THE FUTURIST, Summer 2015 by World Future Society

Forecasts, Trends, and Ideas about the Future

www.wfs.org

Summer 2015

Six Key Areas

of Investment for the Science of

CYBERSECURITY Conversations with NEWT GINGRICH, ELAINE KAMARCK, PETER SCHIFF and DENNIS KUCINICH

Conversation with The Futurist: Gina Bianchini How Trends in Interpersonal Relationships Will Disrupt our Social and Business Traditions

Transforming Society by Teaching Everyday People the Characteristics of a Modern Hero An Interview with Science Fiction Writer Tobias Buckell

WORLD FUTURE SOCIETY EMPOWERING FUTURISTS. SHAPING FUTURES. 3220 N STREET NW #161 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20007, USA +1.301.656.8274 | 1.800.989.8274 WFS.ORG

The World Future Society is the first membership organization in the world for people who research, envision and create potential futures. Our mission is to improve decision-making about the future by empowering futurists, fostering networks and advancing knowledge and action on futurecritical issues. The organization was founded in 1966 by Edward Cornish, who went on to write Futuring: Exploring the Future, a foundational text still used in many classrooms today.Prominent early members included Buckminster Fuller, Robert McNamara, Arthur C. Clarke, Herman Kahn and Alvin and Heidi Toffler. Today, the World Future Society provides robust tools, cutting-edge ideas and opportunities to collaborate through its newsletters and publications, events and conferences, and a global chapter network in countries around the world. The World Future Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational and scientific organization, incorporated and located in Washington, D.C. The WFS Transformation: In order to support the urgent need for anticipatory decision-making in a complex and rapidly changing world, WFS has embarked on a multi-year modernization and transformation designed to culminate in WFS “2.0” by 2017. WFS 2.0 will be the world’s premiere ecosystem for empowering futurists, igniting dialogue about the future and shaping futures.

WFS.ORG

Summer 2015 Volume 49, No. 1

A magazine of forecasts, trends, and ideas

about the future

ARTICLES 8

Conversation with The Futurist: Gina Bianchini By Amy Zalman

22 Looking Forward: How Trends in Interpersonal

A wide-ranging interview with this entrepreneur, investor and futurist, currently the CEO of social networking startup Mightybell.

Six Key Areas of Investment for the Science of Cybersecurity see page 10

An erudite overview of the current state of cybersecurity, and how scientific approaches toward it will help us in the near future.

Letter from the Editor Letter from the CEO

16 Looking Backward: Conversations with Newt Gingrich, Elaine Kamarck, Peter Schiff and Dennis Kucinich

30 Consultants and Services

We take a look back 10 years at diverse predictions about international relations, the global economy, innovation, and more.

Conversation with The Futurist: Gina Bianchini

By Helen Fisher

10 Six Key Areas of Investment for the Science of Cybersecurity By Dan Geer

DEPARTMENTS 3

Relationships Will Disrupt our Social and Business Traditions Transforming Society by Teaching Everyday People the Characteristics of a Modern Hero

By Philip Zimbardo

Two famous academics give their takes on the future of how we live as people and as societies.

26 Last Word: How Science Fiction Makes Better Futurists

An Interview with Science Fiction Writer Tobias Buckell

By Brenda Cooper One science fiction writer interviews another about how the genre bears on professional futurists.

Transforming Society by Teaching Everyday People the Characteristics of a Modern Hero

Conversations with Newt Gingrich, Elaine Kamarck, Peter Schiff and Dennis Kucinich

see page 16

see page 8

see page 24

Interview with Tobias Buckell

see page 26 COVER PHOTOGRAPH: SHUTTERSTOCK

© 2015 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 by the World Future Society, 3220 N Street Northwest, #161, Washington D.C.,20007, U.S.A. Included with membership in the World Future Society. • POSTMASTER: Send address changes to THE FUTURIST, 3220 N Street Northwest, #161, Washington D.C., 20007. • 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 tax-exempt organization under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. • CHANGE OF ADDRESS: Email to info@wfs.org or call: +1-800-989-8274.

www.wfs.org • THE FUTURIST Summer 2015 1

OFFICERS CEO & President: Amy Zalman Treasurer: Jennifer Rose Secretary: Les Wallace DIRECTORS Evan Faber aide to the CEO, Change.org Joyce Gioia president and CEO, The Herman Group Zhan Li strategic foresight analyst, University of Southern California Eric Meade (Chair) principal, The Whole Mind Strategy Group Mylena Pierremont president, Ming Pai Consulting BV Gabriela Prada director of Health Innovation, Policy and Evaluation, The Conference Board of Canada Jennifer Rose vice president, corporate controller, Summit Materials, LLC Les Wallace president, Signature Resources Inc. Jared Weiner vice president, Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc. Amy Zalman CEO and president, World Future Society

Adolfo Castilla economist, communications professor, Madrid

Julio Millán president, Banco de Tecnologias, and chairman, Grupo Coraza, Mexico

Marvin J. Cetron president, Forecasting International Ltd.

Joergen Oerstroem Moeller visiting senior research fellow, ISEAS, Singapore

Hugues de Jouvenel executive director, Association Internationale Futuribles

Ramez Naam computer scientist and author

Yehezkel Dror professor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Esther Franklin executive vice president and director of cultural identities, Starcom MediaVest Group William E. Halal professor of management science and director of Emerging Technologies Project, George Washington University Peter Hayward program director, Strategic Foresight Program, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

John Naisbitt trend analyst and author Burt Nanus author and professor emeritus of management, University of Southern California Joseph N. Pelton founder and vice chairman, Arthur C. Clarke Foundation Timothy M. Persons chief scientist, U.S. Government Accountability Office John L. Petersen president, The Arlington Institute Francis Rabuck director, Technology Research, Bentley Systems Inc.

GLOBAL ADVISORY COUNCIL

Barbara Marx Hubbard president, The Foundation for Conscious Evolution

Stephen Aguilar-Millan European Futures Observatory

Sohail Inayatullah professor, Tamkang University, Taiwan

Paul Saffo managing director of foresight, Discern Analytics

Raja Ikram Azam honorary chairman, Pakistan Futuristics Foundation

Zhouying Jin president, Beijing Academy of Soft Technology

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

Raj Bawa president/patent agent, Bawa Biotech LLC, and adjunct professor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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

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

Clement Bezold chairman and senior futurist, Institute for Alternative Futures

Graham May principal lecturer in futures research, Leeds Metropolitan University, U.K.

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

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 WFS by email at info@wfs.org. 3220 N Street NW, #161, Washington DC 20007 Telephone: 1-301-656-8274, Toll free: 1-800-989-8274 Web site: www.wfs.org • E-mail: info@wfs.org

letter from the editor A Publication of the World Future Society

Editorial Emeritus Edward Cornish (Founding Editor)

Editorial Staff Mark Drapeau Publisher and Executive Editor

Daniel Schweon Staff Editor

Alexandra Morrill Art Director

Other queries: mdrapeau@wfs.org THE FUTURIST World Future Society 3220 N Street Northwest, #161, Washington D.C., 20007, U.S.A. Telephone: 301-656-8274 or 800-989-8274 info@wfs.org www.wfs.org/futurist

elcome to the beginnings of a new magazine. I am very pleased to be serving as the interim publisher and executive editor of The Futurist. In this role, I will be reassessing both the business-side and editorial-side to create a financially viable publication creating valuable content aligned with the long-term vision of the World Future Society. These changes won’t happen overnight, but we have been working behind the scenes to put The Futurist on a strong new trajectory.

Today, I hope you enjoy this Summer 2015 issue, in which we have begun some small experiments with content and design. Next, you can expect a Winter 2015 issue, for which we are actively planning an extensive 50year retrospective of both the archives of The Futurist and of the World Future Society as a whole. Then, in 2016, you can look forward to something entirely new.

I’ll be sharing much more of my vision for The Futurist with you in…the future. Meanwhile, I promise that what’s coming will be fresh, interesting, and relevant to your life and work. I won’t be doing this in a bubble, but rather in close collaboration with WFS CEO Amy Zalman and new staff. I will also be forming an advisory board of diverse people to help me plot the right course and steer our way through it.

I also welcome your comments and feedback as World Future Society members. Please tell me what you have liked, and have not liked, in the past. Let me know about potential features you would find useful. Along the path to making The Futurist as valuable as possible to its readership, I’d also like to know what else you read and why. What value does it add to your life? What does it lack? You can reach me anytime at mdrapeau@wfs.org.

Thank you for entrusting me with this opportunity. I look forward to working with your vibrant community.

Mark

www.wfs.org • THE FUTURIST Summer 2015 3

WORLD FUTURE SOCIETY EMPOWERING FUTURISTS. SHAPING FUTURES.

MEMBERSHIP BENEFITS 3220 N STREET NW #161 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20007, USA +1.301.656.8274 | 1.800.989.8274 WFS.ORG

ANNUAL MEMBERSHIP, $79 USD • A global network: Full access to a global community of futurists and foresight professionals • Ahead-of-the-curve news and analysis in technology, science, governance, business and the arts • Innovative foresight tools and methods • A unique annual conference: Pre-eminent and action-oriented conference that provides a platform for the best thinkers, ideas and projects shaping our global future • Subscription to The Futurist magazine: Published since 1967, The Futurist offers in-depth features about the personalities, inventions and discoveries that will impact the future • Discounted access to WFS events • A global fraternity of chapters around the world and an organization dedicated to building regional leadership • A vibrant social media community on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn • Offers and discounts from our partners: education and training opportunities, conferences and products

World Future Society members enjoy a range of benefits, from participation in a cutting-edge global community to original and curated content, discounted event access, and opportunities to engage in special projects. Members include professionals from the public sector, corporate domain, academia, science, technology and the arts, as well as those who are engaged in shaping the future of their communities, institutions, nations and planet.

PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIP, $295 Nonprofit & Educational Members, $195 WFS also offers a separate membership tier for individuals across the private and public sector who use foresight tools and methods professionally. Professional membership includes all the benefits of general membership, and also: • Networking opportunities with professional foresight colleagues around the world • Participation in the Professional Members Forum at the Annual Conference • Specialized content for and by foresight professionals • Exclusive opportunities to participate in special projects, including speaking, research or foresight activities

INSTITUTIONAL MEMBERSHIP Corporate Membership, $850 Nonprofit & Educational Institutions, $450 Contact WFS for further information about institutional memberships

JOIN NOW Join online at WFS.org Join by phone at +1.301.656.8274 or 1.800.989.8274

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a message from the ceo

DEAR FELLOW FUTURIST, In 1966, Edward Cornish had the powerful insight that the world needs an organization to serve as a “neutral clearinghouse for the exchange of ideas about the future.” Armed with that insight, and many dedicated volunteers, he founded the World Future Society, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation based in Washington D.C. Today, the accelerating rate of change in areas from technology to the global economy to our social and civic lives make the need for such a global organization to champion intelligent, imaginative approaches to the future even more acute. That organization is the World Future Society. For fifty years, WFS has served as the world’s largest and most impactful organization to advocate for thoughtful, systematic, approaches to understanding the future. Yet, conditions today are different than they were 50 years ago. As a result, we needed a new kind of WFS to serve the emergent needs of a global community. When I took on the job of WFS CEO one year ago, I pledged to ensure that WFS successfully serves its mission for at least another 50 years, by spearheading a multi-year transformation and modernization program. Here are some of the broad elements of this program for which I have been laying ground in the last year: Become even more global. WFS has always been

remarkably international. Today we have members in over 80 countries, with 80% of them in the United States and 20% in other countries. In order to support a global community and enhance foresight on transnational issues, I will continue the groundwork laid this year to strengthen our international chapter network and, by 2017, to develop new, regionally-focused activities. Strengthen member benefits. WFS would not exist were it not for our members, and it is critical for WFS going forward to provide individual and institutional members with meaningful returns on their investment, such as global professional networking, educational and work opportunities, as well as access to unique research and analysis, to name a few. Establish a digital-first and multimedia content strategy. WFS was born in the print era, and its print

magazine The Futurist is remembered fondly all over the world as an important part of many childhoods. Now, we will combine our efforts in print with a variety of other communications mechanisms to better reach our global network and support more effective global information and knowledge exchanges. Increase our gender and age diversity. WFS and the field of foresight will benefit from greater diversity, and I am confident that WFS has a strong community to offer a diverse community of futurists. I will be working in the next few years to reach out to women of all ages, to students, and to young and mid-career professionals globally.

Amy Zalman, CEO and President of the World Future Society

Strengthen ties between futures work and active decision making on future-critical issues. In the first two

generations of WFS, the field of futures studies was established. As a result, today there are many techniques for better understanding what might and could unfold. Going forward, WFS will also be an advocate of strong action: by promoting foresight as a leadership skill, enhancing institutional capacity, and improving decision making on future-critical issues.

Moderniz e and update The Futurist magazine .

The Futurist magazine and brand has been an important benefit to many in our community over the years. Recognizing that importance, I am delighted to introduce with this issue our new interim Publisher and Executive Editor, Mark Drapeau, who has taken the reigns for the remainder of 2015 and will be taking steps toward a complete re-envisioning and re-launch in 2016.

My agenda is ambitious, and it won’t happen overnight.

But the World Future Society has a crucial message to relay: that we have the capacity to understand and act in ways that shape better futures: for ourselves, our communities, our businesses and governments, and our planet. Such an important message deserves all the energetic focus we can bring to it. Warm Regards, Amy

T H E WO R L D F U T U R E S O C I E T Y 2014 DONORS:

Thank You THE WORLD FUTURE SOCIETY IS DEEPLY GRATEFUL TO OUR 2014 DONORS. Your financial contributions are playing a vital role in keeping the practice of foresight and future-critical issues in arenas such as the environment, the global economy, governance, and everyday life in view of decision-makers and citizens around the world. Contributors to the Susan Echard Scholarship Fund supported activities at the annual conference and new initiatives for students in 2015 and 2016. This year, your contributions also helped WFS begin the important process of modernizing and transforming our program benefits, global network, and digital infrastructure. To learn more about how you can help shape the future, read more about the WFS transformation at http://www.SupportWFS.org. The WFS is chartered under U.S. laws (District of Columbia) as a nonprofit, tax exempt scientific and educational association and recognized by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt organization under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Gifts are deductible on U.S. income tax returns. If you would like to make a donation to the Society, please call us at +1-301856-or donate online at http://www.SupportWFS.org

T H E WO R L D F U T U R E S O C I E T Y OUR CONTRIBUTORS

INSTITUTIONS

Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc. The Morning Star Company Oracle Education Foundation

INDIVIDUALS

Mikel Aizpurua Katherine Antal Tom Bliffert Karen Carnahan Denise Cavanaugh Jose Luis Rodriquez Cervantes Douglas Congdon Brenda Cooper Edward Cornish Mike Dababie Victor Daniels Richard A. Feder Michael Francoeur Cameran Frisbee Rodrigo I. Galindo

Nicholas St. George Edward Gordon Linda Groff Bonnie Haufe L. Fielding Hower Henry G. Hudson Barbara Hulka Kenneth W. Hunter Anvay Idiatullin Ernest H. Jernigan Nico van Klaveren Guido George Lombardi Sam Lovalenti Bernard Maloney Michael Marien Gary D. Marx Om Marwah W. N. Mathews Michael Maw Lawrence C. McSwain Robert Moran Mack B. Pearsall

Stevens Pendleton John S. Reidy William Rowley Edwin G. Sather Larry Smead Eileen Swerdlick Judy Tatman Dean Thacker Edward Thomas Joel Ticknor Paul Tinari Daniel Tuuri Nicole Trapp Charles Unger Les Wallace Robert Wells Phil Witkowicz Greta and Marvin Zalman Kathleen Zellmer Peter A. Zuckerman

conversation with the futurist By AMY ZALMAN

Gina Bianchini The serial entrepreneur, investor, and ‘closeted futurist’ talks about the global competition startups face, dating apps, military tactics and being an introvert. I arrive at the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco fresh off a flight from Washington, D.C., where I’ll have just enough time to hang out with Gina Bianchini at the Bloomberg Technology Conference before she herself needs to catch a flight. Later today, she’ll be sitting on a panel named “Management Tips from Hackers,” ostensibly about the differences between how engineers and MBAs view management. Engineers and MBAs certainly tend to dress differently. I’m relieved when Gina arrives wearing the same thing I am— the San Francisco tech business uniform— jeans, jacket, black high-heeled pumps. It’s a welcome change from the Washington fashion scene of dark suits and the occasional seersucker. Glad I got the memo. After trying a few locations, Gina and I (with some help from her publicist) carve out a relatively quiet space in the main lobby, downstairs from the main hall where the conference activities are occurring. The entire place is alive with energy; “bustling,” I’d recall later. Bloomberg’s brand essence is something like a cross between a movie set and a spa, with extremely good-looking people migrating between a cornucopia of yogurt, nuts, berries, and herbal tea, makeup chairs, TV cameras, and conference talks. It’s actually not unlike their headquarters on Lexington Avenue in New York, I think to myself. Gina’s startup, Mightybell, is top of mind for her, and she repeatedly comes back to it as a foundation of sorts throughout our conversation. The company has raised a few million dollars in venture capital, and has a freemium business model. “For me, it’s about the power of context in terms of uncovering and creating different kinds of relationship dynamics, especially among people who don’t already know each other, because I think that that is the piece that wasn’t possible 20 years ago without a lot of work that today can be instantaneous,” she says when I ask her about big vs. small, or general versus specialized social networks. 8 THE FUTURIST Summer 2015 • www.wfs.org © 2015 World Future Society • All rights reserved.

Gina Bianchini

Software that authentically recreates the atmosphere of a cocktail party or business networking event is a bit of a Holy Grail in the tech industry at the moment, with giants like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft (with Yammer) and upstarts such as Mightybell and Slack all funded and elbowing for space. It’s not easy. First, the code must leverage the “power of context” to uncover new relationship dynamics between people who don’t know each other. Then, software needs to “break the ice,” which presumably isn’t any easier digitally than at a hotel bar. Gina herself has sought this Holy Grail for a while. In 2004, she co-founded (with Marc Andreessen) another platform for forming custom social networks, Ning. It launched in October 2005, perhaps ahead of its time. While it had novel features and successfully attracted the likes of everything from the informal government employee social network GovLoop to the bands Linkin Park and Weezer, it has also gone through business model pivots and layoffs. She left as CEO in 2010, when she became an entrepreneur-in-residence at venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. But she’s confident that Mightybell’s vision is oriented in the right direction for the future. “Our strong belief is that technology gets better and better at surfacing the right people to each other, the most relevant people to each other. Then the probability of making new relationships goes up significantly. It’s not a guarantee. But it goes up significantly.” These are the “modern guilds for

the 21st century,” she tells me later. Our chat isn’t all work, as we quickly develop chemistry with each other. I find her extremely personable, at ease, comfortable in her own skin. She volunteers to balance my iPhone on her lap during the interview to capture the conversation. The discussion wanders into classic interview question territory– What’s something most people don’t know about you? “I’m actually an introvert. A pretty outgoing introvert. As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten more introverted and I feel like I want more time to read and think and just reflect on all of the different trends going on, especially because I’m a systems thinker.” I can actually begin to see how working on the automation of developing valuable relationships might appeal to her nature. She goes on at length to describe how as she’s gotten older she takes a more disciplined approach to taking a step back to reassess all the information available to find the right things to be focusing on. “I think this is incredibly important, and more important than anything else I do,” she tells me. I accuse her of being a closeted futurist, and she laughs and compliments me for saying the nicest things about her. Her laugh is hearty, and there is plenty of authentic laughter throughout our conversation. We also keep getting interrupted by her many friends and acquaintances at the conference; at one point, Padmasree Warrior– one of the keynote speakers– drops by. As a woman working in technology, and a high-profile serial entrepreneur at that, she has strong views about struggles and successes in startup land. Not surprisingly, she thinks Mightybell has contributions to make here. “A start-up CEO today is smarter and more informed and sophisticated than when I started as a founder and CEO in 2000.” [She was the co-founder and president of a media company named Harmonic Communications, which was acquired by Dentsu. Marc Andreessen was on the board.] She goes on at length about the culture of sharing and transparency that makes Silicon Valley a particularly unique place for entrepreneurs to ply their trade. It’s a salient point– a world-class tech hub isn’t merely the result of a lot of people with technical skill working at high density. Silicon Valley does have something special, which she believes Mightybell is capitalizing on and contributing to. But she doesn’t see why that can’t scale beyond the Valley, and even beyond tech, into industries that haven’t traditionally been geographically clustered or contained transparent cultures of constant learning and growing. Her vision is effectively to offer extreme transparency as a service, breaking down barriers and empowering everyone from small businesses to teachers to learn from each other. “At Mightybell, we want to be that infrastructure for creating the kind of innovation that is happening

in these pockets. We want to bring it to as many people around the world as possible.” Our conversation touches on the truly global nature of business, including startups, in the modern age. The oftheld notion that Silicon Valley companies are just competing with each other is a fallacy. Rather, ”what we are actually seeing today is that we collectively… are competing on a global basis from day one. So understanding, respecting and appreciating people from different perspectives and backgrounds is I think the number one job requirement of a founder in 2015 and is certainly one I take seriously.” I ask her about where she gets her inspirations and the knowledge that help to guide her as a businessperson. She’s certainly eclectic (“You have to pay attention to everything, everywhere”), with favorite “brain candy” magazines that include InStyle and Vanity Fair, to apparently a strong interest in how people connect and form different kinds of relationships via dating apps. “What’s happening with Tinder is really interesting but actually what’s happening with Grindr is interesting as well. How do you start to think about the things that are transactional relationships and what are the things that are relationship relationships. Only by remixing all of the things we are starting to see in other areas into our particular mission, how do we help professionals that don’t know each other yet, but may have a lot in common, whether it’s by topic or by stage of business or numbers of years in the teaching profession or by what you teach.” As for books, she just began reading retired General Stanley McChrystal’s new book, Team of Teams, which concerns optimizing for speed and adaptability rather than command and control. “A lot of it is interesting to see from a military perspective, as opposed to a business or engineering perspective.” A brash straight-talker (which sometimes got him in hot water), McChrystal is a highly respected Army Special Forces officer. More generally, she uncovers a lot of her best ideas not from large conferences (ironically), but rather from oneon-one conversations with people that are both very similar to her, and “people who have completely different backgrounds that I can learn from.” Her work with a non-profit called Endeavor supports this learning process for her. It’s an organization that identifies and supports high-potential entrepreneurs in developing nations. “What I love about Endeavor is that I’ve met some of the most inspiring people who I learn from… I walk out of these meetings humbled,” helping also to give her a holistic global perspective on the business she’s in with Mightybell (and perhaps her calling in life): helping people form unique and fruitful relationships to learn from each other. ■

“ ... understanding, respecting and appreciating people from different perspectives and backgrounds is I think the number one job requirement of a founder in 2015”

www.wfs.org • THE FUTURIST Summer 2015 9

Six Key Areas of Investment for the Science of

CYBER SECURITY

By DAN GEER

Cybersecurity is perhaps the most difficult intellectual profession on the planet. The technical basis for that which needs security changes rapidly, and we have sentient opponents. We have no real ability to perform controlled experiments, yet uncontrolled natural experiments are all around us all the time even though data quality from those natural experiments is a constantly confounding issue.

SHUTTERSTOCK

Editor’s note: When I heard Dan Geer’s talk at the recent ‘Suits and Spooks’ conference in New York City, I was spellbound. His unique speaking style combined with erudite thinking on many cybersecurity topics made for a fascinating learning experience. I wanted to publish his ideas without losing the magic of the in-person experience. While this is truly one of those “you had to be there” situations, this humble magazine is doing its best to deliver it to you. Here is Dan’s talk in (nearly) unedited form. –MD

here are fields where it seems as if scientific progress has a certain cadence, a certain predictability, a pace of progress akin to lava overspreading a coastal plain, a largely stable forward velocity. That does not seem to be the case with cybersecurity, where breakthroughs occur with an event-rapidity that I just don’t see elsewhere. Maybe I’m just not looking hard enough, but we seem to be so much closer to the work factor of a fire department than to the work factor of an accounting firm, to pick two examples approximately at random. One of the questions we have yet to answer is whether vulnerabilities are sparse or dense; if and only if vulnerabilities are sparse does it actually make sense to allocate the effort to find them or reward those who do. If vulnerabilities are dense, then treasure should not go to finding them but to making systems resilient to them. I ask about this in varied settings; I get strong — and I mean strong — opinions over the full range of dense to sparse. Smart, knowledgeable people say “too dense to measure” while other smart, knowledgeable people say “too sparse to measure.” That’s not a trick question. It is a steering question like no other. In the meantime, it seems to me that we are near a fork in the road, a fork where one road is that of generating provably defect-free code followed by long term, brutally rigor-

ous change control while the other road is that of moving target defense, rapid release, DevOps, et cetera. These alternatives seem both antithetical yet promising and both are fed by real scientists making real progress, but after having chosen one road switching to the other at some later time seems likely to be infeasible. As with the ”availability calculus,” do we maximize the mean time between failures or do we minimize the mean time to repair? We cannot do both nor, therefore, should we try. The question of whether cybersecurity is yet a science is a hard one. I am sorely tempted to answer the question “Is cybersecurity a science?” with “Getting closer, but not yet” — to say, in other words, that we are in the pre-paradigmatic stage with a variety of schools of thought. We then first ask about candidate paradigms of cybersecurity. If they exist and have turned over from time to time, then my answer would be simply wrong and cybersecurity may already be a science. But let me repeat the one thing that may make cybersecurity different from all else we have sentient opponents. The physicist does not. The chemist does not. Not even the economist has sentient opponents. We do. What puzzles we have to solve are not drawn from some generally diminishing store of unsolved puzzles, nor could our theories completely explain all observable fact thus reducing our worries and our work to engineering alone. There is something different about a search for truth when there isn’t any, or at least any that lasts long enough to exhaustively explore. Science tends to take us places where policy cannot follow. Policy tends to take us places where science cannot follow. Yet neither science nor policy can be unmindful of the other. Both science and policy heavily influence, if not control, the possible futures we might find ourselves inhabiting. It is clear that policy is having ever-greater difficulty in keeping up with science, yet science without policy limits is inevitably dystopian. In past months, very well-informed individuals have warned about advances in the fields of both

artificial intelligence and genetic engineering as being likely to introduce irreversible, unintended effects that are permanently incompatible with fundamental values. I side with the above in both cases, as I believe advances in cybersecurity are likewise introducing irreversible and unintended effects that are permanently incompatible with fundamental values. So, if we are to help science and policy help each other, what are we to do? It may be that making predictions is the core value. In that vein, I will confine myself to six points where I see science, including applied science, asking us to look ahead.

Identity Miniaturization will continue its long-running progression and as a consequence, devices will continue to proliferate into spaces in which they were never before present. Burgeoning proliferation demands device autonomy, and will get it. For autonomy to not itself be a source of irredeemable failure modes, devices will have individual identities and some degree of decision-making capacity. As device counts grow, device identity eclipses (human) user identity because user identity can be derived from device identity insofar as the proliferation of devices means that users are each and severally surrounded by multiple devices, devices whose identity is baked into their individual hardware, as is already the case in mobile telephony. There is then neither need nor process to assert “My name is Dan” as Dan’s several devices will collectively confirm that this is Dan, perhaps in consultation with each other. As per Zuboff’s Laws1, all devices are therefore sensors and as the devices themselves have immutable device identities, Dan’s claim to being Dan is decided algorithmically. And distally. Cryptographic keys for users thus become irrelevant, as devices will have them, thereby freeing users from key management much less password drills. The Fifth Amendment is entirely mooted as Courts have already ruled that only some-

thing you know is protected thereunder, not something you are or have, that is to say that production of devices under subpoena cannot be thwarted. The longstanding debate over whether identity should be namecentric (where “Dan” is the identity and some key is an attribute of “Dan”) or key-centric (where the key is the identity and “Dan” is an attribute of that key) is thus decided in favor of key-centricity though the keys are now held in a fog of small devices. This setting mimics how a stratum of elite people carry neither identification nor money - in the context of their retinue there is no need for such. For the result of this data fusion to not be a unitary identity for the individual user, policy will have to demarcate data fusion with a vigor it has never before dared.

Ownership as perimeter The paradigm of cybersecurity has long been perimeter control, but that same proliferation of devices rewrites the calculus of what is a perimeter. It is clear that the design of the Internet as we now know it rests on two principles above all others: preferential attachment and end-to-end communication protection. Preferential attachment yields scale-free network growth that, in turn, maximizes network resistance to random faults; Internet build-out could not have happened otherwise. The end-toend principle is and has been the fuel for innovation as end-to-end scales whereas permission brokering does not. Both of those principles are under stress. First, the S-curve of name-addressable Internet growth passed its inflection point in November of 2008, and since that time growth rates have slowed. Second, random faults no longer comprise the availability risk they once did, all the while carriers and governments alike clearly want non-preferential attachment, carriers in their desire for economic hegemony, free-world governments in their desire for attribution, and unfree-world governments in their desire to manipulate information flow.

Add in the proliferation of small devices and the paradigm of cybersecurity can no longer be perimeter control. For example, let’s count cores in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801. The central CPU is 4 cores, the Adreno 330 GPU another 4, Video Out is 1 more, the Hexagon QDSP is 3, the Modem is at least 2 and most likely 4, Bluetooth is another 1 as is the USB controller and the GPS. The Wi-Fi is at least 1 and most likely 2, and none of this includes charging, power, or display. That makes somewhere between 18 and 21 cores. In the vocabulary of the Internet of Things, I ask you whether that is one thing or the better part of two dozen things? It is pretty certain that each of those cores can reach the others, so is the perimeter to be defended the physical artifact in the user’s pocket or is it the execution space of those cores, each and severally? I looked at seven different estimates of the growth of the Internet of Things as a market phenomenon — everything from smart electric meters to networked light bulbs to luxury automobiles - and the median is a compound annual growth rate of 35%. If perimeter control is to remain the paradigm of cybersecurity, then the number of perimeters to defend in the Internet of Things is doubling approximately every 24 months. So what is to be the perimeter of control from a cybersecurity point of view? Is it ownership that demarcates perimeter? More and more of user capability is controlled by licensure, not ownership in the dictionary sense of the word “ownership.” The science is taking us away from ownership conferring cradle-to-grave control towards a spectrum of temporally constrained permission granting; I can buy a $200,000 John Deere tractor, but not until I accept a software license agreement. I can give you my bed, but I cannot give you my iTunes. Self-driving cars are perhaps as good an illustration as any; overthe-air auto-update of firmware will not be optional in either time or place and vehicle-to-vehicle communication will do route selection in the name of the common good. In the digital world, nothing comes without strings attached.

“ ...science will be under the gun to encode human ethics into algorithms that will thereafter free run” Control diffusion As has been shown in finance, if one entity can do high speed trading then all must, but whereas predatory and/or unstable trading is subject to regulatory control, cyber predation is not, and cyber predators have zero legacy drag. As such, turning over our protections to machines is inevitable. Science and startups alike are delivering a welter of automation for protection, most not involving recondite algorithms but rather bigdata fueled learning about what is normal, the better to identify that which is not and thus suspect. I leave to any policy discussion the question of whether the speeds at which cybersecurity automation must run will even allow occasional interruption to ask some human operator for permissions to act, or must cyber ‘kill decisions’ be automated on the argument that only when so automated can they respond in time? If the latter holds, and I am certain that it will, science will be under the gun to encode human ethics into algorithms that will thereafter free run. Put differently, I predict that it is in cybersecurity, per se, where the argument over artificial intelligence will find its foremost concretization. As an example of an unevaluable vignette, the self-driving car will choose between killing its solo passenger or fifteen people on the sidewalk. Many are the examples of airplane pilots sacrificing themselves to avoid crash landing in populated zones. Would you willingly ride in an altruistic vehicle? Coupled with algorithmic user identification, control will enter a state where trust is multi-way, not one-to-one. It is hard to overestimate

just how much the client has become the server’s server. Take JavaScript, which is to say server-side demands that clients run programs as a condition of use, or web screens recursively assembled from unidentifiable third parties; the HTTP Archive says that the average web page now makes out-references to 16 different domains as well as making 17 JavaScript requests per page, and the JavaScript byte count is five times the HTML byte count. A lot of that JavaScript is about analytics, which is to say, surveillance of the user. But as a practical matter, any important control (such as for medical emergencies) needs an override. Barring national security situations, such override is closer to a failure that must not be silent. That is to say that if the pinnacle goal of security engineering is “no silent failure,” then the as yet unmet challenge is how to design cybersecurity such that it never fails silently. There is scientific work to be done here - full automation of cybersecurity maximizes the downside cost of falsely positive indicators of attack.

Communications provenance Provenance of network traffic will rise to new importance unrelated to quality of service or transport neutrality. Executives delegating correspondence handling to their assistants have heretofore driven delegation of credentials; as devices proliferate, delegation of credentials and authority becomes a necessity across the board, at least for First World digerati. Take loading a web page in a browser: the browser does proxying, nameservice lookup, etc., and

eventually loads that page plus subsequent web page dependencies, probably from other sites. In other words, there are various levels of “who” actually requested what, such as what piece of JavaScript invoked Google Analytics. As a one-

protocol, i.e., it has no provenance and is likely peer-to-peer. While intentionally obscure traffic may as easily be pedophiles as heroic freedom fighters, in a world where machines provide cybersecurity by learning what is normal so as to tag

“ Science is rapidly teaching us that everything is unique if examined at close enough detail.” off experiment, I looked at the topmost page of cnn.com; there I found 612 HREFs across 38 hosts in 20 domains even without evaluating the 30-odd JavaScript’s there. Competent scientists are studying the issue of how to characterize multi-dimensional attack surfaces, and we should attend their results. Because cybersecurity is to remain the driving reason for egress filtering, provenance — as in “Who ordered this page?” — is the crucial variable for intelligent flow control. If cyber integrity of the browser platform itself is to remain the topmost user goal, then agency - again as in “Who ordered this page?” — is likewise the most important variable for permission decisions. This need will be met with traffic analysis extending into the execution environment. When the general public came to need encryption, the commercial sector caught up to the military sector in the application of cryptography within a decade. Now the marketers are driving the commercial sector to catch up to the military sector in traffic analysis. How the traffic analysis that marketers demand (and will get) meshes with the traffic analysis of end-users delegating human authority to their growing constellation of devices remains to be seen, but w i t h d u a l d e m a n d f o r t r a ff i c analysis, the commercial sector will fill that demand one way or another. But even if the public and the marketers want some kind of traffic analysis that is of a toy variety compared to what the military sector needs, there are two other considerations at play. One is that a nonnegligible fraction of Internet backbone traffic cannot be identified by

what is abnormal, the pedophiles and the freedom fighters will stand equal chances of being blocked, if not outed. The other consideration is junk traffic, meaning traffic whose emitter is on autopilot but whose purpose is long defunct. Years ago, my col-

“ Some apartment building owners now require that tenants provide a DNA sample of their dog so that unscooped poop can be penalized. ” leagues spent some time trying to figure out what was calling one of our dialup numbers. In the end, it turned out to be an oil tank in an abandoned building that was outfitted to request a fill when needed, and we had inherited the number to which such requests had once gone. Junk traffic will have to be dealt with via provenance or some discoverable correlate of provenance. Perhaps we will remanufacture spam detection for this purpose. Perhaps traceability will become the rule of law as soon as geolocation applies to the Internet as much as it now applies to cell phone triangulation.

Everything is unique Science is rapidly teaching us that everything is unique if examined at close enough detail. Facial recognition is possible at 500 meters, iris recognition is possible at 50 meters, and heartbeat recognition is possible at 5 meters. Your dog can identify you by smell; so, too, can an electronic dog’s nose. Your cell phone’s accelerometer is plenty sensitive enough to

identify you by gait analysis. A photograph can be matched to the camera from which it came as well as a bullet can be matched to the barrel of the gun through which it passed. Some apartment building owners now require that tenants provide a DNA sample of their dog so that unscooped poop can be penalized. When everything is detectably unique, decision support of many sorts becomes possible. Assessing nuances (such as whether you are angry) will be embedded in automatons. Accountability will doubtless be extended to ever more minor behaviors. That heartbeat recognition technology is already slated to be part of automobiles. Courtroom alibis will soon be backed by cybersecurity-like evidence, noting that because an alibi involves evidence of

innocence rather than of guilt, the privilege against self-incrimination is not implicated and is, instead, subject to compelled disclosure. The testimony of spouses against each other will be unnecessary — their devices will do.

Opaqueness is forever Where data science spreads, a massive increase in tailorability to conditions follows. Even if Moore’s Law remains forever valid, there will never be enough computing, hence data driven algorithms must favor efficiency above all else. Yet, the more efficient the algorithm the less interrogatable it is; that is to say, the more optimized the algorithm is, the harder it is to know what the algorithm is really doing. The more desirable some particular automation is judged to be, the more data it is given. The more data it is given, the more its data utilization efficiency matters. The more its data utilization efficiency matters, the more its algorithms will evolve to opaque operation. Above some

threshold of dependence on such an algorithm in practice, there can be no going back. As such, if science wishes to be useful, preserving algorithm interrogatability despite efficiency seeking, self-driven evolution is the research-grade problem now on the table. If science does not pick this up, then Larry Lessig’s characterization of code as law is fulfilled, and permanently so.

Implications: Why this matters There is no argument whatsoever that the proliferation of devices and information are empowering. Technology is today far more democratically available than it was yesterday and less than it will be tomorrow: 3D printing, the whole “maker” community, DIY biology, micro-drones, search, home automation, constant contact with whomever you choose to be in constant contact with, instrumentation of every stripe and caliber, the steady migration of military technology to general government use thence to the rich thence to the lumpenproletariat - these are all examples of democratizing technology. This is perhaps our last fundamental tradeoff before the Singularity occurs: Do we, as a society, want the comfort and convenience of increasingly technologic, invisible digital integration enough to pay for those benefits with the liberties that must be given up to be protected from the downsides of that integration? If, as the late Peter Bernstein said, risk is that more things can happen than will, then what is the ratio of things that can now happen that are good to things that can now happen that are bad? Is the good fraction growing faster than the bad fraction or the other way around? Is there a threshold of interdependence beyond which good or bad overwhelmingly dominate? Now that we need cybersecurity protections to the degree that we do, to whom does the responsibility devolve? If the worst laws are those that are unenforceable, what would we hope our lawmakers say about technologies that are not yet critical but soon could be? Do we forbid becoming critically dependent on them when it is the sheer magnitude of

adoption that makes them critically essential? The need for what we have heretofore called cybersecurity is now so varied that it is no longer a single field but many. There are perhaps 1000 cybersecurity startups in some stage of the funding game, a fair fraction of them spinouts from highly focused university research projects. Generalists such as myself cannot be replaced—there is too much for the novitiate to learn. The core knowledge base has reached the point where new recruits can no longer hope to someday become competent generalists, serial specialization is the only broad option available to them. As I said earlier, cybersecurity is perhaps the most difficult intellectual profession on the planet. Ray Kurz-

weil is beyond all doubt correct; within the career lifetime of nearly everyone in this room, algorithms will be smarter than we are, and they will therefore be called upon to do what we cannot - to protect us from other algorithms, and to ask no permission in so doing. Do we, like Ulysses, lash ourselves to the mast or do we, as the some would say, relax and enjoy the inevitable? What would we have science do? What are the possible futures you will tolerate? What horses do you want not let out of the barn? ■ This article is an edited version of remarks given at the Suits and Spooks conference (suitsandspooks.com), June 19, 2015 in New York, NY.

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www.TheFuturesSchool.com www.wfs.org • THE FUTURIST Summer 2015 15

looking backward

Conversations with

NEWT GINGRICH, ELAINE KAMARCK, PETER SCHIFF and DENNIS KUCINICH Every four years, the U.S. National Intelligence Council publishes its Global Trends Report for the incoming or returning U.S. President. It is also released publicly as a tool for policymakers, academics, and others to use. The report gives a viewpoint on trends in topics that include economics, demography, ecology, energy, health, governance, security, identity, and geopolitics, and provides a framework for thinking about the next 20 years. The Futurist thought it would be insightful to look backward almost ten years at Global Trends 2025, now that we’re roughly halfway between its publication and the end of its ‘shelf life.’ Noteworthy and throught-provoking scenarios laid out in the report for a newly elected President Obama included: • U.S. influence and power will wane, and the United States will face constricted freedom of action in 2025. China and Russia will grow in influence. Wealth will also shift away from the United States toward Russia and China. • A broader conflict, possibly a nuclear war, could erupt between India and Pakistan. This could cause other nations to align themselves with existing nuclear powers for protection. • Rising world population, affluence, and shifts in Western dietary habits will increase global demand for food by 50% by 2030. Some 1.4 billion people will lack access to safe drinking water. After its publication, this magazine interviewed four experts with a range of backgrounds and viewpoints about the report. These conversations with Newt Gingrich, Elaine Kamarck, Peter Schiff and Dennis Kucinich span numerous topics that are very top-ofmind in 2015, including STEM education as a national security issue, student debt loads, a “RAND for cybersecurity,” the possibility of a failed Mexico, the ambition and limits of a rising China, and the power of American innovation. As we anticipate the upcoming Global Trends 2035 report to come after the next Presidential election in November 2016, this short retrospective highlights the promise and challenges of forecasting policy-related issues twenty years out.

INTERVIEWER: To what extent do you agree with the key points outlined in the Global Trends 2025 report? NEWT GINGRICH: The influence and power of the United States may decline, but this will not be a decline in our economic, political, or military strength. Rather than the United States enjoying the role of the world’s lone superpower, as we do today, the influence of other countries such as India and China will increase in relative terms. As the countries with the two largest populations, India and

China will certainly have a voice in the next quarter century, and their current economic growth, along with the attendant increase in their military strength, will support that voice. With respect to India and Pakistan, the United States can do much in the way of reducing tensions between them. What we are witnessing is a continuing ascendance in the strategic importance of both nations. The November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai have raised tensions between India and Pakistan considerably. The United States can continue to work with both

nations to reduce these tensions, find common ground where possible, and forge a cooperative relationship between them. INTERVIEWER: Are the events laid out in the report inevitable? N E W T G I N G R I C H : Nothing is inevitable. In my book, Implementing the Art of Transformation, I provide a point of reference for considering what the decades ahead may look like. There will be more growth in scientific knowledge in the next 25 years than occurred during the past 100 years. We are exceeding, by four to seven

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times, the rate of change of the past 25 years. This means that, by even the most conservative estimate, in the next 25 years, we will experience the scale of change experienced between 1909 and 2009. INTERVIEWER: How might the negative scenarios be averted? NEWT GINGRICH: Access to natural resources and energy may be the most important challenge the world faces in the next quarter century. We must develop a strategy for global energy abundance that maximizes both production and the efficiency with which energy is used. This sort of strategy would have a significant positive impact toward reducing or preventing future conflicts. INTERVIEWER: How might the U.S. government, and how might U.S. citizens, cope with a state of diminished influence, a wealthier and more powerful Asia, and intensified competition over resources? NEWT GINGRICH: Education will be the key issue that determines our continued strength and prosperity in a world where China and India have increased influence. If you read A Nation at Risk, published more than 25 years ago, it makes clear that the education of our children is a serious national security concern and that parents, administrators, teachers,

lawmakers, and leaders of this nation need to view it as such and respond accordingly. Finding innovative ways to dramatically improve how our children learn - especially in math and science - will make the biggest difference for our future. INTERVIEWER: What do you see as the worst-case scenario, and the bestcase scenario, of the above events coming to pass? NEWT GINGRICH : Within the key points you provide, the worst-case scenario would be a belligerent China and a resurgent and belligerent Russia. Likewise, a complete breakdown in relations between India and Pakistan and a corresponding threat of nuclear war would be destabilizing to the entire world. Obviously, the best-case scenario would be increased cooperation and stronger, closer relationships among the United States, China, Russia, India, as well as Pakistan. A common recognition of the future threats to our livelihood that the global community faces as our populations increase and our needs for greater amounts of energy increase is essential. This recognition by all today and cooperation in achieving solutions would do much in terms of growing the global economy, as well as enabling health and prosperity for all.

INTERVIEWER : Might decreased geopolitical influence, with increased power in China, actually be good for the United States in some way? NEWT GINGRICH : It depends. We have a choice with China: cooperation or competition. Certainly if we strengthen our relationship with China, an economically and militarily strong China would be within our national interests to maintain stability in the Western Pacific region. INTERVIEWER: What is the report overlooking? NEWT GINGRICH: The report doesn’t look closely enough at the impact of a failed Mexico. A failed state on our southern border is a significant national security threat to the United States. INTERVIEWER: What would you add to the above list of key points? NEWT GINGRICH: Cybersecurity. As we continue to integrate computers into every single aspect of our lives, we are creating a significant vulnerability to our very livelihood. What we need today is a cyber think tank staffed by the generation today that lives and breathes in the electronic world. The institution would be set up much like the RAND Corporation was, with the exclusive purpose of ensuring the survivability of our networks and data.

www.wfs.org • THE FUTURIST Summer 2015 17

INTERVIEWER: What’s the most important trend that will shape U.S. policy in the next two decades? N E W T G I N G R I C H : I n c re a s i n g worldwide demand for energy with decreasing resources. We must take concrete steps today to become energy independent. INTERVIEWER: What can we begin doing now to ease our transition into this new world?

kinds of warfare. We monitor nuclear materials around the world carefully. As for rising world population and affluence, surely we’re already seeing shifts in Western dietary habits. There will be increases in world population, in demand for food, and in affluence, but this will be countermanded by the downsides of Western dietary habits — such as obesity and all the diseases that come from obesity — and there

“ Education will be the key issue that determines our continued strength and prosperity in a world where China and India have increased influence.” NEWT GINGRICH: We must make smart choices today that are an investment in our future. We need to fundamentally transform litigation, regulation, taxation, education, health, energy, infrastructure, and our national security apparatuses. The policies that we have in place today reflect the realities of the twentieth century. We can’t compete globally with our current laws, systems, and obsolete bureaucracies; they don’t have the flexibility or effectiveness required to manage the issues of the day. All of this seems to be a huge undertaking — and it is — but it can be done. It must be done. *** INTERVIEWER: To what extent do you think the above outlined points — such as a wealth migration from the United States to Asia, potential war between India and Pakistan — are likely? ELAINE KAMARCK: I don’t see a shift in wealth away from the United States toward Russia or China, especially not Russia. That’s too pessimistic precisely because the structural components of innovation in the United States — culturally, legally — are so strong. The cultural and legal components for innovation in the rest of the world are, frankly, so weak. Broader conflict between India and Pakistan? I don’t see the United States allowing that to happen. I think that, as bad as the United States has been when it comes to predicting asymmetric warfare, the United States is adept and prepared for more traditional

will be significant environmental problems resulting from the provision of all this food. This is a pretty complicated situation. Countries may take countermeasures instead of adopting Western dietary standards, for both environmental and human health. INTERVIEWER: What you are saying is that the primary focus in the United States must be maintaining a culture of innovation and economic openness? ELAINE KAMARCK: That includes controversial things like keeping fairly open immigration. Immigration is one of the best sources of American talent, and so we have to be careful not to give in to those who would cut off immigration. There are a lot of things that go into the American economic competitive advantage, from education to innovation. Fundamentally, we’re the most innovative economy in the world. There are very few signs that any of the other big economies will surpass the United States in innovation. INTERVIEWER: What about an apocalyptic scenario, where being more innovative economically and producing goods valued higher than goods produced elsewhere doesn’t matter? How likely is that? ELAINE KAMARCK: Isn’t that the basis of economic growth? Why would growth deteriorate other than in a severe recession? We’re not going to be in a severe recession until 2025, if that’s your time frame. In the short term, everybody has a problem, but between now and 2025 there will be

new business cycles. We’ll likely lead the world out of the current downturn. INTERVIEWER: Okay, but might one of these other developing nations develop an innovation model to match that of the United States in the decades ahead? ELAINE KAMARCK: The big question is China, because China certainly has an entrepreneurial people and culture. But they still have an overhang from their communist era. When it comes to information, they’re still a closed society. It’s hard to imagine a society being truly innovative when there are so many restrictions on freedom of speech, as there still are in China. If that would change dramatically, and certainly the Internet is pushing at it to change, then China could become very innovative. The second thing about China is that they still have significant corruption problems and they don’t have a rule of law that respects contracts. It’s hard to attract significant investments from people when investors have doubts about getting their money out, or when there’s the question of state nationalization of industry. It’s not a legal structure that fosters innovation. Until that changes in other parts of the world, people will still come to the United States to develop new products. INTERVIEWER: What about the theory that the U.S. consumer market is tapped, that real consumer growth lies in other countries because of the amount of debt the United States has accrued as a nation? Is it overly pessimistic to think the U.S. is played out as a consumer market? ELAINE KAMARCK: It’s not overly pessimistic for the short term. There’s still a lot of debt to be worked off in the U.S. economy. However, there is a very large generation coming up, the millennial generation. They’re bigger than the baby-boomer generation. They’re now in high school and in college. They’ll need to purchase homes and consumer durables. They’ll have children. As people work themselves out of debt, and as a new generation that doesn’t have this debt (because they’re kids) become adults, you can see a return to a more normal set of consumption patterns in the economy. Hopefully, you won’t see a return to

overconsumption. We’ve swung dramatically from buying everything with money we didn’t have to buying nothing. Clearly there’s someplace in the middle.

lot more important than thinking about deficits. Once the economy gets moving again, then you’ll have to confront the deficit crisis. If the stimulus works to really get the economy grow-

“ Internationally, the biggest challenge is to deal with terrorism more as an intelligence matter and less as a military matter.“ INTERVIEWER: The issue of the amount of debt that is being placed on the backs of younger generations is of great concern to me. The average college graduate carries $19,000 in school loans and an additional $12,000 in credit-card debt before they get out of school. When you add on future entitlement spending (Social Security and Medicare) as the baby boomers retire, the cost begins to sound significant. Many young people are leaving school with bleak job prospects and burdens that the generation before them didn’t have. How would you rate that as a challenge for the United States going forward? ELAINE KAMARCK: When you talk about debt to future generations in the U.S. economy as a whole, that’s different from school loans. People get upset about loans, but loans are politically and practically a different thing. I think there will be 10 hard years. That’s how long it will take for the overspending to move its way out. Eventually, people will need to buy cars, refrigerators, and houses again. That, plus whatever the Obama administration does by way of government spending, should help younger people to get jobs when they get out of college. INTERVIEWER: You think it will take 10 years to fully move out of this current downturn? ELAINE KAMARCK: It depends on how effective the stimulus package is and how quickly it succeeds in doing two things: It has to stop the rise in unemployment, and it has to get the credit markets moving again so that the banks have some trust and can start lending to people forming new businesses. Then you start having a more normal economy. That’s why for the time being, frankly, spending is a

ing again, you’ll grow out of some of the deficits. The question is, what is an acceptable level of debt as an aspect of GDP? Who knows if we’ll ever get back to the Clinton administration levels? But Certainly by the time we’re coming out of this recession, hopefully the next administration will be poised to reinvent government and try and get inefficiencies out of government. INTERVIEWER: Assuming that we do absolutely nothing correctly in the next 15 years, the intelligence report on 2025 has outlined what looks like a very bad worst-case scenario. What’s your worst-case scenario? E L A I N E K A M A R C K : If we do everything wrong in the short term, we face a long period of deflation and unemployment. It becomes more difficult to meet our international obligations and maintain our military force. Then you begin to see some of the darker scenarios that we started this conversation with. But there is also a feeling that the U.S. economy has enough flexibility in it that people will work out of the present situation. INTERVIEWER: What do you think is the most important trend to shape U.S. policy over the next two decades? ELAINE KAMARCK: Domestically, the aging population. That will determine a lot of government spending, because elderly people vote and are sophisticated about influencing the government. The probability of being able to achieve any significant savings out of either Medicare or Social Security is pretty slim. And so that will be the most significant domestic problem. Internationally, the biggest challenge is to deal with terrorism more as an intelligence matter and less as a military matter. The Bush administration treated the war on terror as if it were a war, including invading coun-

tries. When we see terrorism stop, it’s almost always the result of something similar to effective police and detective action rather than military action. The U.S. military, for all its talents, isn’t well suited to the prevention of terrorist plots. We need to build better alliances, and do better international police and intelligence work to preempt plots. That’s a change from the way the Bush administration dealt with the problem. *** INTERVIEWER: In your television interviews and your books, you talk a lot about the wealth transfer to Asia. According to your Web site, it’s one of the key components of your investment strategy at EuroPacific Capital. To what extent do you agree or disagree with some of the scenarios in the Global Trends 2025 report? PETER SCHIFF: Rising influence in Asia? I definitely agree with that, China more so than Russia. But there are other countries in the equation, like India. Japan will also have more clout in 2025. It won’t only be China and Russia that will see an increase in their influence and wealth. I think the United States will see a reduction in its economic, political, and military power. We’re in serious trouble. Our economy is a mess, but more worrisome is that the U.S. government is poised to completely destroy it. What Obama is seeking to do could ruin the economy. The economy is a mess because of bad fiscal and monetary policy in the preceding years. But what we need in order to recover is more capitalism, more free markets. We need more savings to make credit more available to businesses that could borrow to build more factories and start producing again to repair the industrial base. We should make repairs to our infrastructure, but only when we can afford it. There’s a lot of serious work to be done. Unfortunately, President Obama seems intent on building roadblocks that will just prevent market forces from correcting the problems in our economy. By assuming more and more control and micromanaging our economy, by making the government bigger, our economy is going to be much less dynamic. The standard of living is going to fall more precipitously than would otherwise be the case.

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We’re going to recreate another great depression, only this one will be worse than the one the government created in the 1930s. INTERVIEWER: How can individuals, particularly people in the United States, cope with the trends you’ve laid out? What’s an action plan for them? PETER SCHIFF: Their action plan is to get out of U.S. assets entirely. Don’t hold bonds or U.S. currency. Get out of U.S. real estate. U.S. assets are going to lose substantial value, especially relative to assets in other parts of the world and certain commodities.

and minimal taxes relative to the rest of the world…Now, I think, there’s more entrepreneurial capitalism going on in places like China than there is in the United States. INTERVIEWER: Many developing nations face tremendous political uncertainty in the years ahead. To what degree will they become more open? To what degree will they become more democratic? Will there be social upheavals? PETER SCHIFF: There will be social upheavals in the United States. We’re going into a situation with severe economic hardship in this country. The

“ What enabled Americans to be so much more successful than people of other countries was that we were freer.” People need to understand that U.S. assets are going to be substantially marked down. INTERVIEWER: Is this something that will have an effect geopolitically and militarily going forward? PETER SCHIFF: Of course. As the dollar loses value, it becomes more expensive to maintain the military — to supply it with food, fuel, and ammunition. Most of U.S. military equipment runs with imported components and imported parts. If we’re going to keep our planes in the air, our tanks rolling, and our ships steaming, we’re going to have to import more expensive foreign components. We have military bases all around the world. As the dollar loses value, it’s more expensive to maintain those bases. INTERVIEWER: What about the argument that the United States will maintain its dominance because it has a unique culture of innovation, with the world’s best universities? PETER SCHIFF: We don’t have a unique culture of anything. American citizens aren’t innately smarter or harder working than people anywhere else. We’re no better than the Italians, the French, the Mexicans, or the Chinese. What enabled Americans to be so much more successful than people of other countries was that we were freer. We had a better system of government because we had a constitution that limited the power of government, so we had minimal regulation

inflation that the U.S. government is unleashing will lead to spectacular increases in the cost of living. Ultimately, it will lead the Obama administration to implement price controls for products, including food and energy, which will result in food and energy price wars. When people are cold and hungry, there’s a tendency to commit crimes, and this will lead to social unrest. There are a lot of problems in that respect coming to the United States. There’s also the chance the United States government will act in much more oppressive ways. I think the U.S. government might start seizing assets from its citizens, such as precious metals and foreign stocks. There could be outright confiscation and seizure. Moving money out of the country could be very difficult. INTERVIEWER: Do you think there is any chance that the U.S. government would begin to pursue an open market strategy? PETER SCHIFF: I don’t see that happening soon. I see a lot more damage occurring in our economy before Obama comes to that revelation. But hopefully he comes to it in time. The failure to come to it in time will produce a hyperinflation. The dollar will be wiped out completely. That economic crisis will be far worse than the one we’re dealing with today. The United States will not be the largest economy based on GDP well before 2025. It will be China. The United

States will still be behind Japan and it will no longer be in the top 20 countries in per capita GDP. We’ll see a significant reduction in our stature in the world. INTERVIEWER: Do you think China and Japan will be able to shift from being export economies toward being economies that stimulate domestic consumer spending? PETER SCHIFF: They will certainly be consuming a lot more domestically, particularly China. But Japan and a lot of countries that are now exporting to the United States will simply export to other countries. For instance, Japanese exports to China will pick up significantly. It’s certain that a country that’s going to see one of the most dramatic increases in domestic consumption will be a country like China. INTERVIEWER: When does it get very bad for the United States? PETER SCHIFF: When the only buyer left for U.S. debt is the Federal Reserve itself, that’s when hyperinflation kicks in. That’s when the bond market plunges and consumer prices really take off. That’s when we’re really up against a serious crisis. INTERVIEWER: That can happen anytime between now and… PETER SCHIFF: That can happen any day. It could happen tomorrow morning, next year, two years. You just don’t know. The fact is it will happen. Even Bernie Madoff knew he would be found out eventually. Ponzi schemes can’t go on forever. That’s why they’re illegal. If you could make it work then it wouldn’t be illegal. *** INTERVIEWER: To what extent do you find these scenarios to be credible? DENNIS KUCINICH: I would suggest that such reports are interesting, but they’re not constructive because they don’t allow for our ability to change the direction of events. If the United States does not take control of its economic destiny, and if the country keeps spending money on wars and allowing the accelerated creation of material wealth either through the instrumentation of government of because of the theft of Wall Street — certainly the United States will be in a precarious position.

When it comes to the globe, we need to look at ourselves not as a nation apart from other nations but as a nation among nations. We need to come into resonance with the founding principles of this country and its first motto: E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one). We are one people, not just fifty states, but we’re also one with a world that is increasingly i n t e rc o n n e c t e d . W h y n o t r a l l y around these ideas to save the world from scarcity, from drought, and from hunger? We need to do that now, not in 2025. These warnings that we get from economists, from environmentalists, from people who study global trends are warnings we should pay attention to not because they predict the future but because they give us a snapshot of what’s happening today. We can change the outcome. I N T E RV I E W E R : G e t t i n g m o re specific, what do you see as the most important trend that will shape U.S. policy over the course the next two decades? DENNIS KUCINICH: The trend toward a more equitable distribution of wealth. In the last few decades, the United States has become a massive machine where all the instruments in government were aimed at accelerating the creation and accumulation of wealth. The last administration put in place more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts that went to the wealthiest 1% of the U.S. population. Our military spending is used to accelerate the accumulation wealth of the nation through war and huge amounts of defense spending. Our environmental policies deteriorated the quality of our air and water and appreciated the financial assets of companies who contaminated our environment. Our energy policies accelerated the accumulation of wealth by turning over our energy supply to the oil companies. These companies [were able to] determine the kinds of energy we had. We’ve allowed insurance companies to run our health-care systems. One hundred million people in the United States are either underinsured or uninsured. Massive displacements are going on economically because people can’t afford health care. You can look at every system of government over

the last few decades and you can see how special interests have allowed the acceleration of the creation of wealth. We’re living with the culmination of lack of regulation. This lack resulted in fraud. We need to have a system that causes a more equitable distribution. INTERVIEWER: Global collaboration seems to be one of your focal points. What sort of future opportunities do you imagine for the United States to collaborate with the developing world to improve the future?

groundwater. I think this speaks to your broader point: How do you convince other people not to follow the growth path that the United States has established? DENNIS KUCINICH: I think that most of the rest of the world sees that supply-side economics is a failure. If we want to restore our credibility with the people of other nations, we need to reject the canards of the past and start talking about human values that have proven to be sustainable. We need to set ourselves

“ When it comes to the globe, we need to look at ourselves not as a nation apart from other nations but as a nation among nations.” DENNIS KUCINICH: We have an opportunity to stop looking at it as a world that needs to be developed. These distinctions need to be challenged. There’s a lot about the “developed” world that I don’t find particularly acceptable, such as the geography of nowhere. This is where everything looks alike, where local cultures are obliterated by concrete. This is an aspect of the so-called developed world. We need to come into rhythm with the natural world. We shouldn’t be talking about the developing world. We should be talking about the natural world. INTERVIEWER: Do you envision a way to achieve this equilibrium you talk about and maintain the supplyside economic system? DENNIS KUCINICH: We can’t sustain the system we have in place. We already know that. It’s predatory. It’s broken down — why should we revive it? INTERVIEWER: Some might argue that supply-side economics over the last two decades has led to an increase in quality of life, especially parts of the world outside of the United States. On that note, one of the key issues in the Global Trends report is how the shift to Western dietary habits in many parts of the world, particularly in Asia, is one of the primary drivers putting strain on freshwater, because as people switch to eating more meat they deplete

on a path where there are jobs for all, housing for all, education for all, health care for all, retirement security, clean water, clean air, a sustainable food supply, and peace. This is not a pipe dream. All of this is achievable. We have it within our reach, but we have to change our institutions so that [those] institutions can respond and evolve with human potential. INTERVIEWER: Which institutions in particular? DENNIS KUCINICH: Every institution. Jefferson talked about the fact that institutions come from the mind of man and evolve with the mind of man. They have to change. They are our products. They didn’t make us, we made them. INTERVIEWER: Why do you think it’s important for individuals to take their future seriously? DENNIS KUCINICH: I think it’s important for individuals to live joyously. I think we need to live without fear of the future and enjoy the moment, live it to the utmost, and live it with great heart, love, and courage. That’s what I think we should do. If you do that, the future will take care of itself. ■ This article is a slightly edited version of one that originally appeared in the July-August 2009 issue of The Futurist.

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looking forward

We wanted to take a few pages, featuring two essays, to reflect on how the study of the future relates to the way we live. The first essay by anthropologist Helen Fisher discusses how trends in interpersonal relationships will affect many traditions, institutions, and policies. The second essay by psychologist Philip Zimbardo takes a look forward at how formal research into heroism by ordinar y people faced with extraordinar y circumstances can have wider benefits for society as a whole. Enjoy. —MD How Trends in Interpersonal Relationships Will Disrupt our Social and Business Traditions

By HELEN FISHER

arriage has changed more in the past 100 years than it has in the past 10,000, and it could change more in the next 20 years than in the last 100. We are rapidly shedding traditions that emerged with the Agricultural Revolution and returning to historical patterns of sex, romance, and attachment that evolved on the grasslands of Africa millions of years ago. Beliefs in virginity at marriage, arranged marriages, the concept that men should be the sole family breadwinners, the credo that a woman’s place is in the home, the double standard for adultery, and the concepts of “honor thy husband” and “until death do us part” are vanishing. “Hooking up” (the refreshed term for a one-night stand) is becoming commonplace, along with living together, bearing children out of

wedlock, women-headed households, interracial marriages, homosexual weddings, commuter marriages between individuals who live apart, childless marriages, betrothals between older women and younger men, and small families. Our concept of infidelity is also changing. Some married couples agree to have brief sexual encounters when they travel separately; others sustain long-term adulterous relationships with the approval of a spouse. Even our concept of divorce is shifting. Divorce used to be considered a sign of failure; today it is often deemed the first step toward true happiness. These trends aren’t new. Anthropologists have many clues to life among our forebears; the dead do speak. A million years ago, children were most likely experimenting with sex and love by age six. Teens lived to-

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gether in relationships known as “trial marriages.” Men and women chose their partners for themselves. Many were unfaithful, a propensity common in all 42 extant cultures I have examined. When our forebears found themselves in an unhappy partnership, these ancients walked out. A million years ago, anthropologists suspect, most men and women had two or three long-term partners across their lifetimes. All these primordial habits are returning. But the most profound trend is the rise of what sociologists call the companionate, symmetrical, or peer marriage: marriage between equals. Women in much of the world are regaining the economic power they enjoyed for millennia. Ancestral women left camp almost daily to gather fruits, nuts, and vegetables, returning with 60% to 80% of the evening meal. In the hunting and gathering societies of our past, women worked outside the home; the double-income family was the rule, and women were just as economically, sexually, and socially powerful as men. Today, we are returning to this lifeway, leaving in the dustbin of history the traditional, male-headed, patriarchal family - the bastion of agrarian society. This massive change will challenge many of our social traditions, institutions, and policies during the next 15 years. Perhaps we will see wedding licenses with an expiration date. Companies may have to reconsider how they distribute pension benefits. Words like marriage, family, adultery, and divorce are likely to take on a variety of meanings. We may invent new kinship terms. Matriliny may become common as more children trace their descent through their mother. Emergent industries are booming as they take advantage of our tendencies to marry later, then divorce and remarry. These include Internet dating services, marital mediators, artists who airbrush faces out of family albums, divorce support groups, couples therapists, and self-improvement books. As behavioral geneticists begin to pinpoint the biology of such seemingly amorphous traits as curiosity, cautiousness, political orientation, and religiosity, the rich may soon create designer babies. For every trend there is a countertrend, of course. Religious traditions are impeding the rise of women in some societies. In countries where there are far more men than women, due to female infanticide, women are likely to become coveted and cloistered. An aging world population may cling to outmoded social values, and population surges and declines will affect our attitudes toward family life.

Adding to this mix will be everything we are learning about the biology of relationships. We now know that kissing a long-term partner reduces cortisol, the stress hormone. Certain genes in the vasopressin system predispose men to make less-stable partnerships. My colleagues and I have discovered that the feeling of romantic love is associated with the brain’s dopamine system—the system for wanting. Moreover, we have found that romantic rejection activates brain regions associated with profound addiction. Scientists even know some of the payoffs of “hooking up.” Casual sex can trigger the brain systems for romantic love and/or feelings of deep attachment.

“ Emergent industries are booming as they take advantage of our tendencies to marry later, then divorce and remarry.” What will we do with these data? One forwardthinking company has bottled what our forebears would have called “love magic.” They sell Liquid Trust, a perfume that contains oxytocin, the natural brain chemical that, when sniffed, triggers feelings of trust and attachment. We are living in a sea of social and technological currents that are likely to reshape our family lives. But much will remain the same. To bond is human. The drives to fall in love and form an attachment to a mate are deeply embedded in the human brain. Today, 84% of Americans wed by age 40, and with the expansion of the roles of both women and men, new medical aids to sex and romance, our longer life spans, and the growing social acceptance of alternative ways to bond, I believe we now have the time and tools to make more-fulfilling partnerships than at any time in human evolution. The time to love is now. ■ This article is a slightly edited version of one that originally appeared in the November-December 2010 issue of The Futurist.

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looking forward

Transforming Society by Teaching Everyday People the Characteristics of a Modern Hero By PHILIP ZIMBARDO

hat is a hero? I argue that a hero is someone who possesses and displays certain heroic attributes such as integrity, compassion, and moral courage, heightened by an understanding of the power of situational forces, an enhanced social awareness, and an abiding commitment to social action. Heroism is a social concept, and like any social concept it can be explained, taught, and modeled through education and practice. I believe that heroism is common, a universal attribute of human nature and not exclusive to a few special individuals. The heroic act is etraordinary; the heroic actor is an ordinary person - until he or she becomes a heroic special individual. We may all be called upon to act heroically at some time, when opportunity arises. We would do well, as a society and as a civilization, to conceive of heroism as something within the range of possibilities for every person.

“ Research into the component attributes of heroism and their practical application can have farreaching benefits for society.” But rarely do we hear about ordinary men and women who have, by circumstance or fate, done something extraordinary for a greater cause or sacrificed on behalf of fellow human beings. Today’s generation, perhaps more than any preceding one, has grown up without a distinct vision of what constitutes heroism, or, worse, has grown up with a flawed vision of the hero as sports figure, rock star, gang leader, or fantastic super hero. This is why I formed the Heroic Imagination Project (heroicimagination.org), or HIP, which seeks to encourage and empower individuals to develop the personal attributes that lead them to take heroic action during crucial moments in their lives, on behalf of others, for a moral cause, and without expectation of gain. HIP is committed to realizing this goal in three ways. First, we conduct and support new research that will expand society’s understanding of heroic behavior. Second, we have created new educational programs in

schools and on the Web that coach and mentor people in how to resist negative social influences, while also inspiring them to become wise and effective heroes. Finally, we have created public engagement programs that involve people everywhere to take our heroic pledge and to sign on to one of our many emerging programs.

Research on Heroism One of the most fundamental and unique aspects of our mission is its focus on encouraging new empirical research on the nature and dynamics of heroism. There is a dearth of information on this idea, at least partly due to the changing definition of heroism over the last 30 years, and the earlier focus in psychology on the dark side of human nature. To build this new body of research, we are partnering with major universities and will sponsor promising doctoral candidates who devote their research to questions around this issue of heroic behavior. Research into the component attributes of heroism (ethical behavior, leadership, courage) and their practical application (defiance of unjust authority, whistle blowing, facing physical danger) can have far-reaching benefits for society. We need to better understand the neurological and psychological basis of such phenomena as action versus passivity at the decisive moment. The components of our research initiative include Web-based surveys of self-selected individuals, analysis of a program of senior volunteers, and laboratory studies of the personal, social, and neurological roots of heroic behaviors.

Implementation of Our Findings Everyday heroism is the highest form of civic virtue. It transforms the personal virtue of compassion into meaningful social action. To that end, we will work to instill in all people, particularly in young people, the self-confidence and the ability to readily perform deeds that improve the lives of other individuals and society as a whole. We believe it begins by adopting, and internalizing, the mind-set of a heroic imagination - I can be a hero when the opportunity arises. We have developed specific program modules for

scholastic, non-profit, and academic audiences, with one for corporate audiences forthcoming. Our initial program was launched in middle and high schools and provides young people with tools to encourage heroic self-identification. The aim is to fortify their moral framework and coach them to act beyond their comfort zone—but wisely so.

Why Heroism? This exploration into heroism was spurred by recent research that shows how otherwise exemplary individuals can be easily persuaded, when their social framework is skewed or altered, to perform acts that go against conscience, and behave in ways they would ordinarily find despicable. My Stanford Prison Experiment (1971) reflected such an outcome, and my findings have been frequently validated since, including the recent actions of American military police guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004. I testified during the trial of one of the U.S. guards accused of mistreating prisoners in that incident. My mes-

sage was this: It’s imperative for our society to acknowledge how situational forces can corrupt even good people into becoming perpetrators of evil. It is essential that all of us learn to recognize the situational and systemic determinants of antisocial behaviors. What’s more, I argue, we must actively seek to change this paradigm by encouraging and empowering individuals to make the difficult but moral decision—the decisive heroic choice - when faced with challenging circumstances. By redefining these ideas for contemporary audiences, we can popularize and energize the concept of everyday heroism around the world. In doing so, HIP hopes to be the catalyst for individuals to transform their passivity and reluctance to come to the aid of those in need into the positive social action heroism. Ideally, HIP will become a social movement that sows the seeds of heroism everywhere. ■ This article is a slightly edited version of one that originally appeared in the November-December 2010 issue of The Futurist.

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final word By BRENDA COOPER

How Science Fiction Makes Better Futurists An Interview with Tobias Buckell, Science Fiction Writer I’m very lucky to count Tobias Buckell among my friends. I first met Toby a decade ago at an intimate writing retreat we were both invited to. He’s smart, global, and courageous, a very fine writer and speaker, and a perfect subject for a short interview about the value of science fiction authors to the field of futurism studies. There’s even a summer reading list – enjoy!

BRENDA COOPER: Hi Toby. You’ve set Arctic Rising, Hurricane Fever, and other work in a near future that has been serio u s l y a l t e re d b y c l i m a t e change. How did you decide what would change? TOBIAS BUCKELL: I was very lucky in that a lot of the Tobias research had already been Buckell done for me. I started reading documents related to the IPCC1 reports and was reading stuff coming out from Task Force Climate Change2. Add into that the legal challenges being faced by Pacific Islanders who were figuring out how to plan for the dissolution of their homes, and things began to click into place for me. Unlike most science fiction that I write, I actually didn’t have to make many decisions in the background for these books in terms of making up worlds; I just kept encountering challenges people were already facing or trying to plan to face. Fictionalizing them was the trick, not finding them. 26 THE FUTURIST Summer 2015 • www.wfs.org © 2015 World Future Society • All rights reserved.

BRENDA COOPER: I found myself as interested in your predictions for social change as I was in the climate science. Can you describe a few things that you consider likely scenarios from your recent work? TOBIAS BUCKELL: There are a lot of undercurrents and assumptions we make about the nature of work, corporate structures, and who should benefit from that which are fairly unique to the last fifty years. Quarterlybased shareholder capitalism doesn’t seem particularly sustainable, and I’m fascinated by the small bits of green shoots you see in the areas of employee-owned businesses, or more businesses that hand employees a cut for their hard work. On the other hand, I do think the increased nature of contract work will continue. While I used the ideas of freelance spies in Arctic Rising as an extreme, it’s not that far out of hand. And I imagine we’ll see more and more of society having to adapt to the fact that most of the workforce will be temporary. We’re already seeing some services being built to handle that, from changes in U.S. healthcare to companies that create banking accounts specifically designed to buffer freelance cash to even out the flow.

“ …I believe the best science fiction can be unfettered and give us a thirty thousand foot view– one that can inspire people to make something a reality. ” B R E N DA C O O P E R : In what ways do you think that working futurists might learn from reading science fiction? TOBIAS BUCKELL: William Gibson once pointed out that when he came up with many of the concepts he was famous for, the experts told him there wasn’t enough bandwidth to make it work. Had he remained constrained by the on-the-ground reality and not used his imagination, he wouldn’t have had nearly the influence he did. Likewise, I believe the best science fiction can be unfettered and give us a thirty thousand foot view– one that can inspire people CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK to make something a reality. When we focus on the function and use, it can point out something that is needed that might be currently beyond our grasp. I am thinking of tricorders from Star Trek; the cyberspace of William Gibson; visions of societies arranged differently. By jolting ourselves out into different paradigms we exercise that great muscle: imagination.

sions trading program to cut way back on it. It is the same with the ozone layer, which is in much better shape. But now those tools are off the table due culture wars, not because we lack the ability to tackle it. BRENDA COOPER: What makes you the most hopeful? TOBIAS BUCKELL: The rapid technological growth rate of solar and battery efficiencies. BRENDA COOPER: The World Future Conference this year is about “making” the future. While that can obviously refer to 3D and 4D printing, in what other ways are we making the future right now? How might we go about “making the future?” TOBIAS BUCKELL: Remaking roads. Other than a few places in Europe we are oriented toward cars, which are an amazing technology that allow a great deal of independence. But with paint and planters we can redesign for humans fairly effectively. We still put a great deal of our budgets into new roads and are struggling to maintain roads. But network simulations of traffic show that more roads don’t equal less traffic. I’m hopeful to see more design around human beings, rather than our tools. And I say that as someone who owned a sports car and loved it. ■

BRENDA COOPER: Are there particular authors that you would recommend? TOBIAS BUCKELL: I think futurists should be reading Ramez Naam, Ken Liu’s short science fiction, Madeline Ashby, Cory Doctorow, Paolo Bacigalupi, Charles Stross (in particular his Halting State and Rule 34 novels), Karl Schroeder (check out Lady of Mazes for a novel, or any of his short fiction), Afterparty by Daryl Gregory, The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson– that’s a good start! BRENDA COOPER: What frightens you? TOBIAS BUCKELL: Climate change. It’s something hard to recover from, and it has become such a political leverage point. Politicians were able to use an emis-

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Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Task Force Climate Change is a U.S. Navy study group, first stood up in 2009. www.wfs.org • THE FUTURIST Summer 2015 27

CONTRIBUTORS GINA BIANCHINI is an entrepreneur and

DR. DANIEL E. “DAN” GEER is a computer

investor. She is the founder of Mightybell, a specialized professional network site, and an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Bianchini was previously the co-founder and CEO of Ning, the co-founder and president of Harmonic Communications, and prior to that held positions at CKS Group and Goldman Sachs & Co.

security analyst and risk management specialist. He is currently the chief information security officer for In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit venture capital firm investing in high-tech companies for the purpose of keeping U.S. intelligence agencies equipped with the latest technologies. He has earned many accomplishments and accolades in the computer science community, including the 2011 USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award (“The Flame”), which recognizes “singular contributions to the UNIX community of both intellectual achievement and service that are not recognized in any other forum.”

TOBIAS S. BUCKELL is an award-winning science fiction author and futurist. His accolades include nominations for the Nebula and Prometheus awards for his novel Ragamuffin, and the Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer (Finalist). His latest book is the technothriller Hurricane Fever (Tor Books, 2014).

BRENDA COOPER is a technologist, futurist, and science fiction author. She is currently the chief information officer of Kirkland, Washington. She is also the co-creator of Futurist.com, an introductoryto-intermediate level website about futurism. She has been an author for 26 years, with numerous published novels and short stories to her credit. Her most recent book is Edge of Darkness (The Glittering Edge) (Pyr, 2015). DR. HELEN FISHER is an anthropologist who studies gender differences and the evolution of human emotions, best known as an expert on romantic love. She is the author of numerous books including the highly regarded Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (Holt, 2004). She is also the chief scientific advisor to Chemistry.com and a visiting research associate in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University.

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DR. NEWTON LEROY “NEWT” GINGRICH is most recognized as the former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives (1995-1999) and former candidate for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination. Prior to serving in the U.S. House of Representatives beginning in 1979, he was a history professor at West Georgia College. Post-speakership, he has been involved in many activities that include founding the Center for Health Transformation, serving on the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, and serving as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution. He has also authored many nonfiction and fictional alternate history books, and he is a prolific book reviewer.

DR. ELAINE C. KAMARCK has been a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government since 1997, after a career in politics and government. She is also a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution. At the Kennedy School she served as Director of Visions of Governance for the Twenty-First Century and as Faculty Advisor to the Innovations in American Government Awards Program. At Brookings she is the founding director

of the Center for Effective Public Management. She previously served in the White House from 1993 to 1997, where she created and managed the Clinton administration’s National Performance Review, also known colloquially as “reinventing government.” She is the author most recently of How Change Happens –Or Doesn’t: The Politics of U.S. Public Policy (Lynne Rienner, 2013).

DENNIS KUCINICH is a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served the state of Ohio from 1997-2013. He has twice (2004, 2008) been a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Prior to joining Congress, he served as the Mayor of Cleveland, Ohio (the youngest in the city’s history). Long a progressive proponent of environmental initiatives, sustainability practices, and human rights issues, he was the 2003 recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award of the Religious Society of Friendsaffiliated organization Promoting Enduring Peace.

appeared in many other publications including Slate, MIT Technology Review, and Utne Reader. He is the author of well received The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014).

DR. AMY ZALMAN is the CEO and president of the World Future Society, the world’s first and largest membership organization for futurists, the advancement of foresight, and advocacy on behalf of future-critical issues. She is also the founder of Strategic Narrative, a digital clearinghouse for resources and expertise that helps governments and private sector clients influence outcomes and shape behaviors using the principles of storytelling and narrative. Her writing and public speaking has been featured in many forums around the world. She is also a member of the board of the Council for Emerging National Security Affairs. Immediately prior to joining WFS, she held the title of Department of Defense Chair of Information Integration at the U.S. National War College.

PETER SCHIFF is an economist, financier, radio talk show host, and author. He is the chief global strategist and CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, a financial broker/dealer in Connecticut, and host of The Peter Schiff Show. In 2008, he served as an economic advisor to Ron Paul’s campaign for the Republican nomination for President of the United States. He has appeared as a guest on many news programs and is frequently quoted in major publications. He is the author of a half dozen books, including the best-selling Crash Proof 2.0: How to Profit from the Economic Collapse (Wiley, 2011).

PATRICK TUCKER is currently the technology editor for Defense One. He was previously deputy editor of The Futurist, where over nine years he bylined more than 180 articles. His other writing, particularly about emerging technologies, has

DR. PHILIP ZIMBARDO is a professor (emeritus) in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, where he has worked since 1968. Prior to that he held academic positions at Yale University, New York University, and Columbia University. His research career has focused on topics that include time perspective, shyness, terrorism, madness, and evil. He is perhaps best known for his 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, an investigation into the causes of conflict between guards and prisoners. More recently, he has been the author of books that include The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2007), and has founded the Heroic Imagination Project, a non-profit dedicated to promoting heroism in everyday life. Among many accolades, he received the 2012 American Psychological Association Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in the Science of Psychology. www.wfs.org • THE FUTURIST Summer 2015 29

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 Karl Albrecht International

Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking

FutureManagement Group AG

San Diego, CA U.S.A. Phone: 858-836-1500 E-mail: futures@KarlAlbrecht.com Web: KarlAlbrecht.com Contact: Dr. Karl Albrecht Planning a conference? Include a “Futures Update” keynote by renowned futurist Dr. Karl Albrecht.

46 B/4 Jerusalem St., Kfar Saba, Israel 44369 Phone: 972-54-558-7940 Fax: 972-9-766965 Web: www.futurist-thinking.co.il E-mail: bisk@futurist-thinking.co.il Contact: Tsvi Bisk Strategic futurism: “Getting from Here to There” (Keynote speaker) Jewish, Mid-East and Mediterranean Futures (consulting).

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!

Alsek Research Economic Futures

Christensen Associates, Inc.

7650 S. McClintoch Dr., #103-233  Tempe, AZ 85284 Phone: 480-225-2507 E-mail: jfoltz@alsekresearch.com Web: www.alsekresearch.com Contact: Joan Foltz Keynotes, workshops, and anticipatory analysis of global markets, investing, and business structures. Author of Market Whipped: And Not By Choice.

8168 Manitoba St., No. 2, Playa Del Ray, CA 90293-8291 Phone: 310-578-0405 Fax: 310-578-0455 E-mail: chris@camcinc.com Web: www.camcinc.com Contact: Chris Christensen, CMC Avoid devastating surprises! Exploit ANY future! Stimulating and entertaining keynotes, workshops, assessments, and consulting.

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 D irector FPSPI is an established educational program that provides a 6-step problem solving process to assist students as they think about the future.

Common Sense Medicine

The Futures Corporation

2331 Mill Rd., Suite 100, Alexandria, VA 22314-3134 Phone: 703-684-5880 Fax: 703-684-0640 E-mail: futurist@altfutures.com Web: www.altfutures.com Contact: Clement Bezold, Jonathan Peck Vision and scenario development, strategic planning, trend analysis, workshop design and facilitation, presentations, keynotes, consulting.

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.

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 s trategies.

Atlas Safety & Security Design, Inc.

CREO Strategic Solutions

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.

PO Box 840, Kittery, ME 03904 Phone: 415-450-1515 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.

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

Alternative Futures Associates

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.

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.

30 THE FUTURIST Summer 2015 • www.wfs.org

The Future Hunters: Weiner, Edrich, Brown

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.

Futurist Speaker Thomas Frey

Institute for Alternative Futures

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.

2331 Mill Rd., Suite 100, 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 Uses research reports, workshops, scenarios, and visioning to help organizations understand future possibilities and create their “preferred future.”

The Greenway Group 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.

H.G. Hudson and Associates 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. 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, BristolMyers Squibb.

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.

Institute for Participatory Management and Planning 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.

iscover new opportunities and challenges. d 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.

KAIROS Future AB 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.

Jim Pinto Technology Futurist

Leading Futurists LLC

Pinyon Partners 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

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.

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.

More consultants and services, next page www.wfs.org • THE FUTURIST Summer 2015 31

consultants and services

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.

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.

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 coproduction directly with leadership teams.

TechCast Global, Inc. 3342 Maud St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20016 Phone: 202-994-5975 E-mail: info@techcastglobal.com Web: www.techcastglobal.org Contact: William E. Halal, president, TechCast Global Inc. TechCast Global 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 Global among the best systems available, and Google ranks it No. 2 or 3 out of 45 million hits. TechCast Global also gives presentations, conducts customized studies, and performs most types of consulting related to technology and strategic change.

Town and Gown Relations Kemp Consulting, LLC P. O. Box 342, Meriden, CT 06450-0342 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, P resident Dr. Kemp has been author and editor of over a

32 THE FUTURIST Summer 2015 • www.wfs.org

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.

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 bestselling 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.

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.

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.

BACK ISSUES OF THE FUTURIST November-December 2014 (Volume 48, No. 6) Trends at Work: An Overview of Tomorrow’s Employment Ecosystem • The Future of Futurists: Can a Machine Produce This Forecast? • Library Futures: From Knowledge Keepers to Creators • OUTLOOK 2015: Top Trends and Forecasts for the Decade Ahead • When Futurists Ask “What If”(Reports from WorldFuture 2014) • Futurists and Their Ideas: Why Pop Futurism Fails

September-October 2014 (Volume 48, No. 5) Special Report—Futures Education: Teaching and Learning about the Future [Part 1: Foresight Education Programs and Courses; Part 2: The Houston Experience; Part 3: Real-World Futures Learning] • Our Global Situation and Prospects for the Future • Seven Big Challenges for Pakistan—and the Lessons They Could Teach • 10 Questions for Machine Intelligence

July-August 2014 (Volume 48, No. 4) WorldFuture 2014 preview issue: Looking at the Future through a Cartoonist’s Eyes • Visualizing the Future • Technolife of Romeo and Juliet in 2035 • Terra Nova: The Religious Quest for Tomorrow • Backing into Eden, Gardening the World: A Parable • Forest Futures in the Anthropocene: Can Trees and Humans Survive Together? • What Does Moore’s Law Mean for the Rest of Society? • Deconstructing the Future: Seeing beyond “Magic Wand” Predictions • Abandoning Ship Titanistad

May-June 2014 (Volume 48, No. 3) Mission for Worldwide Innovation • Euphoric, Harmless, and Affordable: A Trend Analysis of Sex • Where Will the Century of Biology Lead Us? • Rx Disruption: Technology Trends in Medicine and Health Care • Sniffing out the Future of Medicine • Adventures in Personal Genomics • Extending Pet Longevity: Our Companions in Sickness and in Health

March-April 2014 (Volume 48, No. 2) A World without Waste? • The Information Revolution’s Broken Promises • Blundering to Success? Learning from Failure • When Do I Get My RoboCop? Power before Superpowers • Robotic Technology to Preserve Wildlife: A Scenario • More Talk, Fewer Languages: Communicating in a Connected World • Learning without Schools: A Contrarian Future

January-February 2014 (Volume 48, No. 1) Water Futures: An Islamic Perspective • Causal Layered Analysis Defined • When the Economy Transcends Humanity • The Best Predictions of 2013 • Privacy and the Surveillance Explosion • Riding the Power Jacket

Forecasts, Trends, and Ideas about the Future

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November-December 2014

Outlook 2015

THE FUTURIST’s roundup of the most thought-provoking forecasts of the year. Page 29

Could a Machine Have Predicted This? page 20 Tomorrow’s Employment Ecosystem, page 14 Libraries as Knowledge Creators? page 24 Conference report, WorldFuture 2014: What If, page 39

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Forecasts, Trends, and Ideas about the Future

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September-October 2014

FUTURES EDUCATION Teaching and Learning about the Future A special report by members and friends of the World Future Society Page 28 The State of Our Global Future, page 15 7 Big Challenges for Pakistan, page 22 WORLD TRENDS & FORECASTS

Mars Can Wait. It’s Back to the Lunar Future Inequality as a Predictor of Civil War Sharing the Caring: Trends in Child Custody Unraveling the Mysteries of Alzheimer’s Disease

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Forecasts, Trends, and Ideas about the Future

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July-August 2014

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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May-June 2014

INSIDE MEDICAL FUTURES Thanks to technologies that promise to improve not only the practice of medicine but also the management of health, our bodies will be built better and last longer. See the special section beginning on page 31

Toward a More Perfect Sex Life, page 20 Our Pets in Sickness and Health, page 47 Mission for Worldwide Innovation, page 16 WORLD TRENDS & FORECASTS

Good Robots Gone Bad Altitude’s Vertical Limit to Population Growth The Unexpected Tolls of Racism The End of the Earth’s Oceans? 3-D Printing Keeps on Growing Choosing between Happiness and Meaning

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Join World Future Society for just $79 per year and receive: • THE FUTURIST magazine • Exclusive digital access • Futurist Update e-newsletter • Discounts on books • Conference invitations Call 1-800-989-8274 or 1-301-656-8274

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March-April 2014

Drones vs. Poachers Toward a World without Waste, page 16 The Information Revolution’s Broken Promises, page 22

Conservationists have a new weapon in their battle to save endangered species. Page 35

How Businesses Can Learn from Failure, page 30 WORLD TRENDS & FORECASTS

Designing the Domestic Robot Does Smoking Drive Us to Drink? Microalgae to Feed and Fuel the World Why We Love the Apocalypse … and more!

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Forecasts, Trends, and Ideas about the Future

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January-February 2014

The Best Predictions of 2013 A roundup of the year’s most-intriguing predictions by experts from around the world. Page 31 An Islamic Approach to Water Management, page 19 Privacy and the Surveillance Explosion, page 42 When Virtual Workers Rule the World, page 27 Taking the Exoskeleton for a Ride, page 64 WoRld TREndS & FoREcASTS

Seeking Alien Life Primates as Planners Turf Wars? Modeling Green Economies

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THE FUTURIST has been published continuously since 1967. Back issues are available (print or PDF) for $5.95 each (plus $4.90 postage and handling for first copy and $0.95 for each additional copy of print editions). Most issues for the past 10 years can be supplied. Call 1-800-989-8274 (weekdays 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern Time) or use secure online ordering at wfs.org/backissues.

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Summer 2015