic Developers Association conference, where she expressed supreme optimism about the areas of the economy that she believed would be central to North Carolina’s economic future: green industry, the military, and aeronautics. She continued her remarks with a matter-of-fact assessment by saying, “I believe the textile industry in North Carolina can still thrive. They might have to cut the workforce to increase efficiency and profitability, but.…” She said it! She said what every business in America has said for the last six years. Workers, with their rising health care and other costs; workers, who represent a huge percentage of business costs and unproductive overhead during tough times; workers, who are the human measure of these “jobs” that elected officials promote; workers, who represent the biggest cost to virtually every company; yes, workers may have to be cut in order for a company to survive and prosper. Businesses are charged with making profits (and in this economy, surviving). Their disposition toward job creation is, “You’ve gotta be kidding. I’m trying to stay in business.” The next time you think about job creation, try a little word exchange: Replace the word jobs with the term payroll expense. Try it and see how it feels to say this: “We need more payroll expense!” or “Why haven’t you created more payroll expense?!” It sounds weird, doesn’t it? That’s what is truly relevant, because that’s how a potential employer sees the labor force. If a company is in survival mode, its goal is to increase profitability, not to create jobs. The disconnect between governmental goals of creating jobs through spending and other stimulus and the virtually opposite goals of those who

ries emanating from the failure of its product, it can build that risk into the price of the robotic car. The system will function in a manner that both protects the public and is fair to the manufacturer. Federal governments could enact legislation requiring a black box in all vehicles, so that each failure can easily be determined. The industry could spread the risk associated with human injury and death by requiring each manufacturer to insure against these risks. This is no different from the current system requiring each operator of a motor vehicle to be insured. Keep in mind, though, that the actual costs are going to be massively lower than the current system. Insuring human drivers who get distracted, angry, or drunk is an expensive proposition. Because the issue of liability will no longer be litigated, the only real question will be the amount of damages to the victim. Litigation costs would be cut to less than half their current amount without the necessity of proving fault. It would make compensation of the injured both more reliable and more uniform. If we’re looking for a win– win, this is it. But What about the Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! Exponential improvements in technology have created new wealth in recent years. Now, for the first time in history, it isn’t land that matters so much in wealth creation as it is innovation—innovation that increases productivity and raises the standard of living throughout the developed world. Continuously advancing technology is disrupting many of the very industries it helped build—and in many cases, those rapid advances are proving to be real net job killers. Disruptions have swept through industries like publishing, music, retail, and manufacturing. Many theorists admonish local business and government leaders to “do something” about the economy, such as attract manufacturing and entrepreneurship in order to create jobs. But pushing the rope of artificially creating entrepreneurship, a 42

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are expected to do the heavy lifting that solves the unemployment problem (the private sector) is undoubtedly the most confounding economic enigma today. But what if governments could pull the private sector into providing jobs as a way of promoting the social good? Companies that have benefited from technological advancements that increase productivity could employ people to provide good-deed public services. As economics professor Bill Watkins wrote for NewGeography.com, “It turns out that a job costs less than dependency, and that’s why we need economic growth. Jobs and opportunity provide us with some things that consumption can’t. I think those are pride, dignity, and purpose.” The new technologies that once created new industries and new jobs are now only creating new productivity without the jobs. Computers, robots, artificial general intelligence, and other technological advances have changed the economic game. From a business point of view, improved productivity is good; but from the point of view of public officials desperate to create jobs for their constituents, not so much. This may be the biggest disruption we face. ❑

Rawlings

Bencini

About the Authors Clay Rawlings is a personal injury litigation attorney from Houston, Texas, and a former assistant district attorney for Harris County, Texas. Rob Bencini, MBA, is a Certified Economic Developer (CEcD) and economic futurist from Greensboro, North Carolina. Rawlings and Bencini are co-authors (with James Randall Smith) of Pardon the Disruption: The Future You Never Saw Coming (Wasteland Press, 2013). This article is a preview of their presentation at WorldFuture 2014: What If, the World Future Society’s conference to be held July 11-13 in Orlando, Florida.

World Future Society Professional Membership Tools and Techniques… Leading-Edge Ideas… Highly Productive Collaborations… AARON M. COHEN

The World Future Society’s Professional Membership is a focused program for individuals involved in futures research, forecasting, corporate or institutional planning, issues management, technology assessment, policy analysis, urban and regional planning, competition research, and related areas. Professional Members include educators, government and business leaders, researchers, think-tank members, corporate planners, and analysts, plus others involved in the study of the future and its impact on their organizations. World Future Review

In addition to all of the vital benefits of regular membership, Professional Members receive a subscription to the exclusive World Future Review: A Journal of Strategic Foresight. This publication offers full-length refereed a rticles, interviews of leading futures practitioners, insightful reviews of important new publications, and abstracts of the most critical new foresight-relevant literature. Professional Members Forums

Professional Members also have the opportunity to meet once a year to focus more intensively on crucial topics in our field. The Professional Members Forums feature some of the top thinkers in futures studies, who convene to share insights in a small-group setting that allows for dynamic interaction. Recent forums have been held in Washington, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Boston, Vancouver, Toronto, and Chicago. Upcoming forums are also s cheduled in Orlando and San Francisco. Join now, and receive:

• A subscription to World Future Review, the Society’s professional journal. An international editorial board referees all articles for this unique publication, which covers a wide range of futures-relevant subjects. • Invitations to the annual Professional Members Forums. (Join now to qualify for the 2014 Forum in Orlando.) • All benefits of regular membership in the World Future Society, including a subscription to THE FUTURIST, the Society’s bimonthly magazine on the future; discounts on books and other products; the Society’s yearly “Outlook” report of selected forecasts from THE FUTURIST; and a subscription to Futurist Update, a monthly e-mail newsletter. Professional Membership is $295 per year. A special rate of $195 per year is available for individuals belonging to educational or nonprofit organizations. Join online at www.wfs.org/professional or call 1-800-989-8274 weekdays (9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time).

WORLDFUTURE 2014 Preview

By Karl Albrecht

Deconstructing the Future: Seeing Beyond “Magic Wand” Predictions Whether it’s “rocket mail” or self-driving cars, predictions about the future need to be built on a deep understanding of context and consequences in order to inspire confidence. A business futurist offers insights on how to put wishful thinking, whims, and fads aside in favor of a process of structured inquiry. On June 8, 1959, the U.S. Navy submarine Barbero surfaced just off the Atlantic coast and fired a Regulus cruise missile, aimed at the Naval Air Station in Mayport, Florida. Twenty-two minutes later, the missile struck its target but did not explode. Shortly thereafter, a crew of sailors cut open the smoldering carcass of the missile and extracted two standard U.S. Post Office mail containers tucked into the compartment where the nuclear warhead would normally have been. The mail was then trucked to the post office in Jackson-

ville, where it was sorted and sent on its way for delivery. One of the addressees was President Dwight Eisenhower, at the White House. After witnessing the event, Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield proclaimed it to be “of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world.” He predicted, “Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.” Some experts believed at the time

that missile mail delivery might be feasible; most did not. It’s likely that the Navy Department saw the episode as merely an opportunity to showcase its new missile capabilities, and possibly offer a sobering reminder to the Russian military brass, near the peak of the Cold War. Summerfield, for his part, was wildly enthusiastic. But the concept never flew. What Were They Thinking?

The “rocket mail” prediction serves as a useful lesson about the

The “Missile Mail” Story

One of some 3,000 letters launched by missile in a Cold War demonstration of military technology for peaceful purposes.

Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield’s audacious proposal to deliver mail with reusable Regulus missiles—as a very public demonstration of the technology’s potential peaceful uses—came at the height of the Cold War, in 1959, when most military technologies under development in the United States were kept secret. The missile—containing 3,000 letters addressed to various VIPs, including all members of Congress, the Supreme Court, and President Eisenhower—was successfully launched on June 8, 1959, from the USS Barbero and guided by chase planes to its landing at the Mayport, Florida, Naval Auxiliary Air Station. Despite Summerfield’s enthusiasm for his vision of a space-age postal service, missile mail never took off. However, the Regulus experiment did demonstrate the U.S. military’s ability to guide a missile to a chosen target. For more information, see “Regulus Missile Mail,” Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, www.postalmuseum .si.edu/museum/1d_RegulusMail.html.

Regulus I missile fired from USS Barbero. PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE U.S. POSTAL MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

President Dwight Eisenhower (left) receives his copy of the letter from Summerfield (center), delivered by letter carrier Noble Upperman.

One of two rugged containers in which the letters were packed and launched via the Regulus 1 missile. Postmaster General Summerfield receives successful delivery of the missile mail, which then was sent on to recipients by normal post.

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ways in which emotion can trump common sense. Was this a case of rational futuring or just wishful thinking? We can sometimes get so excited and seduced by a “gee-whiz” idea that we neglect our responsibility to subject it to a disciplined inquiry. Let’s briefly deconstruct the rocket mail prediction and see what we might learn from it, starting with a few contextual observations. First, the missile shot proved nothing that wasn’t already known. If submarine-launched missiles could deliver nuclear warheads, it would hardly be a stretch of the imagination to conclude that they could deliver mail. Second, the presenting feasibility questions would surely have to be cost and scalability; the technical questions were mostly settled. Airplane mail, just rising from its infancy at that time, would almost certainly be cheaper and more easily scalable. Airports were sprouting up all over the world, but dedicated launch sites—and target zones—for rocket mail would have to be built, or military sites would have to be co-opted. Postmaster Summerfield and his advisers probably had good reasons to think it could be done. More likely, however, this missed call was the result of either wishful thinking or a lively imagination untethered from reality testing. We can do better. Imagination is an invaluable resource for thinking about the future or attacking any future-focused problem, but it also needs the support of a diligent, organized thinking process that lends depth to the inquiry. The Structured Inquiry Method (SIM), described briefly here, is a three-step process for deconstructing a presenting problem, issue, or opportunity, using three simple whole-brained thinking tools, and then reassembling it into a coherent picture of what might be realistically possible. Before we review the SIM process and toolbox, we need to explore the interplay between three complementary human mental processes: imagination, emotion, and logic. I believe we also need a more reliable conno46

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tation of the word prediction. And, I believe, we can adopt a more disciplined habit of building and deploying our predictions. Decrees Are Not Predictions

It seems to be fashionable these days for commentators in the popular press to outdo one another with ever more grand, bold and confident predictions. “Printed books will be gone in twenty years.” “There will be almost no poor countries by 2035.” “The Internet of Things: Everything will be connected to everything else.” I suspect that many of these declarations are simply “magic wand” predictions, wishful decrees that arise from the simple confusion of the possible with the probable. The fuzzy reasoning seems to be, “If I can imagine this thing happening, it should happen, and therefore it will happen.” This kind of pop futurism can be a pleasant pastime over coffee or drinks, but it’s a dangerous luxury in business. It also seems that optimistic magic wand predictions outnumber negative or pessimistic ones by a wide margin, at least in the popular press. Understandably, people who are trying to attract attention to themselves and their ideas tend to favor the good news over the gloom and doom. My biases are those of a business futurist—someone who assists the leaders of organizations of various kinds in thinking about their enterprises. Whether it’s a corporation, a government agency, a hospital, a university, an association, a religious institution, or any other entity that must survive in a resource-scarce environment, betting its future on a grand prediction of some sort carries an inescapable risk. In a number of competitive environments, if you get it wrong, you can stay wrong for a long time. Context Counts

What makes the magic wand prediction fun and easy also tends to make it weak and risky: the absence of context. When one merely decrees that “We’ll all have microchips installed in our brains by the year (fill •

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in the blank),” without considering the many related trends, events, and conditions that must dovetail for this conceivable state of affairs to manifest, the putative prediction degenerates to an unsupported conjecture. Conjecture has its uses, but it can only take us so far. The trouble begins when people mistake the “geewhiz” for the gospel—they begin to act out the assumption that it will materialize. In other words, we believe it because it’s too good not to be true. In business futuring, we speak of the strategic gestalt, which is a constellation of interwoven causal factors that, considered together, determine whether a particular state of affairs might be possible or probable. The richer the constellation of co-factors, and the more consistent and compelling the logic of the gestalt, the more confident we might be of the outcome we’re considering. In other words, there’s much more to the microchipin-the-brain scenario than just the technology of microchips. One skill that tends to set the top chess masters apart from all others is what cognitive psychologists call depth of search. This is the ability to imagine a long series of possible moves and countermoves—a futuring skill if there ever was one—and identify the moves that are most promising. As futurists, we don’t need to have been born with the mind of a chess master to look ahead; simple diagramming tools can help enormously. Returning to the rocket mail prediction, consider how a few extra “what if” questions might have brought its proponents back to earth. For example, airplanes don’t usually land by crashing, but missiles do. Suppose one of these mail missiles veers off course and takes out the Arc de Triomphe, the Taj Mahal, or Buckingham Palace? What do we do about the lost mail if one of them goes down in the ocean? How will air defense systems discriminate between mail missiles and nuclear missiles? The case gets weaker with every question. To separate trends from fads, futurists need to study what I call “whimology.” An unvoiced assump-

tion that seems to be embedded in many of the grand technological predictions these days is, “If you build it, they will buy it.” But marketers don’t seem to be much better than futurists at predicting the choices that fickle consumers—especially adolescents and teenagers—will make. Whimology is an underappreciated and much needed discipline. For example, at the time of this writing, one of the more highly caffeinated predictions in circulation is “self-driving cars.” Most of the reports I’ve read seem to focus on the technical feasibility—GPS positioning, automatic steering, car-to-car signaling, traffic control systems— none of which is really in doubt. The more operative question might be, What are the various ways people may react to the prospect of automated vehicles? Additional questions present: How “complete” will the self-driving experience be, and by when? Will I be able to take a two-hour nap while my car drives itself from San Diego to Los Angeles? Or must I remain on standby in case something goes wrong? Automobile manufacturers are already making humandriven cars ever smarter with digital electronics, so the story seems to be that the kids in Silicon Valley have somehow reinvented the car. Consider the whimology here: I’m not saying that self-driving cars are just a fad, but to make accurate forecasts we need to estimate the number of people who will be attracted to this technology and the number who will pass it up. And that requires understanding how they decide.

lations, or wishful decrees, which is what many of them are.

“Every child in the world will have access to a computer by 2050” carries a grand air of certitude, which can be very misleading to the casual listener. It conveys no sense of uncertainty or probability; it’s framed as if it were a simple fact. A confidence-weighted prediction might say, for example, “Retinal transplants will be standard medical procedure by 2040, give or take about seven years.” Or, “Sixty percent of new homes built will be ‘digitally smart’ by 2030, at a 90% confidence level.” Adding the confidence interval might not make it any more “scientific,” but at least we warn the listener that it’s a guess. And we need to remind ourselves that predictions composed of several interdependent outcomes will involve a higher total uncertainty than any individual one. Perhaps we futurists can adopt a shorthand convention for rating our predictions, something like motion picture ratings, or in this case a “confidence index” (CI). We might say, for example, “Cremations will outnumber burials by 2030 (CI = +/- 6 years),” or “Sales of e-books and print books will be approximately equal by 2020 (CI = 85%).” If this kind of convention became standard, then “naked” predictions—i.e., unqualified by confidence ratings—might be perceived as simply fantasies, specu-

Deconstructing, Contextualizing, And Road Mapping

Now, let’s zoom in on the process for building more robust, reliable, and trustworthy predictions, using a procedure I call the Structured Inquiry Method.

Step 1: Mapping the Strategic Context We begin by posing a “big question” of some sort, such as, Will independent book publishers and bookstores survive, thrive, or dive? That question immediately unleashes a swarm of other questions: Which way are they headed at the moment? How might digital technology change things for them? Will changing reading habits and preferences present threats, opportunities, or both? And how might the behavior of big-name publishers help them or hurt them? A simple and useful tool for this step is the “mind map,” aka an idea map or cluster diagram. This triedand-true method is cherished by consultants and facilitators who preach and teach creative thinking. Let’s visualize a team of investigators in a futures session, gathered

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

How About a Rating System For Predictions?

If we commit to a policy of insisting that predictions come with pedigrees—a plausible context and a believable strategic gestalt—we might also raise the bar on the format of the prediction; i.e., the language in which it is cast. In addition to contextualizing our predictions, another way to lend discipline to the futures thinking process is to frame our conjectures as confidence-weighted predictions. For example, a statement like

Author Karl Albrecht leads a group through a Strategic Inquiry Method workshop.

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around a huge sheet of paper at- sticky-notes, the group leader facili- quence of the key drivers that will tached to a wall, or a giant white- tates a process of grouping them into likely lead to the prospective outboard. Each one gets a felt marker, logical categories based on common come. The result is a series of note and they’re all free to add their ideas themes. As the notes keep shifting cards arranged on a timeline, usually to the diagram that will emerge. around, they ultimately form a set of w i t h s e v e r a l — a n d s o m e t i m e s The group leader writes the top- “affinity groups,” or clusters that many—branches and sub-branches. level question, or a phrase Each branch corresponds to that summarizes it, in the one of the major driver catCOURTESY OF THE AUTHOR center of the working suregories on the affinity diaface. As the participants gram. come up with related quesWhen all of the drivers tions and sub-questions, and their dependencies and they draw lines radiating sequences are agreed to, the out from the main question, result is a best guess about and write (or summarize) “Nature’s plan” for the evothe many sub-questions. lution. The card plan on the Sub-questions branch out to wall looks much like a projsmaller questions, and also ect plan or schedule, except to various topical subthat it’s a guess about what themes to be considered. will happen rather than a The diagram quickly starts plan to make something to look like a big spider happen. web. Next, by assigning bestMind mapping is a gen- Small group discussions during Strategic Inquiry Method workguess time intervals to the erative process, with few shop enable participants to build on each other’s ideas. various drivers in the card rules or restrictions. It conplan, we can estimate the tinues until it runs its shortest and longest probacourse. Now the investigable time spans for the estitors have a collective memory de- suggest a categorical structure for mated outcome. We can also assign vice. Everybody sees the same the causal factors on the evolution- best-guess probabilities to each of shared picture. They can always ex- ary path to the prospective end state the drivers and calculate an overall tend or amend the mind map as the (possible answers to the question confidence factor for the outcome. that the group is asking). next steps of the process unfold. Some of the drivers might be more Typically, each affinity group of speculative than others. Some might The mind-mapping tool gives us the first important piece of the themes represents a key driver, or be extremely likely, based on availfutures inquiry: the context, or the possible causal factor. Sub-topics able data. strategic gestalt as previously men- within the group may be sub-factors Taken together, the three tools of tioned. It offers a valuable perspec- that are more-specific drivers. Each structured inquiry—the mind map, tive on the implications of the big affinity group gets a descriptive the affinity diagram, and the card heading that summarizes its influ- plan—can give us a much clearer and question we’re exploring. ence. Some groups might be broken more trustworthy basis for underdown into sub-topics at different lev- standing the outcome we’re investiStep 2: Discovering the els of detail. gating than we would otherwise have Drivers by relying on hearsay, advocacy, and Next, the investigators gather at magic-wand predictions. ❑ Step 3: Building the Road another wall and build an “affinity Map diagram.” This collection of movable Once we have a clear portrait of sticky-notes, index cards, or similar About the Author media allows participants to itemize the strategic gestalt—the mind Karl Albrecht is an executive the key trends, events, develop- map—and we’ve discovered the key management consultant, coach, futurist, lecturer, and ments, and possible actions that drivers that may propel the evoluauthor of more than 20 might “cause” the particular out- tion—the affinity diagram—the third books on professional step is to trace out the likely timeline come that’s central to their inquiry. achievement, organizational Many of the topics on the slips of the change. performance, and business For this process, we use the simple will come from the mind map that strategy. His last article for THE FUTURIST was built in the first step. Other top- method of “card planning,” which is was “The Information Revolution’s Broken ics arise during discussion. This is another visual tool that keeps every- Promises” (March-April 2014). His Web site also a generative process, albeit a one in the group focused. is www.KarlAlbrecht.com. Moving to a third wall, the investimore focused one, in that it seeks to This article is a preview of his presentagators use sticky-notes, index cards, tion at WorldFuture 2014: What If, which will identify and itemize causal factors. Once the wall is plastered with or similar media to lay out the se- take place July 11-13 in Orlando, Florida. 48

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S P E C I A L

A D V E R T I S I N G

S E C T I O N

CONSULTANTS AND SERVICES

listing of consulting futurists. For information about being listed in the directory, published in every issue of THE FUTURIST and available on the Web at www.wfs.org, call Jeff Cornish toll free at 1-800-989-8274 or 301-656-8274, or e-mail jcornish@wfs.org.

Karl Albrecht International

Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking

Common Sense Medicine

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812 W. 8th St., Suite 2A, Plainview, TX 79072 Phone: 806-291-0700 Fax: 806-293-8229 E-mail: drjonzdo@yahoo.com Web: www.commonsensemedicine.org Contact: Lon Jones DO, Jerry Bozeman M.Ed., LPC Adaptations today are the future. The authors of The Boids and the Bees tell how to guide adaptations in our living systems: healthcare, education, economy, even us.

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Alternative Futures Associates 100 N. Pitt St., Suite 307, Alexandria, VA 22314-3134 Phone: 703-684-5880 Fax: 703-684-0640 E-mail: futurist@altfutures.com Web: www.altfutures-afa.com Contact: Clement Bezold, Jonathan Peck, Eric Meade Vision and scenario development, strategic planning, trend analysis, workshop design and facilitation, presentations, keynotes, consulting.

Atlas Safety & Security Design, Inc. 770 Palm Bay Ln., Suite 4-I, Miami, FL 33138 Phone: 305-756-5027 Fax: 305-754-1658 E-mail: ratlas@ix.netcom.com Web: www.cpted-security.com Contact: Dr. Randall Atlas, AIA, CPP Pioneers in crime prevention through environmental design. Design of jails, prevention of premises liability lawsuits.

Aviv Consulting 15363 NE 201st St. Woodinville, WA 98072 Phone: 425-415-6155 E-mail: avivconsulting@gmail.com Web: www.avivconsulting.com Contact: Aviv Shahar Helping leaders and teams develop their vision and design the future. Innovation, strategy, coaching, consulting, retreats.

Joseph F. Coates, Consulting Futurist, Inc. 5420 Connecticut Ave. NW, #619 Washington, DC 20015-2832 Phone 202-363-7440 Fax 202-363-4139 Email: joe@josephcoates.com Web: www.josephcoates.com The future is my business: futures research, consultation, trend analysis, scenario development, visioning, scientific, technological and social forecasting, training, briefings, workshops, presentations and keynotes. Coates has been one of the most frequently cited authors in Future Survey and one of the most popular speakers at the World Future Society annual meetings. He is the author or co-author of six books, most recently A Bill of Rights for 21st Century America, and of 2025: Scenarios of US and Global Society Reshaped by Science and Technology. He has had assignments from half of the Fortune 100 firms, and has had published 290 articles on the future since 1990. He is also responsible for 200 proprietary reports to business, government and association clients. Coates will enlighten you on the future of any subject. Prepare for an unforgettable encounter.

Creating the Future, Inc. with Edward D. Barlow, Jr. 2907 Division St., Suite 109, St. Joseph, MI 49085 Phone: 269-982-1830 Fax: 269-982-1541 E-mail: info@creatingthefuture.com Web: www.creatingthefuture.com Contact: Ed Barlow (staff: Sandy, Tammy, and Tresea) Relating influences of a changing world to industries, organizations, professions, communities. Presentations, strategic planning facilitation.

CREO Strategic Solutions 7710 Woodmont Ave., #211, Bethesda, MD 20814 Phone: 301-656-1034 Contact: Kevin Fickenscher, MD Email: drkevin@creostrategicsolutions.com Healthcare is undergoing dramatic change that extends far beyond the financing of healthcare. Understanding and embracing the future is critical. Keynotes, workshops, leadership training, strategic advisory services and consulting.

de Bono For Business 248 W. Loraine St., #103, Glendale, CA 91202 Phone: 818-507-6055 E-mail: info@LyndaCurtin.com Web: www.deBonoForBusiness.com Contact: Lynda Curtin, the Opportunity Thinker Lift your thinking. Learn breakthrough futurist tools—lateral thinking, six thinking hats. Workshops. Keynotes. Facilitation.

FutureManagement Group AG Wallufer Strasse 3a, Eltville, Germany D-65343 Phone: 49-6123-7 55 53 Fax: 49-6123-7 55 54 Web: www.FutureManagementGroup.com E-mail: Office@FutureManagementGroup.com Contacts: Pero Micic, Claudia Schramm Use the “Eltville Model” of FutureManagement to see more of the future than your competitors!

Consultants

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Services

Future Problem Solving Program International, Inc. 2015 Grant Pl., Melbourne, FL 32901 Phone: 321-768-0078 Fax: 321-768-0097 E-mail: mail@fpspi.org Web: www.fpspi.org Contact: Marianne Solomon, Executive Director FPSPI is an established educational program that provides a 6-step problem solving process to assist students as they think about the future.

The Futures Lab 2130 Goodrich Ave., Austin, TX 78704 Phone: 512-468-4505 E-mail: dwoodgate@futures-lab.com Web: www.futures-lab.com Contact: Derek Woodgate International futures-based consultancy specializing in consumer, business futures. Leaders in the future potential business.

Institute for Alternative Futures 100 N. Pitt St., Suite 307, Alexandria, VA 22314-3134 Phone: 703-684-5880 Fax: 703-684-0640 E-mail: futurist@altfutures.com Web: www.altfutures.com Contacts: Clement Bezold, Jonathan Peck, William Rowley, MD Uses research reports, workshops, scenarios, and visioning to help organizations understand future possibilities and create their “preferred future.”

Futurist Speaker Thomas Frey DaVinci Institute, 511 E South Boulder Road, Louisville, CO 80027 Phone: 303-666-4133 E-mail: deb@davinciinstitute.com Web: www.futuristspeaker.com Contact: Debra Frey Thomas Frey is Google’s top-rated futurist speaker and IBM’s most award-winning engineer. Author of Communicating with the Future—the book that changes everything. Speaking topics: future of business, work, education, transportation, government, and more.

Institute for Global Futures 2084 Union St., San Francisco, CA 94123 Phone: 415-563-0720 Fax: 415-563-0219 E-mail: info@globalfuturist.com Web: www.GlobalFuturist.com Contact: Dr. James Canton Futures based keynotes, consulting and research for any vertical industry by leading futurist James Canton.

The Greenway Group

Institute for Participatory Management and Planning

25 Technology Pkwy. South, Suite 101, Norcross, GA 30092 Phone: 678-879-0929 Fax: 678-879-0930 E-mail: jcramer@di.net Web: www.greenway.us Contact: James Cramer, chairman Strategic change, trends, forecasts, research. Architecture and design technology. Journals: Design Intelligence. Publications: The Almanac of Architecture & Design, How Firms Succeed, Design + Enterprise, Leadership by Design, Communication by Design, Value Redesigned.

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P.O. Box 804, S-10136 Stockholm, Sweden Phone: (46 8) 545 225 00 Fax: (46 8) 545 225 01 E-mail: info@kairosfuture.se Web: www.kairosfuture.se Contacts: Mats Lindgren, Anna Kiefer Values, work, technology, marketing. Methods: scenarios, studies, lectures, seminars, consulting. Public and private sectors.

111 E. Chestnut St., Lancaster PA 17602-2703 Phone: 717-394-2500 Web: www.innovationfocus.com Contacts: Christopher W. Miller, Ph.D.; Anne Orban, M.Ed. Innovation Focus is an internationally recognized consulting firm that brings innovation to all stages of product life cycle management and provides proven processes for deep customer understanding and meaningful innovation. Clients include: Kraft Foods, Kimberly Clark, WD-40, Bristol-Myers Squibb.

1109 Main St., Ste. 299A, Boise, ID 83702 Phone: 208-345-5995 Fax: 208-345-6083 E-mail: JLuthy@futurescorp.com Web: www.futurescorp.com Contact: Dr. John Luthy Strategic thinking/planning; evolving leadership; organization redesign/development; trend analysis; scenario planning; business growth strategies.

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KAIROS Future AB

34 Warren Dr., Newport News, VA 23608 Phone: 757-874-5414 E-mail: HUDSON2059@msn.com Contact: Henry G. Hudson, president and CEO Management consulting help in advanced administrative services, operations, systems, methods, procedures, policies, strategy, and management.

Innovation Focus Inc.

The Futures Corporation

H.G. Hudson and Associates

P.O. Box 1937, Monterey, CA 93942-1937 Phone: 831-373-4292 Fax: 831-373-0760 E-mail: ipmp@aol.com Web: www.ipmp-bleiker.com Contacts: Annemarie Bleiker, Hans Bleiker, Jennifer Bleiker We offer a Leadership Boot-Camp for guiding complex problem-solving and decision-making efforts.

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Leading Futurists LLC 4420 49th St., NW, Washington, DC 20016 Phone: 202-271-0444 E-mail: jbmahaffie@starpower.net Web: www.leadingfuturists.biz Contacts: John B. Mahaffie, Jennifer Jarratt Futures consulting, workshops, scenarios, research, keynote talks to help organizations discover new opportunities and challenges. Members, Association of Professional Futurists.

MG Rush Performance Learning 1301 W. 22nd St., Suite 603, Oak Brook, IL 60523 Phone: 630-954-5880 Fax: 630-954-5889 E-mail: futurist@mgrush.com Contacts: Terrence Metz, 630-954-5882; Kevin Booth, 630-954-5884 Facilitation of, and facilitator training for: scenario planning, strategy development, group decision-making, workshop design, ideation, option development and analysis, and training of facilitative leadership.

Minkin Affiliates 135 Riviera Dr., #305, Los Gatos, CA 95032 Phone: 408-402-3020 E-mail: barryminkin@earthlink.net Web: minkinaffiliates.com Contact: Barry Minkin Keynote speaker, bestselling author, global management consultant, three decades linking emerging trends to consumer and market strategy.

Next Consulting 104 Timber Ridge Rd., State College, PA 16801 Phone: 814-237-2575 Fax: 814-863-4257 E-mail: g7g@psu.edu Web: nextconsulting.us Contact: Geoffrey Godbey, Ph.D. Repositioning leisure/tourism organizations for the near future. Speeches, ideation, imagineering. Client list on request.

Jim Pinto Technology Futurist 2805 Ocean St. #2, Carlsbad, CA 92008 Phone: 858-353-5467 E-mail: jim@jimpinto.com Web: www.JimPinto.com Contact: Jim Pinto Speaker and consultant: technology futures, industrial automation, global business trends, Internet business relationships.

Pinyon Partners LLC 140 Little Falls St., Suite 210, Falls Church, VA 22046 Phone: 703-651-0359 E-mail: pshoemaker@pinyonpartners.com Web: www.pinyonpartners.com Contacts: Peter B.G. Shoemaker; Dan Garretson, Ph.D. Quantitative and qualitative. Art and Science. However you want to characterize it, our distinctive combination of the hard-nosed and the deeply intuitive is perfectly suited for those navigating over the horizon. Expansive explorations of what’s next; engaging engagements with change; consultations, workshops, research, and talks aimed at creating future-oriented clarity, purpose, insight, and confidence. Member, Association of Professional Futurists.

Qi Systems 35 Seacoast Terr., Apt. 6P, Brooklyn, NY 11235 Phone: 718-769-9655 E-mail: QiSys@msn.com Web: www.qisystems.org Contact: Ronn Parker, Ph.D. Spectrum Counseling: conflict resolution, conscious evolution, martial arts, meditation methods, mindbody strategies, transformational learning.

David Pearce Snyder, Consulting Futurist The Snyder Family Enterprise, 8628 Garfield St., Bethesda, MD 20817-6704 Phone: 301-530-5807 Fax: 301-530-1028 E-mail: david@the-futurist.com Web: www.the-futurist.com Contact: Sue Snyder High-impact motivating presentations. Strategic assessments, socio-technologic forecasts/scenarios. Keynote addresses, strategic briefings, workshops, surveys.

Strategic Futures® Strategic Futures Consulting Group, Inc. 113 South Washington St., Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone: 703-836-8383 Fax: 703-836-9192 E-mail: info@strategicfutures.com Web: www.strategicfutures.com Contact: Ron Gunn or Jennifer Thompson

Strategic planning, succession planning including mentoring, executive coaching, organizational change facilitation, and matrix management assistance.

Phone: 203-686-0281 E-mail: rlkbsr@snet.net Web (consulting): www.rogerlkemp.com Web (background): www.rogerkemp.org Contact: Roger Kemp, MPA, MBA, PhD, President Dr. Kemp has been author and editor of over a dozen books dealing with issues relating to cities (towns) and colleges (gowns). He gives keynote speeches, strategic briefings, and does futures research and consulting on emerging trends dealing with the dynamic and evolving field of town-gown relations.

SynOvation Solutions 455 Hazelwood Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94127 Phone: 415-298-3008 E-mail: info@synovationsolutions.com Web: www.synovationsolutions.com Contacts: Bruce L. Tow, David A. Gilliam Future-is-now resources to help you achieve key and mission-critical breakthroughs or creatively evolve your business to meet future challenges.

21st Century Learning LLC 10 Jamaicaway, Suite #18, Boston, MA 02130 Telephone: 978-204-2770 Email: charlesfadel@gmail.com Web: www.21stcenturyskillsbook.com Contact: Charles Fadel, founder and best-selling author: 21st Century Skills; visiting scholar, Harvard GSE and MIT ESG. Education’s futures, as impacted by Technology, and along the dimensions of Knowledge, Skills, Character, and Metacognition. Keynotes and seminars on global education; education technology; neuroscience of learning; creativity & innovation; artificial intelligence & augmented intelligence.

Synthesys Strategic Consulting Ltd. Belsize Park, London NW3 UK Phone: 44-207-449-2903 Fax: 44-870-136-5560 E-mail: www.hardintibbs.com Web: www.synthstrat.com Contact: Hardin Tibbs, CEO Synthesys specializes in using futures research to develop innovative strategies. Based in London UK, with international experience in both the public and private sectors, across many different industries. Projects include horizon scanning, strategic sense-making, scenarios, vision building, assumption testing, and strategy formulation, either as expert input or by co-production directly with leadership teams.

van der Werff Global, Ltd. 4958 Crystal Circle, Hoover, AL 35226 Phone: 888-448-3779 Fax: 888-432-9263 E-mail: terry@globalfuture.com Web: www.globalfuture.com Contact: Dr. Terry J. van der Werff, CMC Confidential advisor to corporate leaders worldwide on global trends, executive leadership, and strategic change.

The TechCast Project Department of Information Systems & Technology Management, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. 20052 Phone: 202-994-5975 E-mail: Halal@gwu.edu Web: www.techcast.org Contact: William E. Halal, professor, George Washington University; president, Techcast LLC TechCast is an online research project that pools the knowledge of 100 experts worldwide to forecast breakthroughs in all fields of science and technology. Results are updated in real time and distributed to corporations, governments, and other subscribers to aid in their strategic planning. The project has been featured in The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Futurist, and various journals. The National Academies consider TechCast among the best systems available, and Google ranks it No. 2 or 3 out of 45 million hits. TechCast also gives presentations, conducts customized studies, and performs most types of consulting related to technology and strategic change.

Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc. 200 E. 33rd St., Suite 9I, New York, NY 10016 Phone: 212-889-7007 Fax: 212-679-0628 E-mail: info@weineredrichbrown.com Web: www.weineredrichbrown.com Contact: Arnold Brown, Edie Weiner For over two decades, the pioneers in detecting emerging trends and linking them to a ction.

Xland sprl 111 Av Grandchamp, Brussels, Belgium 1150 Phone: 32-475-827-190 Fax: 32-2-762-46-08 Web: www.xland.be E-mail: xland@skynet.be Contact: D. Michel Judkiewicz Trend analysis, scenarios, forecasting opportunities/threats based on strong and weak signals for resilient strategies.

Town and Gown Relations Kemp Consulting, LLC P. O. Box 342, Meriden, CT 06450-0342

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THE FUTURIST

July-August 2014

Reviews Futurizing Workers For Future Work By David Pearce Snyder

As we move from the Information Age and into the Cyber-Mental Age, many new jobs are left unfilled. The goal of developing the advanced competencies of available workers, like self-directed learning and creativity, will best be met through partnerships among employers, educators, and local governments. Edward Gordon brings a good deal of data, insight, and clarity to a hotly debated topic: the skills required by the workers of the Post industrial Age. Readers familiar with the extensive literature on this subject will find this assessment of the facts refreshingly free of political posturing or sweeping policy pronouncements (e.g., “Send everybody to college”). Future Jobs maps out the dimensions of an underappreciated crisis confronting the United States, as well as many of the world’s developed and emerging economies: the rapidly growing shortage of adults who possess the basic skills to qualify for the high-growth, informationintensive jobs of what the author calls the age of “cyber-mental work.” The first half of Future Jobs is largely devoted to summarizing the multiple demographic, econometric, and technological trends and developments that have combined to render our once notably successful school-to-work education system

outmoded and inand prospering docreasingly ineffective. mestic job markets in At the heart of today’s the emerging econoemployment/skills mies are already dicrisis, Gordon conminishing the appeal cludes, is the restrucof emigrating to turing of our economy America. The author caused by information also cites evidence of technology and gloa growing “reverse balization, which is brain-drain,” as inoccurring at the same creasing numbers of time that a shrinking recent immigrants to entry-level labor pool the U.S. are returning will increasingly fall to their home counshort of replacing the tries to pursue their retiring baby boomers. c a r e e r s . Wi t h i n a While the central fo- Future Jobs: Solving the decade, Gordon forecus of Future Jobs is Employment and Skills Crisis c a s t s , t h e U n i t e d by Edward E. Gordon. Praeger. the U.S. economy and States will be largely 2013. 203 pages. $37. workforce, the author “on its own” in supspends an entire chapplying employers ter to show that the same dynam- with workers. ics—i.e., techno-economic restructurThe prospects for robust U.S. job ing and demographic discontinuity demand would seem to offer reason —are at work throughout all devel- for hope among the nation’s more oped nations, as well as in most of than 20 million unemployed and unthe major developing nations. Cop- deremployed workers. But Gordon’s ing with millions of underemployed, assessment of the projected job marinappropriately skilled workers is al- ket suggests otherwise. While ready a crisis for the United States, around 45% of forecast U.S. workEurope, and Japan. Gordon shows place vacancies during the coming that it will soon become a crisis for decade will require some form of China, India, and other emerging postsecondary degree or certificate, economies, as well. all jobs from now on will require emU.S. workforce demographics for ployees “to be able to use informathe coming decade are straightfor- tion to make non-routine workplace ward and compelling. Even at its decisions.” current modest growth rate, the U.S. Such higher-order cognitive comeconomy is projected to create 21 petencies, Gordon asserts, are million new jobs during the next 10 quickly becoming basic minimum years, at the same time that 33 mil- requirements for essentially all U.S. lion baby boomers are expected to employment. The general absence of retire. This means that U.S. employ- these skills in the U.S. workforce, ers will need to fill 54 million vacan- Gordon believes, helps explain why cies during the coming decade. employers report having 4 to 5 milHowever, the U.S. Census Bureau lion unfillable vacancies just when projects that the nation’s labor pool more than 20 million unemployed will only grow by 11 million work- and underutilized Americans are uners, so more than 40 million vacan- able to find jobs. He cites evidence cies will have to be filled by recruits that those unfilled vacancies are who are already in the labor pool to- causing a measurable drag on U.S. day. economic growth, both nationally Gordon notes that U.S. employers and at the local community level. have long relied on imported labor Future Jobs makes a convincing to mitigate shortages of all kinds of case that there is an urgent need to workers, from field hands to physi- provide tens of millions of U.S. cists. But slowing population growth workers—both the unemployed and

employed—with advanced cognitive skills, which include systems thinking, problem analysis, teamwork, self- directed learning, cyber-literacy, and applied creativity. As Gordon points out, no such formal curriculum is currently offered by any American educational institution. Higher-order cognitive skills are incorporated in the new Common Core Standards of L e a r n i n g t h a t a re n o w b e i n g adopted throughout most U.S. public schools. But, as the author observes, it will take more than a decade for the new curriculum to be fully implemented, and it will do nothing to address the cognitiveskills deficit afflicting tens of millions of U.S. adults. The author accepts the available evidence showing that college graduates typically acquire advanced cognitive skills in the process of earning four-year baccalaureate degrees. In particular, he cites surveys of CEOs indicating that employers believe liberal arts and humanities curricula are sources of such skills. But Gordon concedes the implausibility of scaling up the nation’s colleges and universities to provide advanced cognitive skills training to millions of adults, more than onefourth of whom never completed high school! The business model of our current postsecondary institutions, he concludes, is simply too expensive, too inefficient, and too labor-intensive to solve the employment/skills crisis. Throughout Future Jobs, as the author documents the size and makeup of our evolving job market and workplace skills set, he makes recurring references to spontaneous local initiatives in small and large communities nationwide. In these initiatives, employers, educators, and civic leaders collaborate to create new learning programs targeted at providing workers with the skills required by specific, hard-to-fill local jobs. First appearing during the mid1990s as economic development initiatives, such programs now exist in dozens of communities across the country. Gordon provides a number

cally concedes that today’s fractious partisan politics make such a tax reform unlikely. Given the improbability of either major new public sector education expenditures or corporate tax reform, he concludes that the only effective means to address the workplace skills crisis is through local initiatives: employers collaborating with educators, government, and civic leadership to provide millions of individuals with the specific skills required to perform the jobs of the Cyber-Mental Age.

of case studies detailing these successful initiatives, which he refers to collectively as “Regional Talent Innovation Networks” or RETAINs. He also describes successful RETAINs in other countries as evidence of the concept’s general practicability. Having spent his professional career in human resources development, Gordon is able to augment his “big picture” analysis with important insights from workplace realities. In particular, he points out that once-robust U.S. business investment in worker training has fallen steadily since the 1980s, as corporate leadership adopted policies aimed at maximizing short-term profits and shareholder returns. While noting recent increases in training expenditures by some multinational firms, the author argues that, in light of rising skills shortages, employers should be encouraged to invest in workforce development by permitting companies to treat their training expenditures as capital investments rather than as a business expense. If the U.S. tax code and accounting standards were revised so that employer investments in worker training were treated the same as investments in capital goods (e.g., equipment, facilities, etc.), businesses would be able to depreciate their spending on human resource development over a number of years, reducing the impact of such spending on corporate bottom lines. Gordon points out that depreciating the cost of training would be entirely appropriate, since today’s rapid rates of workplace innovation and job redesign renders the content of much workplace instruction outdated within just a few years. Changing the tax treatment of training expenditures, he believes, would lead to a substantial increase in corporate spending on human resource development, permitting business and the marketplace to deal directly with the workforce skills crisis, and reducing the need for new public sector programs. Notwithstanding the intuitive appeal of his proposal, Gordon realistiwww.wfs.org

About the Reviewer David Pearce Snyder is a consulting futurist, principal of The Snyder Family Enterprise, and THE FUTURIST’s Lifestyles editor.

Annual Report Card On Our Future By Rick Docksai

The Millennium Project assesses where the world is gaining or losing ground. The world community is in better shape than it should be, states the Millennium Project’s leadership team in its 2013-14 State of the Future report. This volume, the international think tank’s acclaimed annual “report card on the future of the world,” finds that human health and living standards are trending upward but are doing so despite deficient stewardship of the planet and widespread occurrences of poor governance, political corruption, crime, and violence. “When you consider the many wrong decisions and good decisions not yet taken—day after day and year after year around the world—it is amazing that we are still making as much progress as we are,” the authors write. •

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Reviews

The Millennium at the expense of the Project has been proenvironment,” the auducing annual State of thors write. the Future reports All is not trending since 1996. Each rewell for human life, eiport makes a full-scale ther. The SOFI notes assessment of where little or no progress on life on Earth is headnuclear nonproliferaing, based on contion and HIV prevastantly incoming data lence—areas in which from an international we were winning in network of more than 2011. Some trends from 4,500 contributing re2012 or earlier are consearchers. Like its pretinuing to worsen, decessors, this year ’s too—namely, income report integrates the inequality, terrorism, data into a list of 15 2013-14 State of the Future and political corrupGlobal Challenges that by Jerome C. Glenn, tion. Theodore J. Gordon, and require collaborative This year’s 15 Global Elizabeth Florescu. The action by the world’s Millennium Project, www Challenges list addileaders, along with a .millennium-project.org. 2014. tionally notes that State of the Future In- 239 pages plus a CD-ROM global material waste dex (SOFI) that marks containing 10,000 pages. increased tenfold last areas of life in which $39.95. century and could douwe are “winning,” ble again by 2025. The “losing,” or experiencing “unclear or authors also voice concern over little change.” shrinking supplies of potable water. This report’s SOFI cites some en- They call for new agricultural apcouraging firsts. For the first time, proaches that would consume less wawe are “winning” on renewable enter, such as new ways to synthesize ergy—worldwide renewable capac- meat without growing animals, geity has been growing and is on track netic engineering for higher-yielding for a much larger growth spurt this and more drought-resistant crops, and decade. We are also winning for the cultivating insects as animal feed. first time on Gross National InvestOn the upside, literacy and IQ ment Per Capita, Foreign Direct In- scores keep rising, and the growth of vestment, and Health Expenditures online educational resources could Per Capita. accelerate intellectual growth even Also, some positive trends from further. Also, the prospects for a earlier years are still running strong. more peaceful world are on the upThe number of physicians per capita swing, thanks to democracy, internais growing worldwide, as it was in tional trade, Internet use, and news 2011. The world is likewise winning media all gaining ground; prosperity on energy efficiency, a winning rising and poverty declining; crossstreak that started in 2012. cultural dialogues flourishing; and Other trends are not good. For the NGOs and regional organizations first time, we are losing on forest fostering community-led social rearea. Also, greenhouse-gas emissions forms and peace accords. and our overall ecological footprint, Efforts to affirm women’s rights two areas that have been on the “los- are also making crucial gains. New ing” side of the ledger for the past worldwide campaigns to stop viofew years, are still losing areas today. lence against women are expanding, Glaciers are melting and coral reefs while new mobile-phone apps and are dying at accelerating rates as cli- Internet sites are making it easier to mate change gathers steam. report and publicize incidences of “The global situation for humanity violence. Overall, the report projects continues to improve in general, but that “slow but massive shifts in gen54

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der stereotypes will occur in the next few decades.” The Global Challenges section breaks each problem area down to the regional levels, as well. Readers will see specific takes on the energy, governance, and human and environmental health situations of Africa, Europe, North America, Latin America, and Asia and Oceania. Some new issues have surfaced since 2012, such as poor nutrition. The authors explain that, while hunger is down throughout the world, much of the world’s daily caloric intake is “empty calories” that satisfy hunger pangs but do little for overall health and contribute to weight gain and diabetes risk. “It is not clear that food nutrient density will keep pace with human needs,” they write. The report lists several dozen steps that could remedy the situation. Among them are taxing unhealthy foods more heavily to subsidize healthier ones, posting “low nutritional value” warning labels on food packaging, breaking up agribusiness and food market monopolies, increasing investment in developing countries’ agricultural R&D, and organizing school-based campaigns to encourage healthier eating. Another concern is major construction along the world’s coasts, where there is vulnerability to numerous environmental hazards. The authors give several pages of recommendations for safer development, such as more interdisciplinary and participatory urban planning that involves NGOs, ecologists, and the urban poor; building green, floating cities with newer materials; imposing compensation fees and higher taxes on activities that pollute; and organizing youth environmental groups to carry out habitat restoration. The world has the means to further improve human life while preserving the planet’s natural systems and resources, but it must marshal global intelligence and activism across national borders to an entirely new degree, the authors conclude. They stress the value of better infor-

mation-gathering systems as guides to the process. “Some of the world’s toughest problems affect everyone almost instantly and do not end at national borders. In the future, solutions as well as problems must also cross boundaries—ideological as well as geographic,” they write. The 2013-14 State of the Future is an authoritative compendium of what we know about the future of humanity and our planet. Policy makers and advocates will find it to be a vast yet very readable source of insight on where the world’s thorniest problems begin and where they might end. About the Reviewer Rick Docksai is senior editor of THE FUTURIST. E-mail rdocksai@wfs.org.

The Outer Limits of Quantum Computing Computing with Quantum Cats: From Colossus to Qubits by John Gribbin. Prometheus. 2014. 295 pages. $28.95.

A whole other reality exists at the quantum level, and we are learning how to access it via quantum computers. In his latest book, science journalist John Gribbin gives readers a detailed look at this technology area and its capabilities—including the prospect that quantum computers might hold the key to true artificial intelligence. He starts by retracing computer history and the series of breakthroughs that eventually brought the specialized field of quantum computing into being. Along the way, he explains what we now know about quantum mechanics and describes how engineers have succeeded in reproducing some quantum phenomena in experimental quantum computer systems. Quantum computers generate much excitement due to their ability

to construct multiple simultaneous calculations of the same problem, a feat that would theoretically enable them to far surpass conventional computers in certain types of functions. For example, a single quantum computer could calculate all of the activities occurring in an area of space, and thereby give scientists exceptionally accurate models of the universe and physical reality—or even, if the operators wish, of the “multiverses” that many physicists argue exist alongside our universe. Also, quantum computers can encrypt data so that no conventional computer can intercept it—thus raising the possibility that quantum computers could give all of us greater safety from identity theft and other pilfering of our personal data. But this technology has considerable limitations, as well. Gribbin describes the present-day difficulties of building quantum computers that are large enough to compete with conventional computers at most tasks, as well as possible solutions. The approaches that engineers are now attempting include using trapped ions to perform computations; the Josephson function, which uses photons of light to store data; and quantum teleportation, by which two photons become “ent angled,” such that, when one goes into a quantum state, that state transfers to

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the other photon. Computing with Quantum Cats is a highly technical read. Nonscientists may find it intimidating, but the book is a worthy find for tech-savvy readers who want a well-informed look at quantum computing’s present state and future potential. —Rick Docksai

Big Data Keeps Getting Bigger Data Crush: How the Information Tidal Wave Is Driving New Opportunities by Christopher Surdak. AMACOM. 2014. 280 pages. $27.95.

Our world is awash in evergrowing amounts of data, ranging from detailed b re a k d o w n s o f what consumers are buying to macro-scale indicators of which b u s i n e s s e s a re growing and why, notes technology consultant Christopher Surdak. He explores the driving forces behind the data accumulation and the tremendous opportunities that it offers to businesses and organizations, as well as to individual consumers who make an effort to utilize it. Surdak recaps the recent history behind the rise of Web-enabled mobile phones, mobile apps, and the

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Reviews

optimal reading for business professionals in any industry. —RD

“Internet of Things”—e.g., household appliances and other consumer products communicating with each other through Wi-Fi. Among the industry trends he describes are cloud computing; consumer analytics; “contextualization,” by which individuals’ mobile devices give them targeted ads and entertainment suggestions based on where they are located; and personal wellness apps, which consumers use to keep track of their health. Companies will have to manage larger influxes of data than they have ever before seen, and achieve innovations in both their products and their production processes more quickly than ever. None of this will be easy, but those companies that are up to the challenges will find a gold mine of wealth-generating opportunities. Surdak lays out his own forecasts on how companies might learn to collect and use this data, and the information-technology sectors that might have to grow to help them manage it all. He concludes with a compilation of scenarios for life in 2020. Each scenario imagines hypothetical new technology products and services that embody all of the trends he’s described in the chapters preceding. A few examples: • A weight-loss app that advises its user throughout each day on exercise options and meal plans, based in part on the user’s buying habits and Facebook likes. • Personalized genome maps that, when coupled with mobile apps that monitor a user’s physical health indicators nonstop, enable doctors to preempt and treat health problems years before any visible symptoms of them occur. • Online tutoring and educational programs that students receive and watch as e‑videos on their own pairs of iGlasses, which also send and receive e‑mails—perfect for students who are working while studying, which will be most students by 2020. Data Crush is an informative guide to the information-technology ecosystem and where it is heading. It’s 56

THE FUTURIST

July-August 2014

Making the Most of Our Brains The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind by Michio Kaku. Doubleday. 2014. 377 pages. $28.95.

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has not only been exploring some of the deepest mysteries of science over the years— he co-founded the string field theory of the universe and its alleged parallel multiverses—but he’s also been breaking these mysteries down to lay audiences worldwide as a professor, radio show host, and author. In The Future of the Mind, he tells readers of the latest scientific discoveries of the human brain and the startling impacts that those discoveries could have for life as we know it. Kaku recaps brain science from the 1800s through the present and fills readers in on what we have learned about how the brain works and how our brains create our perceptions of reality. He also illuminates the progress that medicine has been making more recently in decoding brain chemistry to figure out how the very foundations of memory, dreams, and emotions form on the one hand, and mental disorders and addictions on the other. This knowledge could lead us to new methods of boosting health by directly interfacing with—or altering, in some cases—brain processes. He shows, for example, how brain science might one day restore mobility to people suffering paralysis, eliminate mental illnesses and addictions, and boost individuals’ intelligence to unprecedented new levels. Even steeper challenges could later fall within our grasp: Kaku examines the prospects for implanting human-level intelligence in apes and •

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dogs, creating truly “conscious” robots, and transferring our minds onto software for virtually enabled immortality. We might even communicate telepathically through brainto-brain interfaces, break free of our bodies altogether and live forever as humanoid machines, or, if we’d rather, roam the universe as freefloating entities of pure consciousness. Kaku offers readers a s t u n n i n g e x e rc i s e i n imagination that’s grounded in hard scientific fact. The Future of the Mind is a great find for all readers who take an interest in scientific discovery and its capacity to enhance human life. —RD

What We’ll Need to Know to Bounce Back from Armageddon The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch by Lewis Dartnell. Penguin Press. 2014. 340 pages. $27.95.

What if a horrific global disaster brought civilization to an end? Lewis Dartnell, a BBC science correspondent and University of Leicester space research fellow, considers the aftermath of a worldwide catastrophe such as a nuclear war, a global pandemic brought on by a super- virus, or even an unusually intense coronal mass ejection from the Sun. All of these are very unlikely events, but all are destructive enough to lay waste to global commerce, electrical grids, and civic order around the world if they ever did come to pass. We had best have some survival action plans ready, just in case, he argues. Dartnell looks at how the survivors might salvage usable items from the rubble and eventually rediscover the technologies of building construction, energy generation, computers, and modern medicine. His account starts with their foraging for supplies in the abandoned cities, after which they’d take cover out in the country—ideally, in loca-

tions near the coasts. Then he lays out step-bystep how these plucky survivors could scrape together the necessities of everyday living: They could stitch together clothes and fabrics from naturally cultivated cotton and wool; sow and fertilize crops when the tools of modern farming are gone; and derive heating fuel, soaps, and candles from animal fat, plant oils, and charcoal. He also describes how they could purify the charcoal prior to use, minimizing pollution. More-sophisticated creature comforts are feasible for these postapocalyptic humans, too. Dartnell continues with makeshift processes for making glassware and ceramics, generating electricity, creating some form of motorized transportation, and providing basic medical care. All of these are innovations that took early humans tens of thousands of years to discover, he notes. But we could bring them back far sooner. We just need to hone our survival skills ahead of time and know where to look for the technical knowledge before it is lost. The Knowledge is a well-organized and engaging guide to life in a truly worst-case global scenario. While we can all hope that readers will never have to use its advice, it’s certainly good to be prepared. Who’s to say: If

1990s with the profusion of mobile phones, and have gained an even higher pitch in more recent years, not only because far more consumers now own mobile phones, but also because the amount of time that they spend on their phones in an average week has increased by five- or sixfold. Meanwhile, scientists who sound the alarm on the radiation’s dangers get sidelined and silenced by telecommunications industry groups and the government officials who are beholden to them. It’s not only we humans who are at risk. Blank documents additional harms to birds, plants, and insects— three vital links to food chains everywhere—stemming from electromagnetic radiation exposure. All show damage to DNA and reduced ability to respond to stresses in the environment. We don’t need to give up our cell phones, Blank explains, but he advises us to modify our devices and how we use them. Otherwise, he warns, our radiation exposure and the health effects associated with it will only grow, as more electronic devices continue to populate our surroundings. Electromagnetic radiation and its health risks are a complex subject, but Blank breaks it down effectively for lay audiences everywhere. Readers who want to know the hard science behind the issue will find an accessible and helpful resource in Overpowered. —RD ❑

civilization’s end does come, those who keep this book close by just may have the knowledge they need to restart civilization while avoiding a protracted Dark Age. —RD

Toxicity and Mobile Technologies Overpowered: What Science Tells Us About the Dangers of Cell Phones and Other WiFi-Age Devices by Martin Blank. Seven Stories. 2014. 271 pages. $23.95.

Mobile phones are incredibly useful, but what effects do they have on our long-term health? Martin Blank delves into this question and pre sents a heavily sciencebacked case for concern. Like any electronic device, mobile phones emit electromagnetic radiation. As dozens of studies over the years have shown, recurring exposure to even small amounts of this radiation brings on higher incidence of numerous adverse health effects. Blank reviews a multitude of these studies, the findings of which include higher incidence of cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and mood disorders such as depression, all stemming from overexposure to radiation from telephones and telephone lines. Concerns over phone-related radiation harms have arisen since the early 1980s, when researchers first noticed increased cancer rates in people living near telephone lines. The concerns heightened in the

FUTURIST UPDATE News

and

Previews

from the

World Future Society

The World Future Society’s free monthly e-mail newsletter keeps you up on the trends and ideas that are shaping our collective future—and connected with the futurist community. Futurist Update offers sneak previews of FUTURIST magazine content, plus highlights of upcoming conference activities and speakers and the latest thinking from leading futurist bloggers. FREE! Sign up online: www.wfs.org/content/futurist-update

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THE FUTURIST

July-August 2014

WORLDFUTURE 2014:

What If

The Annual Conference of the World Future Society July 11-13, 2014 • Hilton Orlando Bonnet Creek • Orlando, Florida, U.S.A. In just a few short weeks, futurists from around the world will meet in Orlando, Florida, to explore the trends and ideas that will provide the intellectual and imaginative infrastructure for the future we will build together. Here is an overview of the activities planned.

WorldFuture 2014: What If ~ Schedule at a glance Thursday, July 10, 2014 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. ��Preconference Master Courses (extra-fee events) Friday, July 11, 2014 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. ��Preconference Master Courses (extra-fee events) 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. ��Special Interest Group Meetings 7:00–8:45 p.m. ��Opening Plenary: Paul Saffo, co-founder and managing director of Foresight at DISCERN, “What If We Took the Future Seriously” 8:45–10:00 p.m. ��Welcoming Reception: BetaLaunch Saturday, July 12, 2014 7:00–8:45 a.m. ��Special Activities 8:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. ��Exhibits Open 8:30–9:00 a.m. ��Sector Keynotes 8:30 a.m.–7:30 p.m. ��Science Fiction Symposium 9:30-10:00 a.m. ��Concurrent Sessions 11:00 a.m.–12:00 noon ��What If Journeys 12:15–1:45 p.m. ��Keynote Luncheon (extra-fee event): Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center Internet Project, “All In: The Internet’s Turbulent Next Decade” 2:00–3:00 p.m. ��Concurrent Sessions 3:30–5:00 p.m. ��Concurrent Sessions 5:00–6:30 p.m. ��Dinner on Your Own 6:30–7:30 p.m. ��Future Faire posters session, Science Fiction Symposium authors meet and greet, Networking Stations, Cash Bar

PHOTOS: KAZ OKADA FOR WFS

Sunday, July 13, 2014 7:00–8:45 a.m. ��Special Activities 8:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m. ��Exhibits Open 8:30-9:30 a.m. ��Sector Keynotes 9:30–10:30 a.m. ��Concurrent Sessions 11:00 a.m.–12:00 noon ��What If Journeys 12:15–1:45 p.m. ��Keynote Luncheon (extra-fee event): Steven M. Johnson, artist-inventor and futurist, “An Artist-Inventor Sees the Future” 2:00–3:30 p.m. ��Concurrent Sessions 3:45–5:00 p.m. ��Closing Plenary Session: Stacey Childress, deputy director of Education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will describe how future schools can be made be more personalized, more adaptable, and better at meeting society’s needs. Monday, July 14, 2014 9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. ��Professional Members Forum (extra-fee event, open to World Future Society Professional Members), “The Futures Community: Making the Long Term Matter”

To register, call (M-F, 9-5 Eastern time): 1-800-989-8274 or 301-656-8274 To download a PDF of the preliminary program or to register online, go to www.wfs.org/worldfuture-2014-what-if Hilton Orlando Bonnet Creek • 14100 Bonnet Creek Resort Lane • Orlando, Florida 32821, USA The Hilton Orlando Bonnet Creek hotel is a full-service resort and spa within a 482-acre nature preserve. Amenities include complimentary wireless Internet in all guestrooms, a championship golf club and premier spa, plus convenient access to Disney World and other Orlando attractions. And we have secured excellent rates starting at $149 a night for conference attendees. The Hilton Orlando Bonnet Creek has generously agreed to waive the $22/night resort fee for all attendees of WorldFuture 2014. You will still be allowed access to all the resort amenities. Continental breakfast including coffee, fruit, and pastries will be provided free to all attendees on Saturday, July 12. A complimentary coffee break will be provided on the morning of Sunday, July 13. To reserve your room online, go to www.wfs.org/worldfuture-2014/register/hotel-reservations

Future Active News for the Futurist Community As Tweeted: International Future Day The celebrations for Future Day on March 1 were widespread, both in person and online, and all across the globe. The Millennium Project, based in Washington, D.C., and the India Future Society were among those conducting Google Hangout chats. Symposiums and seminars were also hosted in Turkey, Sweden, Peru, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and the United States (San Francisco). And at the University of Houston and The Situation Lab at OCAD University (Toronto), student futurists attended all-day seminars and workshops. Here is a gallery of tweets, Instagram photos, and Facebook posts from the day’s events. ❑

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THE FUTURIST

July-August 2014

Now Published by SAGE, the World's Leading Independent Academic and Professional Publisher

World Future Review Free sample copy available online at wfr.sagepub.com World Future Review (WFR), published on behalf of the World Future Society, is the top forum for all who are professionally involved in the theory, methodology, practice, and use of futures research. Along with interviews with leading futures practitioners, WFR publishes important new foresight literature addressing topics informed by technology assessment, policy analysis, operations research, issues management, competition research and much more.

For more information and to subscribe, visit wfr.sagepub.com today! World Future Society members receive WFR at a low member price. See the World Future Society website for details: wfs.org. World Future Review also invites manuscripts from contributors worldwide at http:// mc.manuscriptcentral.com/wfr. For questions, contact tmack@wfs.org.

www.sagepub.com SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, CA 91320 Los Angeles | London | New Delhi | Singapore | Washington DC

World Future Society Programs The World Future Society is a nonprofit educational and scientific organization chartered in the District of Columbia, U.S.A., and is recognized by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt organization. The Society has about 25,000 members and subscribers in 80 nations. PUBLICATIONS

• The Futurist: A magazine published bimonthly, covering trends, forecasts, and ideas about the future. • Futurist Update: An e-mail newsletter available monthly to all members, covering a range of future-oriented news and useful links. • World Future Review: A Journal of Strategic Foresight: A journal for futures practitioners and scholars, with articles on forecasting techniques and applications, profiles of futurists and organizations, and abstracts of current futures-relevant literature. ACTIVITIES AND RESOURCES

• Conferences: The Society holds at least one major conference per year, to which all Society members are invited. Most conferences cover a wide range of topics related to the future. Most conferences are in the United States, but the Society has also held meetings in Canada and Austria. • Groups: Futurist groups are active in a number of U.S. cities, such as Chicago, Washington, and Atlanta, and in more than two dozen countries. • Books: New books of special interest to members may be purchased through the Society’s partnership with Amazon.com. MEMBERSHIP PROGRAMS

• Regular Membership: Includes THE FUTURIST magazine; discounts on conferences and books published by the Society; and such other benefits as may be approved for members. Discounted memberships are also available for full-time students under age 25. • Professional Membership: Programs and publications are available to meet the special needs of practitioners, researchers, scholars, and others who are professionally involved in forecasting, planning, or other futureoriented activities, including education and policy making. Professional members receive all the benefits of regular membership, plus a subscription to the journal World Future Review, as well as invitations to Professional Members Forums, and other benefits. • Institutional Membership: The World Future Society’s Institutional Membership program offers special services for business firms, educational institutions, government agencies, associations, and other groups. Members receive all of the benefits of Professional Membership, plus copies of all books, monographs, conference proceedings, special reports, and other publications produced by the Society during the year of the membership; special discounts on bulk purchases of Society publications; assistance in locating sources of information, consultants, and speakers for conferences and meetings, getting information tailored specifically to the organization’s needs; and inclusion in the Society’s list of institutional members published on the Society’s Web site and annually in THE FUTURIST. For more information and an application, contact Membership Secretary, World Future Society, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, Maryland 20814 www.wfs.org.

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THE FUTURIST

July-August 2014

Future View By Jim Tull

Abandoning Ship Titanistad Picture the Titanic, grafted on top of the slave ship Amistad—the powerful and wealthy sailing on the backs of the miserable. Once this unwieldy ship falters, all will suffer. Can a vision of paradise, a message of hope, provide a lifeboat for all? PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY WFS / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

We are living in a dark age. Having reached the global carrying capacity for human life on Planet Earth, we just might burn out from here: from dark to gone. This dark-age world has often been compared to the sinking of the “unsinkable” Titanic. Now graft the notorious slave ship Amistad to the bottom of the ocean liner, and we get the Titanistad. This vessel represents an unsurpassable high life on the upper decks that can only be kept humming by the exploitation of the passengers below. And life is miserable down below: harsh traveling conditions coupled with humiliation. As the boat scrapes the iceberg, the behemoth begins to rock, compromising life on all levels. If those for whom the system is intended most to serve were ever rewarded with genuine human happiness, those rewards appear to be slipping away. On today’s Titanistad, nausea is hitting those even on the upper decks, and certainly those in the middle. The growing discontent among those for whom the system should be working may be the hinge of cultural collapse and breakthrough. Our culture is becoming unhinged, quickly now, and nowhere more obviously than in the eyes, hearts, and minds of young people losing faith in their futures. On the Titanic, as the North Atlantic Ocean began to fill the hulls of the damaged ship, there must have been an engineer or other crewmember who became convinced that the emergency response must switch from managing the water to abandoning the ship. His recommendation would have led to a hectic conversation. A good leader is someone who can communicate bad news without overwhelming people. It was likely a painful conversation, but the message “Get everyone in lifeboats” needed to go out and go viral. That is the only way to get them to “budge from their comfort zones.” Indeed, some Titanic passengers never budged and went down with the ship. The first lifeboats weren’t filled with passengers, because the “abandon ship” message hadn’t spread sufficiently.

Quick and deliberate action was taken to save lives. Perhaps the message that saved people was a vision, a wild utopian dream, a paradise to strive for: Thrown overboard into dinghies, on the icy cold North Atlantic and in the dead of night, they might make it to dry land, loved ones, warmth, and dry clothes. What does it mean to jump ship now? What are the lifeboats in our collapsing world? Perhaps the lifeboats on our Titanistad are the small-scale, community-based economic networks that can survive in the absence of the global money economy. Perhaps they are the ways of healing, worshipping, learning, adjudicating, and deciding outside of the long halls of our dead or dying institutions. But most certainly and fundamentally, heading overboard requires a change of mind about the future. It means investing in human justice and sustainability as a possibility on the other side of collapse—not as an assurance or even a likelihood, but simply as a possibility. This is our challenge. The fairness of our world’s systems, structures, and institutions has been challenged for some time, mostly with an aim to reform rather than replace. Sustaining the ecological viability of our way of life is a much more recent challenge. A world that enriches and empowers the alreadywealthy and powerful by squeezing the life out of the poor and powerless is horrible, but can theoretically keep itself going. Our Titanistad world, however, is sinking fast by the weight of its systemic gluttony, its appetite no longer supported by the Earth’s resources. Let us have, and continue, this conversation, but move quickly to action. We have paradise to build. ❑

About the Author Jim Tull is a teacher and social activist. He facilitates workshops on systems thinking, community building, and deep ecology. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and can be reached at jtull@ providence.edu.

Businesses, Nonprofits, Foundations, Educational Institutions, and Governments Get the Most Out of the World Future Society! The Institutional Membership Program of the World Future Society will help you lead your organization into the future by participating in the Society’s activities to a greater extent than would be possible with an individual membership. Key Benefits of Institutional Membership: • Subscriptions to THE FUTURIST, Futurist Update, and World Future Review. • Web access to wfs.org, including THE FUTURIST archives, for up to 20 team members. • Invitations to Professional Members Forums, held at least once per year. • Invitations to Society meetings at special members’ rates, extended to up to 20 team members. • Free copies of any books published by the World Future Society during the term of your membership. • Preferential rates for advertising and promotional opportunities. (Contact World Future Society business manager Jeff Cornish, jcornish@wfs.org, for details.) • Recognition as a forward-thinking institution, acknowledged in THE FUTURIST and online at wfs.org. • Contacts! Institutional membership will help your organization make valuable connections with other professionals and organizations. The Society also helps Institutional members locate sources of information, consultants, and speakers for conferences and meetings, tailoring information specifically to your organization’s needs.

Heiko A. von der Gracht of EBS Business School SMI, an Institutional Member of the World Future Society. AARON M. COHEN FOR WFS

Yes! I’d like the World Future Society’s support in leading my organization into the future. Please enter my membership as follows: ❑ New

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❑ One Year Corporate or for-profit ($850)

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Method of Payment ❑ Check or money order enclosed (payable to World Future Society) ❑ Please charge my: ❑ VISA

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Signature Name Organization Address City/State ZIP/Country E-mail (for receiving Futurist Update electronic newsletter) Mail to: Institutional Membership Program, World Future Society, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, Maryland 20814, U.S.A. Telephone 1-800-989-8274 or 1-301-656-8274 • E-mail info@wfs.org • To order online, go to: www.wfs.org/benefits

About the World Future Society Why explore the future? The world changes so quickly that it‘s hard to keep up. New inventions and innovations alter the way we live. People‘s values, attitudes, and beliefs are changing. And the pace of change keeps accelerating, making it difficult to prepare for t omorrow. By studying the future, people can better anticipate what lies ahead. More importantly, they can actively decide how they will live in the future by making choices today and realizing the consequences of their decisions. The future doesn‘t just happen: People create it through their action—or inaction—today.

What can we know about the future? No one knows exactly what will happen in the future. But by considering what might happen, people can more rationally decide on the sort of future that would be most desirable and then work to achieve it. Opportunity as well as danger lies ahead, so people need to make farsighted decisions. The process of change is inevitable; it‘s up to everyone to make sure that change is constructive.

What is the World F uture Society? The World Future Society is an association of people interested in how social and technological developments are shaping the future. The Society was founded in 1966 by a group of private citizens, and is chartered as a nonprofit educational and scientific organization.

What does the Society do? The Society convenes and connects. Through meetings and publications, it serves as a neutral clearinghouse for ideas about the future, including forecasts, recommendations, scenarios, alternatives, and more. These ideas help people to anticipate what may happen in the next five, 10, or more years ahead. When people can visualize a better future, then they can begin to create it.

What does membership offer? • THE FUTURIST, a magazine of forecasts, trends, and ideas about the future. Every member receives a subscription to this exciting bimonthly magazine. Experts in various fields share their insights and forecasts in articles directed at a general audience. • Special rates for all annual PHOTOS: KAZ OKADA FOR WFS conferences. These conferences provide members with the opportunity for face-toface meetings with distinguished scholars, leaders, and experts from around the world. • Access to your local chapter. Cities and regions around the world have chapters for grassroots support of futures studies. They provide a way for members to get involved in their local communities through workshops, discussion groups, and speakers. A number of special interest groups also offer virtual and local How do I join networking.

Society?

Free e-mail newsletter! Visit www.wfs.org.

the

Visit www.wfs.org or contact: World Future Society Membership Department 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450 Bethesda, Maryland 20814, USA Telephone: 301-656-8274