2020 Visionaries Part III: Engineering the Physical and Political Future

Published in THE FUTURIST, May-June 2010

In this third installment of the 2020 Visionaries series, we look at the future of the global environment and of democracy — two areas of concern that will increasingly intertwine in the next 10 years.

Over the course of the last century, humans took over the evolution of our species from nature. From huge public works projects visible from space to designer protein species that companies like Maxygen can manufacture on demand, evidence of our escape from the Darwinian imperative is all around us.

This artificial evolution has proceeded 10 million times faster than natural evolution, according to one scientist with whom I spoke. The results include not only exponential scientific progress and increased longevity and quality of life, but also human-engendered global warming, pollution, deforestation, and the threat of mass species extinction. The eventual collapse of the ecosystem is becoming the overwhelming issue for our time, as the European Commission on Key Technologies first declared in 2005. There are 30% too many people for the ecosystem to support sustainably.

The time has come to evolve the way that we evolve.

How do we reduce our species’ impact on the planet? Or has the opportunity to apply that solution already passed? If so, what are the last-resort options available to us, and what are the risks and obstacles?

In these essays, Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at the NASA Langley Research Facility and a WorldFuture 2010 featured speaker, provides an overview of the scope of the climate crisis and the weapons against it that we have at our disposal. The problem is larger than you’ve probably imagined, but the tools to use against it are more numerous.

Next, Jamais Cascio, author of Hacking the Earth, will explain the potential and pitfalls of geoengineering, which refers to the deliberate manipulation of the earth’s natural systems to fight global warming. Both foresee a radical break in the way human beings relate to the Earth. It’s a change that’s long overdue.

Freedom and Democracy

Ian Bremmer, head of the world’s largest political-risk consultancy, is widely regarded as the go-to expert on the intersection of geopolitics and business. In his new book, The End of the Free Market, Bremmer describes the rise of a new geopolitical force — state capitalism — a form of government where political elites use state-owned companies and sovereign wealth funds to entrench their power, and where markets are rigged for political gain. China is the quintessential example; after recording year-over-year expansion while the United States experienced the worst recession since the Great Depression, China has also become the poster child for state capitalism’s success. This has changed the landscape for the United States, the spread of democracy, and the future of free markets.

In his previous book, The J Curve, Bremmer argued that information technology in the hands of citizens would make it increasingly difficult for authoritarian governments to operate. In his new book, he acknowledges that advances in communications technology have not yet proven their ability to topple dictatorships. He argues that, unless there is widespread, grassroots demand for democracy, “these new tools will simply be used for other purposes.”

We asked Bremmer about his new book, the future of Sino-U.S. relations, and the changing face of freedom and prosperity in the next decade and beyond. We contrast his answers to those of American Enterprise Scholar Michael Rubin, who also generously donated his time to the project.

We also spoke to Azar Nafisi, human-rights advocate, fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies, and author of the international bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran. In her second memoir, Things I’ve Been Silent About, she tells of life growing up in Iran as the daughter of the mayor of Tehran, before and after the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

In one poignant section, she retells a story by Shahrnoosh Parispur about an old man who meets a British foreigner. The British colonialist confronts the Iranian with the fact that the earth is round. For several days, she writes, the old man “contemplates the foreigner’s presence, the roundness of the earth, the future changes and upheavals and finally announces ‘yes, the earth is round; the women will start to think, and as soon as they begin to think they will become shameless.’” The anecdote serves as a metaphor for globalization and the clash of cultures that follows the spread of Western ideals. The story also inspired Nafisi to write about her life and the lives of others she calls women without shame.

We asked her about what Iran’s history means for its future, and the effects of technology on democracy around the globe.
--Patrick Tucker, senior editor.

Conquering Climate Change

By Dennis M. Bushnell

Carbon-dioxide levels are now greater than at any time in the past 650,000 years, according to data gathered from examining ice cores. These increases in CO2 correspond to estimates of man-made uses of fossil carbon fuels such as coal, petroleum, and natural gas. The global climate computations, as reported by the ongoing Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) studies, indicate that such man-made CO2 sources could be responsible for observed climate changes such as temperature increases, loss of ice coverage, and ocean acidification. Admittedly, the less than satisfactory state of knowledge regarding the effects of aerosol and other issues make the global climate computations less than fully accurate, but we must take this issue very seriously.

I believe we should act in accordance with the precautionary principle: When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures become obligatory, even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.

As paleontologist Peter Ward discussed in his book Under a Green Sky, several “warming events” have radically altered the life on this planet throughout geologic history. Among the most significant of these was the Permian extinction, which took place some 250 million years ago. This event resulted in a decimation of animal life, leading many scientists to refer to it as the Great Dying. The Permian extinction is thought to have been caused by a sudden increase in CO2 from Siberian volcanoes. The amount of CO2 we’re releasing into the atmosphere today, through human activity, is 100 times greater than what came out of those volcanoes.

During the Permian extinction, a number of chain-reaction events, or “positive feedbacks,” resulted in oxygen-depleted oceans, enabling overgrowth of certain bacteria, producing copious amounts of hydrogen sulfide, making the atmosphere toxic, and decimating the ozone layer, all producing species die-off. The positive feedbacks not yet fully included in the IPCC projections include the release of the massive amounts of fossil methane, some 20 times worse than CO2 as an accelerator of warming, fossil CO2 from the tundra and oceans, reduced oceanic CO2 uptake due to higher temperatures, acidification and algae changes, changes in the earth’s ability to reflect the sun’s light back into space due to loss of glacier ice, changes in land use, and extensive water evaporation (a greenhouse gas) from temperature increases.

The additional effects of these feedbacks increase the projections from a 4°C–6°C temperature rise by 2100 to a 10°C–12°C rise, according to some estimates. At those temperatures, beyond 2100, essentially all the ice would melt and the ocean would rise by as much as 75 meters, flooding the homes of one-third of the global population.

Between now and then, ocean methane hydrate release could cause major tidal waves, and glacier melting could affect major rivers upon which a large percentage of the population depends. We’ll see increases in flooding, storms, disease, droughts, species extinctions, ocean acidification, and a litany of other impacts, all as a consequence of man-made climate change. Arctic ice melting, CO2 increases, and ocean warming are all occurring much faster than previous IPCC forecasts, so, as dire as the forecasts sound, they’re actually conservative.

These threats exist in addition to the documented economic, geopolitical, and national-security issues associated with the continued use of fossil fuels. The finite nature of coal, oil, and natural gas will instigate higher energy prices and greater energy price disruptions. According to some credible estimates, the world will realize “peak” oil fuel availability before 2015, peak uranium around 2025, peak natural gas around 2035, and peak coal around 2050. Because of these climatic, economic, national-security, and geopolitical drivers, it makes sense to alter our energy sources and uses in an expeditious manner.

Conquering Climate Change

The world currently derives 300 exajoules (83 million gigawatt hours) of energy from fossil fuel use each year. The major renewables — such as biomass, drilled or hot rock geothermal, solar thermal, solar photovolatics, and wind — could yield 4,000 exajoules per year each. In my previous article for THE FUTURIST magazine, I touched on the potential of genetically engineered saltwater algae, and I would reiterate my enthusiasm for that solution here.

There are several other intriguing renewable alternatives, such as a number of wind-energy systems that merit more research. These include not only terrestrial, or even offshore wind projects, but also high-altitude wind-energy farming. Estimates of the high-altitude wind capacity off the East Coast indicate the presence of enough potential energy to meet U.S. electrical grid requirements.

Researchers are also considering several unconventional sources of heated water with huge potential capacity. These include harnessing the waste water sitting in deep oil wells that’s been geothermally heated and tapping the Gulf Stream off the U.S. East Coast. Researchers at MIT have documented the potentials of drilled or hot rock geothermal energy.

Oceanic thermal energy conversion (OTEC) uses the temperature differences in the ocean to run turbines and produce energy. In tropical climates, the surface of the water, continually exposed to the sun, can reach temperatures of 80°F. Some 3,000 feet below the surface, the temperature descends to 40°F. This temperature difference, harnessed correctly, is enough to drive generators. New research suggests that descending to depths of 3,000 feet and lower may not even be necessary, as very cold water actually runs alongside the Gulf Stream and can be tapped horizontally. Studies from the University of Massachusetts suggest that this type of OTEC could produce sufficient energy to power the U.S. electrical grid.

These are among the more exotic solutions, but simple conservation could reduce overall energy use by 30%. In the United States alone, some 200,000 homes are off the electrical grid. The technology for this type of distributed power generation, where individuals are much less beholden to utility companies, is developing rapidly. Tomorrow’s off-the-grid pioneers will use next-generation photovoltaic panels, windmills, solar thermal, passive solar, thermoelectrics, and bioreactors, which convert sewage, yard waste, and kitchen scraps into fuels.

Nuclear power could play a larger role if we were able to go to nuclear reactors that generate more fissile material than they use (also called breeders) and switch from uranium to thorium, which is three times as abundant but otherwise is probably not a major portion of the energetics solution space. Renewables remain the less-costly option.

Skeptics such as former U.S. Energy Secretary James Schlesinger have raised concerns about the difficulty of storing energy from renewable sources, as opposed to oil or coal. But geothermal energy and biomass produce power continuously, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Wind, photovoltaics, and solar thermal power plants are, of course, cyclical — when there’s no wind or light, there’s no power — but storage options are increasing daily. Future batteries will take advantage of new technologies that will make them orders of magnitude more efficient than today’s chemical battery options. Researchers at Sandia National Labs are already researching the practicality of batteries using ultracapacitors and superconducting magnetic energy storage with carbon nanotube magnets. Low-energy nuclear reactors (LENRs), otherwise known as cold fusion reactors, were considered impossible to build a decade ago but are gaining attention thanks to the work of Allan Widom and Lewis Larsen, who have proposed a new theory to explain how LENR might work. NASA is conducting experiments in an attempt to verify their theory, which explains the decades-long LENR experiments as products of quantum weak interaction theory applied to condensed matter, not fusion.

The footprint of human civilization on this planet is now so large, covering so much geographical area, that we can even have a meaningful effect on climate change simply by painting our roofs and roads white to reflect more sunlight back into space.

The costs of fossil carbon fuels are increasing, and this trend will accelerate due to potential “carbon taxes,” but mostly due to worsening shortages. The costs for the renewables have been dropping for years. Many, such as certain biofuels, are already economically competitive with fossil fuels, and all renewables are projected to be as cheap as oil and even coal within some 10 to 15 years or sooner. If governments mandate that power companies who run coal-fired plants sequester their waste CO2, the costs of coal use will go up, hastening its inevitable replacement.

If, by the year 2020, we’ve passed a critical climate tipping point and guaranteed future generations a much more difficult future, it won’t be because of a lack of available solutions today. It’s not technology, capacity, or costs per se that are slowing humanity’s move to renewables, but rather conservatism, our attachment to the industries and strategies we’ve already invested money in (sunk costs), and lack of creative strategic planning for the inevitable demise of fossil fuels.

About the Author

Dennis Bushnell is the chief scientist at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and a speaker at the World Future Society’s conference in Boston this July. His previous article for THE FUTURIST, “Algae: A Panacea Crop?” was published in March-April 2009. Web site www.nasa.gov/centers/
langley/home/index.html.

Finding Faith in Humankind

A humanist is spreading the gospel of godlessness, respectfully.
By Roy Speckhardt

A modern look at religion and spirituality yields a mix of potentialities. On the one hand, there’s testimony and evidence that religion and spirituality can benefit people. After all, there’s an obvious social and political benefit in adhering to the beliefs of the majority. And there are also indications that both psychological and physical health are stronger among the faithful. On the other hand, spiritual faith has been a source for conflict and authoritarian control. Disputes, terrorism, and war are rarely rooted solely in religious disagreement, but such conflict surely fans the flames of such conflagrations. And faith is also a tool used by those in power to retain their control. As we look to the future, we see that traditional spirituality may bring us both good and harm. But will it persist?

From Friedrich Nietzsche to H. L. Mencken to Christopher Hitchens, many who were convinced of religion’s negative impact falsely predicted its demise. Those whose worldviews are solidly built with a frame of logic upon the firm foundation of knowledge often forget that they are in the minority. Just because faith requires adherence to unproven and unprovable assertions does not mean that such ideas will be abandoned now, or even over time. Much more likely is that the human need for resolution, the tendency to hold on to what’s desired, and simple inertia will maintain spiritual faith indefinitely.

While religion and spirituality may persist, it will certainly not be as it is today in the future — not 10 years from now, and not into the more distant decades. History has shown the evolution of religion from tribal animisms and other polytheistic faiths to monotheistic ones. A few religions, including some modern schools of Buddhism, New Age worldviews, and religious philosophies, are even in the realm of “post-theological.”

One steady change we’ve seen is the lessening impact of traditional religion on richer societies. Where once religion held equal sway over political, social, and spiritual domains, we’ve seen that authority recede. Political authority is rarely granted today in the same way it was under Holy Roman emperors and the divine right of kings. Social control in the West is far less stringent than it once was, with the churches losing their hold on rules surrounding courting, marriage, and the family. Even mainline churches are seeing their domain shrinking as discoveries provide testable explanations for movements of the stars, the origins of species, and the birth of the universe. For some, these sorts of answers remove the need to rely on spirituality.

As we move into the future, one can predict where traditional spirituality will continue to lose its authority. The churches will eventually surrender their losing battles on gay marriage, on a woman’s right to choose (abortion rights), and on the maintenance of stereotyped gender roles. But it will also lose in struggles that are just beginning.

The prejudice seen commonly among the faithful today — that goodness can only come through godliness — will be less and less accepted. As more and more of the 10%–15% of the population who are atheists and agnostics come out of their closets to their friends, family, and neighbors, it will be difficult to hold to the claim that so many lack the ability to lead productive moral lives. As that breaks down, religion and spirituality will begin to lose its connection to goodness in general. No longer will it be a social liability to voice secular principles and rationalist grounding.

In a world like this, being part of secular humanist communities will be an accepted alternative to traditionally religious ones, and even preferred over increasingly irrelevant fundamentalist faiths. And fundamentalists will no longer get the support they need to impose religion in the military, the democratic process, and the public schools. When the time comes to mark marriages, funerals, and the like, evocative and inspiring humanist ceremonies will become the norm for these life events, because they address the needs of an increasingly diverse culture.

The scientific method, with its basis in observation, analysis, and experimentation, will be seen as the driving force for determining valid choices for public policy. People will understand that science is a way to seek answers, not something to “believe” in, and polls will show vast majorities accepting human evolution over creationism, supporting comprehensive sex education, and understanding how human intervention impacts our environment.

As politicians campaign for public office, the days when it was political suicide to be a humanist or an atheist will be long gone. Like Jack Kennedy’s efforts to show his political actions to be separate from the Holy See, future political leaders will go even further, trying to position their belief systems in humanistic terms, with the religious candidates pointing out that, while they believe in a higher power, they base their decisions on the here and now.

That may not all come to pass by 2020, but progress should be clearly visible. Though Christianity and other religious paths will remain, the writing will be on the wall for the end of Christian social and political dominance in the United States.

With all these changes occurring, what will the new spirituality look like? Perhaps the word spirituality will slip from usage, since it’s derived from something so debatable, but the idea of shared values and a unified vision for the future will remain.

Humanists will encourage empathy, along with the compassion and sense of inherent equal worth that flows from it, in a way that honors human knowledge about ourselves and our universe. This means applying the scientific method to our pursuit of happiness, a pursuit we recognize as not just a solitary one, but one for us to strive for as a society. When we look at the world in this way, we discover that self-improvement, doing for others, and working to improve society are the keys to deep-seated happiness.

Those ideals are consistent with many traditional morals, like integrity, fidelity, and an independent work ethic. In 2020, most people will no longer regard religious ideas as outside the realm of analysis and critique. Respect for the various gods will diminish, but respect for parents, teachers, and others who’ve accumulated knowledge should increase. Holding to sacred days and geographies will become less prevalent, but an appreciation for diverse expertise will be cultivated. The finality of death will be a challenge for many to grapple with, but fear of the unknown will be replaced with greater curiosity and an acceptance of uncertainty.

So looking to the future, 10 years from now and further down the road, we see a changing landscape for spirituality. Religious faith, with its positives and negatives, will persist. While mainstream faiths remain part of U.S. culture, traditional, and fundamentalist religious ideas will recede. As they lose their reach, rational, universal answers will come to the center stage.

About the Author

Roy Speckhardt is executive director of the American Humanist Association, where he actively promotes the humanist perspective on political issues. He serves as a board member of the Humanist Institute and the United Coalition of Reason and as an advisory board member of the Secular Student Alliance. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Literary Learning in the Hyperdigital Age

Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein is fighting to preserve literary thought in an age of digital distraction.
By Mark Bauerlein

When the Boston Globe reported that an elite prep school in Massachusetts had set out to give away all its books and go 100% digital, most readers probably shrugged. This was just a sign of the times: Everyone now assumes a paperless future of learning through screens, not Norton anthologies and Penguin paperbacks. After all, the headmaster of the school told the Globe, “When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books.” Who wouldn’t believe that every school a decade hence will display a marvelous, wondrous array of technology in every classroom, in the library, in study hall?

It won’t go that far, though, not in every square foot of the campus and every minute of the school day. In 2020, schools will indeed sport fabulous gadgets, devices, and interfaces of learning, but each school will also have one contrary space, a small preserve that has no devices or access, no connectivity at all. There, students will study basic subjects without screens or keyboards present — only pencils, books, old newspapers and magazines, blackboards and slide rules. Students will compose paragraphs by hand, do percentages by long division, and look up a fact by opening a book, not checking Wikipedia. When they get a research assignment, they’ll head to the stacks, the reference room, and the microfilm drawers.

It sounds like a Luddite fantasy, but even the most pro-technology folks will, in fact, welcome the non-digital space as a crucial part of the curriculum. That’s because over the next 10 years, educators will recognize that certain aspects of intelligence are best developed with a mixture of digital and nondigital tools. Some understandings and dispositions evolve best the slow way. Once they mature, yes, students will implement digital technology to the full. But to reach that point, the occasional slowdown and log-off is essential.

Take writing. Today, students write more words than ever before. They write them faster, too. What happens, though, when teenagers write fast? They select the first words that come to mind, words that they hear and read and speak all the time. They have an idea, a thought to express, and the vocabulary and sentence patterns they are most accustomed to spring to mind; with the keyboard at hand, phrases go right up on the screen, and the next thought proceeds. In other words, the common language of their experience ends up on the page, yielding a flat, blank, conventional idiom of social exchange. I see it all the time in freshman papers, prose that passes along information in featureless, bland words.

English teachers want more. They know that good writing is pointed, angular, vivid, and forceful. A sharp metaphor strikes home, an unusual word catches a perceptive meaning, a long periodic sentence that holds the pieces together in elegant balance draws readers along. There are the ingredients of style, the cultivation of a signature. It happens, though, only when writers step outside the customary flow of words, especially those that tumble forth like Yosemite Falls. Because writing is a deep habit, when students sit down and compose on a keyboard, they slide into the mode of writing they do most of the time on a keyboard — texting (2,272 messages per month on average, according to Nielsen), social networking (nine hours per week, according to National School Boards Association), and blogging, commenting, IM, e-mail, and tweets.

It’s fast and easy, but good writing doesn’t happen that way. As more kids grow up writing in snatches and conforming to the conventional patter, problems will become impossible to overlook. Colleges will put more first-year students into remedial courses, and businesses will hire more writing coaches for their own employees. The trend is well under way, and educators will increasingly see the nondigital space as a way of countering it. For a small but critical part of the day, they will hand students a pencil, paper, dictionary, and thesaurus, and slow them down. Writing by hand, students will give more thought to the craft of composition. They will pause over a verb, review a transition, check sentence lengths, and say, “I can do better than that.”

The nondigital space will appear, then, not as an antitechnology reaction but as a nontechnology complement. Before the digital age, pen and paper were normal tools of writing, and students had no alternative to them. The personal computer and Web 2.0 have displaced these tools, creating a new technology and a whole new set of writing habits. This endows pen and paper with a new identity, a critical, even adversarial one. In the nondigital space, students learn to resist the pressures of conformity and custom, to think and write against the fast and faster modes of the Web. Disconnectivity, then, serves a crucial educational purpose, forcing students to recognize the technology everywhere around them and to see it from a critical distance.

This is but one aspect of the curriculum of the future. It allows a better balance of digital and nondigital outlooks. Yes, there will be tension between the nondigital space and the rest of the school, but it will be understood as a productive tension, not one to be overcome. The Web is, indeed, a force of empowerment and expression, but like all such forces, it also fosters conformity and stale behaviors. The nondigital space will stay the powers of convention and keep Web 2.0 (and 3.0 and 4.0 ) a fresh and illuminating medium.

About the Author

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University. He’s served as a director of the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, where he oversaw studies about culture and American life. He’s published in the Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. His latest book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30, was published in May 2008 by Penguin. Web site www.dumbestgeneration.com.

March-April 2020 Visionaries Inroduction

In the second installment of our 2020 Visionaries series, we look at media and spirituality in the next decade and beyond.

Media refers not only to books, movies, music, and journalism that we consume; it also speaks to the way we enjoy and create culture. Today, publishing houses, record companies, and movie studios face a future where every book, album, and movie is nothing more than a collection of ones and zeroes, downloadable anywhere, with no expensive packaging or backroom dealing technically necessary.

This means diminished profits and returns for media companies that rely on enormous and expensive distribution systems. In 2008, the sale of music on the Web rose significantly: More than a billion songs were downloaded, up from just 19 million in 2003. But the number of albums sold has dropped considerably, reflecting a change not only in the way music is sold, but also in the way it’s created and arranged. Similar trends are affecting newspapers, publishing houses, and movie studios.

Cory Ondrejka, co-founder of the online game Second Life and former vice president for digital marketing for EMI Music, and Andrew Keen, Internet entrepreneur and outspoken critic of Web 2.0, paint contrasting pictures of how the Internet will redefine culture in the next 10 years.

The Web is also changing the way we perceive the universe and our place in it. Scientific breakthroughs that challenge core religious beliefs — fossil data adding credence to evolution or new telescopic imagery showing the vast emptiness of space — are broadcast immediately, globally, and with increasing frequency. A cross-continental community is developing around the rejection of traditional religion, as evinced by the growing popularity of prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

The twenty-first century, more than any other, will be governed by science. No wonder the number of Americans who self-identified as not being part of any organized religion roughly doubled from 8% of the population in 1990 to 15% in 2008. The percentage of the U.S. population who self-identified as Christian decreased from 86% of the population to 76% during the same time.

But the Internet is also allowing religious people to connect on an international scale and discuss the intersection of science and spirituality. The relationship need not be a hostile one, as a number of religious leaders are beginning to recognize. In his 2005 book The Universe in a Single Atom, the Dalai Lama remarked, “Today, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, science and spirituality have the potential to be closer than ever, and to embark upon a collaborative endeavor that has far-reaching potential to help humanity meet the challenges before us.”

We asked Roy Speckhardt of the American Humanist Association and Buddhist abbess Ayyā Gotamī (the reverend Prem Suksawat) for their views on how spirituality, science, and the Internet may influence one another in the decades ahead. — Patrick Tucker, senior editor, THE FUTURIST.

Navigating the Multipolar World: The Free Market vs. State Capitalism

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine.

THE FUTURIST: In your new book, The End of the Free Market, you write that human rights and free markets are inextricably linked, yet you perceive a future where many large and profitable state-run corporations exist, advancing neither free-market principles nor human rights. Briefly, was there a particular moment or incident in your travels where you reached this realization?

Ian Bremmer: These tectonic shifts have been under way for a long time. I’ve seen this on the horizon since I started the Eurasia Group. All states are going to become a much bigger driver for global investment. It’s happened more structurally in countries that have state-capitalist systems. Those countries are becoming more important. The eureka moment came several months after the financial crisis first hit. I got a phone call from the protocol office of the Chinese mission in New York. They said the vice minister of foreign affairs, He Yafei, was coming to town. They asked if I would have time to engage in an exchange of views. We got together a small group. I was sitting right across from him, and he said, “Tell me, now that the free market has failed, what do you believe the appropriate role for the state in the global economy should be?” I had to suppress a smile. It was a bold statement.

My response was that, just because the self-regulation of banks proved to be a bad way to run the global economy, does not mean that the absence of the rule of law, or an independent judiciary, or the presence of the state as both principal actor and arbiter of the economy is a better way to run an economy. That was the beginning of a long conversation where we began to engage each other’s worldviews. But the fact of the matter is, on some fundamental philosophical level, these worldviews and systems are incompatible. We in the United States have been able to ignore that, because America has done well in China, and China’s been a very small country (economically speaking). In other words, there’s been a lot of free-riding. It’s now 2010. China is growing at 10% a year and the United States has 10% unemployment. This is going to become a very politicized relationship.

THE FUTURIST: How will people in the United States begin to see that polarization?

Bremmer: Here’s one example: In 2008, as an American voter, you could choose McCain or Obama without any interest or concern as to what their views were in regard to China. That will never happen again.

THE FUTURIST: How does the United States navigate that relationship? What happens to our argument for greater openness in China, greater respect for human rights?

Bremmer: The first thing we have to do is understand that you can’t navigate something without a map. We haven’t had one. There are big problems with the basic narrative that Americans subscribe to about China. Here’s the story we tell ourselves: There’s an authoritarian, communist government on one side and there are people yearning to be free on the other. In that struggle, ultimately, the Chinese people will win; therefore, the United States stands on the side of the Chinese people. We don’t seem to understand that the vast majority of Chinese are exceptionally supportive of their leadership.

Imagine for a moment that there were political reforms put into China right now. They had free and democratic elections. Would the resulting government in China be more beneficial, antithetical, or indifferent to American interests than the government now in place in Beijing? I could make a very strong argument that the resulting Chinese government would be less pro-status quo, more nationalistic, and more problematic to U.S. interests.

THE FUTURIST: You could argue the same thing happened when Hamas won elections in Palestine.

Bremmer: Indeed you could. We tend to fetishize elections in the United States.

THE FUTURIST: What’s the most important thing the U.S. government can do to ensure a better relationship with China, one that’s mutually beneficial?

Bremmer: Be indispensable. We’ve forgotten about this. Many years ago, James Chase wrote about America as the indispensable nation. Today, the United States is in comparative decline vis-à-vis countries like China. I’m not a declinist. But the rise of the rest does mean the comparative decline of the United States. In policy terms, that means we need to focus on the places where we can make them feel that we are indispensable.

1. We have by far the world’s largest military, and it’s essential for humanitarian response after a disaster, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that struck Indonesia. The United States has more capability for large-scale coordinated operations because of the size of our military. Hard power becomes more important over time, especially as parts of American soft power, like financial leverage, deteriorate, comparatively speaking.

2. Reiterate our commitment to regulated free markets; that includes being open to Chinese investment in the United States. In 2005, CNOOC — the state-owned Chinese National Offshore Oil Company — made an offer for Unocal [a U.S.-based oil company]. At the time, U.S. lawmakers expressed concern over the Chinese government acquiring a U.S. energy interest. Ultimately, Unocal was sold to Chevron for millions less than the CNOOC offer. Some of the people who really wanted the sale to CNOOC to happen were Unocal management. Chevron already had good managers, but China wanted Unocal managers at CNOOC. More Western management in Chinese firms is insidious; it shows we do this stuff better than they do. They want access to better accounting and more transparency. We have it. This know-how over time makes us more indispensable to China.

3. Most important, we want to avoid protectionism. We don’t want the Chinese to look toward decoupling. That’s a bad scenario. But the argument for globalization will become harder to make politically in the United States, as laid-off workers complain that globalization favors Beijing more than Detroit.

THE FUTURIST: How do you sell globalization to an electorate that’s feeling increasingly pressured by it?

Bremmer: It will become a less popular sell. That’s why you see people arguing in favor of protecting automotive sector jobs even if they aren’t competitive. It’s why the European Union spends 40% of its budget on the farming sector, just 8% of the population. The Europeans just shouldn’t be farming. They should be spending more where they have an advantage.

THE FUTURIST: The United States, too, should focus on its advantages?

Bremmer: Yes, and the United States has huge competitive advantages. A couple of months ago someone asked me, is America even going to be relevant in 10 or 15 years? I told him to ask that question again, but replace “America” with “world’s largest economy.” So, in 10 to 15 years, is the world’s largest economy going to be relevant? The question is farcical. The United States will still, overwhelmingly, be the world’s largest economy and reserve currency.

Research and development throughout the world is U.S.-driven. The world’s best institutions of higher learning are in the United States. It’s harder to get immigration into this country, but scientists are still seeking training here. Who would I bet on to make the next world-changing patents in 20 years for new energy technologies? I’d bet on the United States, of course. If Iwas betting a pool of money, would I bet as much on the United States after 20 years as I would today? No I would not. Would there be a significant shift? Probably yes. But I would still bet on the United States.

Unfortunately, the trajectory is moving in a way that’s more and more uncomfortable. U.S. institutions, which operate well in a steady state or during times of increasing wealth, are terrible at responding to impending crisis. India has been dealing with this same problem for some time, which is why China continually eats their lunch. The kind of system that we have in the United States is decentralized away from the president on key legislative issues; it’s one where individual constituencies win political battles except in the bleakest crises. Given that, it’s very hard for elected political leaders to make globalist arguments publicly. That’s a weakness in the American political system that is structural and will become increasingly apparent as we muddle through these deficit and spending issues.

As a political scientist, I expect that America won’t address these issues proactively; as a consequence, the war between states and corporations will look increasingly combative.

THE FUTURIST: Do you assume the average American voter is incapable of grasping the inherent logic of a globalist perspective?

Bremmer: I would never say “incapable,” but there is a serious collective-action problem. The average American is capable of understanding why voting is important, but what are our voting numbers? As the economic situation, especially from a comparative perspective, becomes tougher, as deficits grow, you’re also going to see much more populism. Some of that will be driven top-down, and a lot of that will be driven by frightened, upset people. It’s a reality. The United States is not well positioned — given all of our priorities on a daily basis — to actually deal with these globalist perspectives. That’s clearly true.

When I talk about these issues, I’m trying not to be ideological about them. The embrace of globalization is how, I am convinced, we will ultimately have the strongest global growth with the most boats rising. But I also understand why it is relatively unlikely to happen. We have to be honest about that.

THE FUTURIST: The year is 2020. Is the average human being — take the aggregate, Russia, China, Iran, western Europe, the United States — more free or less?

Bremmer: A little less, for two reasons. First, the dynamics playing out between the United States and China and within China itself will not have run their course by then. As a consequence, we will increasingly experience an absence of global cohesion and institution making. There will be no sufficient global response to climate change or to proliferation. That creates more volatility and instability, which tends to empower these entrenched authoritarian systems.

The second reason is the increasing risk of the diffusion of dangerous technologies. Rogue states and individuals are more empowered, irrespective of the amount of money going into counterterrorist efforts. It doesn’t take teams of people to take down planes anymore but one sufficiently motivated individual, and not just planes but other targets with real-time market implications. That’s going to have an impact on individual liberties.

The combination of those two things, the dangerous technology growth and the tectonics of an increasingly non-polar world, will affect the spread of freedom and democracy. The fight between free but regulated markets against state capitalism will result in swings in that direction.

THE FUTURIST: On the most micro-level, what can a reader of THE FUTURIST do to improve that situation?

Bremmer: I focused just now on the massive decentralization of dangerous technologies. The flipside of that coin is the decentralization of empowering technologies. The most significant of those is the Internet, the blogosphere, and communications networks. We’re living in an increasingly content-rich environment. Some of that content is dangerous, but more of it is benign.

We’re also living in a world where really interesting and valid content becomes more important even if it comes from people who have not been anointed by the powers that be. The average insightful reader with something intelligent to say can contribute ideas and criticism in a way that has actual and meaningful potential to affect the way political, civic, and economic leaders think and act, and in a way that 10 or 20 years ago was unimaginable.

About the Interviewee

Ian Bremmer is an American political scientist specializing in U.S. foreign policy, states in transition, and global political risk. He is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, a global political risk research and consulting firm providing financial, corporate, and government clients with insight on how political developments move markets. His latest book, The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? will be released by Portfolio in May 2010.

Nurturing the Spirit in the Age of the Web

A Buddhist teacher brings the dharma, both digitally and in person.
By Ayyā Gotamī, Dr. Rev. Prem Suksawat

What is the future of spirituality? To answer, let’s look at its recent past. Many individuals around the world, especially in the developed West, put less emphasis on spirituality and more faith in science and technology to solve their problems. They sought to break with religious authority. The last century was marked by rapid change, and this century surely will be as well. Change has an enormous effect on the human psyche — the estrangement many of us feel in the twenty-first century is only worsening, at ever-escalating rates. The tsunami of technology has done nothing to assuage the problem; indeed, it is a major force in the surge of feelings of collective alienation.

Computing technology is the most striking example. It has become an indispensable survival tool for most, yet the hardware and software often have short, costly lives in terms of both money and time. Even a nun like me is not immune to this! Especially for young people, technology can be a real addiction. Instead of doing the physical activity the human body was designed to do, many young people spend long hours in front of computers and have electric and electronic devices to replace almost all human duties.

Technology may be at the root of many of the spiritual problems related to modernity; but technology, combined with spirituality, can be part of the solution to feelings of emptiness and despair. Far from becoming obsolete, spirituality can play a larger and more important role in the lives of people around the world if spiritual teachers and leaders adapt to modern life and use technology to reach a wide audience, sustainably and with minimal cost.

However, they must also work with their students and congregations on a very personal level. Even those who do not realize it are in desperate need of compassion and human understanding, and there are times that “virtual spirituality” will not be adequate. Nothing about spirituality, in my opinion, needs to be redefined; however, it is critical that we make the right use of the new methods of communicating to ensure its usefulness to coming generations.

For example, Buddhism in the text-based Theravāda tradition is inherently rational, logical, and often scientific. The mandate to use the texts as they are and not to update them to modern circumstances provides an excellent opportunity to teach the theology while applying its lessons to present-day problems. A learned and most-likely ordained person can find sections of text, such as helpful allegories, that are applicable to almost any modern situation. Religious texts highlight what is universally true about human suffering. This is why they’ve endured and why I believe they will endure into the future. For students and young people, finding that people from thousands of years ago shared their difficulties is a great discovery and source of comfort.

Science and religion will not only coexist in the twenty-first century; they will reinforce one another. I have a mental-health background; I draw upon that knowledge to assist people who come to me for guidance and support. I also have students to whom I lecture regarding their religious studies. I draw parallels between modern mental-health practices and Buddhist teachings. In the future, most ordained individuals should expect to have some counseling function in their roles, focusing on practical, daily living in the twenty-first century (and by this I mean “counseling” strictly in the Western sense of psychological guidance; the same word is used, in some countries, to refer to superstitious and sometimes exploitative rituals).

Religious practitioners will rely on technology to reach out to more people. Many monks, nuns, and other ordained people have spread knowledge via videos, blogs, wikis, etc. Many people have switched from attending sermons at churches or temples to watching them on TV or online due to transportation and time constraints. I teach more than 200 students around the world. We take as much advantage as we can of electronic and online reference materials. I run retreats and Dhamma Talks via online chat. I have frequent phone and chat discussions with individual students.

However, I am continually surprised by the number of students who still put forth the effort and expense to visit me in person to gain real, human support. Recently, I visited the Fo Guang Shan (FGS) monastery where Ven. Hsing Yun leads a practice of Humanistic Buddhism (utilizing Buddhism to fit the needs of the present world). FGS is based in Taiwan and has branches around the world. Apparently, China, one of the greatest examples of a developing country rampantly assuming the problems of the West, has asked them to establish more temples there. This shows that people need spiritual support more and more, and they need it where they live, not just via the Internet.

I predict that more and more people will begin to visit their priests, rabbis, and pastors again because the technology will not be able to replace warm gestures from real, live human beings. While we need not update our scriptures, we must certainly update our practices to suit the real needs of people as they evolve; this means both the high-tech and the high-touch aspects. By doing this, many of them will gain a feeling of security that will allow them to make positive life changes.

About the Author

Ayyā Gotamī (Dr. Rev. Prem Suksawat) is the abbess of the Dhamma Cetiya Buddhist Vihāra, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. She founded the temple in 1997, converting her former lay residence to propagate Buddhism in the United States. Prior to her ordination, she spent 14 years as an anāgārika (“homeless monk”). Her lay career included experience in the mental-health field in public and private agencies, where she specialized in the impact of cultural differences on individuals. She uses this background to integrate Western psychology and psychiatric treatment with Buddhist teachings to help and educate her students.

Reinventing the Luddite: An Interview with Andrew Keen

An Internet entrepreneur and Web critic is trying to remake the Internet from within.

The following interview was conducted by FUTURIST senior editor Patrick Tucker.

THE FUTURIST: You’re perhaps the most outspoken critic of Web 2.0 and Internet culture to participate in Internet culture. You’ve railed against Twitter and Facebook even though you subscribe to both. What do you see as your mission?

Andrew Keen: I’m ambivalent about Facebook and Twitter and almost all of these things. But as a speaker and a social critic, I have an economic incentive in finding an audience. As mainstream media cracks up, the only way to build a brand successfully is to use a service like Twitter. That’s not to say that tweets in themselves have intrinsic value or will ever have intrinsic value. You’ll never be able to sell a tweet, no matter how beautifully crafted. I don’t have to admire or improve what’s happening, but I can’t be a Luddite, either. The people in the nineteenth century who refused to acknowledge the significance of the Industrial Revolution were swept away.

THE FUTURIST:You’ve been very vocal about how today’s Internet culture erodes privacy. Do you envision a future in which privacy neither exists nor is particularly missed? If so, what does someone with no conception of privacy behave like? What is the culture like?

Keen:I do envision such a possibility. In a culture with no concept of privacy, there wouldn’t be an inner life. Nothing would be kept to ourselves. We would lifestream 24 hours a day. The John Stuart Mill idea of the good life, with a clear delineation between inner and outer life, is turned on its head. I hope we never see it.

But you can already sense the way the Internet and artificial intelligence are tearing down the notion that we should have a distinction between public and private. I’m terribly hesitant about terminology like “transparency,” which suggests that businesses, institutions, even professionals, should try to put as much of themselves online as they can to reassure the public about their activities. This portrays that shift as something good, as more evolved. What does this lead to? Perhaps a culture of constant self-arrest, where we’re afraid to do anything because of how it may appear to others. Perhaps we’ll live vicariously through our AI entities.

THE FUTURIST: You’ve compared the Internet revolution to rock ’n’ roll, but it seems that the Internet revolution has the potential to be more hopeful. After all, rock ’n’ roll coincided with the rise of Jacques Derida and the deconstructionist philosophical movement. Many argue that the appeal of rock ‘n’ roll was the way it presented a violent teardown of prior musical forms. The Internet, by definition, is about construction, building the future. How exactly is the Internet like rock ‘n’ roll?

Keen:The Internet is more closely related to the rock ’n’ roll culture of the Sixties rather than of the Fifties. Richard Florida, who wrote Rise of the Creative Class, has talked about this. He makes a good point that the Internet, technologically, rose from the military-industrial complex of the Fifties, but the culture of it is better represented by the counterculture of the Sixties. It’s not that the Internet is like the Sixties; it is the Sixties.

The primary difference is that rock ’n’ roll generated a lot of money for certain types of people — namely, record companies and artists. The heroes of the Sixties were the rock stars and the counterculturalists. Many of them were obsessed with a childish revolt against authority, but some of them were remarkable. The wealth that’s been created out of the Internet revolution has been monopolized by technologists. The heroes of this age are entrepreneurs like the Google boys rather than the creative artists who have been relatively ignored for the most part.

The ultimate irony is that the artists were the radicals in the Sixties. In the Internet age, they’ve been rendered conservatives. Look at what happens to singers who try to defend intellectual property rights and the vitriol of the attacks to which they’re subjected?

Similarly, nothing of much intellectual or cultural value has come out of the Internet as an artistic medium. Intellectuals are able to use it peddle their own brands and ideas, but I’ve seen little Internet-based art with any lasting value. There haven’t been any real Internet movies; there hasn’t been a truly affecting Internet novel, though many have tried; Internet music has been basically a failure. Even when it’s successful, it isn’t created on the Internet, it’s just distributed on the Internet. Google, for example, is a remarkable company built by two computer scientists. Has it contributed to culture? At best, Google has undermined traditional media and destroyed it, and in so doing, it’s destroyed the way artists make money and the way experts make their livelihoods.

What does this mean for us now? The crusty old academic in a chair with a pipe reading books and giving lectures won’t work in the twenty-first century, but I don’t believe expertise will be swept away. I hope it will be modernized. Today’s expert needs to learn how to ride the wave, which requires not only wisdom, but speed.

THE FUTURIST:Watching these trends over the last few years, have you grown more optimistic or more pessimistic?

Keen:I’m more optimistic than I was when I wrote Cult of the Amateur, which was published in 2007 (St. Martin’s). People have begun to realize that Wikipedia isn’t reliable, that most of the stuff on YouTube has no value, that a tweet, by definition, cannot be wise. My hope is that by 2020 experts will be able to flood back into the production of culture. A legal scholar can tweet as well as a 12-year-old. It’s not the technology that undermines the expertise; it’s a cultural disrespect for authority and even for learning.

But culture is changing. We’ll require new experts to help us understand how that’s happened and what it means, particularly for education. Hopefully, people who are smart and well educated, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences, will seize back the tools of production and realize that they can have quite an impact by distributing their wisdom.

About the interviewee

Andrew Keen is an author and Internet critic and the author of Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing Our Culture (St. Martin’s, 2007). As an Internet entrepreneur, he founded the music site Audiocafe.com in 1995. His second book, Digital Vertigo: Anxiety, Loneliness and Inequality in the Social Media Age, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2010.

Reinventing the Pharmaceutical Industry, without the Industry

The founder of the Pink Army Cooperative is bringing the open-source development model to breast cancer therapies.
By Andrew Hessel

If I were to tell you that volunteers working out of garages and bedrooms could play as big a role in the elimination of breast cancer by 2020 as a multibillion-dollar big pharmaceutical company, would you believe me?

I’m convinced it’s possible. That’s why I founded the Pink Army Cooperative. The Cooperative is not your average biotechnology startup. It’s an open source biotechnology venture that is member-owned and operated and not-for-profit. It’s working to create individualized therapies for breast cancer. The mission is to build a new drug development pipeline able to produce effective therapies faster for less money, without compromising safety.
Big Drug Makers versus Co-Op: Why Small Is Better

About six years ago, I realized that the cooperative model could change the future of medicine. I’d just spent years working inside a well-funded scientific playhouse where R&D should have moved forward at breakneck speed, but somehow it hadn’t. Technologies are changing fast, and drugs frequently fail in development.

It costs hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars to bring a drug to market, and the costs are still growing faster than inflation. Even the largest pharmaceutical companies are struggling. The bottom line? Making a new drug is an adventure with no guarantee of success at any cost. The question I asked myself was, why hasn’t the pipeline been scrapped and replaced with something that can accommodate development done faster, better, and cheaper?

There is no public route for drug development; virtually all development is industry-backed. I wondered, if open-source software could effectively challenge multibillion-dollar software franchises, could scientists and drug developers work cooperatively to compete with a product from a big pharmaceutical company? To my mind, breast cancer therapies were the obvious choice, since many people already give time and money toward finding a cure.

Perhaps the single most powerful tool for accomplishing this goal is openness, which allows everyone, amateur or professional, anywhere, to peek under the hood of the company, understand what is being done, and add his or her ideas or comments. I personally believe it’s lack of transparency and inability to share information easily that has held back the biopharma industry compared to the IT industry.

Overall, as biology becomes more digital, there is potential for massive change. Open access will make it easier to share ideas, publish protocols and tools, verify results, firewall bad designs, communicate best practices, and more. Individualized medicine development will be built on this open foundation, which will only help developers be more successful and lower risk.

It also permits a novel funding model — i.e., directly approaching those who would benefit from any breakthrough. Whereas traditional funding models require attracting a few individuals or groups able to make large investments, for which they expect a financial return, we can deliver our message widely, asking people to invest $20 in a membership, in exchange for sharing our data with the community. Finding people to support us and running the cooperative itself is made easier because of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

In the short term, I don’t see open-source drug development having a large effect on the U.S. health economy. The $2 trillion–plus system includes many products and services beyond just drugs. But there is room for a few examples to exist, make a real and measurable difference, and inspire others to experiment with nonprofit development. If Pink Army can treat even a single individual, I will consider the project a tremendous success, although I hope it will grow to treat millions of people with medicines that only get better and cheaper over time.
Personal Cures: From Individuals, For Individuals

The idea of cures or therapies that are unique to the individual is a critical component of the Pink Army Cooperative vision. A few years ago, the notion of cancer treatment that was specific to a person’s genome was seen as a fantasy. But thanks to rapidly moving technologies like synthetic biology, the prospects are very different today. This is a powerful new genetic engineering technology founded on DNA synthesis that amounts to writing software for cells. It’s the ideal technical foundation for open-source biotechnology. Moreover, synthetic biology drops the cost of doing bioengineering by several orders of magnitude. Small proteins, antibodies, and viruses were amenable to the technology and within reach of a startup.

Readers familiar with Wired editor Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail will recognize individualized medicine as the very end of the tail — a future of one product sold only to one person. I don’t think any company had seriously considered making these types of drugs before Pink Army. Most people accept that drugs cost hundreds of millions to make. Who could pay that much for a custom medicine, other than a few billionaires?

But individualized drugs could lower the cost of drug development across the entire spectrum of the development chain. Only very small-scale manufacturing capability is necessary. Lab testing is simplified. And clinical trials are reduced to a single person: No large phased trials are necessary, so there’s no ambiguity about who will be treated, and every patient can be rigorously profiled. This shaves money and years off development. Moreover, with the client fully informed and integral to all aspects of development and testing, the developer’s liability approaches the theoretical minimum.

My interest in breast cancer is personal and professional. Because it affects so many women — roughly 12% — almost everyone has been touched by breast cancer either personally or through someone they know. But cancer has always been central to my work as a genetic scientist, and I’m lucky to have been involved with several breast cancer–related projects during my time in biopharma. Curing cancer should be straightforward: It’s about making a better antibiotic, but the search for a cure seems to have stalled. It’s time to see if open-source drug development can reboot the process. That’s why Pink Army is important.

About the Author

Andrew Hessel is a geneticist and founder of the Pink Army Cooperative in Alberta, Canada. Web site www.pinkarmy.org.

Remaking Education for a New Century

Communications scholar Janna Anderson is charting a new path for education outside of the classroom.
The following interview was conducted by FUTURIST senior editor Patrick Tucker.

THE FUTURIST: You’ve talked about entrenched educational institutions of the industrial age, and how those will be replaced as computer interfaces will be improved. You’ve said that developments in materials science will make learning into a process that happens via computer and video game, and that may even be a precursor to learning by computer implant by 2030 or 2040. My first question is: What role does the classroom have in the classroom of the future?

Janna Anderson: I do believe that a face-to-face setting is an important element of learning. The era of hyperconnectivity will require that most professionals weave their careers and personal lives into a blended mosaic of activity. Work and leisure will be interlaced throughout waking hours, every day of the week. We need to move away from the format of school time and non-school time, which is no longer necessary. It was invented to facilitate the agrarian and industrial economies.

Faculty, teachers, and principals could inform students that they expect them to learn outside of the classroom and beyond homework assignments. The Internet plays a key role in that. Rather than classrooms, one can see the possible emergence of learning centers where students with no Internet access at home can go online, but everyone will be working on a different project, not on the same lesson. You can also imagine students making use of mobile and wireless technology for purposes of learning.

More importantly, we need to teach kids to value self-directed learning, teach them how to learn on their own terms, and how to create an individual time schedule. We need to combine face time with learning online. And we can’t be afraid to use the popular platforms like text-messaging and social networks. As those tools become more immersive, students will feel empowered and motivated to learn on their own — more so than when they were stuck behind a desk.

THE FUTURIST: One thing you and many others have said is that neuroscience has the potential to radically change the way we teach. As we develop a more real and full understanding of the way the brain accumulates knowledge, what technology, aside from IT, could change education?

Anderson: It’s hard to predict which new technology could capture people’s imaginations. I think the combination of bioinformatics — biology and information technology — could have the biggest impact in the next couple of decades. If we continue to see the digitization of all information, which renders even our chemistry knowable, the ramifications for education could be immense and unfathomable. But the far future is the confluence of too many different factors to see.

THE FUTURIST: Right now, many educators perceive a digital divide between the members of different socioeconomic classes. You’ve talked about how scalability — technology becoming cheaper and more available in the future — could help solve that. But what if some people adopt the new technology faster than others? There are early adopters and late adopters. Being a late adopter is a small matter when you’re talking about the new iPhone, but as education becomes increasingly digitized, late adoption could have significant consequences in terms of the educational quality. Do you see any threat of an adopter divide?

Anderson: There’s no doubt that there are capacity differences. When we’re talking about the digital divide, we’re not talking just about access to equipment, but also the intellectual capacity, the training to use it, and the ability to understand the need for it, as well as its importance. There’s no doubt that cultural differences are also a huge factor. In areas that have been less developed, especially in the global south, a capacity gap in terms of adoption of a new technology may emerge because some societies are less able to adopt something new at this point in time.

THE FUTURIST: How can this cultural divide be overcome?

Anderson: This is why the effort to educate women is so important. In cultures where women are highly educated and tend to be heads of the family in terms of the upbringing of their children, there’s a higher likelihood that those children are going to show a more open cultural perspective and be more willing to take up new technologies.

THE FUTURIST: So, you still see an active role for actual physical teachers. In many ways, teachers will be more necessary than ever if they’re going to help people, especially in less-developed nations, to pick up these technologies to improve their own lives?

Anderson: There’s definitely a role for technology evangelists who can help people to understand how to use information technology no matter what level they happen to be at. But the traditional idea of the teacher may be much less valuable to the future, just like the traditional library will have much less value. We need to remove the old books that no one has opened in twenty years and put them in nearby storage. What we do need are places were people can gather — places that foster an atmosphere of intellectual expansion, where learners can pursue deeper meaning or consult specialists with access to deep knowledge resources. It’s all about people accessing networked knowledge, online, in person, and in databases. We need collective intelligence centers, and schools could be that way, too.

THE FUTURIST: The Internet is inherently disruptive to business models; the decimation of the newspaper industry is a case in point. One of the aspects of digital education that people don’t talk about much is how disruptive it could be to the career of teaching. On the one hand, really great teachers will be able to reach a broader audience than ever before, but younger educators — teachers who have not yet hit their stride — could be left out. What happens when the educational community one day realizes that they’re facing the same forces of creative destruction that newspapers are facing today?

Anderson: Today there’s actually an advantage for young teachers because they generally understand better than the oldest generation how to implement new digital tools. If we eventually are able to “patch in” to all of the knowledge ever generated with a cybernetic implant, or if we are able to program advanced human-like robots or 3-D holograms to deliver knowledge resources, “elders” will have more influence over the content delivered. Regarding forces of advancing technology and their influence on things such as the news industry, the story of the entrenched institutions fighting change is an old one. We have to overcome the tyranny of the status quo. Many media leaders understood in the 1990s that they had to prepare for a new day, but they had this great profit machine. They wouldn’t let go of it until the economics of the situation forced them to change. Economics is generally the force that pushes leaders of stagnating institutions to adopt new paradigms. It will be interesting to see how all of this develops over the next few years.

Maybe what we need is a new employment category, like future-guide, to help people prepare for the effects of disruptive technology in their chosen professions so they don’t find themselves, frankly, out of a job.

About the Interviewee

Janna Anderson is an associate professor in Elon University’s School of Communications and the lead author of the Future of the Internet book series published by Cambria Press. She is also the author of Imagining the Internet: Personalities, Predictions, Perspectives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). She will be speaking at the World Future Society’s 2010 conference in Boston.

Supporting Democracy By Standing Firm

The Futurist Interviews American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin

THE FUTURIST: What do you see as the best strategy the U.S. might employ to further the cause of human rights in Iran?

Rubin: First and foremost, the White House should use its bully pulpit. After this past summer’s election protests erupted, the Obama administration muted its response, fearing that to throw support to the protestors might taint them. This is a valid concern, but there is no reason why the White House and the State Department can’t speak up for broad principles, such as democracy, justice, free speech, and free association.

After the Berlin Wall fell, we discovered that Presidential rhetoric meant more to dissidents than we ever imagined. There’s a tendency today to want to address human rights issues silently, but discreet diplomatic inquiries are rarely as effective as public support. Regimes prefer to murder in silence; when a dissident becomes a public symbol, not only does the cost associated with a dissident’s imprisonment or murder increase, but the dissident’s story can be a driving force in mobilizing public pressure, as it humanizes the abstract. We saw this in 1999, when Ahmad Batebi became a symbol of the student uprising when he appeared on the cover of the Economist holding a bloody shirt, and 16-year-old Neda, shot in the street by the paramilitary Basij, became a symbol of the situation in Iran in 2009.

The U.S. government should take care against bestowing undue legitimacy upon the regime. When Iranians are taking to the streets in protest against not only the legitimacy of their post-election government, but also their system of government, the White House’s reference to the Islamic Republic of Iran implies endorsement of the theocracy, and their efforts to engage a government which the Iranian electorate does not support also implies recognition. Instead, the White House and State Department might direct their comments to the Iranian public in general and, if necessary, simply refer to the ‘Iranian government’ or the ‘regime,’ as every president—whether Democrat or Republican—did until President Obama changed the formula.

Most controversially, it is important for the U.S. government to consider aid and assistance to Iranian civil society and independent media. For example, the State Department working through non-governmental intermediaries might assist programs which seek to document Iranian human rights abuses or help independent trade unions organize. Fears that U.S. funding might undercut the opposition and strengthen the regime are real, but misplaced. Opponents of civil society support argue that the presence of funding enables the Iranian government to taint all civil society work. The problem with this perspective, however, is that the Iranian regime always accuses its opponents of foreign connections regardless of U.S. action, so supporting civil society would not appreciably alter Iranian behavior. If fear of Iranian rhetoric toward its own internal opposition were to shape U.S. policy, then we’d also have to rule out dialogue, since Iranian security forces have taken to toward accusing any Iranian who engages with American institutions—Yale University and the Carnegie Endowment, for example—of treason.

THE FUTURIST: What about in China, where the attendant economic risks from the Chinese sale of U.S. Treasuries are much greater?

Michael Rubin: U.S. support for human rights and free speech might antagonize the Chinese government a bit, but the chance that Beijing would respond in this fashion is slight to none. It’s simply not in the interest of the Chinese government to sabotage the United States economy to that extent given the level of U.S.-Chinese trade. At the same time, turning a blind eye toward abuses in China also has some inherent, even if indirect, risk. The Chinese government has no incentive to reform and to correct government abuses against its citizenry. Economic disparities run deep from coast into heartland. Absent an outlet for dissent and a system which forces the government to be accountable to the people, there is an inherent risk of wildfire outbreaks of instability in China. Certainly, gentle U.S. prodding for democratization in China is in both our countries long-term interests.

THE FUTURIST: Do you see the Iranian regime persisting in its present state until the year 2020? What might happen when it fades from existence?

Michael Rubin: If we take a snapshot of Iranian demography, it might look like the Islamic Republic is in trouble. The Iranian economy is stagnant, living standards are declining, and the regime can’t provide enough work for young people finishing the university. Time is, unfortunately, working in the regime’s favor. In the years immediately after the Islamic Revolution and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini encouraged large families. The regime put up posters showing ‘a good Islamic family’ with a mother, a father, and six children. After the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, the Iranian government realized that it could not handle such a large population. Suddenly posters appeared depicting ‘a good Islamic family’ as having a mother, a father, and just two children. As Patrick Clawson, an economist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy points out, the Iran-Iraq war years’ baby boomers are in their 20s, precisely the age of the protestors. In five years, however, the number of 20-somthings is going to decline while the current protestors are going to be in their 30s, and beginning to settle down with young families, their personal priorities elsewhere.

The regime is nervous, though. There is no question that the regime is unpopular across a broad cross-section of society. The evidence for this is not only anecdotal, but also quantitative. Using Persian speakers in Los Angeles, polling companies have surveyed Iranians by taking every telephone exchange in Tehran, and randomizing the last four numbers and conducting what, on the surface is an economic survey but which also provides insight into political altitudes. In September 2007, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reorganized and implemented what its new commander, Mohammad Ali Jafari, called the mosaic doctrine. Rather than orient the IRGC to defend against foreign armies—as it had been from the days of the Iran-Iraq War—Jafari divided the IRGC into inwardly-oriented units, one for each province and two for Tehran. Jafari argued that internal unrest and the possibility of a velvet revolution posed more of a threat to the regime than foreign armies, a judgment validated by the June 2009 unrest.

The key issue in regime survival therefore lies with the loyalty of the Revolutionary Guards. It matters not if 90% of the Iranian people turn against the regime so long as the IRGC remains loyal to the Supreme Leader. Western politicians can hope for muddle-through reform, but ultimately change will come when the IRGC defects, much like regime change came to Romania after Nikolai Ceausescu’s security forces switched sides. The Iranian regime is aware of this, and so IRGC members are seldom stationed in their home provinces minimizing the risk that units will refuse to fire on crowds which might contain family members, friends, or neighbors.

If the Islamic Republic does not fall, then the regime will have made a Faustian bargain. The IRGC will become a predominant force, dominating not only political life, but also economic and religious life. What we are now seeing is a slow, creeping coup d’état. The Islamic Republic is becoming a military dictatorship, albeit one with a religious patina.

THE FUTURIST: Of all the trends playing in terms of human rights at this moment, from China to Iran to the United States, which ones concern you the most? Which make you the most hopeful?

Michael Rubin: What concerns me most is cultural relativism—the willingness of Western states to accept the arguments of oppressive regimes that Eastern cultures simply do not uphold the same values of individual rights and Western demands that they should is simply new age imperialism. We see this primarily with regard to women and women’s rights.

Communication offers the most hope. From telegram to radio to television to fax to IM and mobile camera and twitter, technology is empowering citizens and preventing human rights abusers from acting with impunity.

THE FUTURIST: Paint us a picture of democracy in the year 2020? What does the word mean? Has the world come to some agreement on it? Is there, on a whole, more of it than existed 10 years ago or less?

Michael Rubin: I’d define democracy not only as representative government accountable to the people, elections contested by political parties who have abandoned militias, and but also a proven record of peaceful transfers of power between government and opposition. I am an optimist and see the spread of democracy is inevitable. I also believe those who argue that certain cultures—Chinese or Arab, for example—are impervious to democracy are wrong. Here, Korea is instructive. Harry S Truman was lambasted for the Korean War and for attempts to bring democracy to South Korea. Critics said that democracy was alien to Korean culture, and it certainly was a process. But today, when we juxtapose North and South Korea, I doubt there are many people who do not believe the price was worth it. Taiwan, too, showed that democracy can thrive in Chinese culture and, while the Iraq war remains a polarizing debate, it is telling that ahead of the March 7 elections, no Iraqi knows who will lead their new government.

About the Interviewee: Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School, and lecturer at Johns Hopkins University.

The Future of Nanomedicine

The founder of the Nanofactory Collaboration is innovating medicine molecule by molecule.
By Robert A. Freitas Jr.

© 2009 Robert A. Freitas Jr. All Rights Reserved.

For countless centuries, physicians and their antecedents have sought to aid the human body in its efforts to heal and repair itself. Slowly at first, and later with gathering speed, new methods and instruments have been added to the physician’s toolkit – anesthesia and x-ray imaging, antibiotics for jamming the molecular machinery of unwanted bacteria, microsurgical techniques for physically removing pathological tissue and reconfiguring healthy tissue, and most recently biotechnology, molecular medicine, pharmacogenetics and whole-genome sequencing, and early efforts at gene therapies.

In most cases, however, physicians must chiefly rely on the body’s ability to repair itself. If this fails, external efforts may be useless. We cannot today place the component parts of human cells exactly where they should be, and restructure them as they should be, to ensure a healthy physiological state. There are no tools for working, precisely and with three-dimensional control, at the molecular level.

To obtain such tools, we need nanotechnology (nanomedicine.com/NMI/1.1.htm ). Nanotechnology is the engineering of atomically precise structures and, ultimately, molecular machines. The prefix “nano-” refers to the scale of these constructions. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, the width of about five carbon atoms nestled side by side. Nanomedicine is the application of nanotechnology to medicine.

The ultimate tool of nanomedicine is the medical nanorobot (http://www.nanomedicine.com/index.htm#NanorobotAnalyses ) – a robot the size of a bacterium, composed of many thousands of molecule-size mechanical parts perhaps resembling macroscale gears, bearings, and ratchets, possibly composed of a strong diamond-like material. A nanorobot will need motors to make things move, and manipulator arms or mechanical legs for dexterity and mobility. It will have a power supply for energy, sensors to guide its actions, and an onboard computer to control its behavior. But unlike a regular robot, a nanorobot will be very small. A nanorobot that would travel through the bloodstream must be smaller than the red cells in our blood – tiny enough to squeeze through even the narrowest capillaries in the human body. Medical nanorobotics holds the greatest promise for curing disease and extending the human health span. With diligent effort, the first fruits of this advanced nanomedicine could begin to appear in clinical treatment sometime during the 2020s.

For example, one medical nanorobot called a “microbivore” ( http://www.jetpress.org/volume14/freitas.pdf ) could act as an artificial mechanical white cell, seeking out and digesting unwanted pathogens including bacteria, viruses, or fungi in the bloodstream. A patient with a bloodborne infection might be injected with a dose of about 100 billion microbivores (about 1 cc). When a targeted bacterium bumps into a microbivore, the microbe sticks to the nanorobot’s surface like a fly caught on flypaper. Telescoping grapples emerge from the microbivore’s hull and transport the pathogen toward the front of the device, bucket-brigade style, and into the microbivore’s “mouth.” Once inside, the microbe is minced and digested into amino acids, mononucleotides, simple fatty acids and sugars in just minutes. These basic molecules are then harmlessly discharged back into the bloodstream through an exhaust port at the rear of the device. A complete treatment might take a few hours, far faster than the days or weeks often needed for antibiotics to work, and no microbe can evolve multidrug resistance to these machines as they can to antibiotics. When the nanorobotic treatment is finished, the doctor broadcasts an ultrasound signal and the nanorobots exit the body through the kidneys, to be excreted with the urine in due course. Related nanorobots could be programmed to quickly recognize and digest even the tiniest aggregates of early cancer cells.

Medical nanorobots could also be used to perform surgery on individual cells. In one proposed procedure, a cell repair nanorobot called a “chromallocyte” ( http://www.jetpress.org/v16/freitas.pdf ), controlled by a physician, would extract all existing chromosomes from a diseased cell and insert fresh new ones in their place. This process is called chromosome replacement therapy. The replacement chromosomes are manufactured outside of the patient’s body using a desktop nanofactory optimized for organic molecules. The patient’s own individual genome serves as the blueprint to fabricate the new genetic material. Each chromallocyte is loaded with a single copy of a digitally corrected chromosome set. After injection, each device travels to its target tissue cell, enters the nucleus, replaces old worn-out genes with new chromosome copies, then exits the cell and is removed from the body. If the patient chooses, inherited defective genes could be replaced with non-defective base-pair sequences, permanently curing any genetic disease and even permitting cancerous cells to be reprogrammed to a healthy state. Perhaps most importantly, chromosome replacement therapy could correct the accumulating genetic damage and mutations that lead to aging in every one of our cells.

Right now, medical nanorobots are just theory. To actually build them, we need to create a new technology called molecular manufacturing. Molecular manufacturing is the production of complex atomically precise structures using positionally controlled fabrication and assembly of nanoparts inside a nanofactory, much like cars are manufactured on an assembly line. The first experimental proof that individual atoms could be manipulated was obtained by IBM scientists back in 1989 when they used a scanning tunneling microscope to precisely position 35 xenon atoms on a nickel surface to spell out the corporate logo “IBM”. Similarly, inside the nanofactory simple feedstock molecules such as methane (natural gas), propane, or acetylene will be manipulated by massively parallel arrays of tiny probe tips to build atomically precise structures needed for medical nanorobots. In 2006, Ralph Merkle and I founded the Nanofactory Collaboration ( MolecularAssembler.com/Nanofactory ) to coordinate a combined experimental and theoretical R&D program to design and build the first working diamondoid nanofactory that could build medical nanorobots.

How are these ideas being received in the medical community? Initial skepticism was anticipated, but over time people have begun taking the concept more seriously. (In late 1999 when my first book on “nanomedicine” came out, googling the word returned only 420 hits but this number rose fourfold in 2000 and fourfold again in 2001, finally exceeding 1 million hits by 2008.) Of course, most physicians cannot indulge themselves in exploring the future of medicine. This is not only understandable but quite reasonable for those who must treat patients today with the methods available today. The same is true of the medical researcher, diligently working to improve current pharmaceuticals, whose natural curiosity may be restrained by the knowledge that his or her success – no matter how dramatic – will eventually be superseded. In both cases, what can be done today, or next year, is the most appropriate professional focus.

But only a fraction of today’s physicians and researchers need look ahead for the entire field of medicine to benefit. Those practitioners who plan to continue their careers into the timeframe when nanomedical developments are expected to arrive – e.g., younger physicians and researchers, certainly those now in medical and graduate programs – can incrementally speed the development process, while simultaneously positioning their own work for best effect, if they have a solid idea of where the field of medicine is heading. Those farther along in their careers will be better able to direct research resources today if the goals of nanomedicine are better understood.

The potential impact of medical nanorobotics is enormous. Rather than using drugs that act statistically and have unwanted side effects, we can deploy therapeutic nanomachines that act with digital precision, have no side effects, and can report exactly what they did back to the physician. Test results, ranging from simple blood panels to full genomic sequencing, should be available to the doctor within minutes of sample collection from the patient. Continuous medical monitoring by embedded nanorobotic systems, as exemplified by the programmable dermal display ( http://www.nanogirl.com/museumfuture/freitastalk.htm ), can permit very early disease detection by patients or their physicians. Such monitoring will also provide automatic collection of long-baseline physiologic data permitting detection of slowly developing chronic conditions that may take years or decades to develop, such as obesity, diabetes, calcium loss, or Alzheimer’s.

Drug companies? Rather than brewing giant batches of single-action drug molecules, Big Pharma can shift to manufacturing large quantities of generic nanorobots of several basic types. These devices could later be customized to each patient’s unique genome and physiology, then programmed to address specific disease conditions, on site in the doctor’s office at the time of need. Could personal nanofactories ( http://www.rfreitas.com/Nano/NoninflationaryPN.pdf ) in patients’ homes eventually do some of this manufacturing? Yes, especially if creative designs for new devices or procedures are placed online as open-source information. But basic issues such as IP rights, quality control, legal liability, trustworthiness of design improvements and software upgrades, product branding, government regulation and the like should allow Big Pharma to retain a significant role in medical nanomachine manufacture even in an era of widespread at-home personal manufacturing.

Doctors and hospitals? For commonplace pathologies such as cuts or bruises, colds or flu, bacterial infections or cancers of many kinds, individuals might keep a batch of generic nanorobots at the ready in their home medical appliance, ready to be reprogrammed at need either remotely by their doctor or by some generically-available procedure, allowing patients to self-treat in the simplest of cases. Doctors in this situation will act in the role of consultants, advisors, or in some cases gatekeepers regarding a particular subset of regulated conventional treatments. This will free up physicians and hospitals to deal with the most difficult or complex cases, including acute physical trauma and emergency care. These practitioners can also concentrate on rare disease conditions; many diseases also have few symptoms and thus go unrecognized for a long time. Medical specialists will also be needed to plan and coordinate major body modifications such as cosmetic surgeries and genetic upgrades, as well as more comprehensive procedures such as whole-body rejuvenations that may involve cell repair of most of the tissue cells in the body and might require several days of continuous treatment in a specialized facility.

Cost containment? Costs can be held down because molecular manufacturing can have intrinsically cheap production costs (probably on the order of $1/kg for a mature molecular manufacturing system) and can be a “green” technology generating essentially zero waste products or pollution during the manufacturing process. Nanorobot life cycle costs can be very low because nanorobots, unlike drugs and other consumable pharmaceutical agents, are intended to be removed intact from the body after every use, then refurbished and recycled many times, possibly indefinitely. Even if the delivery of nanomedicine doesn’t reduce total health-care expenditures – which it should – it will likely free up billions of dollars that are now spent on premiums for private and public health-insurance programs.

Many are working to extend the bounds of conventional medicine, so here it is relatively difficult for one person to make a big difference. Few are given the opportunity (the perspective, the resources, and the willingness) to look a bit farther down the road, identifying an exciting long-term vision for medical technology and then planning the detailed steps necessary to achieve it. Planning and executing these steps toward the long-term vision has been my career and my passion for the last two decades. As the technologies I’m working on come more clearly into focus, more people will acknowledge them as realistic and their enhanced trust in the longer-term vision will help speed the development of medical nanorobotics.

About the Author

Robert A. Freitas Jr. is senior research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing (IMM) in California, after serving as a research scientist at Zyvex Corp. in Texas during 2000-2004. He is the author of Nanomedicine (Landes Bioscience, 1999, 2003), the first technical book series on medical nanorobotics. Web site www.rfreitas.com. Freitas is the 2009 winner of the Feynman Prize in nanotechnology for theory.

The Potential and Risks of Geoengineering

By Jamais Cascio

When it comes to our planet’s environment, “isolationism” is impossible. By the year 2030, environmental policy and political policy will be completely inseparable at the global level. Arguably, that should be the case today. As we gain a deeper understanding of ecosystem processes, we’re seeing how actions on one side of the world can dramatically change the lives of people on the other. Interconnectedness is a challenge we can’t run away from.

By 2030, though, the connection between politics and the environment could show up in two very different ways: as a catalyst for war, or as a new model for handling complexity.

The Complexity of Environmental Challenges,
The Challenge of Complexity

Global delays in reducing carbon emissions will likely force the human race to embark upon a set of geoengineering-based responses, not as the complete solution, but simply as a disaster-avoidance measure.

Geoengineering, the deliberate manipulation of the earth’s natural systems, may include various forms of thermal management, such as stratospheric sulfate injections or high-altitude seawater sprays, and might also embrace some form of carbon capture via ocean fertilization, or even something not yet fully described. The mid-2010s is the probable starting period for these strategies, in my view. Geoengineering advocates may see the mid-2010s as already too late, while opponents would likely want more time to study their models.

Once we start down the geoengineering path, we’ll see that talking about it is much simpler than doing it. The unexpected feedbacks and unintended consequences would quickly become manifest, and the reactions could be volatile. Planetary management could become a political flashpoint, leading to outbreaks of violence, especially if different regions have divergent results or demand incompatible outcomes. A good portion of international diplomacy would focus on just how to control climate engineering technologies and deal with their consequences.

Ours will be a challenging world to navigate in the next couple of decades, and not just because of conflicts over who’s in charge or who’s to blame for which problems. We’ll be dealing with multiple complex global system breakdowns — from the ongoing financial system crisis, peak oil production, climate disruption, and the very real possibility of food system collapse. These crises demand greater information analysis, longer-term thinking, and more accountability than traditional forms of global politics have tended to offer. For centuries, nations have been ready to commit “hard power,” military force, when necessary to push their interests. In the twentieth century, nations recognized the value of “soft power,” cultural influence, as a way of gaining allies. But these multifaceted system problems don’t lend themselves to either the hard or soft power approach. They call out a need for a new model to meet the needs of the new century.

It’s hard to exaggerate the sheer complexity of the situation. If the great obstacle to our continued survival and prosperity as a species were “just” global warming, achieving success would be tricky but doable. The challenge we face is global warming plus resource collapse plus pandemic disease plus post-hegemonic disorder plus the myriad other issues.

Nonetheless, there are reasons for optimism.

Solutions to Complex Challenges

We know what we need to do to mitigate climate change, and we have the necessary technology. What we’re missing, more than anything else, is the political will. But politics and society can change — we’ve seen it happen before. It might take a generational shift, it might take a disaster (or three), or it might just come from an expanding understanding of what we’re doing to the planet. It will take a lot of people working on fixes and solutions and ideas — not simply top-down mandates, but massively multi-participant quests, across thousands of communities and hundreds of countries, bringing in literally millions of minds. The very description reeks of innovation potential.

• Innovation in energy. A mix of nuclear, wind, solar, and a few others, such as ocean thermal energy conversion and hydrokinetic power, will overtake fossil fuels by the 2020s, even if China and India retain coal-fired power plants. If handled poorly, such recalcitrance may end up being a driver for significant global tension. If handled well, it could be an engine for new markets and development.

• Innovation in urbanization. More than half the planet lives in cities today, and that proportion is increasing quickly. Sensor dust, embedded computing, augmented reality, and a host of other emerging technologies hold the potential to “awaken” cities as smart environments. But “smart city” has to mean more than just lots of urbanites knowing their own carbon footprint; it must come to refer to a far better understanding of what can be done to improve things.

• Innovation in materials and manufacturing. By the year 2030, molecular fabrication (“nanofactories”) will significantly boost the world’s productive capacities. Although nanofactories have the potential to pose another complex system problem, the kinds of political institutions and models we’ll be forced to develop in response to ongoing environmental crises can serve as platforms for handling issues such as this one. If we can handle the political and social complexities of global warming (and likely geoengineering) in the 2010s and 2020s, we’ll be well-positioned to handle potentially even more disruptive events as the century continues.

Then the Singularity happens in 2048 and we’re all uploaded by force.

I’m kidding about that last one.

I think.

About the Author

Jamais Cascio is a writer, futurist, and ethicist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He specializes in design strategies and possible outcomes for future scenarios. Cascio has written for the The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal, and is the author of Hacking the Earth: Understanding the Consequences of Geoengineering (Lulu.com, 2009). He was one of Foreign Policy magazine’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers” for 2009.

Writing for Rights: An Interview with Iranian Dissident Azar Nafisi

THE FUTURIST: You are regarded as a proponent both of women’s rights in the Muslim world and of Westernization. How have recent events changed your views of the influence of Western culture in Iran? On the one hand, there is evidence that students in Iran were using mobile technology to organize protests following the 2009 Iranian presidential election. (Most of the people “tweeting” about it, however, were from the United States.) On the other hand, the Iranian government has used that same technology against protesters. Does mobile tech like cell phones and the Internet make the fight against authoritarianism easier or more difficult? What are the pitfalls?

Azar Nafisi: You see the adverse effects of technology in America itself. It’s become a challenge to turn information into real knowledge. The United States is becoming a superficial culture. But right now, inside Iran and other repressive countries, this technology is far more advantageous to the people than to governments. The Internet and cell phones are allowing the Iranian people to connect to the world through human-rights sites where texts about democracy are available. These texts are read and translated widely in Iran. I’ve connected with hundreds of Iranian students to learn about what’s actually going on there. A similar phenomenon is playing out in China. But the continuance of this progress requires the help of companies like Google and Yahoo.

THE FUTURIST: Looking more broadly, the current tension between the United States and Iran has become a dispute over technology — does Iran have the right to the same nuclear weapons capability that the United States has possessed for more than 60 years? Isn’t it hypocritical for the West to claim it’s seeking to aid the cause of progress when it is literally standing in the way of knowledge sharing on this issue?

Nafisi: Don’t get me started criticizing the problems of Western U.S. foreign policy; this isn’t among my criticisms. We should put our efforts into taking these weapons out of the hands of all countries, whether Pakistan, Iran, or North Korea. Yes, Ahmadinejad mentions this supposed double standard, and nuclear weapons are dangerous in America’s hands, just as they are in anyone’s. But the United States is far more open and democratic than is Iran. The system in the United States is more reliable. The government is more accountable than that of the Iranian regime. I can trust it more. But I don’t feel good about America or any other country having nuclear weapons.

THE FUTURIST: You’ve said: “At the beginning of the [Iranian] Revolution, not only the Islamists but also the radical left were all very set in what they wanted and the way they saw the world. As the revolution progressed, two things happened to the young Islamists. One was that the Islamic Republic failed to live up to any of its claims. Apart from oppressing people and changing the laws, and lowering the age of marriage from 18 to nine, [the Islamic government] did not accomplish anything economically, socially, politically, or in terms of security.” Today, as part of the so-called Green Revolution, thousands of Iranians are directly challenging the results of the latest presidential election. Do you think the Green Revolution’s aims are more realistic? Do today’s rebels stand a greater chance of success? And what’s the most important thing the 1979 revolution has to teach the Iranian rebels of today?

Nafisi: I was one of those starry-eyed optimists as well. But the new movement is mature. The Iranian people have paid a very high price for the mistakes of 1979. The most important lesson: If you’re going to join a revolution, you have to have as clear an idea of what sort of government you do want as what you don’t want.

The second lesson they appear to have learned is that democratic ends should be achieved through democratic means. The government won’t allow it. I have hope, but I’m not overly optimistic. The government is savage and terrified. The political leaders who would favor democracy, both in Iran and abroad, are now followers of the new movement, whose strength comes from the spontaneous actions of the people themselves. It’s truly a grassroots phenomenon.

What does this show? That Iran has a strong civil tradition. But there are times you need leadership and strategy. I expect the government will continue to kill and jail anyone who comes to the front.

THE FUTURIST: In your new memoir, Things I’ve Been Silent About, you write: “Looking back at our history, what seems surprising to me is not how powerful religious authorities have been in Iran, but how quickly modern secular ways took over a society so deeply dominated by religious orthodoxy and political absolutism.” Why do you think that was, and what does it say about the potential spread of Western ideals and Western notions of democracy in Iran and throughout the Muslim world?

Nafisi: Iran has a unique history; it goes back 3,000 years to the beginning of Zoroastrianism. Even now, the Islam practiced today in Iran is mixed and mingled with pre-Islamic traditions. The Iranian New Year is celebrated on the first of March; the names in the calendar are Zoroastrian deities. We are a multicultural society, with different religions, different traditions, living side by side. This provides the flexibility the country needs to accept the new.

So many people think changes and modernization in Iran just came from the West. I think the old system of monarchy just stopped working. The time of Western ideas coincided with a period of crisis. At the start of the last century, Iranians were bringing novels and theater back to Iran, but they were also boycotting foreign goods and fighting British imperialism. The history of the West in Iran is one of cultural and economic exploitation.

On the other hand, you have a close relationship culturally. This persists. The most important political leaders of Iran in the twentieth century were secular. And the most important of these was Mohammad Mosaddeq. The Ayatollah Khomeini hated him as much as he hated the Shah. Mosaddeq was religious but secular in governance, and his influence remains considerable.

When you talk about genuine, multiculturalism, you need a political and civil system that extends rights to all. You see that in the United States itself. There are people who think the country is Christian in nature, but this is a stagnant view. The Founding Fathers were Christian — they mention God — but without freedom of religion, no country can claim to be multicultural.

THE FUTURIST: What do you see as the likely future of Iranian–U.S. relations? What future would you like to see?

Nafisi: The problem lies with both sides. It’s to the advantage of the United States to have full diplomatic relations, but it’s not in the regime’s interests to make peace. The regime sees U.S. culture as the most dangerous weapon. An embassy in Iran, with people lining up to apply for visas, doesn’t help them maintain power. But the United States has been tactical and simplistic in its approach. It’s reduced its perception of Iran to the regime.

The United States has vacillated. I think the correct policy is pursuing dialogue with the regime, but also creating a dialogue with the Iranian people.

My ideal future is one that features genuine interaction and dialogue well beyond the government level. The problem is that connections right now aren’t through personal contacts but through governments. If people in the United States became more concerned with the human rights of the Iranian people, this would be a positive step. I’ve been looking for ways to create a connection between the two peoples. I do this through my books and through my teaching. I was first introduced to America by Huck Finn. I want people to come to Iran through Firdausi, a poet. Perhaps I can help with this. Art and literature should not be bound by nationality.

THE FUTURIST: Paint us a picture of the year 2020.

Nafisi: I hope that developments in technology, particularly visual and virtual reality, will bring us closer together. Imagine people across countries and continents “walking” into each other’s homes thousands of miles away. If we can create this experience through technology, the world will become a better place. I’m terrified of a future where we use gadgets, devices, and little amusements to shut ourselves in, to isolate ourselves. But new technology can actually serve the cause of empathy. If a girl is shot in the street in Iran during a protest, and a girl across the world can see it — can put herself in the place of her comrade across the sea — a tragedy becomes a victory for humanity. ❑

About the Interviewee

Azar Nafisi is the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran (Random House, 2008) and Things I’ve Been Silent About (Random House, 2008). She is a visiting fellow and lecturer at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, www.sais-jhu.edu.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine.

“Big Brother” versus “Little Brother”: Two Possible Media Futures

A Second Life creator is fighting to give digital pioneers room and freedom to grow.
By Cory Ondrejka

We live in the future.

I am writing on a three-pound sliver of a laptop that can execute billions of operations every second, connected to the Internet over a mobile broadband connection. I am juggling competing deadlines for this article and writing Web code for a project running on a cloud infrastructure I will never see. I send e-mail, listen to music, publish updates to Twitter and Facebook, and test machine-learning algorithms, all while enjoying a double espresso.

When I run into a bug or can’t remember the syntax for a command, I Google the question, knowing the Web’s answers to be faster and more accurate than thedocumentation stored on my hard drive and Kindle. My phone is a pocket computer with nearly the power of the first desktop machines used in Second Life’s development. All of us can find, manage, remix, and share information with an ease we are already taking for granted.

We live in the future. Big Content does not. Big Content — shorthand for the publishing, music, movie, television, and news industries and their powerful lobbying organizations — is staggering into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Despite the largest, wealthiest, and most connected global audience in human history, Big Content faces precipitous declines in sales and advertising revenue.

Because Big Content does not embrace the world we live in, two wildly different outcomes exist for media in 2020: Big Brother or Little Brother. Which future we get is a function of who participates in and drives the ongoing debates around media, innovation, copyright, piracy, and Internet access.

Content owners have railed against technological change since before Big Content even existed, from John Philip Sousa’s denouncing of the player piano to former Motion Picture Association of America chief Jack Valenti’s famous comparison of the VCR to the Boston Strangler. But for the most part, national governments have acted to maximize growth and prosperity through a balanced approach to intellectual property law. History validated that approach, with content creators and owners repeatedly adapting to and mastering new technologies and business opportunities.

The massive advantages that Big Content has when leveraging new technology — existing audience, established talent, and institutional expertise — are not enough for the incumbents. Instead, Big Content wants regulation to control technology, to force the law to define what artists and fans want in the future. As laughably bad as our ability to regulate the future is, it is fortunate that previous attempts, focused on limiting what artists and fans could do with their content through digital rights management (DRM), met with limited success at best.

Recently, Big Content has changed tactics, determined to create a Big Brother future for us all. At the heart of this new approach is the idea of “graduated response,” embodied in France’s recently ratified “three strikes” law. “Three strikes” is fairly simple: Be accused of violating copyright law three times, and you lose access to the Internet for three months to one year. A mysterious official body, the High Authority for the Distribution of Works and the Protection of Rights on the Internet, or HADOPI, would enforce the measure in accordance with a broad mandate to “prevent the hemorrhaging of cultural works on the Internet.”

This bears repeating: If HADOPI accuses you of violating copyright law three times, you could lose your access to the Internet.

“Three strikes” is gaining support worldwide. Today, most of the developed world is engaged in negotiations around the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The parties to the agreement, including the United States, the European Union, and South Korea, have kept negotiations secret, but leaks indicate “three strikes” is under consideration.

This is akin to having your phone service terminated for making a mix tape. Or your electricity turned off for wearing a homemade superhero Halloween costume.

This is the Big Brother future. Abuses of the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act have already shown that content owners will allege copyright abuse to hamper business competitors, suppress free speech, and block innovation. How much more powerful a hammer is “three strikes,” since it can effectively cut off the accused from their community, co-workers, and family by blocking Internet access? For many people, such a move would destroy their livelihood.

Thus, a bleak media future for 2020 is on the horizon, one where any content owner is able to invoke Big Brother to cut off your access to the Internet. Use the Internet as your phone service, for playing games, watching television, paying your bills, attending school, or working from home? Too bad! Three alleged copyright violations and you are back in 1990. Three mistakes by notoriously error-prone filtering software, and you are a second-class citizen, blocked from interacting with the rest of civil society.

What will this lead to? In 2020, the Internet and World Wide Web will be the most important technology any of us have access to. Fearing the loss of that connection, you will take the only option available and avoid media on the Internet entirely. No posting pictures, no streaming content, no cloud storage of your data, no user-generated content, no discussion groups about media. Any of these uses of media could lead to inadvertent copyright infringement or false positives, resulting in the loss of your connection to the Internet and the Web. So, ironically, by driving a Big Brother agenda, Big Content is sowing the seeds for its own destruction by eliminating the largest and most easily addressable audience ever.

Alternatives to Big Brother and Big Content

Fortunately, Big Brother is not the only option. We — innovators, politicians, and citizens — can demand a better option: a Little Brother future.

Among the changes brought on by the Internet age, one of the greatest is the tremendous increase in capability available to individuals and small teams. First, the dramatic decrease in computation, storage, and transmission costs makes it far less risky to experiment with new technology. Next, the explosion of wired and wireless connections to the Web ensures an addressable audience. Finally, intense competition between tools and technologies makes Web development faster and more approachable. It has never been cheaper or easier to create content or to find and deliver that content to the right audience.

In broader terms, the costs of communication and learning have never been lower, and will only drop further if we refuse to allow Big Content to drive the debate. Cheaper learning should matter to all of us, because innovation is constrained by the cost of learning. Innovation — turning knowledge into products — drives per capita economic growth through productivity gains, so any nation that fundamentally reduces the costs of learning has a global competitive advantage. History is replete with examples, most recently the United States’ productivity gains in the 1990s due to the expansion of the Internet and information technology.

In 2010, as the world pulls out of a dramatic economic downturn, we are on the cusp of a new period of innovation and growth, driven by wireless broadband, mobile devices, and ubiquitous connectivity. Rather than succumbing to Big Brother policy demands, citizens should rally for a Little Brother future, where everyone has the maximum chance to create the next Google, Facebook, or Twitter. A Little Brother future relies on net neutrality (unrestricted movement of data) and a reasonable balance between the rights of content owners and music, movie, and content fans.

This is the future where artists and audiences have the best chance to find each other and create the next great ideas for Big Content. New media companies and business strategies can only emerge if the regulatory framework enables experimentation. Recent examples abound. EMI Music led first with non-digitally rights-managed music and a focus on the music experience; the company announced a significant upturn in revenues. YouTube was able to launch and grow while the courts worked on the legal questions related to hosting user-uploaded videos. Trent Reznor, founder of the rock band Nine Inch Nails, works with fans to create new media projects. Second Life’s users created successful virtual venues for live music. A Little Brother future ensures that innovators continue to have the space to try.

As the last decade has taught us, they will try and try! And TRY! This doesn’t guarantee Big Content’s ongoing success, but when compared with a Big Brother future where their demise is guaranteed, the choice is obvious. Big Content should be joining the rest of us as we lead the charge for a Little Brother future.

About the Author

Cory Ondrejka is the former executive vice president of digital marketing for EMI Music and the co-creator of Second Life. He’s also an entrepreneur, speaker, advisor, and a nonresident fellow at the Network Culture Project at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. He can be reached at cory.ondrejka(at)gmail.com. Blog: http://ondrejka.net

Note: The choice of “Little Brother” was inspired by the novel of the same name by Cory Doctorow, which examines life in today’s Big Brother world.

A New Generation of Business Leaders

Students are increasingly blending social awareness and social entrepreneurship.

Business schools may attract more students if they offer more courses on corporate responsibility and environmentally friendly business practices.

More than 80% of undergraduate students surveyed jointly by nonprofits Net Impact and the Aspen Institute said that they want more sustainability and corporate responsibility material in their curricula. Only 23% said they were satisfied with the quantity of material that their schools currently offer.

“Students in college today are pretty aware of environmental issues in a way that my generation was not,” says Amanda Nicholson, an assistant professor of retail management at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management. “They grew up with recycling bins outside their dorm rooms. They’re already believers.”

Nicholson led a group of students in a Converting Organic Waste project. The students built a septic system that breaks down food waste from the dining hall into biogas and fertilizer; the biogas powers the tank system, and the fertilizer can be bagged and sold commercially.

Not only does the project benefit the environment, according to Nicholson, but it also makes great business sense in that it cuts costs while also making marketable products.

The Whitman School offers a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Sustainable Enterprise, which students earn by completing five courses in the challenges facing businesses that strive to practice social and environmental responsibility.

The school also partners with the State University of New York to teach a course called “Managing Sustainability,” which explores sustainable enterprise. Syracuse and SUNY faculty jointly teach it, and students from schools in both universities enroll in it.

“Ethics and environmental sustainability — those two things seem to come up in every class now across the board,” Nicholson says.

Whitman law and public policy professor Eletta Callahan sees the trend echoing in college campus administrations. Colleges are measuring their own carbon footprints, for example, and reducing their buildings’ emissions.

“Attention to sustainability has become an expectation in colleges,” says Callahan.

However, college curricula have been slower to adopt the sustainability ethos, as course material is much harder to change than campus administrative policies. But if student populations have their way, course content, too, may change over time, Callahan concludes. — Rick Docksai

Sources: Amanda Nicholson and Eletta Callahan, Syracuse University, www.syr.edu.

Net Impact, www.netimpact.org.

A Software Business Model That Turns Users into Partners

A new start-up has built “economic self-empowerment” for its users into the core of its mission.
By Jason P. Clark

I believe it’s safe to say that the next 10 years will give rise to some of the greatest advances in technology we have ever seen. We have witnessed a steady climb to a new level of collective consciousness and distributive intelligence through increasing Internet use. Today, social media sites such as Facebook, Reddit, and many others each possesses its own unique hive mind, wherein knowledge and life experiences are shared across the planet at the speed of light.

Yet, there is a major drawback to this fantastic future. As we progress, we simultaneously create a great divide that leaves behind those who do not have the means to participate in the global hive. These individuals are separated by economic challenges and thus are limited to this collective information. There is a chasm between those who have access to the Internet and those who do not.

Most of us take for granted our privileged exposure to technology and do not think about how this exposure creates opportunities for us later in life. Over the next 10 years, some aspects of this problem will be resolved by cheaper access to computing and the Internet. Case in point: The Federal Communications Commission has submitted its National Broadband Plan for the next decade and proposes that every American should have affordable access to “robust broadband services.” That means at least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to speeds of at least 100 megabits per second (Mbps) for downloading and 50 Mbps for uploading.

By 2020, access to the Internet will no longer be an issue for most who desire it. Computers will be handed out as readily as textbooks in schools and communities. Yet, simply having access to these tools does not instantly solve the problem of a knowledge divide. So long as a paradigm exists by which corporations profit by directly charging the end user for their services, there will be so-called “haves” and “have-nots” of the Internet.

Turning Have-Nots into Partners

One way in which we at Syntiant, the company at which I serve as chief technical officer, are working to actively shift this paradigm is by incorporating philanthropy — or, more specifically, “economic self-empowerment” — into the core of our business model. Empowering people to help themselves through knowledge and a marketplace for knowledge fosters loyalty, spurs creativity, and creates a potential revenue stream in the process. This approach weds individuals’ ideals with their financial interests and shatters the attitude that an organization can’t be philanthropic and make money at the same time.

One of Syntiant’s goals is to facilitate education and social interaction, while providing the requisite equipment and connectivity to those who need it most. Syntiant’s goal is to introduce a new profit paradigm for a global social media company. Here’s how it works: Instead of charging users for the use of our basic services, we will offer free access in exchange for a small computational contribution. In essence, Syntiant will request four to five hours per day of an end-user’s unused computing time, a tit-for-tat trade in which everyone benefits.

Syntiant will use the millions of combined hours of excess computing power to create a Global Exaflop Supercomputing Cloud (GESC), the fastest and most distributed system of its kind. Instead of feeding from our users’ pockets, we receive their donations of unused clock cycles, thus turning users into contributors. By utilizing a distributed computing network already in existence, we eliminate the need for the costly overhead associated with deploying and managing our own computing infrastructure. Syntiant will also offer an app-store model for user-based transactions within our operating environments.

We are working on a wholly new way of delivering social networks — evaluating them as a microcosm of the Internet itself and using already proven models of browsing and searching to improve content and advertising delivery in a way that is tailored to each and every individual user.

The year 2020 should see many variations of this distributed, consumer powered — but not consumer-based — revenue model. The companies of tomorrow that embrace this philosophy will stand a much better chance at prosperity long after organizations adhering to the traditional model have run aground.

It is difficult to visualize and prepare for a coming phase change before the event, when it seems as if chaos and entropy are increasing boundlessly. Consequently, when we originally shared our comprehensive vision with potential investors and other stakeholders, we were told that our ideas are scattered, unfocused, and without direction. Yet it is precisely this model of scattered, distributed components working together as a global information system that creates value in the Syntiant network.

We are committed to overcoming the challenge of limited information access and striving to bridge the gap by creating a global, user-built community. We believe the tipping point is soon upon us for a more consumer-driven, user-focused world in social networks.

About the Author

Jason P. Clark is a serial entrepreneur in the field of network infrastructures, multimedia, and virtual-reality content. He’s the creator of three international patents for uni-directional audio navigation, which were later purchased by Hewlett-Packard. At age 32, he’s developed and acquired funding for more than five start-up companies. He’s currently chief technical officer for Syntiant, www.syntiant.com/.

The author acknowledges Brad Thompson, CEO of Altruent, and Elliot Kulakow, partner/VP Technology R&D at Syntiant, as contributors to this article. Without their distributive intelligence and vision, this article would not have been possible.

Books in Brief: July-August 2010

Edited by Rick Docksai
The Economics of Integrity: From Dairy Farmers to Toyota, How Wealth Is Built on Trust and What That Means for Our Future by Anna Bernasek. Harper. 2010. 193 pages. $19.99.

The businessman who says he created his wealth all by himself is mistaken, states financial reporter Anna Bernasek in The Economics of Integrity. She points out that any successful enterprise is the result of a number of people lending their cooperation and their time. For all these people to cooperate effectively, they must first be able to trust each other.

Bernasek affirms the fundamental role that relationships of trust play in national and global commerce. There is actually far more integrity in the world of finance than some people might assume, she says. Integrity is what makes the economy go. Without it, a future of economic prosperity will not be possible.

Bernasek cites the successes that some major businesses attained by being trustworthy, and the comparatively greater wealth that some nations attain by enforcing transparency and integrity among their national businesses. Then she describes the benefits a new business can enjoy if it counts integrity and trustworthiness among its paramount values.

The Economics of Integrity makes a sound case for moral behavior and a clear link between doing the right thing today and achieving a better future tomorrow. Entrepreneurs and students who might one day be entrepreneurs will both find it to be inspirational reading.

Global Sources of Local Pollution: An Assessment of Long-Range Transport of Key Air Pollutants to and from the United States by the National Research Council. National Academies Press. 2010. 234 pages. Paperback. $35.

The pollution that a factory emits on one continent today will impact the health of a neighborhood on another continent next week, warns the National Research Council in Global Sources of Local Pollution.

Global wind and water currents have the potential to carry smog, soot, pesticide residues, and other toxins from region to region. Within one week, they can cross an ocean. A year is all the time needed for them to completely circumnavigate the globe. Consequently, any one locale’s ecological problems are likely to become the world’s ecological problems.

The authors identify four main types of pollutants — ozone, particulate matter, mercury, and organic pollutants — the long-term health risks each one presents, and specific actions that the global community can take now to mitigate them.

With thorough research and analysis, Global Sources of Local Pollution affirms the interconnectedness of our world and the ties that bind every community within it, and points out scientifically sound ways forward toward a healthy future for all.

Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making by Gary Klein. MIT Press. 2009. 337 pages. $27.95.

Decision makers sometimes put their faith in logic and data when intuitive thinking would really be the better guide, says scientist Gary Klein in Streetlights and Shadows.

He notes that most adults assume that the way to plan for the future is to gather copious information about the matter at hand and carefully consider the available options. This may be true only in situations that are well-ordered and predictable. But real life is often complex, random, and prone to dramatic changes in short spans of time.

We often are pressed to make decisions without having all the information at hand, or where change is taking place rapidly and unpredictably. Trying to analyze the environment and predict what will happen next could be futile, and maybe even counterproductive.

Klein urges decision makers to alter their planning methods when they are faced with unexpected events. This means revising a lot of deeply ingrained beliefs: accepting that biases aren’t always bad, logic does not always help, gathering more information can confuse instead of clarify, and generating multiple options might do more harm than good. There are times to conduct analysis, Klein says, and there are times to let experience and intuition pinpoint the answers.

Streetlights and Shadows is a sharp assessment of planning methods and their relative strengths and weaknesses. Consultants and organization leaders may find it an insightful read.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Broadway. 2010. 305 pages. $26.

How, exactly, do you motivate people to change their behaviors? According to Chip Heath and Dan Heath in Switch, it boils down to a three-part process: reaching people’s rational minds, appealing to their emotions, and then shaping the environment to make it more conducive to change.

The authors lay out their own insights about the change process and how successful change comes about. They demonstrate their findings by presenting case-by-case examples from real life. Among the many anecdotes that they share:

• Steve Booth-Butterfield and Bill Reger, two West Virginia University health researchers, persuaded the residents of two West Virginia towns to drink more low-fat milk and less whole milk via promotional ads that contrasted unsightly images of blobs of saturated fat (which an individual ingests when he or she drinks whole milk) with appealing images of glasses of low-fat milk. After six months, sales of low-fat milk nearly doubled.

• Donald Berwick, a doctor and president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, spearheaded life-saving procedural changes within Institute-affiliated hospitals. The hospital administrators were reluctant to adopt many of them, but he won them over by setting forth specific goals and the interventions that could help achieve them. He then launched a campaign of procedural change that hospitals would join if they wanted to participate. For added effect, he brought the mother of a girl who had been killed by medical error on stage to deliver a keynote speech. Joining the campaign was easy, and every hospital that did would receive a team of researchers that would help guide it through the changes. Within the first two months, more than a thousand hospitals joined.

• Jerry Sternin, a Save the Children administrator, received an invitation from the Vietnamese government to come to the country and reduce rural malnutrition. He traveled to a rural village and sought out “bright spot” households in which children were healthier and better-nourished than their peers. Then he interviewed the bright-spot parents to find out what they were doing differently. He brought them together with other parents in cooking groups that would meet regularly to prepare well-balanced meals. Six months later, 65% of the children in the village were eating better.

Switch offers many insights about human behavior and psychology that marketing professionals, communications experts, and public-policy makers might all appreciate.

Toward Human Emergence: A Human Resource Philosophy for the Future by Philip Harris. HRD Press. 2010. 452 pages. $59.95.

The human species is transitioning toward a new, higher state of being, asserts management and space psychologist Philip Harris. The exponential acceleration of knowledge is transforming civilization itself. As the twenty-first century progresses, humans will have a series of opportunities to develop their potential.

The challenge will be for all people to widen their perspectives and be mindful of humanity’s long-term evolution. People can move beyond self-destructive and exploitative behaviors, and embrace cooperation and compassion for those less fortunate. But it will take a concerted effort. We must all personally strive to be “world shapers” rather than “earth squatters.” Harris lays out specific courses of action for both policy makers and private citizens to take.

Harris’s Toward Human Emergence is an introspective and inspirational discussion of human life. Philosophers, public officials, and the general public will all find it to be a worthy read.

2048: Humanity’s Agreement to Live Together by J. Kirk Boyd. Berrett-Koehler. 2010. 221 pages. Paperback. $15.95.

Since World War II, world leaders have initiated serious discussions about how to turn from a past of worldwide warfare and poverty to a future of global peace and prosperity for all, notes Kirk Boyd, executive director of the nonprofit 2048 Project. He argues that the goal is achievable, though it will require a written agreement for peaceable coexistence that is ratified by all countries and enforceable in all of the world’s courts.

He explains how the agreement might come to fruition by 2048: It will build off the successes of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it will follow two prior steps: education of all the world’s citizens on human rights, and then bringing the world’s leaders together to draft an international accord.

Many skeptics believe that war and poverty are inevitable and will always be realities of human life, Boyd notes. But he challenges that supposition throughout 2048 with hope for a better future and an action plan to bring it about. His book offers a lofty, but inspiring, set of goals.

The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World by William Sims Bainbridge. MIT Press. 2009. 248 pages. $27.95.

Imagine a video game bursting out of the screen and merging with the real world around you. You may experience precisely that if a prototype augmented-reality game system called LARP (live-action role-playing games) becomes fully developed, according to William Sims Bainbridge in The Warcraft Civilization.

A LARP’s playing field, Bainbridge says, would be an open-air city or park. Your view would be altered by game-generated holographs of heroes, villains, and action sequences. Gamers who now play World of Warcraft on computer screens might gather in a theme park and face off against each other in real time, disguised as warlocks, elves, orcs, and other characters.

Education might get enhancements, too. Tourists who visit Washington, D.C., and listen to a guide discuss the capital’s role in World War II might relive the era by pretending to be OSS agents or Nazi spies.

Even without LARP, however, World of Warcraft is very much present in the real world and may become more so, Bainbridge adds. In May 2008, scientists held an academic convention as avatars in the World of Warcraft domain. Also, many sociologists are experimenting with the game because of its parallels with real life. Tribes of beings interact with each other and sometimes clash. And there are functioning economic systems, complete with “black-market” transactions.

In The Warcraft Civilization, Bainbridge explores the social trend of role-playing games and their significance for contemporary culture in the years ahead. Gamers and sociologists will both find his observations informative.

Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century by Paul Milo. Harper. 2010. 288 pages. Paperback. $14.99.

Renowned twentieth-century experts made many educated guesses about what life in the early twenty-first century would be like, and many of those guesses turned out to be spectacularly wrong, notes freelance journalist Paul Milo in Your Flying Car Awaits. We’re now 10 years into the new century and have as of yet no bases on the moon, computers that think, flying cars, or any of the other marvels that scholars only three decades ago expected that we would have.

Milo reviews the leading forecasts across the twentieth century and infers what they say about their respective times — optimistic eras bred optimistic forecasts, while recession eras bore gloomy forecasts, for example. He also identifies lessons that forecasters today stand to learn from these erroneous forecasts. Forecasting is always a risky endeavor, he says. But if we determine how scholars in the past erred, we can alter our approaches to forecasting accordingly and guess the future with greater accuracy.

Your Flying Car Awaits is a light and conversational overview of forecasting through the decades, as well as a sharp evaluation of the limits to our abilities as humans to guess the future. Students of cultural history will appreciate it, as will any readers who want an approachable yet informative discussion about the discipline of making forecasts.

Future Scope: July-August 2010

MEDICINE

Rx: New Medical Specialties

Tomorrow’s doctors will practice more-personalized medicine, not because they’ll be friendlier, but because they’ll have access to more-detailed genetic information about their patients. Such changes will affect how medicine is taught.

“A curriculum in genetics is so important to the future of medicine,” says Aaron Michelfelder, associate professor of family medicine at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. Loyola’s genetics course used to be completed in the first year of medical school, but now it has been expanded and incorporated into the entire four-year curriculum.

Another major change Michelfelder foresees is more specialties and sub-specialties to handle new and emerging medical technologies and innovations.

Source: Loyola Medicine, www.loyolamedicine.org.

HABITATS

Design Out Unwanted Noise

Architects may soon be able to design more conversation-friendly rooms by mapping “hot spots” for potential noise.

Sound-mapping software developed by engineers at Cardiff University in Wales shows where conversations would be unintelligible if a room were busy. The architect could then alter room shapes and materials to cancel out noise that would make conversation difficult.

Acoustic engineering is already well developed for theaters and concert halls, but more attention is needed for acoustic design of indoor meeting spaces, notes research project leader John Culling, a professor at Cardiff’s School of Psychology. The new software could be used where large numbers of people gather to interact, such as open-plan offices, cafés, and reception halls.

Source: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, www.epsrc.ac.uk.

HEALTH

Gluten Intolerance on the Rise

Population aging may be behind a recent upsurge in gluten intolerance in Finland, report nutrition researchers at the Academy of Finland. Sufferers of the digestive disorder have increased from 1% of adult Finns in the early 1980s to 2% by the 2000s. Among the elderly, the rate is 2.7%.

Intolerance to gluten — a blend of proteins found mainly in wheat — is difficult to catch early, as patients may be symptom-free until later stages, when the condition can be identified from tissue samples. The principal symptom may be anemia due to iron deficiency or folic acid deficiency.

Researchers are seeking new and better markers for gluten intolerance that will allow easier diagnosis without need for endoscopy. Patients also hope for an “anti-gluten” pill with enzymes that break down gluten — a treatment that may prove feasible in the future, the researchers believe.

Source: Academy of Finland, www.aka.fi.

LIFESTYLES

Cheaper Fashions Change Faster

Fashions are changing faster than ever because clothing is becoming relatively cheaper. In fact, twenty-first-century clothes are 70% cheaper than the mod outfits of the Sixties, reports University of Kent sociologist Julia Twigg.

One outcome of this trend is that fashion is, well, fashionable for a wider age group, as new markets extend to the very old and very young. Women over age 75 are shopping for clothes more frequently now than they did as youths in the Sixties — and far more than their elders did at the time..

Despite a reputation for nonconformity, aging baby boomers are adopting the latest mainstream fashion trends, Twigg notes. Boomer women are neither accepting the “frumpy” look of previous generations of middle-agers nor making their own fashion statements, as they have throughout their lives.

“Although the baby boomers are indeed increasingly engaged with fashion in the twenty-first century, it’s a myth that they are different,” says Twigg. “It is just that they are responding to the mood of the times — like everyone else.”;

Source: University of Kent, www.kent.ac.uk.

WORDBUZZ

Unconsumption

More people are becoming conscious consumers or even unconsumers, reports social entrepreneur Halle Tecco in the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog (April 7). She credits the convergence of recession-driven frugality and the green movement for the rise of this trend.

“Unconsumption describes the now savvy and respectable trend of reducing, reusing, and recycling,” writes Tecco.

Source: Stanford Social Innovation Review, www.ssireview.org.

Life Among the Clones

How to Defeat Your Own Clone: And Other Tips for Surviving the Biotech Revolution by Kyle Kurpinski and Terry Johnson. Bantam. 2010. 180 pages. Paperback. $14.

Genetic manipulation and human cloning are possible, write bioengineers Kyle Kurpinski and Terry Johnson in How to Defeat Your Own Clone. They point out that medicine is gaining the abilities to alter genes, delete them, or copy them in their entirety, and speculate on where the innovations might lead.

Mass production of clones might lead to a nightmare world of viral warfare, clone rebellions, and super-intelligent clones that take over the workforce and drive non-clones into unemployment. Scenario: A government-funded battalion of Chuck Norris clones imposes a rough Norris Law everywhere and forces all television stations to play reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger around the clock. An army of Bruce Lee clones rises up to resist them, and the biggest kung fu battle in world history ensues, at the end of which society lies in ruins.

Alternatively, genetic manipulations might lead to a better world in which doctors undo any physical injury or ailment via on-demand generation of any human body part. Children everywhere are born immune to HIV and diabetes, and they are smarter and stronger than ever before. Medicine treats every major disease and anticipates every newly emerging one.

The authors detail what clones are, what they are not, and how we might expect clones to behave. They also delve into the potential family and social dynamics you would likely encounter after cloning yourself. Your clone could be your best friend — or a dangerous enemy. The authors argue that you should think now about what you might do if you do get cloned.

Kurpinski and Johnson lay out in precise detail what it would take to clone a human being and why present technology cannot yet achieve it. They also explore the role that stem cells might play in finally making cloning a reality. Since stem cells can transform into any cell in the body, researchers might use one to generate a complete human being. All they’d be doing is replicating the process of human reproduction.

“Complex organisms don’t exist as a single cell, but they all start as one — a very special one — and this phenomenon is what will allow us to replicate the development of a specific individual,” write Kurpinski and Johnson.

Real clones will be very different from the clones in science-fiction movies and television shows. Your clone will not necessarily have your personality, likes, and dislikes, for example. An individual’s thoughts and memories come from life experience and do not get carried over in genetic codes.

“Popular culture has been misrepresenting clones since the term was applied to Homo sapiens,” write Kurpinski and Johnson. “If you want to make the most of the biotech revolution, you’re going to have to unlearn the most egregious of culture’s misapprehensions.”

Among the things that biotechnology can do is genetically engineer lab mice to run faster and farther than average mice, and to not accrue body fat at the same rates.

These same enhancements might enable humans to change their genomes to be stronger and less prone to obesity. Extended life spans, faster recovery times from injuries, and immunity to diseases and addictions will all be feasible. Individuals might change their appearance, raise their intelligence to unnaturally high levels, or program themselves to thrive on three or four hours of sleep a night.

“Whether you want to be smarter, prettier, or genetically battle-ready, your body will be yours to enhance — and so will your clone’s,” write Kurpinski and Johnson.

But are all of these enhancements things that we would want to see? The authors stay relatively mum on this question.

Having new powers to change the human body carries deep ethical dilemmas. Individuals who use medical treatments to boost their strength and intelligence might become a new ruling elite, for example. And a society of people who only sleep four hours a night sounds like a society of workaholics. Kurpinski and Johnson thoroughly relate the mechanics of what we could develop, but they say little on whether we should develop it.

Nevertheless, How to Defeat Your Own Clone is a lighthearted, erudite look at the many directions that biomedicine could lead society.

About the Reviewer

Rick Docksai is a staff editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review.

Sustainable Urban Mobility in 2020

To make the car of the future, we need to make the city of the future, says MIT designer Ryan Chin.

How can you design a city by designing a car? Today’s automobiles are driven by an increasing number of users who live in cities. The United Nations reported in 2007 that migration patterns and population growth have created an equal split between inhabitants of cities and rural areas for the first time in human history. This general trend will continue for the next several decades and will produce a very urbanized world.

In 1950, New York City was the only megacity on the planet, with 10 million occupants. Today, there are 25 megacities that are mostly in developing countries. To verify this trend, we need only to look at the rapid urbanization in China to see the mass migration of the rural poor to urban areas for economic opportunity. Population experts project that most of the urban growth will occur in Asia and Africa for the next several decades. Simultaneously, humanity’s thirst for personal mobility will continue to grow. History shows that, as countries develop economically, so does their use of four-wheeled motorized transportation.

The world’s automobile fleet is currently estimated at 800 million cars that serve the 7.8 billion people living on Planet Earth. In the developed world, roughly seven out of 10 people own a car, whereas in the developing world, it’s two out of 10. The continued economic development of Brazil, Russia, India, and China will fuel the growth of this fleet to more than 1 billion cars by 2020. The continued use of this personal transportation model is simply unsustainable given the combination of energy inefficiency, environmental consequences of fossil-fuel usage, potential disruptions to fuel supplies, urban sprawl created by automobile reliance, and congestion caused by inadequate alternative modes of transport. What we need is to radically rethink the problem by examining not only the automobile itself, but also how it is used in cities (where most of us are currently living).

Size and Weight

2010: Today’s automobiles weigh an average of nearly 4,000 lb, approximately 20 times the weight of the driver. Today’s automobiles also have a footprint of approximately 100 square feet, which is nearly 15 times the amount of space required for a comfortable office chair. But the size requirements don’t stop at the footprint of the vehicle, if we consider the space that cars occupy on the road, in parking at home, work, and other destinations; add to that the space for maintenance and repair and it quickly grows to approximately 1,200 sq. ft. per vehicle. In midtown Manhattan, a 1,200 sq. ft. condominium would cost you upwards of $2 million to own.

2020: Tomorrow’s automobiles will be more lightweight and smaller. Size, weight, and energy efficiency are three factors that intimately interconnect in the design and engineering of automobiles. The lighter the vehicle, the more energy efficient it will be to move the mass of the car. The smaller the vehicle, the less mass you have. This set of relations forms a set of positive and negative feedback loops that ultimately affect the design of the vehicle. It will be imperative to incorporate technological improvements in lightweight materials, and composites will certainly help to make vehicles leaner, but this is not enough. Vehicles must also become more compact. These changes will not only improve energy efficiency, but also the vehicles’ overall footprint.

Range and Speed

2010: Today’s automobiles have a fuel range of about 300 miles (meaning they can travel 300 miles or so on one tank) can go from 0 to 60 mph in less than 10 seconds, and top out at more than 110 mph. This is great for intercity travel, but most Americans don’t travel that far. More than 80% of daily commutes in America are less than 40 miles (round trip). With more than 81% of Americans living in metropolitan areas, you simply don’t need to go 100 miles an hour down a city street. If you travel to Shanghai today, the average speed in the city is 9 mph. Bangalore, India, has achieved 24-hour congestion. Today’s vehicle is simply over-engineered for most practical purposes in cities.

2020: Tomorrow’s automobiles will not need that much refueling autonomy. BMW recently finished a series of user experiments to examine “range anxiety” — the fear of running out of electricity in electric cars — and discovered that their new electric mini (with 100 miles of range) has two to three times the range required for practically all trips. Users don’t need to have five to six times the range, and they quickly learned to adapt to the constraints (and benefits) of this new vehicle type. The introduction of electric charging infrastructure in the upcoming decade will virtually eliminate range issues in urban areas. Cities like San Francisco, Portland, Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona all have initiatives to bring a network of charging stations in their respective metropolitan areas. Car makers are introducing plug-in options for many models that enable the electrical charging from a common 110V household outlet.

Gasoline versus Electric

2010: Today’s vehicles are predominantly powered by petroleum-based fuels. An internal combustion engine is terribly inefficient (approximately 15%) in converting chemical energy into mechanical work to drive the wheels of your car. Hybrid vehicles are better at conserving energy at the cost of a more complex powertrain, but projections for the next five years call for less than 12% of the total new car market. The remaining alternative fuels, like compressed natural gas, hydrogen, compressed air, and biofuels, have varying levels of efficiency, but are utilized in even fewer numbers than hybrids. Battery electric vehicles utilize electric motors that are more than 90% energy efficient, but these have not taken over mainstream markets because of limitations of battery technology.

2020: Tomorrow’s automobiles will be increasingly electrified. The emergence of new battery chemistries such as lithium ion nanophosphate have allowed battery manufacturers to produce cells that have higher energy density and lower internal resistance, thus allowing rapid charging in less than 30 minutes. In fact, my colleagues at the MIT Electric Vehicle Team have been able to rapid-charge these new cells in less than 7 minutes with just a 10% degradation in capacity after 1,500 cycles. For comparison, lithium ion cells in your laptop today have roughly 1,000 cycles of usable life. The ability to rapid-charge will enable users to top-off their batteries in about the time it will take to order and drink an espresso, thus opening up new opportunities to create a ubiquitous charging network distributed throughout cities. No longer do we need to charge only at home or the workplace where our cars sit waiting for six to 10 hours.

Driver-Controlled versus Autonomous Driving

2010: Today’s cars are driven by human operators. Drivers have a number of telematic devices that aid in driving, such as antilock brakes for safe stopping, adaptive cruise control for the highway, parking sensors to help avoid scratches to the bumpers, and GPS for navigating unfamiliar places. However, we still have more than 50,000 deaths a year in the United States under the current driving paradigm. Today’s drivers sit in traffic for more than 50 hours a year and endure the stop-and-go driving experience.

2020: Tomorrow’s cars will be increasingly autonomous. The annual DARPA Urban Challenge has consistently proven to be a tremendously useful catalyst for innovations in autonomous driving. The most recent challenge shows that autonomously driven vehicles can navigate in busy city streets without incident. The potential of autonomous vehicles to self-drive and coordinate with other autonomous vehicles is to smooth traffic flows. In urban environments, top speed is not necessary; it is the orchestrated movement of vehicles within a speed regime that will improve congestion. The introduction of semi-autonomous systems such as self-parking and automated highway systems has provided useful lessons in the benefits and challenges of autonomous driving. Continued federally funded research in this area, combined with improvements in computational power, will enable the miniaturization of autonomous technologies, thus making autonomous driving commercially viable for mass markets in the coming decade.

Private versus Shared Ownership

2010: Today’s automobiles are designed for private ownership. The burden of ownership includes the cost of the vehicle, depreciation, tires, licensure, taxes, registration, insurance, maintenance, fuel, and parking. These individual direct costs are compounded by what economists call “negative externalities,” which include congestion and pollution leading to global warming — that is, costs to society not immediately felt by the individual user. Privately owned commuter vehicles that may drive two hours a day (round trip) will sit doing nothing useful for 92% of the day. During this state, the car takes up valuable real estate and doesn’t move people around. Single passenger occupancy also doesn’t help in this situation; if I stand on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I could wait up to 20 minutes before seeing a vehicle with two occupants. In that same city, approximately one-third of the land area is devoted to the servicing of automobiles (this includes roads and parking for cars) that are principally used by private individuals. This is not an atypical land-use percentage devoted to the automobile throughout the United States.

2020: Tomorrow’s automobiles will be increasingly utilized in cooperative or shared-use models. The emergence of car-sharing and bike-sharing schemes in urban areas in both the United States and Europe have established alternative models and markets for fractional or on-demand mobility. Zipcar, the world’s largest car-share program, has grown from just a handful of cars to a fleet of 6,000 cars and 275,000 drivers in 49 cities in just under 10 years. It’s very difficult to own one-quarter or one-tenth of a car with traditional ownership, and let’s not even talk about fractional insurance. Shared ownership provides users fractional ownership that allows them access to any vehicle in the fleet whenever they please and for as long as they need, just like video on demand or print on demand.

Radical Rethinking Required

Since 2003, the Smart Cities group at the MIT Media Lab has developed solutions to directly tackle these problems. We have designed an electric two-passenger vehicle called the CityCar, which utilizes in-wheel electric motors called Wheel Robots that have incorporated drive, suspension, and braking directly inside the wheel. Each wheel is independently controlled with by-wire controls (no mechanical linkages) and is capable of 120 degrees of steering, which provides very high maneuverability. The CityCar can turn on its own axis (zero turn radius) and can make sideways turns by turning the wheels perpendicular to the primary driving axis.

The Wheel Robots eliminate the need for traditional components like drivelines, transmissions, and gearboxes. We have taken advantage of this freedom by rethinking the architecture of the vehicle. Since there is no driveline, we can make the vehicle very compact by folding the chassis. The CityCar can fold up to half its length to just under the width of a traditional parking space. The CityCar, when folded, is less than 60 inches in length and 100 inches when unfolded (comparable to the Smart Car). Three CityCars when parked can fit into one traditional parking space. It weighs just 1,000 lb, thus making it very lightweight and energy efficient, and the new architecture allows us to rethink entry and exit. We have designed a front ingress solution that easily allows the driver and passenger to safely exit the vehicle onto the curb rather than the street. The folding mechanism complements this feature by articulating the seats so that the user can ergonomically and elegantly exit at an elevated position. CityCars are designed to park nose-in to the curb, which allows the users to use the sidewalk rather than the street. Finally, the in-wheel motors will provide plenty of low-end torque, thus making the CityCar fun to drive in urban areas.

Simply redesigning the vehicle is only one part of the solution. We have also created a new use model, called “Mobility on Demand”(MoD), which utilizes a fleet of lightweight electric vehicles (LEVs) that are distributed at electric charging stations throughout a metropolitan area. The LEVs are designed for shared use, which enable high utilization rates for the vehicles and the parking spaces they occupy. The use model mimics the bike sharing systems made popular in Europe, whereby users simply walk up to the closest charging station, swipe a credit card, pick up a vehicle, drive to the station closest to their destination, and drop off the vehicle.

Our group has designed our CityCar to fit into these MoD systems, thus creating a complementary network that can solve what transportation planners call the “First Mile Last Mile” problem of public transit — that is, how to bridge the distance between your real origin (i.e., your home) to the transit station and from the transit station to your real final destination (i.e., your workplace). Often these distances are too long to walk, thus encouraging private automobile use.

The expansion of MoD into a sustainable urban ecosystem can be achieved by introducing additional shared-use vehicle types like electric bicycles and scooters. (Smart Cities has also designed an electric folding scooter called the “RoboScooter” and an electric bike called the “GreenWheel.”) This will offer flexibility and convenience while allowing for asymmetric trips. For example, a user can drive a GreenWheel to the supermarket, then go home with a CityCar that can carry groceries.

We believe that MoD systems will work better than private automobiles in cities because you never have to worry about storing the vehicle. In many cases, a MoD charging station will be closer to your final destination than if you had to park in a private lot. A typical urban trip is short, however; much of the time spent is not actually driving, but rather walking to the vehicle and finding parking once you get there. A recent study by the Imperial College in London showed that, during congested hours, more than 40% of total gasoline use is by cars looking for a parking space!

In 2020, I expect the shift from private gasoline powered use to shared electric vehicles will be on its way. There are three primary factors that will accelerate this trend:

1. Economic and environmental pressure to transition away from petroleum fuels.

2. Technological innovations.

3. Political leadership to promote new regulations and policies for this type of innovation.

In 2010, China has become the world’s number-one automobile market, surpassing the United States. in the total number of cars purchased. The increased consumption of fossil fuels and the emissions of CO2 will be part and parcel of this economic development. This will all but guarantee increased demand for petroleum and set the stage for political responsiveness.

Luckily, most of the technologies required to make the CityCar real already exist today, such as highly efficient electric motors, computational horsepower, new battery technologies, wireless network communications, lightweight composite materials, advanced sensing, and GPS. The only thing that limits us is the inherent difficulty of breaking away from our preconceived notions and embracing this radical rethinking.

About the Author

Ryan Chin is PhD student at the MIT Media Lab in the Smart Cities research group. He has led and managed the design development of lightweight electric vehicles (LEVs), including the CityCar, RoboScooter, and GreenWheel electric bicycle. In 2007, Chin co-founded the MIT Smart Customization group, which is focused on improving the ability of companies to efficiently customize products and services across a diverse set of industries and customer groups. Web site: http://cities.media.mit.edu.

The author would like to acknowledge the collective effort of the Smart Cities team that developed the CityCar, RoboScooter, GreenWheel, and the Mobility-on-Demand System. He is particularly grateful for the guidance of Professor William J. Mitchell and team leaders William Lark Jr., Raul-David “Retro” Poblano, Michael Chia-Liang Lin, Andres Sevtsuk, Dimitris Papanikolaou, and Chih-Chao Chuang.

The Future Then and Now: Electronic Newspapers

When futurists were first outlining scenarios for electronic news delivery, they didn’t foresee the overwhelming demand for interactivity, nor the consequences of multitudes of competing information sources.

The Internet has so transformed our lives that we may forget how recently it came about. Interestingly, one of the industries it’s transformed most radically—journalism—was in the process of changing anyway.

“Futurists have long speculated that newspapers would someday be delivered electronically to people’s homes. In Britain, electronic newspapers are already a reality,” THE FUTURIST reported in “The Electronic Newspaper,” April 1978.

In that article, Kenneth Edwards, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Alabama, took FUTURIST readers on a tour of Britain’s Viewdata system, a scheme whereby information could be transmitted by teletext from a BBC editor’s office directly to viewers’ televisions at home.

While the technologies were being developed to provide online access to news, information, and other communication, another unexpected phenomenon was beginning to occur: a call from media consumers to participate in the process.

Nearly a decade after Edwards’s article, Mike Greenly wrote about his experience as one of the world’s first interactive electronic journalists (“Interactive Journalism and Computer Networking: Exploring a New Medium,” March-April 1987). In addition to covering the World Future Society’s 1986 conference electronically, Greenly also used computer conferencing to cover the Comdex computer trade show in Las Vegas and the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in 1984 (for which Greenly struggled to obtain press credentials).

As he hauled his portable computer to interview such luminaries as New York City Mayor Ed Koch for research on his book Chronicle: The Human Side of AIDS, Greenly sent reports back to a computer bulletin board on The Source (a predecessor of AOL). When he checked back in after a day’s reporting, he would find responses and queries from readers.

“I had a following to whom I offered my reports,” Greenly wrote. “Not just my own attempts at journalism, but interactive journalism, since people could write back to me and electronically converse with each other.”

We caught up with Greenly recently to get his thoughts on today’s—and tomorrow’s—media environment.

“Back when we—myself and scattered online buddies around the world—were exploring or inventing what ‘electronic journalism’ could be, the corporations who were hosting us didn’t seem to have a clue,” he recalls. “They kept pushing stock quotes, news feeds, and weather, but the pull we users felt to spend more time online came primarily from each other and from what we each had to share.”

Welcome to the first glimpse of Web 2.0!

“Today’s online world has surpassed, already, our expectations for it,” Greenly continues. “We knew that people-to-people sharing would only grow and flourish, and we demonstrated for ourselves the power of an on-the-spot ‘reporter’ being able to respond, live, to the queries of distant readers. But we didn’t envision, for example, the impact of broadband to enable the global sharing of YouTube videos of dancing cats or government oppression.

“As for tomorrow,” he adds, “I would personally strongly favor stricter regulation of publicly crediting content. If blog X lifts content from blog Y, for example, I think it must always be clear who generated the original content. That kind of accountability is clearly in the public interest, so that we always know the source of reports or ‘news’ we can trust versus lies disguised as fact.

“As usual, technology is outpacing regulation,” Greenly observes. “But the fast-growing critical mass of online readers and reporters (and the blur between them, since people can play both roles) will—I believe and I hope—lead to clearer legal guidelines that protect content providers, encourage them to keep providing, and enable all of us to use or avoid them, depending on what matters to us.”

Coincidentally, Greenly’s 1987 article appeared in the same issue in which THE FUTURIST described a technology enabling researchers to better communicate with each other—“ScholarNet: The Beginning of a World Academic Community” by Richard W. Slatta of North Carolina State University. We would later know this technology better as the Internet.

About the Author

Cynthia G. Wagner is managing editor of THE FUTURIST and editor of the World Future Society’s e-newsletter, Futurist Update. E-mail cwagner@wfs.org.

For more information, visit Mike Greenly at www.mikegreenly.com.

Tomorrow in Brief: July-August 2010

Solar Power at the Micro Scale

Tiny, sunlight-capturing cells could one day provide a nearly ubiquitous source of mobile power. Glitter-sized photovoltaic cells, developed at Sandia National Laboratories, would also lower the costs of solar arrays, as they could be mass-produced using common microelectronic and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) techniques.

Glitter power could be applied on items with unusual shape, such as clothing or other textiles used for hiking, hunting, and military operations.

Source: Sandia National Laboratories, www.sandia.gov.

“Skinput”: Human Skin as Touchpad

Instead of scribbling someone’s phone number in your palm, you may soon be able to tap the number on your arm or some other part of your body.

A technology called “Skinput,” developed by Carnegie Mellon PhD candidate Chris Harrison and team, uses bio-acoustic sensors that can pick up the signature sounds of a finger tapping on specific locations on the skin. An armband device projects the keypad image on the user’s palm or forearm and picks up the acoustic signature of the finger taps.

Simple devices such as MP3 players could be used without the projected keypads, as users learn where to tap without looking — a true touch system.

Sources: Carnegie Mellon University, www.cmu.edu. Skinput, www.chrisharrison.net/projects/skinput.

Biodegradable Packaging

An eco-friendly alternative to petroleum-based food packaging could come from dairy farms.

Most foods are wrapped in multilayer films made of synthetic polymers, which has some consumers worried about the use of petroleum in manufacturing the film and disposing of the waste after it’s used.

Agricultural researchers believe dairy proteins such as casein and whey offer a viable alternative to petroleum.

Future research will address the ability of dairy-based packaging to provide adequate barriers to moisture.

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, www.ars.usda.gov.

Tattletale Pills

Doctors, caregivers, and clinical researchers may soon have an easy way to make sure patients are taking their medicines: The pills will tell on them.

Engineers at University of Florida have developed a digestible microchip and antenna that can be integrated into a standard medicine capsule; when it’s swallowed, it automatically sends an alert to the doctor or caregiver.

Improving compliance is important not just for patients using prescription drugs, but also for clinical drug research, since a participant’s failure to take the experimental drug will skew the test results.

Source: University of Florida, www.ufl.edu.

Conquering Phobias Pharmaceutically

It may one day be possible to vaccinate yourself against irrational fears.

Researchers at the University of Hiroshima used classical conditioning to “teach” goldfish to become frightened by a flash of light; however, fish that first received injections of the anesthetic lidocaine into their cerebellums maintained steady heart rates, suggesting that they did not learn to fear the flash.

The effects of the lidocaine were temporary, but the researchers hope their work could one day help people overcome phobias. (And perhaps an alternative to injections could help those with a fear of needles.)

Source: “Effects of Local Anesthesia of the Cerebellum on Classical Fear Conditioning in Goldfish,” Masayuki Yoshida and Ruriko Hirano, Behavioral and Brain Functions, BioMed Central, www.behavioralandbrainfunctions.com.

What Quantum Computing Means for National Security

If cyberwarfare is the Cold War of the new millennium, quantum computation may be the hydrogen bomb.

Researchers with Google, D-Wave (a Canadian computer hardware company), and the U.S. government are looking to quantum physics to make vastly more-capable computers. They may also find the key to making certain networks, pages, or computers nearly invincible to cyberattacks, or render certain Internet security systems completely defenseless.

Quantum computation harnesses the unique behavior of subatomic particles — behaviors that don’t occur anywhere else in nature above this incredibly small scale. Scientists view quantum physics as distinct from regular physics for this reason. It’s also why subatomic particles can be made to compute information differently than their bulkier macro-scale counterparts.

Regular computers function through the use of transistors. An electric current running through the transistor activates a switch, turning the switch either on or off, thus giving it a value of either one or zero. Lots of activated switches create the binary computer codes of ones and zeros that compose all computer functioning. But quantum bits of information (qubits) can convey a value of one, zero, or both at once because certain subatomic particles can exist in more than one state (known as a superposition). If scientists can direct the powers of these in-between numbers, they can use them to solve mathematical problems, called quantum algorithms, which have long eluded solutions.

A quantum computing breakthrough could, in turn, enable governments to break otherwise impervious encryption codes such as the “public key” cryptographic systems that protect your e-mail and bank account. Cracking the public key could render such security measures worthless. The same trick could be reversed to create essentially unbreakable encryption codes.

One potentially vulnerable code is the “public key” system, based on a supremely difficult math problem called Shor’s algorithm. Cryptography may sound like some obscure security concept of little relevance to civilians, but millions of people interact with public key codes every day.

For instance, thousands of U.S. banks rely on a type of public key system called RSA (named for Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, its inventors) to provide users with private online account access. Web sites around the world use a public key system called the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) when they integrate Google code into their sites’ functioning, in order to keep areas of their site visible only to secure, approved users. Home WiFi networks employ various “public keys” to keep their networks closed to hackers (or neighbors who refuse to buy their own routers). As more sensitive data — possibly involving medical records or the electric grid — is brought online, the use of simple encryptions like RSA and DSA will likely increase, potentially spreading vulnerabilities across the system

“There is a national security interest in not being the second country to build a large quantum computer,” says Dave Bacon, a computer scientist at Washington University.

Recently, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) unveiled what they called “the world’s most efficient single photon detector,” which is purportedly able to count individual particles of light traveling through fiberoptic cables with roughly 99% efficiency. The announcement could have ramifications for quantum computing efforts and for secure networking. A detector that could recognize if a photon forming part of a transmission were missing would be a substantial defense against information theft, say researchers.

According to the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), several research groups have built functioning multiple qubit processing systems in which two qubits were able to interact in a stable way.

Canadian company D-Wave is the industry pioneer in the building of these processors, having invested $44 million over the last five years. The biggest chips the company has feature 128 total qubits, according to D-Wave chief technical officer Geordie Rose. (Not all of qubits interact — or form an “entanglement gate” — on the chip, however.) Last December, the Google image recognition team led by Hartmut Neven demonstrated a search algorithm that could differentiate objects in thousands of still photographs. The demonstration was run on the D-Wave chip developed by Rose.

A number of technological hurdles remain before these chips can show their superiority to regular processors. Researchers will have to maintain and improve control over the chips’ quantum operations in more complex environments. Additional challenges will arise from trying to increase the density of the qubits used in the devices.

Rose says the net knowledge gain from quantum computing R&D is probably wider than we can imagine. “A universal quantum computer is the most powerful computer possible in our universe,” he told THE FUTURIST. “Anything better would quite literally violate the laws of physics.” — Patrick Tucker

Sources: Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. www.iarpa.gov.

D-Wave, personal interviews with Dave Bacon, Geordie Rose. A detailed paper on the D-Wave processor may be obtained at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.1628.

Further reading: “Recent Progress in Quantum Algorithms” by Dave Bacom and Wim van Dam, Communications of the ACM.

What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

By Patrick Tucker

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Norton 2010. 264 pages. $26.95.

Nicholas Carr achieved notoriety after a July 2008 article in The Atlantic, in which he asked, “Is Google Making us Stoopid?” For all its wonders, all the convenience it creates for consumers and the money it makes for companies across the world, the Internet may actually be a diseducating force, gradually and invisibly rendering the surfing public incapable of reflective thought or sustained attention, argued Carr.

In posing this polemic, he set fire to a debate that still smolders. Web proponent Clay Shirky called Carr’s essay a “caricature of Luddism.” Best-selling author Steven Johnson, writing in the Chicago Tribune, derided it as “perfect fodder for a ‘don’t-be-ridiculous’ blog post.”

In his newest book, The Shallows, Carr responds to these criticisms and shows that neurological and cultural effects of heavy Internet use are becoming more observable and measurable. As our reliance on ever brighter and faster Internet content increases, a new force is taking hold across the culture of the Web-connected world, leading to changes in reading habits and even in human brains. The Internet trends of today foreshadow the surfing, the teaching, learning, and thinking of tomorrow. The picture of our intellectual future, rendered thoroughly, convincingly, and often beautifully in Carr’s text, is bleak enough to give any serious mind some serious pause. Studies show that constant exposure to high-speed Internet is making us quicker in our ability to make connections and more adept at finding what we’re looking for online using search engines. But we’re losing something of great value in the trade: the literary mind-set.

The Internet has many virtues and is perhaps as great an aid to research and conversation as Gutenberg’s printing press or the library of Alexandria; however, the effect that the Web has on the brain is rather distinct from that of books and more traditional literary activity. If sitting and reading a piece of static text for long periods of time feels “less natural” or “less intuitive” than zipping through the various pages, applications, and comments of a Web page, that’s because it is. The patience and focus required for sustained engagement with static text must be cultivated, a primary benefit of reading. Our most significant achievements as a species — the discovery of the scientific method, the recognition of universal human rights, and the exploration of space — would have been impossible without the rigorous, stubborn, disciplined, and unnatural literary mind-set; brains, in other words, capable of understanding and analyzing extremely complex narrative and dialogic arguments.

The traits of the informed intellect are essential to the furtherance of scholarship, particularly in difficult and abstract domains like science or philosophy, but the educated mind-set isn’t characteristic of the brain’s natural state. Like those of most of our cousins in the animal kingdom, the human neural and sensory network is biologically predisposed to quick attention shifts and unstructured rapid-fire responses to stimuli. In our wildest state, we’re wide-eyed, constantly searching our environment for threats to be avoided or opportunities to be exploited. We emerged upon the world naked, dirty, and easily distracted.

Book culture offered humanity some reprieve from this condition. But the Internet, in the speed and randomness with which it presents new information to the user, encourages a return to the feral mode of information gathering. Although the Web overflows with text, the bounty of links available in any article or post, the advertisements, the widgets, the blog displays increasingly crowding out the pages of even ostensible information sources, have the effect of pushing the brain away from the words on the screen as forcefully as they pull the user toward the most up-to-the-moment celebrity tweet.

“The need to evaluate links and make related navigational choices, while also processing a multiplicity of rapid sensory stimuli, requires mental coordination and decision making, distracting the brain from the work of interpreting text or other information,” says Carr. “The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. The more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted, to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention.”

Herein lies an explanation for why so many of us feel challenged to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory. The type of reading that the Internet engenders does not inspire or support the cultivation of the literary mind-set. Indeed the effect of the Internet, Carr argues, is to unravel that mind-set where it exists, and prevent its formation where it is absent. It was, after all, unnatural to begin with. The effect of this trend can be clearly perceived: Every day, every hour that we submit to the furtherance of Internet culture, we are creating a new type of civilization. Its schools and offices shall be populated with individuals who lack the mental circuitry required to read beyond a few sentences. These are the students, teachers, entrepreneurs, and leaders of the future.

The postliterate being whom Carr conjures up is a subtle sort of monster. He grows more menacing the longer you stare at him. This creature processes visual signals and forms memories differently from his more book-reliant ancestors. He is incapable of reflection or contemplation and doesn’t care to remember much. He is limited in terms of his capacity for original thought, having spent his entire life tailoring his communications to meet the expectations of an ever-vigilant network of so-called peers. He communicates constantly but only in sparse bursts. He can think with great speed but cannot know anything with certainty. He cannot conceive of hard-won knowledge yet is isolated in his hastily reached convictions. He is quick in every decision. What is perhaps most frightening about the phantom of The Shallows, this ghost of our collective future self, is how much, and how quickly, we have come to resemble him already.

About the Reviewer

Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine.

Books in Brief, May-June 2010

Edited by Rick Docksai

Life After Fossil Fuels

Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis by Richard Heinberg. New Society. 2009. 200 pages. Paperback. $18.95.

Momentum is growing to combat climate change, but the use of fossil fuels continues to rise, reports Post Carbon Institute scholar Richard A. Heinberg.

He warns that, in the next few decades, supplies of coal, oil, and natural gas will run low. Societies will have to expend more resources on extracting the remaining supplies, and quality of life will deteriorate. Over time, economic catastrophe and political anarchy may befall much of the industrialized world.

Only with proactive effort now to reduce energy consumption and limit further growth of cities and mass industry can we avert this future. More fundamentally, governments must measure economic growth in terms of human welfare and environmental stability rather than GDP.

These efforts require near-term sacrifices, while their payoff will not bear fruit until later in the future. Implementation thus defies conventional political thinking, which fixates on imminent risks and opportunities. As actual oil shortages and coal price increases become manifest, however, policy makers might rethink strategies they would not consider now.

Designing Isn’t Just For Designers

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation by Tim Brown. HarperCollins. 2009. 260 pages. Paperback. $27.99.

Design executive Tim Brown attributes many of the boldest innovations in business today to “design thinking,” a radical product-development strategy that “pulls design out of the studio” and channels the creativity of everyone in a company or organization, from the CEO down to the entry-level employee.

Brown describes the design-thinking process and the principles that underlie it: shifting thinking from “problem” to “project”; working in small teams, rather than large groups; supplementing incremental innovation with evolutionary innovation that extends beyond a company’s traditional base and takes it in new directions; people from different disciplines joining forces; creating stories to share ideas; and empathizing with real people, so as to create products and services that will improve their lives.

The Palm Pilot, the Wii, and Netflix all were born of design thinking, according to Brown. It’s catching on in hospitals, universities, NGOs, and businesses of every industry. He is hopeful that, as design thinking continues to spread, it will help industries and organizations of all kinds to resolve a much wider range of problems than they had ever thought possible.

Change By Design offers inspirational reading for entrepreneurs and designers in many fields of industry.

The Nature of the Cosmos

Cosmic Conversations: Dialogues on the Nature of the Universe and the Search for Reality by Stephan Martin. New Page Books. 2010. 287 pages. Paperback. $16.99.

We humans have been trying to understand the cosmos since prehistory and will keep inquiring well into the future, according to astronomer Stephan Martin. He presents interviews with 20 thinkers, each of whom speaks about the cosmos, but from a spiritual rather than a scientific or materialistic standpoint.

• Brian Swimme, California Institute of Integral Studies cosmologist, finds deep truths about the cosmos within the languages of the Hopi, Navajo, and other indigenous peoples. English, he says, is embedded with Newtonian perceptions of reality. Researchers now know that the universe does not conform to Newton. English does not have the words to describe it, but many indigenous peoples’ languages do.

• Futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, notes that the universe has been evolving since its inception. She adds that the evolution may be accelerating, and that we are active participants: We can either self-destruct or ascend and become a universal species.

• Media activist Duane Elgin speculates that the universe is regenerating and recreating itself anew at astonishingly rapid speeds. Our purpose, he says, is to keep evolving with it by growing progressively in self-knowledge.

Other interviewees include astronaut Edgar Mitchell; Peter Russell, author of The Global Brain; and the Rev. Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World.

In Cosmic Conversations, scholars of any field might find material relevant to their concerns.

Trading Freedom for Economic Security

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer. Portfolio. 2010. 221 pages. $26.95.

The free-market economic system of Europe and North America could be undone by a new rival, called state capitalism, warns political consultant Ian Bremmer.

State capitalism is the economic system of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and many other politically authoritarian countries. In each, the government owns various companies and uses the markets to create wealth that it can direct as it deems best-suited for maximizing the state’s power and the leadership’s chances of survival.

Bremmer tracks the rise of state capitalism out of the ruins of the Soviet command economy and its present-day potential to unseat free markets and take control of the global financial system. The 2008 recession has emboldened state capitalism’s proponents, since they can claim a degree of stability that the U.S. economy lacks. Free markets might withstand the challenge, but only if they successfully reform themselves to guard against future meltdowns and crises.

Readers will find in The End of the Free Market a thought-provoking critique of the existing economic system and its future.

Low-Cost, Low-Risk Space Flight

Lightcraft Flight Handbook LTI-20 by Leik Myrabo and John S. Lewis. Apogee. 2009. 284 pages. Paperback. $29.95.

Jet airplanes and rocket-propelled spacecraft are profligate fossil-fuel burners and carbon-dioxide emitters, according to aerospace engineer Leik Myrabo and planetary-sciences professor John S. Lewis. They look forward to the debut — possibly by 2025 — of carbon-free “lightcraft.”

These up-and-comers, the authors explain, wouldn’t use rocket boosters or combustion engines. Instead, they would run on electromagnetic waves beamed to them from remote satellite power stations.

The lightcraft will not only be cleaner, but also immensely cheaper. Average consumers might finally be able to afford to travel to space. National and international space programs could ferry personnel and supplies continuously to bases on the Moon or to space stations in near-Earth orbit.

Non-space flight will be easier, too, the authors explain. These lightcraft will be fast enough to fly passengers from one hemisphere to another in under an hour.

Myrabo and Lewis describe the state of lightcraft technology and detail how, with further development, it could evolve into the components of lightcraft spaceplanes.

Engineers and astronomers will enjoy this book, as will many nonscientist readers — provided that they are so excited by the prospect of cheap space flight that they are not daunted by many pages of technical jargon.

Charting the Pathways of Disaster

Mega Disasters: The Science of Predicting the Next Catastrophe by Florin Diacu. Princeton University Press. 2010. 195 pages. $24.95.

It is possible to mathematically predict the directions in which stars, planets, and other objects in space will travel, but can we also predict how things will unfold on Earth? Yes, in many cases, argues mathematician Florin Diacu.

Real-life systems are often unpredictable and hard to calculate, he notes. We can, however, recognize many dangers before they happen and avert them if we watch for the common warning signs. He cites examples of tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, stock market crashes, and other particularly consequential phenomena.

Mega Disasters offers a highly readable cross-disciplinary perspective on tsunamis, pandemics, climate change, and financial collapses.

Connecting Wildlife, Habitats, and People

Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution by Caroline Fraser. Metropolitan. 2009. 400 pages. $28.50.

In just one century, we could undo hundreds of millions of years of natural evolutionary processes, according to ecologist Caroline Fraser. She warns that the loss of ecosystems to growing human populations and rampant development could wipe out half the world’s animal and plant species by 2100.

Rewilding might stop this massive extinction before it happens, she argues. Rewilding consists of preserving and expanding key habitat areas; linking them with “corridors,” or intersecting patches of land; then mobilizing local people to participate in caring for these ecosystems.

Conservationists now agree that rescuing isolated patches of earth is not enough. It is also necessary to save the greater system of which individual lands are just parcels.

Fraser shares examples of successful rewilding in North America, South America, Europe, and Africa. She sees a bright future ahead for it. The establishment and maintenance of corridors and reserves is an engine of job creation. Plus, these projects might mitigate climate change by stabilizing forests and sequestering carbon dioxide.

A Renewable-Energy Vision

Turning Oil into Salt: Energy Independence Through Fuel Choice by Gal Luft and Anne Korin. Booksurge. 2009. 138 pages. Paperback. $14.99.

Current oil-consumption rates will require four new Saudi Arabias before the century is finished, according to the co-directors of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in Potomac, Maryland.

Gal Luft and Anne Korin, in their new book Turning Oil into Salt, rate the odds of finding such bonanzas as virtually nonexistent. Instead, they hope that societies will embrace electric-powered transportation.

Supply issues aside, the switch to electric would advance global democracy, according to the authors. Oil dependence forced the United States to forge alliances with brutal dictatorships and support them while they oppressed their peoples. An oil-free United States could press these dictatorships to reform.

But energy independence will not happen, the authors conclude, until car designers develop electric cars with wide ranges and affordable batteries. The authors offer reasons for hope, such as promising outcomes from tests of several new batteries, potential for methanol and algae-based biofuels to provide cheap power, and the possibility of a scaled transition via plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

Turning Oil into Salt provides a balanced overview of where electric car technology stands now and where it might head. This is a worthwhile book for car enthusiasts, environmentalists, policy makers, and anyone who looks forward to a post-fossil-fuel world.

Are Humans Headed for Extinction?

The Vanishing of a Species? A Look at Modern Man’s Predicament by a Geologist by Peter Gretener. Qualitas. 2010. 280 pages. $19.95.

In the 1970s, geologist Peter Gretener believed strongly that the human race would go extinct if it did not dramatically readjust its ways of living. He wrote a manuscript explaining why, but he died before he could publish it.

In 2009, his son, Nick Gretener, discovered the manuscript and found that “much of what had been put down some 30 years ago rings as true today as when it was written, perhaps even more so given the current economic turmoil.”

Nick Gretener had the text published as The Vanishing of a Species. His father’s words — untouched except for obligatory proofreading corrections and occasional editorial notes — implore the human race to reassess its actual needs and scale back its expectations accordingly. The author cautions that permanent economic growth is impossible, that pursuit of happiness via material gain guarantees disappointment, and that the planet will not support our continued trajectory of population expansion. True prosperity necessitates that we flourish within our planet’s ecological limits.

The Vanishing of a Species is a valuable look both backwards and forwards — the challenges the world faced in the twentieth century, and the challenges it still faces today. Historians and futurists both may find much to like.

Connecting the Dots

ReThink: A Twenty-First Century Approach to Preventing Social Catastrophes by Donald Louria. LouWat. 2010. 200 pages. $24.95.

The world’s problems will be much more manageable if we look at them all at once, says health scholar Donald Louria. In systems thinking, every issue and challenge in the world is viewed as part of an integrated whole. Only by observing the whole, he argues, can we adequately judge the individual parts.

Louria’s own brand of systems thinking diagrams a system’s parts and their relationships. He applies this diagram to a range of contemporary problems. Among them are:

• The case for and against public-health recommendations to consumers to eat more omega-3 rich fish.

• The potential for the United States and other countries to deploy military hardware in space.

• The pros and cons of universal screening for health conditions.

Many approaches for systems thinking and complexity science exist, he says, but they tend to require years of study. Louria touts his method as one that anyone can use: With a semester of instruction, high-school students could become regular systems thinkers.

Louria is a scholar who is writing about futurist theory. But like the method itself, ReThink is approachable for a well-educated reader.

China First

By Patrick Tucker

China's Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society by John and Doris Naisbitt. Harper Business. 242 pages. $27.

Oh, to be China in 2010, object of the world’s envy, admiration, and fear. Since the economic reforms of the late premier Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, the country has gone from a relatively isolated authoritarian state into a shining triumph of socialist-market economics. At present rates of growth, it will be the world’s largest economy by the middle of this century, overtaking the United States and achieving a GDP above $14 trillion per year — a significant first.

The question of how China became so successful, and what its leadership might do next, is a source of speculation and consternation, particularly in Washington, D.C. In China’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society, John and Doris Naisbitt dissect China’s achievement and provide what they call a “balance” to the “heavily weighted negative commentary” about China in the U.S. media.

Why has China grown so much so quickly? The Naisbitts present an exhaustive list of success stories, but their most novel insight comes from the retelling of a third-century Chinese legend. General Zhuge Liang sat on the banks of the Yangtze River facing the enemy army of Cao Cao on the other side. Rather than attack directly, Zhuge sent over various boats packed with straw. Cao Cao’s archers, perceiving an attack, sent a hail of arrows down onto the boats, whereupon Zhuge retrieved the vessels — and stole his enemy’s ammunition.

Deng employed the same “borrowing arrows” strategy when he invited foreign capital and industry into the country, starting with Volkswagen in 1978. Other large Western firms followed, including Boeing and IBM. The arrangement provided abundant cheap labor for U.S. companies. China secured capital and, more importantly, technological expertise — arrows that the West valued cheaply, it turns out. In 2005 Lenovo, which did subcontracting work for IBM under a different name, became the world’s third-largest computer manufacturer when it acquired IBM’s PC division. The Naisbitts forecast that China will eventually become the world’s largest supplier of electric cars, thanks in part to lessons learned building automobile parts for foreign companies.

In the century ahead, China will be first to reach a number of milestones as it seeks to leverage its growing technological sophistication to meet the needs of its one-billion-plus population. Faced with the challenge of educating an impoverished rural workforce, but free from the influence of teachers’ unions, China may be the first country to succeed in educating most of its population through the Internet. From 2003 to 2007, China spent about $1 billion to implement distance-learning projects in the rural countryside.

China’s leaders have invested heavily in the nation’s technological infrastructure through the establishment of various research and development centers such as the Zhangjiang High-Tech Park or the ZHTP (the park’s researchers received 2,205 patents in 2007 alone). It’s no wonder AI researcher Hugo de Garis, who has lived in China for years, has expressed certainty that China will be the first country to create an artificial general intelligence. The children of the researchers who work at ZHTP can elect to take SAT prep classes at the expense of the government (to secure placement in U.S. universities) or they can go along the Chinese track to continue their education in China. It’s a great education by American standards. It’s hardly typical of what most children in China experience.

How does China reconcile an explosion in private wealth with the tenets of communism? Easily, say the Naisbitts. Prosperity for all remains the Chinese government’s goal. But, in the words of Deng himself, China has “allowed some people and some regions to become prosperous first.” Trickle-down economics is apparently just another arrow to be employed expeditiously. The Chinese people don’t find the apparent contradiction nearly as troubling as do China’s critics.

Western concerns about the state of human rights behind the Great Wall aren’t shared by the Chinese people, according to the Naisbitts, and the authors are dismissive of Tibetan or Taiwanese sympathizers. From the 1970s to today, the human rights condition in China has been steadily, even remarkably, improving, the authors point out. Minority rights, worker rights, distribution of wealth, open elections, freedom of capital, freedom of speech, and rule of law: China is making “progress” in every one of these areas. But the Chinese people are happy to allow the government to determine the pace of that progress, rather than suffer the lectures of the West, they assert.

Too many in the West hold to a single, self-flattering image of China as an oppressed people in need of rescue, say the Naisbitts. This picture, born of that iconic moment in Tiananmen Square where an unarmed protester confronted a tank, isn’t representative of how the Chinese view themselves or their government today. China’s continued growth depends on access to U.S. consumer markets and technological expertise, for now. But the Chinese people do not see themselves as needing liberation by Washington. They perceive their future as bright. According to a China Daily poll that the authors cite, 76% of Chinese believe the world will be better in five years. Is China Daily a credible source? Don’t worry, journalistic independence is “improving,” too.

Unfortunately, in their pursuit of balance, the Naisbitts did not, it seems, include any personal interviews with any Chinese dissidents. If they sought any such interactions but were blocked by Chinese censors, they don’t remark on it. China’s Megatrends will likely strike American readers as adulatory in the tone it takes to the country’s leadership. For all of its merits, the book too often reads like a marketing pitch from the office of the Communist Party of China, intended to extol the country’s success and show the government’s sensitivity to the concerns of the people (note: the level of sensitivity is also improving).

China’s ascent is butting up against major obstacles. But the Naisbitts devote barely a sentence to the lack of transparency in Chinese financial institutions; to wit: “China’s banking system is more or less a monopoly. State-owned banks give loans to large [state-owned enterprises] that are operating at a loss; thus large amounts of nonperforming loans have accumulated.” You may recall, it was large, nonperforming loans sitting on bank balance sheets that nearly plunged the world into a second global depression just two years ago. The Naisbitts don’t explore the size of the Chinese finance bubble and don’t speculate when, if ever, it will pop.

The deteriorating freshwater situation is the larger problem, and the Naisbitts do pay more attention here. China hosts 20% of the world’s population, but the country holds only 7% of its resources. As covered in this magazine, the most water-intensive and highly polluting industries — paper, textiles, processed food production, and agriculture — have migrated to China’s relatively arid north, from which the more economically significant southern portion imports most of its food. The authors forecast that “water shortages in Beijing will become a crisis when its population, as expected, reaches 20 million in 2010, 3 million more than its current resources can support.” The Naisbitts offer examples of China attempting to deal proactively with the water situation. But it remains a daunting problem and an example of the most important first China is likely to achieve: limits to growth.

The obstacles are significant, but China seems poised to handle them dexterously. The country has made a habit of defying expectations. It’s done so for centuries. In 607 CE, the insolent Japanese prince Shotoku referred to the aging empire to Japan’s west as the “land of the setting sun.” China recently eclipsed Germany’s status as the third largest country in terms of GDP and will likely surpass Japan by the end of 2010. It seems the sun also rises.

About the Reviewer

Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST and director of communications of the World Future Society.

Film’s Immortals: Forever Young and in 3-D

By Cynthia G. Wagner
The technical achievements of filmmakers like James Cameron, director of Avatar, suggest that futurists’ predictions are close to coming true.

More than 20 years ago, THE FUTURIST wrote of the possibility of bringing Humphrey Bogart (and other movie stars) back to cinematic life.

The item, “Bogey’s High-Tech Comeback” (Tomorrow in Brief, March-April 1987), focused on combining computer animation with accelerated image processing. Theoretically, every move that Bogart ever made in the movies, and every syllable he uttered, could be stored and reprocessed into new moves and new dialogue in future movies.

That future is very nearly now.

In a recent Entertainment Weekly story about the technical achievements in Avatar, James Cameron’s blockbuster 3-D movie, columnist Benjamin Svetkey commented that the photorealistic CGI (computer-generated imaging) technology “could easily be used for other, even more mind-blowing purposes — like, say, bringing Humphrey Bogart back to life.”

So why is that future not now, but only “nearly” now? Ethics, according to Cameron. While the motion-capture and CGI technology that enabled Cameron to transform live actors like Sigourney Weaver into characters far younger (and weirder), his technology would still require a live actor to recreate Bogart’s movements. And since Bogart apparently did not leave permission for the use of his likeness in this way, Cameron suggests that it would be unethical to bring the dead back to life.

The future that Cameron has given us with Avatar is that of the virtual actor (vactor), described in the May-June 1993 FUTURIST in a story about the VActor Animation Creation System developed by SimGraphics Engineering.

And of course there’s that other future we’ve been waiting for — a really awesome 3-D movie. Now that high-definition television networks like ESPN and Discovery are launching dedicated 3-D channels, we can say that the 3-D TV “future,” too, is finally “now.”

About the Author

Cynthia G. Wagner has been an editor for THE FUTURIST since 1981.

Future Scope, May-June 2010

TECHNOLOGY

Electric Cars That Charge Themselves

Materials scientists may have come up with the ultimate solution for keeping cars running: automobile body parts that store and discharge electrical energy.

The prototype material designed by researchers with Imperial College London, Volvo, and other partners is a lightweight composite of carbon fibers and a polymer resin, which could be used to replace metal flooring. Ultimately, the material could make hybrid gasoline/electric vehicles lighter and more energy efficient, allowing motorists to travel longer distances between recharges.

The material could also be used in a number of other applications, such as casings for cell phones and other electronic gadgets used on the go.

Source: Imperial College London, www.imperial.ac.uk.

HEALTH

Children with HIV Are Living Longer

Fewer children are dying of AIDS, thanks to the intensive antiretroviral treatments that have been prescribed since the 1990s, according to the National Institutes of Health. The death rate of children with HIV has been reduced ninefold, although mortality among children with HIV is still 30 times higher than among their noninfected peers.

The “cocktails” of multiple drugs used for highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) help ward off the opportunistic infections and other complications in HIV-infected patients. The death rate among HIV patients under age 21 has fallen from 7.2 per 100 in 1994 to a now-stabilized 0.8 in 2000, and the mean age at death has more than doubled, from 8.9 to 18.2 years old.

Source: National Institutes of Health, www.nih.gov.

ENVIRONMENT

Second-Hand Pollution

Recycling old equipment in developed countries for reuse in the developing world could be bad for the environment in the receiving countries, warns a research team from the University of Luxembourg and the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.

Access to affordable tools and equipment has helped stimulate economic growth in the Third World, but these older technologies tend to be more polluting than newer, more-efficient manufacturing equipment. Thus, the short-term choice of purchasing equipment that is cheaper but dirtier may have long-term costs in increased pollution.

“Pressures put on developing countries in order to reduce their barriers to imports of used goods should thus be balanced against the costs of supplementary pollution that the use of older technology will induce,” the researchers conclude.

Source: “Polluting Technologies and Economic Development” by Luisito Bertinelli et al., International Journal of Global Environmental Issues 2010 (Volume 10, Number 1/2), Inderscience, www.inderscience.com.

GOVERNMENT

Alternatives to Prison

The United States could save $9.7 billion by exploring alternatives to imprisonment for low-level offenses, claims the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

In 2008, about 414,000 Americans were serving time for nonviolent, nonsexual crimes that do not involve significant property loss. Most would be eligible for alternative sanctions that would be less costly than incarceration, such as electronic monitoring or enrollment in drug treatment or work-release programs.

Such programs have proven effective in states where they have been implemented, according to the Council. The United States currently spends about $12.9 billion to incarcerate individuals convicted of these less-dangerous crimes.

Source: National Council on Crime and Delinquency, http://nccd-crc.org.

RESOURCES

Making Food Plants Climate-Proof

Agricultural scientists believe they have isolated the “thermometer” gene in plants that allows them to sense and adapt to temperature changes. The work could one day lead to crops that are impervious to climate change.

Researchers Vinod Kumar and Phil Wigge of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, U.K., discovered a mutant plant that seemed to grow as though it were in hot conditions, despite the temperature being turned down.

The defective gene gives the scientists a clue in plant growth switching mechanisms, which may permit them to create crops that could grow in any climate condition. Such a possibility would be a boon to places like Africa, where food production is predicted to decline dramatically over the next decade.

Source: John Innes Centre, www.jic.ac.uk.

Homosexuality and Family Formation

For the first time in its history, the U.S. Census Bureau will count gay marriages in its 2010 surveys. By collecting and releasing data on same-sex partners, both married and unmarried, and on the numbers of children being raised in these households, the new census will enable researchers and policy makers to do more than extrapolate from existing data.

In previous rounds of census taking, the Bureau has classified married households as only consisting of opposite-sex couples, while unmarried households could consist of either opposite-sex or same-sex couples. Gay or lesbian partners, on the other hand, were either classified as unmarried, even if they declared themselves to be spouses, or erroneously recorded as opposite-sex spouses.

The Bureau has attempted to hypothetically correct its existing data using models such as those that reassigned respondents’ gender based on their first names. The results increased the number of same-sex unmarried partners in the United States in 2000 from 0.6 million to an estimate ranging from 1.1 million to 1.6 million. This model does not correct the data on marital status of same-sex partners, however.

Without official, longitudinal data, it is difficult to track trends in gay/lesbian family formation or to quantify the impacts on children of these household types and of the policies affecting them. As states and voters increasingly weigh the pros and cons of gay marriage and other issues, these data will provide vital (and presumably politically neutral) information.

Heterosexual and homosexual-headed families stand to learn more of both their differences and their similarities in terms of life experiences and challenges in raising children.

Parenting by Homosexuals

Parenting may be as strong an urge in homosexual individuals as it is among heterosexuals, despite what may be counterintuitive from an evolutionary point of view. In a recent study of Samoa’s fa’afafine (a unique gender classification for gay men), Canadian evolutionary psychologists Paul Vasey and Doug VanderLaan found a strong willingness for caretaking and teaching of nieces and nephews, offering the uncles a boost for their family lineage and a way to “earn their evolutionary keep.”

The Western world has not been as supportive of gay males as nurturers as has the more-isolated and communitarian Samoa, but the urge to raise children appears to be especially strong among gay men in the United States. According to a 2007 study of adoption trends by the UCLA School of Law and the Urban Institute, more than 50% of gay men said they desired to be a parent, compared with 41% of lesbians surveyed. Yet, more than a third of lesbians had given birth, while just one in six gay men had fathered or adopted a child.

The study further noted that there may be significant social and economic costs of banning adoption or foster care by lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) parents. Same-sex couples and homosexual singles applying for adoption tend to be older, better educated, and have more economic resources than their heterosexual counterparts. The national cost of excluding this group of motivated and resourceful parents from foster care in the United States was estimated at $87 to $130 million.

Gay men who do become fathers may require more social services, suggests a recent study of fatherhood in the Netherlands. Though same-sex marriage has been approved since 2001 in the Netherlands (the first country to allow it), parenting by LGBT people is less widely accepted. Gay fathers must often share custody with biological mothers, so they typically spend far less time with their children — and have fewer of them — than heterosexual fathers. They also report experiencing more pressure to justify their choice to become fathers, though they are more likely to state that happiness was their motivation than are heterosexual dads.

“Many people can understand a lesbian’s desire to have a baby because they appreciate the idea of maternal instinct,” says University of Iowa anthropologist Ellen Lewin, author of Gay Fatherhood (University of Chicago Press, 2010). “They’re much more suspicious about why gay men would want to be dads, and therefore gay men have to jump through a lot more hoops to be parents.”

As with the Dutch dads, gay fathers in the United States indicate that the desire to have children is part of finding happiness or satisfaction in life, particularly as they mature, Lewin notes. Another motive is to pass on their own values and traditions, just as heterosexual parents do.

“I interviewed several guys who adopted kids with disabilities or other challenges and basically gave their lives up for their children,” says Lewin. “But most weren’t out to be heroes or do something revolutionary by becoming gay fathers. Most were ordinary people who live in suburbs, go to Disney World for their vacations, and just want to have children like anyone else.”

A side effect of parenthood may be the repair or strengthening of relationships with LGBT parents’ own parents, according to Lewin: “I heard stories about gay men who were estranged from their families, but once they had a kid, the grandparents came over all the time. Their relatives may not have understood or supported them in the past, but having kids was something their family got and related to.”

In the United States, gay dads may face another source of criticism — members of the gay community who view parenthood as conformity, according to Lewin. But LGBT parents’ activism may simply have evolved along with their family-oriented lifestyles, as witnessed by such groups as the Family Equality Council and Our Families Count, a campaign partnering with the Census Bureau to ensure that LGBT families are aware of the new Bureau policies and of the importance of being counted.

— Cynthia G. Wagner

Sources: United States Census 2010 Activities Update (December 2009); “Editing Unmarried Couples in Census Bureau Data,” Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division Working Paper (July 2007), Bureau of the Census, www.census.gov.

“An Adaptive Cognitive Dissociation Between Willingness to Help Kin and Nonkin in Samoan Fa’afafine,” Paul Vasey and Doug VanderLaan, Psychological Science (February 4, 2010), www.psychologicalscience.org.

LGBTQ Families, Research Article Summaries, Family Equality Council, www.familyequality.org.

Gay Fatherhood by Ellen Lewin (University of Chicago Press); University of Iowa News Service, www.uiowa.edu.

Nanowires Will Make Computers Smarter

How much more powerful can computers get? Much more than we thought, argue American and British engineers. They cite the recent development of nanowire transistors and transistor-simulation tools.

“As a society, we have come to expect the continuation of Moore’s law,” says Eric Stach, associate professor of materials engineering at Purdue University. Moore’s law is the 1965 assertion by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors that could fit on one integrated circuit would double every two years, and so computers would continue to expand their processing capacity while the price of computer processing would decrease.

Most engineers today doubt that the law can hold true forever, since the silicon-based semiconductors that constitute transistors can only get so small. Stach expects that transistors will reach their limits in the next five to 10 years.

But something else will also take place in five to 10 years, he adds: commercial use of nanowire tranistors.

Stach and other Purdue researchers are working with engineers from IBM and UCLA to develop these new transistors, which are made with silicon and germanium nanowires. The silicon nanowires stand vertically, not horizontally like traditional transistor components, so many more nanowire transistors can fit on one circuit.

The new transistors are also more powerful. The elements that compose them sharply delineate at the atomic level — one solid layer of germanium atop one solid layer of silicon. This is more conducive to effective transistor performance than conventional transistors, whose layers gradually transition from one element to the next. These special features enable them to bypass traditional transistors’ size limitations, Stach explains.

“These structures are being investigated to continue Moore’s law,” he says. Where it might lead is anybody’s guess.

“What will people do with enhanced computation power? Lots!” says Stach.

Existing transistors are already pretty small. Some are no more than a few molecules in size, according to Asen Asenov, University of Glasgow professor of device modeling.

Even smaller ones are possible, he explains, but certain technical problems need to be overcome. One major obstacle to making smaller transistors is that, the smaller they get, the more affected they are by atomic-scale imperfections and variations within the transistor, and thus the more likely the entire microchip will fail to perform as well as it could. To keep shrinking the transistors and improving performance, it is necessary to account for the variability.

Asenov and his Glasgow colleagues have found a way to do so. Working with scientists at Edinburgh, Manchester, Southampton, and York universities, they have devised “simulation tools” that predict how billions of microscopically different transistors will perform if placed together on a computer chip.

These simulation tools will help researchers place nanotransistors in the most optimal arrangements possible. Smaller transistors and more powerful microchips can result.

Moore’s law will reach its end point somewhere, according to Asenov, because no transistor — not even a nanowire one — can be smaller than an atom.

“Because we are hitting the atomic limits, Moore’s law cannot continue forever,” says Asenov. Nevertheless, vast improvements in microchip design and function are still possible. “The end of scaling is not the end of the microchip improvements,” he says.

— Rick Docksai

Sources: Eric Stach, Purdue University, www.purdue.edu.

Asen Asenov, University of Glasgow, www.gla.ac.uk.

Prospects for Truth and Freedom

What would life be like if globalization were to reach its full potential? What about if it fell short or suddenly reversed course?

In his new book, The Future of Truth and Freedom in the Global Village (Praeger, 2010), North Central College religious studies professor Thomas McFaul envisions three different paths that the future might take.

Scenario 1: Fragmentation and Fundamentalism

In the worst-case scenario, globalizing technology produces too much change too quickly, and the frightened masses retreat to the perceived safety, social stability, and unity of their own separate enclaves. People from different religious, ethnic, national, and tribal affiliations voluntarily segregate themselves from each other.

Their cultural traditions, religious worldviews, values, and boundaries bring them respite from encroaching foreign mind-sets. However, the respite is short-lived, due to growing hostility and intolerance between groups with different belief systems. Multiculturalist viewpoints take a backseat to xenophobia. Fundamentalist ideas gain prominence and lead to a rise in terrorist attacks. The first half of the twenty-first century would be characterized by less separation between church and state — and less religious freedom in many countries. If this were to happen, then the democratic growth trend would reverse itself, giving rise to new authoritarian regimes.

Economically, the opposite sides of the spectrum would pose the biggest problems, in McFaul’s view: Greater market deregulation would widen the gap between haves and have-nots and inflict serious structural damage on the middle class (“the foundation for social stability”). On the other hand, excessive regulation, taxation, and nationalization of industry would cause entire economies to stagnate.

All of the above would negatively affect the rate of technological progress.

Outcome for freedom and democracy: “By 2050, the two-centuries-old trend towards democracy also started backing up, as the number of authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes expanded around the planet.”

Scenario 2: Diversity and Harmony

Just because different cultures don’t interact doesn’t mean that they can’t all get along. In McFaul’s second scenario, social integration slows to a crawl at every level, from local to global. As different groups work to preserve their unique cultural identities, they nonetheless peacefully coexist, at least for the most part.

In this scenario, terrorism still poses a strong threat, despite a concerted global effort to eradicate it. Worldwide, democratization slowly grinds to a halt.

Centralized governments (such as China) prove as economically successful as decentralized democracies (such as India).

Under this set of circumstances, technological breakthroughs in fields from transportation to health care would continue to be made.

Outcome for freedom and democracy: By mid-century, democratization has stagnated, providing reassurance to those who feared secularization and the loss of their sacred beliefs — and frustration to those who did not.

Scenario 3: Global Cultural Integration

In the best of all possible worlds, terrorism has been almost completely eliminated — along with most worldview differences. A world “melting pot” culture has emerged, so-called universal values have been embraced, and democracy has spread to many countries, notably China.

Economically, nations everywhere have managed to achieve governments that provide “for the social well-being of all citizens without undermining the entrepreneurial motivations necessary to sustain a modern marketplace economy.” Advances in science and technology continue, and breakthroughs in the biosciences eradicate many diseases.

As for global finance, McFaul writes, “While there is no guarantee, the most probable and preferred economic trend of the future to the year 2050 will involve the spread of the regulated marketplace under the direction of democratically derived governments.”

Outcome for freedom and democracy: “Nations with diverse governments that ranged from multiparty to single-party systems found the balance they needed in order to achieve both political stability and economic growth. … The promises of the Modern world were slowly being realized throughout the global village — even if some communities were marching forward faster than others.”

So, what will the future bring? Of these scenarios, McFaul believes that the first — and most dystopian — scenario is the least likely, since it would necessitate a sudden and complete reversal of key long-term trends. The third — and most utopian — scenario is the most likely, given the long-term indicators.

— Aaron M. Cohen

Source: The Future of Truth and Freedom in the Global Village by Thomas R. McFaul. Praeger, www.abc-clio.com. 2010. 190 pages. $44.95.

Teaching Social Skills

Strengthening Kids’ Social and Emotional Skills, an interview with Clark McKown

THE FUTURIST: You recently identified three key factors in a child’s behavior that could cause him or her to suffer social rejection: inability to pick up on nonverbal cues and social cues in social interaction; inability to recognize cues’ meanings and respond appropriately; and inability to reason about social problems. The first two are pretty self-explanatory. But what, exactly, is the third?

Clark McKown: When we talk about reasoning we're talking about problem solving, real world social dilemmas. For example, if two kids want to play with the same toy, they can’t both play with the same toy. That’s a problem. They’ve got to recognize what the problem is that they want to solve, they’ve got to figure out what they want to get out of the situation, and they have to figure out what they’re going to do to resolve the issue, and then. Then they have to do it. It's really a series of problem-solving steps.

The Futurist: How would a greater awareness of these three factors change the discussion on socially rejected youth and how to help them?

Clark McKown: Identifying these factors would help develop screening tests and treatment plans for social-emotional learning difficulties.

The Futurist: Of the three factors identified, two of them—inability to pick up on nonverbal cues and inability to recognize cues’ meanings—are commonly recognized symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. To what extent does recognizing these three cues early help educators also identify learning disabilities early on?

Clark McGowen: I'm glad you asked that because of two things. One, I'm not sure that kids with ADHD do have deficits in the ability to read nonverbal cues and meanings. We’ve been doing tests of kids with ADHD and autism. The evidence is that a lot of kids with ADHD actually read people pretty well and know what they should do. But they act before they think things through, and so they are they're not able to take advantage of the social smarts that they have. They don’t need to be taught social thinking. They need to be taught to slow down. There's another piece that’s important for social success. That’s social regulation, the ability to refrain from impulsive behavior. Kids who are able to regulate their behavior--slow down, not speak up--end up being at a social advantage.

The Futurist: Many schools currently have staff counselors who work with children who exhibit behavioral problems. Roughly how many of these school counselors know about, and look for, the three factors that you identified?

Clark McGowen: Not too many. I think that many clinicians who work with children who have behavioral issues are looking at whether children are reading people well and so on. But I don’t think it’s pretty uniform. The counselors and mental-health staff at the schools would do well to do these assessments and use them to target treatments. It’s within our reach to do universal screening for social functioning, and to both identify kids who struggle socially and to implement prevention-oriented programming in the schools that gives children the emotional tools they need to succeed. In Illinois and a handful of other states there's legislation that requires school districts to have a plan to address kids with social and emotional needs. We go out to meet school personnel all the time who are aware that they need to be focused on social and emotional issues. I give a lot of credit to school administrators for reaching out and trying to learn these new requirements.

The Futurist: Where are these laws in place, or at least under consideration?

Clark McGowen: They exist in Illinois, New York, California, and the city of Anchorage, Alaska. And there are a handful of other states that are in serious discussion about implementing or passing laws that would increase the focus of school personnel on social learning, teaching social skills in the classrooms. A lot of people are skeptical about that because they think it’s not really the schools’ job, that it’s taking time away from academic pursuits. But it turns out the CASEL Group looked at hundreds of studies and found that when the school implements it well, their social skills improve, and also their tests and grades improve. It’s social learning and academics; it's not either/or. They're both intimately tied together.

The Futurist: In the last 15 years, there have been a number of school shootings committed by students who had been socially isolated and not adequately helped. It wouldn’t surprise me if this had raised momentum for a lot of these new initiatives.

Clark McGowen: I do think that is a big motivator behind some of the legislative efforts.

The Futurist: How early would trained counselors be able to spot these three factors? How early do these signs show compared with other signs of antisocial behavior?

Clark McGowen: What I would recommend for schools is that they look not at the three factors to begin with. The thing to do is figure out who in the school is rejected by peers, actively disliked by peers, excluded from activities, bullied, or is a bully. When you figure that out, those are the kids that you want to do some assessments to figure out if they have skills deficits.

The Futurist: To what extent is concern for children who suffer social rejection a growing phenomenon?

Clark McKown: I think there are a number of groups trying to grapple with this issue of screening identification everyone seems to have a different point of view on it. My view is that there's an inexpensive way of identifying kids having problems socially, and that is to ask kids. Take each kid aside, give the kid a photo of the kids in the class, and have the kid indicate whom he or she likes in the class and whom he or she doesn’t like.. That’s called “sociometrics,” the measurement of peer acceptance. From those two simple questions, you can quickly calculate a score for each child, and you can identify kids who are rejected. It wouldn’t take much for schools to learn how to do it, identify the kids on the fringes, and work on how to integrate them more successfully. Some teachers might be uncomfortable with asking kids to single out other kids who they don’t like. But the questions themselves are not harmful. Kids talk about these things anyway. We’d just make sure that each discussion with each kid is private and stays anonymous. There are other ways, too. Teachers can nominate kids they are concerned about socially, for instance, though they actually don’t get you the quality of information you get when you ask the kids themselves. If you really want to know who is rejected by peers, you ask kids.

The Futurist: What’s a good resource for readers to get more information on these topics?

Clark McKown: I think very highly of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. You can find it online at CASEL.org. It’s a repository of information about programs that can be implemented in school to prevent social problems and help kids who have social problems. If you’re in a school and you want to promote kids behavioral and learning schools, CASEL is where to go.

For more information, see: Rush Neurobehavioral Center, www.rnbc.org . Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, www.casel.org .

Tomorrow in Brief, May-June 2010

The “Greening” of Antarctica

A new wind farm on Antarctica’s Ross Island will supply nearly 1,000 kilowatts of power and save about 240,000 gallons of fuel a year, according to the National Science Foundation. The three new turbines offer a “green” source of power for the polar research work conducted at McMurdo Station (U.S.) and Scott Base (New Zealand).

Once powered by a nuclear plant (closed about 40 years ago), Antarctica’s research stations currently rely on diesel generators and boilers for electricity and heat. The wind farm will meet up to 15% of McMurdo’s and nearly all of Scott Base’s electricity demand.

Source: National Science Foundation, www.nsf.gov.

WordBuzz: Transvaluation

The dictionary defines transvaluing as reevaluating something in a way that repudiates accepted standards. In the case of anthropologists studying ways to save the western lowland gorillas of the Central African Republic, transvaluation refers to combining ethnographic and ecological studies to improve understanding of the role of local human cultures in species preservation.

“Conservation isn’t just about protecting wildlife,” says Purdue University anthropology professor Melissa Remis. “You also need to consider the human dimension such as how local hunting technologies or even migration can change how land is used.”

For instance, diminished populations of a local species of antelope, called duikers, has led many hunters to turn to the gorillas for food; the researchers thus suggest that permitting selective logging would result in new vegetation growth that would help sustain the duiker populations and make the gorillas less tempting.

Source: Purdue University, www.purdue.edu.

Hollywood Goes Bilingual

It’s sounding more and more like America on American TV and movie screens. English–Spanish bilingualism is increasing in Hollywood scripts, according to linguistics researcher Nieves Jiménez Carra of Pablo de Olavide University in Seville, Spain.

With the U.S. population comprising a growing proportion of Latinos, who often alternate between Spanish and English, script writers and producers are also incorporating both languages into scripts, rather than simply adding Spanish subtitles or dubbing English-language programs into Spanish.

The advantage over dubbing or subtitling is that the characters sound more authentic, using natural Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban Spanish, for instance, rather than a more formal version of Spanish translated for audiences in Spain.

Source: Plataforma SINC, www.plataformasinc.es.

Second-Hand Effects of Bullying

Witnesses of bullying may be at greater risk for later psychological distress than the victims themselves, suggests a study of public schools in England.

These “second-hand victims” may be experiencing stress from two fronts: fear of becoming targets of the bullies themselves and guilt from not interceding on the victim’s behalf. The researchers encourage school psychologists to pay more attention to witnesses in bullying incidents and to teach them ways that they can intercede rather than remain passive bystanders.

Source: “Observing Bullying at School: The Mental Health Implications of Witness Status” by Ian Rivers et al., School Psychology Quarterly (Volume 24, Number 4), American Psychological Association, www.apa.org.

Electromagnetic Waves May Protect the Brain

Long-term use of cell phones may improve memory and help protect users from Alzheimer’s disease, or even reverse its effects, report researchers at the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

The study of old mice with Alzheimer’s showed that exposure to electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones reversed memory impairment. The waves removed brain deposits of the protein beta--amyloid, the harmful, sticky plaque that is the hallmark of Alzheimer’s.

While the mice weren’t wearing earpieces or holding phones to their heads as humans typically do, the effect of exposure to electromagnetic fields offers a potential avenue for drug-free treatment of Alzheimer’s patients, the researchers believe.

Sources: “Electromagnetic Field Treatment Protects Against and Reverses Cognitive Impairment in Alzheimer’s Disease Mice” by Gary W. Arendash et al., Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (January 2010). Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, www.floridaadrc.org.

Tourism Booms as Arctic Melts

Gas, oil, and shipping boost economy but add to environmental concerns.

Researchers anticipate large increases of Arctic industry and tourism in this century.

The Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment, a report compiled by the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum, says that the number of cruise ships visiting Greenland alone rose from 14 in 2003 to 39 in 2008.

"All the vistas, all the sights, all the marine animals, polar bears, polar glaciers - people want to go see that stuff," says Lawson Brigham, chair of the assessment. "They want to go to the North Pole and say they stood there."

The Arctic is a promising site for business as well as pleasure. A 2008 study by the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that it contains 30% of the world's undiscovered natural gas and 13% of its undiscovered oil. Energy companies in Canada, Norway, Russia, and other nations now vie for access.

As tourism and industries increase, so might the emissions from ship smokestacks: ozone, carbon dioxide, sulfur oxides, and black carbon, among others. The emissions poison animal life, deplete the ozone layer, and taint the snow and ice, reducing their ability to mitigate global warming by reflecting sunlight away from the earth.

Arctic animals face additional hazards from human activity, according to Brigham: Fish flee ships' noise, and marine mammals are wounded by collisions with boat hulls or entanglements in fishing gear. Those animal populations have been a staple food source for the region's indigenous peoples for millennia. When animals die off, humans will go hungry.

Industry can benefit indigenous peoples, however, with bigger supplies of food, more amenities, and new jobs.

"The issue is how the indigenous people will share in the wealth of the Arctic," says Brigham. "There are opportunities, but also challenges."

Visiting tourists and developers face the risks of boating accidents, according to Walt Meier, researcher for the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

"If someone gets into trouble, there aren't any bases there to operate rescue missions from," he says. "And any kind of oil spill that may need to be cleaned up - there's no infrastructure there to support that."

The Arctic in general is now threatened by global warming, according to Meier.

"If you have a two-degree temperature change, you've completely changed the environment from ice to water," he says.

The ice is already melting rapidly: The Arctic had 13.5 million square kilometers of ice in December 1979, but only 12.5 million square kilometers of it in December 2009. By 2050, or even sooner, according to Snow and Ice Center researchers, the Arctic might be ice-free for part of every summer.

"The ice is now a lot younger and a lot thinner than it used to be," says Meier.

Brigham concurs and hopes that new treaties and laws in the future will enforce responsible use of the region and its resources. - Rick Docksai

Biotechnology’s Promise—and Risks

Chips, Clones, and Living Beyond 100: How Far Will the Biosciences Take Us? by Paul J. H. Schoemaker and Joyce A. Schoemaker. Financial Times Press. 2009. 201 pages. $24.99.

“Between now and 2025, the biosciences will likely become one of the most important topics in our personal lives, at work, and in society,” assert Paul J. H. Schoemaker and Joyce A. Schoemaker, a husband-and-wife team with experience in the industry. Yet, their new book, Chips, Clones, and Living Beyond 100, is not so much about the biosciences as it is about the outside social, economic, and political factors that will likely impact the industry and determine its commercial potential. The real question, as far as the authors are concerned, is not how far the biosciences will take us, but rather what will drive biotechnology forward.

To answer this, the authors analyze long-term trends and build scenarios, giving special consideration to possible wild cards. They also examine biotechnology’s potential impact on related industries such as pharmaceuticals and health care. The end result is practically a textbook example of how to apply futures techniques in a nonfiction book aimed at the average reader, and this may be its most exciting contribution.

After a quick rundown of significant medical breakthrough over the past 200 years, the authors discuss some of the pivotal breakthroughs that effectively created and defined the biosciences (such as synthesizing the human insulin gene and the Human Genome Project). From there, they look to potential future innovations, such as affordable genome-sequencing microchips, individualized prescription drugs, stem-cell treatments, and gene therapy (replacing or shutting off a defective gene).

Next, they examine what must happen fiscally in order to make such innovations a reality. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are needed to help fund biotech innovations and commercialize the technology. Yet, up to this point, commercializing the technology has not exactly been a walk in the park. Given overall disappointing financial results thus far, the industry nonetheless survives and continues to grow in large part because of Big Pharma.

“Established pharmaceutical companies have created extensive alliance and ownership arrangements with many biotechnology companies,” the Schoemakers write. Pharmaceutical companies are drawn to the emerging field in part because of their own struggling financial situation. They see it as a response to growing challenges that are threatening their profit margins, now that they can no longer depend on so-called blockbuster drugs. To them, biotech drugs represent an opportunity to move toward a more sustainable long-term business model. Conversely, how successfully biotech manages to cross business boundaries will be one of the major keys to its success and growth, the authors argue.

The industry’s success also depends on how well we meet global health-care challenges, including those in the developed world.

“How can we expand these new technologies to poorer nations when the richest countries in the world, where they are first developed and deployed, have difficulties themselves controlling healthcare costs?” the authors ask. Health care has to be reformed if it is to be sustained, they argue. The rapidly growing need for greater preventive care and chronic disease management, thanks to increased longevity, will only add to the already large tab.

Where biotech is ultimately headed also has to do with those potential game changers known as wild cards. The authors group them into three sectors: society and politics, science and technology, and business and economics. While the events they list are certainly high impact, the big surprise is that not many truly qualify as low probability. For instance, as the Schoemakers point out, there is ample reason to believe that mass public acceptance — or rejection — of the biosciences could occur. (The debate over genetically modified foods in Europe sets a strong precedent for the rejection scenario.) Even the notion of rogue states harboring bioterrorists doesn’t seem too far-fetched.

Building on these forecasts, the authors divide their scenario framework into two main categories: technological success and societal acceptance. (Funding is a third variable, but it’s at least partially dependent on the other two.) They then use scenario-building exercises to answer the nagging questions: (1) What if biotech doesn’t live up to expectations? and (2) What if it does?

The authors identify a number of different tensions between projected technological breakthroughs and sociopolitical and economic forces. These include potential class inequities that could arise and ethical arguments regarding life extension, not to mention other thornier matters.

“We stand at the threshold of an unprecedented era in which humans can change their own genes, and hence redefine what it means to be human,” the Schoemakers assert. “Unfortunately, we presently lack the regulatory oversight and moral compass to wisely navigate the technological terrain.”

Thoroughly researched and highly accessible, Chips, Clones, and Living Beyond 100 is designed with a wide audience in mind. To that end, it’s not weighted down by technical jargon and the work appeals to the reader’s interest and imagination. The book’s geographic orientation is almost exclusively toward the United States, but the authors justify this focus by arguing that biotech innovation depends mainly on the United States, both economically and politically.

If the book has a not-so-hidden agenda, it’s to advocate for the advancement of the biosciences. But if there’s a second, less-intended aftereffect, it may well be the expansion of futuring.

About the Reviewer

Aaron M. Cohen is a staff editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review.

Books in Brief

By Rick Docksai

Surprising Facts About the Brain

Brain Sense: The Science of the Senses and How We Process the World Around Us by Faith Hickman Brynie. AMACOM. 2009. 274 pages. $24.

The brain is much more dynamic than scientists used to think, according to science and health writer Faith Hickman Brynie in Brain Sense. She takes readers on a tour of how the brain and the senses interact, sharing discoveries that she says have dramatic implications for brain research and medical practice. Examples:

Monkeys using their own brain waves to control robotic arms.

Patients blinded by strokes regain some of their vision by retraining their eyes with computer-assisted visual exercises.

New physical-therapy regimens that relieve amputees of “phantom-limb” pain (pains in the empty spaces where those parts used to be).

Brynie points to newly discovered ways that the brain constantly reshapes its own structure and replacing circuits — or even memories — that had been lost or damaged. She also describes recent observations about how the brain perceives reality: “Our brains have minds of their own,” she says. In other words, no two people will taste, smell, or feel in the same way.

Brynie’s Brain Sense is a fascinating look at what it means to be human and conscious. It is also an exciting preview of treatments that doctors might one day achieve.

Change Design: Conversations about Architecture as the Ultimate Business Tool by NBBJ and Bruce Mau. Greenway. 2009. 250 pages. $59.95.

A well-designed building encourages creativity and cooperation within, according to architectural firm NBBJ and design company Bruce Mau. Their jointly authored and richly illustrated book Change Design showcases new buildings that offer new ways of working. Change Design presents real-life stories of 14 organizations that enhanced productivity, employee satisfaction, energy efficiency, or all three by changing the layout of their office buildings.

Case studies include the Banner Health hospital complex, designed to accommodate systematic growth over the next 20 years; Boeing, which brought manufacturers and designers — two groups that had always worked separately — together into one facility, thereby resolving problems more quickly and cutting production time in half; and developer City Developments Limited, which custom-builds high-rises with ventilation, shading, and rainwater-sequestration features to maximize sustainability and comfort.

Accompanying these stories are essays on the nature of design, the future of workplaces, the relationship between building design and personal values, and hope for resolving tensions between executives and designers. The volume also includes descriptions of change-design activities that you can organize in your own workplace.

Change Design is a delightful show-and-tell of architectural improvements and their tangible benefits. Artists, business leaders, and professionals of all kinds may find it informative and inspirational.

Fight for the Bay: Why a Dark Green Environmental Awakening is Needed to Save the Chesapeake Bay by Howard R. Ernst. Rowman & Littlefield. 2009. 144 pages. Paperback. $19.95.

Pollution has reduced more than 400 water ecosystems around the world to “dead zones,” notes U.S. Naval Academy political-science professor Howard Ernst in Fight for the Bay. For conservationists trying to save these ecosystems, the eastern United States’ Chesapeake Bay serves as a cautionary tale.

Since the early 1980s, Ernst explains, a publicly funded Chesapeake Bay Program has coordinated bay-restoration efforts with the governments of neighboring states Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The program, however, lacks any lawmaking power. It only organizes public education campaigns, distributes grants to citizen cleanup projects, and sets nonbinding guidelines for state officials. This “voluntary” approach — “light-green conservation,” as Ernst calls it —failed miserably. Fauna and animal life across the bay remain in jeopardy, and its fishing industries have collapsed.

There is no substitute for political action and litigation, Ernst concludes. However, he sees the Chesapeake Bay Program’s light-green approach being repeated in estuaries around North America and beyond. He hopes that conservationists will change course and accept confrontation as necessary for reform.

Ernst’s Fight for the Bay is an incisive look at an important ecosystem and what communities everywhere can learn from it. Researchers, environmentalists, and political activists of all kinds may find it an enlightening read.

How to Survive the End of the World As We Know It: Tactics, Techniques, and Technologies for Uncertain Times by James Wesley Rawles. Plume. 2009. 153 pages. Paperback. $17.

Civilization is still standing now, but that does not mean it always will, cautions survival expert James Wesley Rawles in How to Survive the End of the World As We Know It.

We’d better know what to do in the event of a deadly viral pandemic, major asteroid strike, unprecedented hyperinflationary (or deflationary) economic depression, third World War, or any other global disaster, Rawles argues.

He spells out all the hazards that we might face in a post-disaster society: looting, armed violence, food shortages, etc. Then he lays out steps we can take now, such as taking survival-training courses, designing shelters, and stocking them with necessary supplies. He even offers a chapter on disaster-proof financial security: savvy investments to make now, earning income in the midst of a major recession, and bartering in the wake of a true disaster.

If all of these musings sound alarmist, he explains, consider that the world today is increasingly dangerous and fraught with uncertainty — worldwide terrorist movements since the early 1990s and the 2008 meltdown of markets across the globe are proof.

Making the Invisible Visible: Essays by the Fellows of the International Leadership Forum edited by Richard Farson. Western Sciences Behavioral Institute. 2009. 153 pages. $29.

We cannot reliably forecast the future unless we understand the present, says Richard Farson, president of the Western Sciences Behavioral Institute, a nonprofit foundation that explores ways to improve human life. In Making the Invisible Visible, he brings together essays from 29 Institute fellows, who share their perspectives on current challenges. Among the contributing authors are:

Ralph Keyes, freelance writer, describes a trend of increasing groupthink throughout society.

Lawrence Solomon, management consultant, wonders at the human mind’s capacity to simultaneously comprehend reality and distort it.

Michael Crichton, the late physician and author, states his concern that our society is losing its tolerance and respect for opposing ideas.

Jane Poynter, aerospace engineer, debunks the common belief that we must choose between the environment and human welfare.

Carlos Cardozo Campbell, urban planner, notes the toll that mass urbanization takes on human and environmental health.

James Cramer, co-founder of the journal DesignIntelligence and co-chairman of the Design Futures Council, considers the pros and cons of society’s fixation on speediness.

The authors eloquently address deep ideas to general audiences, in thought-provoking essays that are good for reflection, discussion, and community action.

The Smart Growth Manual by Andres Duany and Jeff Speck with Mike Lydon. McGraw-Hill. 2009. 240 pages. $24.95.

Urban growth is inevitable, so let us plan ahead for it to make sure that it takes place in the most orderly ways possible, argue design consultants Andres Duany and Jeff Speck in The Smart Growth Manual.

“No-growth” campaigns rarely if ever succeed, they note, and often serve to undercut needed planning — so when growth does resume, it is even more haphazard and wasteful.

If given the chance, local discussion sessions among city officials and residents can minimize growth’s worst side effects and help keep neighborhood enlargement from degenerating into urban sprawl. If successful, they will design mixed-use neighborhoods that treat all residents with equity. They will also harmonize urban and rural areas, and live in accordance with their regions’ natural resource and water supplies.

The authors outline fundamental principles of smart growth, instructions for formulating a growth blueprint, and making optimum arrangements for convenient mass transit. They also cover affordable housing, vibrant neighborhood life, and conservation of energy, land, and water.

The Smart Growth Manual is an attractive, well-illustrated guidebook for building cities that will offer high quality living in the present and the future.

Upstarts: How GenY Entrepreneurs Are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit from Their Success by Donna Fenn. McGraw-Hill. 2009. 258 pages. $29.95.

A new business landscape is in the making, and the 13- to 25-year-old youth demographic is creating it, according to Upstarts by business writer Donna Fenn. A trend is rising of teens and young adults starting their own businesses, offering the world’s best hope for a flourishing post-recession global economy, Fenn argues.

She explains that these Generation Y “upstarts” are the first generation to grow up digital; they know the Internet, mobile devices, and social media and how these applications can facilitate starting and running a business. In addition, they are more frugal and independent than preceding youth cohorts. Most were raised by working parents, and all were faced with the turmoil of the twenty-first-century economy, in which any large corporation or institution can fail. The upstarts have learned to count on themselves.

Older executives who want to know where their industries are headed, younger professionals who are considering launching out on their own, and anyone else who wants to better understand Generation Y will benefit from reading Upstarts.

The Viking in the Wheat Field: A Scientist’s Struggle to Preserve the World’s Harvest by Susan Dworkin. Walker & Company. 2009. 239 pages. $26.

The global food outlook is grim, says magazine writer and author Susan Dworkin in The Viking in the Wheat Field. She points out that, according to the United Nations, there will be 9 billion people on earth by 2050, and they will require a 75% increase in food supply. Meeting such an elevated feeding demand is a major challenge, since farmers have already cultivated most of the planet’s arable land. Worse still, much of the land that is available has lost its fertility due to overuse. What options remain besides destroying more forests?

One hope rests on making more-efficient use of existing crop land. Dworkin describes the lifetime work of Bent Skovmand, the late Norwegian horticultualist who spent his career developing biotechnology procedures for cross-breeding wheat plants to enhance their disease resistance, accelerate their growth, and exponentially increase their grain output. Dworkin’s account relates Skovmand’s many experiments in seed banks and their successful outcomes in Mexico, Turkey, and other locales.

In light of the much-publicized rises in food costs and shortages of water for farming, the story that Dworkin tells in The Viking in the Wheat Field is very compelling and very timely.

Why We Cooperate by Michael Tomasello et al. MIT Press. 2009. 204 pages. $14.95.

In the next decade, research into human infants’ thought patterns might help answer ancient questions about human nature, speculate anthropologist Michael Tomasello and co-authors in Why We Cooperate.

Tomasello reviews studies that compared human children with apes and found the humans to be uniquely cooperative: Only human children convey information to one another, exhibit teamwork, share their belongings, or object when others are not being “fair.”

But where did humans’ unique cooperativeness emerge, wonders psychologist Carol Dweck. She argues that it is not entirely from nature; children’s altruistic behaviors are heavily influenced by other people.

Philosopher Brian Skyrms encourages researchers to study the cooperation that exists across the animal kingdom: Bacteria, mole rats, meerkats, and many insects are very cooperative with each other.

Psychologist Elizabeth Spelke posits that humans’ cooperation started after they developed language. She notes that at around age two, humans begin to display unique abilities that are possible only with language: analyzing information, understanding math, discerning other people’s intentions, communicating ideas through gestures, and helping others to achieve goals.

Why We Cooperate is an impressive convergence of philosophy and hard science that nonspecialists will find very approachable and engaging.

Digital Bandage Monitors Vital Signs

Wireless technology for early detection.

A wireless digital “bandage” that would continuously monitor patients’ vital signs and transmit the data in real time to health-care professionals is currently being tested in the United Kingdom.

The Sensium disposable adhesive bandage is non-intrusive and affixes easily and painlessly to a patient’s chest. Doctors and nurses would be notified instantly of any changes in a patient’s body temperature, heart rate, and respiration on any digital device, from desktop computers to cell phones. This would enable them to respond faster to any changes or complications. The patient’s medical records would also be automatically updated with the data.

The bandage, developed by Toumaz Technology, is part of a growing medical trend toward integrating wireless technology in patient care.

Compared to large, fixed monitoring machines, the Sensium digital plaster boasts several distinct advantages. It could enable patients to leave their beds and move about with greater independence, shorten hospital stays, and improve the quality of outpatient care.

Just like a regular Band-Aid or gauze wrap, the digital bandage would need to be replaced with a fresh one every couple of days.

Chris Toumazou, CEO and co-founder of Toumaz Technology and the director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College in London, says, “We’re hoping that the plaster will improve the health and well-being of a vast range of patients — from patients on a general hospital ward to people with chronic diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular disease who want to have their health monitored without having to keep visiting the hospital.” — Aaron M. Cohen

Source: Toumaz Technology, www.toumaz.com.

Is Industrial Civilization Doomed?

The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World by John Michael Greer. New Society Publishers. 2009. 153 pages. Paperback. $18.95.

It is the middle of the twenty-first century, and the only countries that can still afford to use fossil fuels are those that are producing them. Half those countries’ populations — and 90% of the populations of the non-fossil-fuel-producing countries — labor at subsistence agriculture. Most of the rest eke out livings in factories converting salvaged materials with hand tools. Public health has collapsed, literacy rates are in steady freefall, and poverty and hunger are everywhere. Dozens of nations are mired in civil war, and populations are migrating in hordes, some to flee rising sea levels and encroaching droughts.

This is the future that ecologist John Michael Greer anticipates in The Ecotechnic Future. He argues that our industrial civilization is headed for its final fall. It doomed itself by exhausting its natural resources and mistakenly assuming that technology freed human communities from their natural environments’ constraints.

The population boom of the last few centuries, Greer explains, was made possible by massive advances in living standards, economic growth, surpluses of food, and vastly improved public health. All of this, however, was sustained by fossil fuels. Once fossil-fuel reserves peak —as they are expected to do between 2020 and 2030 — production, growth, and the amenities of modern life will gradually halt. Contemporary industrial society will downgrade into a “scarcity society” that manages on minimal energy, after which it will become a “salvage society” that scrapes survival from the refuse of the defunct urban buildings, information networks, and industrial centers. Populations everywhere will shrink. Civic unrest will simmer, and epic migrations will sweep continents. Power will shift from multinational corporations to national governments, which in turn will lose power to local communities. Cultures will disintegrate, the Internet will collapse, and cultural exchanges across nations and continents will be few.

Greer sees hope, however: The industrial age’s end might lead to the rise, centuries from now, of a new “ecotechnic” society that supports complex technology and sustainable relations with the rest of the biosphere.

No one knows for sure what this ecotechnic society will look like, he explains. Through diversity and experimentation with many piecemeal solutions — not grandiose, radical agendas — we will gradually construct it. It will help if we embrace sustainability and wise lifestyle changes now, not later; then the decline will be less drastic, and the ecotechnic world’s arrival much sooner.

Every aspect of our daily lives must manage on much less energy, Greer says. We will need to implement massive changes in eating habits, land use, food distribution, and waste management. Homes will have to transition to compactness, energy efficiency, and production of their own electricity and food. Economies will have to rely more on human labor and domestic production. In all, we will need to recognize our role as one species among many, subject to the same natural laws and ecological patterns.

This book is as realistic a portrayal of the end of civilization as one is likely to find. It is a worthwhile read for all who think about the far future.

About the Reviewer

Rick Docksai is a staff editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review.

Pop Music as an Economic Indicator

Changing tastes may reflect market mood.

That long hemlines accompany a bad economy is an old saying in the fashion industry. Today, most experts regard hemline theory as fanciful, but a number of social theorists agree that trends in fashion, movies, or music do reflect public sentiment, which can influence stock market direction. Theoretically at least, new fads could point to shifting economic conditions. But finding the exact correlation between changing music tastes and economic performance is anything but easy.

William Higham, author of The Next Big Thing: Spotting and Forecasting Consumer Trends for Profit (Kogan Page, 2009), argues that the down economy and grumpy public sentiment forecasts an angry music wave in the coming year. However, economics is not the sole cause, says Higham. The next music fad will take more than one form, he believes.

“Consumers’ current mood, which blends confused, afraid, angry, and determined, is due to a mix of financial hardship, anger at being let down by politicians and big business, continuing fear of world events, the speed of technological/social change, and a reassessment of work/life priorities,” Higham told THE FUTURIST.

Jon P. Avlon, author of Independent Nation (Three Rivers Press, 2005), agrees that the public mood is bad and getting worse, and mainstream media will only exacerbate the grumpiness. The angry rhetoric rocking the airwaves and cable channels across the United States, the protestor clashes outside the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, and the Tea Party rallies that have lately sprung up in Washington, D.C., are a “reflection of a larger trend, the fragmentation of modern media, which has had an ironic effect on the way we get our information,” he wrote to THE FUTURIST. “The best ratings are achieved by [TV and radio] hosts who cultivate narrow but intense niche audiences. This has helped pump up the hate and hyper-partisanship we see today.”

Higham argues that previous eras of socioeconomic flux had two distinct and separate effects on pop culture. Mainstream music (which appeals more to baby boomers) became more quiet, subdued, and quaint, whereas “alternative” music, marketed primarily to younger people, became louder and more primal.

“Socioeconomic problems drove rock in the 1960s, heavy rock and punk in the 1970s, gangsta rap in the late 1980s, and grunge in the 1990s. So the new consumer mood will, I believe, drive a rise in both more aggressively patriotic mainstream roots music (the soundtrack to Tea Party anger) and more angry, dissonant Alternative music (the soundtrack to environmental protest),” he said.

Visible changes in fashion, television, movies, and particularly pop music can not only reflect a nation’s economic circumstances, but predict them as well, according to scholars with the Socionomics Institute.

In the October 2009 issue of The Socionomist, authors Matt Lampert and Euan Wilson claim that the commercial success of particular types of popular culture items — the music, movies, and TV shows that big-name clothiers and studios market to the public — can indicate stock market changes. When the public’s “social mood” and popular culture are both good, then upbeat or even vapid entertainment fare becomes the rage and the economy is likely in or about to enter a bullish cycle. Teen or tween pop acts such as the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, and High School Musical epitomized the bull market for stocks following the 2002 recession, say Lampert and Wilson. Supporting their theory, they point to the commercial success of 1980s bubblegum pop musicians such as Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper during a period of economic growth.

When both popular culture and social mood are down, movies, television, and music will trend toward the dark, gritty, dissatisfied, and potentially innovative; in a word, bearish. Lampert and Wilson attribute the rise of Seattle grunge aesthetic during the early 1990s to the recession that began in 1987, and the rise of punk rock in the mid-1970s to falling affluence and economic stagnation of that decade, particularly the 1970 to 1973 period.

A diminished stock market, high unemployment, and unprecedented government intervention that characterized the 2008 and 2009 economic environment portends terribly for social mood going forward. Recent poll numbers indicate as much. Some 55% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, and 66% say that they aren’t confident that their children’s lives will be better than their own (as opposed to 27% who are confident), according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll from December. Yet, popular music in the United States remained “planted in bull territory” during this time. The disconnect suggests a pop culture lag. Forecast: Expect further stock market losses and a downbeat music wave.

“The continued reign of light popular music is an indicator that stocks are high, not low,” write Lampert and Wilson. “Coincident socioeconomic indicators convey compatible messages, and we can use one to validate the other.... At minimum, when social mood turns negative, lyrical themes will become dark and melody will diminish. Many performers who play discordant, experimental styles will find an audience. A genre even more aggressive than punk will ultimately emerge.”

Whether music is becoming angrier, lighter, more primal, or more quaint is no easy determination in an environment where cultural trends can be measured using an ever-wider array of metrics. And music fads will remain an imprecise (at best) indicator of stock market performance into the foreseeable future, according to other sociologists.

“I think there might be a correlation,” says Higham, “but it would be a brave man to bet [his] portfolio on a number one hit album.” — Patrick Tucker

Sources: The Socionomist (October 2009), www.socionomics.net.

The Next Big Thing: Spotting and Forecasting Consumer Trends for Profit by William Highham. Kogan Page, 2009. 261 pages. $29.95.

Reviving the Aral Sea

Aralsk, Kazakhstan, is surrounded by barren desert, but the city could become a thriving port if the Aral Sea makes its anticipated comeback.

“A billboard outside Aralsk proclaims ‘Good News — the Sea is Coming Back.’ There is a lot of optimism among the people,” reports Joop Stoutjesdik, task team leader of the World Bank’s Syr Darya and Northern Aral Sea Project.

The Aral Sea, situated in Central Asia between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water in 1960, according to the European Space Agency. But the Aral lost more than 70% of its water due to drainage for irrigating parched farmland.

By 1990, the Aral had shriveled into a remnant northern sea within Kazakhstan and a southern one on the Kazakh-Uzbek border. Each sea was more than 20 meters lower than the original.

The drainage lay bare more than 40,000 square kilometers of its sea bed, whose exposed salts and sands fueled sandstorms that caused fatal illnesses and erratic weather.

The remaining water became so unnaturally saline that most of the fish and fauna died. Drinking-water supplies became scarce, and tens of thousands of fishing, agriculture, and service-sector jobs vanished.

Better times may be ahead, however. Between 2005 and 2007, Kazakhstan and the World Bank funded extensive restoration projects for the northern sea: a 13-kilometer Kok-Aral dike to block flow of its water into the southern sea; hydraulic facilities along the Aral tributary Syr Darya river to increase its capacity and channel more water into the sea basin; and a dam and canal from the Syr Darya to restore fishing lakes, which would serve as hatcheries for new fish populations.

The northern sea has since risen four meters and increased its surface area by 13%. Its salinity has been reduced by more than two-thirds. New water-supply systems bring better-quality drinking water to seaside villages. Seven species of fish have returned, according to the World Bank. The sea’s recovery is also improving the climate.

“During the last years there were rains in April, May, and June, while before, the last rains would fall in March,” Stoutjesdik adds. “There is more grass for livestock. Dust storms are fewer. Swans, ducks, and geese are returning.”

The southern sea is still shrinking, however. The European Space Agency expects it to dry out completely by 2020.

Amanda Wooden, Bucknell University environmental science professor, says that the best-case scenario is that the southern sea stabilizes around its present levels.

“This is a significant loss for the region and the world,” she says.

She notes that this is troubling for the human communities around the sea basin.

“A decline in health conditions and the agricultural sector could have ramifications for Uzbekistan’s stability,” she says. “The broader region will be impacted by climatic changes.”

The southern sea’s western side, at least, could be salvaged if engineers dammed it. Reforming the region’s irrigation systems would also help, but Wooden does not see either approach happening.

“These steps have not been taken and do not seem likely to be followed soon enough,” says Wooden. But even a partial recovery is better than none, she concludes. — Rick Docksai

Sources: Joop Stoutjesdijk, World Bank, www.worldbank.org.

Amanda Wooden, Bucknell University, www.bucknell.edu.

European Space Agency, www.esa.int.

The Brain versus The Web

By Patrick Tucker

Wired for Thought by Jeffrey M. Stibel. Harvard University Press. 2009. 202 pages. $29.95.

In his new book, Wired for Thought, entrepreneur Jeffrey M. Stibel takes the shop-worn notion that the brain functions like a computer and reorders it into a more useful new idea. The computer is not a brain, Stibel asserts, but the Internet could be.

The differences between the brain and a computer are numerous and inescapable. Among the key distinctions: Our millennia-old three-pound thinking machines perform massive parallel processing. Even the best computers do this terribly in comparison. Electronic logic gates are faster than chemical synapses, but also much simpler. The brain evolved in response to natural circumstances as a tool for survival, but computers (and the vast majority of the programs that operate on them) are designed by people, not by the experience of life, and therefore will never truly be analogous to brains despite the best efforts of many of the world’s top AI researchers.

According to Stibel, computers are much better understood as elements within a larger intelligent system. They act less like brains and more like neurotransmitters. Web sites function as the neuronal synapses in this analogy. Like every synapse, sites hold information and then present that information when accessed. More importantly, Web sites deal in the stuff of the real world. From Wikipedia to the latest trend on Twitter, they serve not simply as files of coded instructions but as repositories of information about life on earth.

Every Web page faces the evolutionary imperative to be both unique and relevant; a Web site that is neither will pass to the digital dustbin, unviewed and unmaintained. Similarly, when the brain is forced to categorize some new sensory impression, it forms a synapse link, a memory. Memories are subject to the same competitive forces that their host organisms must contend with. Those sites that are of little consequence, or that don’t prove particularly useful to the survival of the larger organism, fade with time.

Both the brain and the Internet employ memes or “units of culture” in the parlance of Richard Dawkins, originator of the term. The human neocortex is made of six layers; the topmost of these occupies itself with executing decisions after the lower orders have processed and refined the data to make that decision. Similarly, the makeup of the Web is hierarchical. Internet trends always start small, on individual computers, but quickly pick up momentum. The most-trafficked sites and applications like YouTube and Facebook are popular precisely because they make that process as fast as possible and involve the largest number of people.

Much like the brain, the Internet experienced a period of rapid expansion. But the brain actually grew too large for our Neanderthal predecessors and fell back in size, ultimately settling on 100 billion neurons and roughly 100 trillion interneuron connections. The Web will do the same thing, says Stibel: It will fall back in size and achieve a new equilibrium. This forecast puts Stibel in direct conflict with Internet optimists who contend that the Web can only grow continuously and even exponentially. Surely the Internet shows no sign of curbing its growth anytime soon.

Stibel’s theory is rather comforting, even flattering in the way it reduces the future of the Internet to the evolutionary history of the human thinking organ. According to this view, in the coming decades, the Internet will adapt to the world much as the brain did. It will seek to identify patterns in order to better predict what may happen next. Signs of this future are already evident. In September, Netflix awarded $1 million to a software team who figured out a way for the company to better “predict” what movies its customers might most want to watch. The Web is getting smarter about the real world all the time, accumulating information about the way the world sounds, smells, and tastes through real-time sensing technology. Many trend watchers, such as Tim O’Reilly, consider sensor technology to be the next great trend to move the Internet forward (Web 3.0, if you will). We will merge our brains with the Web, not simply through implants, but through our behavior. This will quickly change the way we experience the Web — and the way the Web experiences us.

No longer will you “surf” the Web, traveling to different sites seeking out information. The Web will search itself and customize itself for you as you encounter it. Stibel points to a company called Kosmix.com that dynamically builds entirely new Web pages based on a particular search. “The Web will one day be able to generate a Web page specific to your request, just as the brain fires off new symphonies of excitation when it encounters a novel subject,” he writes.

Missing from this engaging and persuasive book is any doubt or hesitation that a future smarter, more brainlike Internet is a good thing. A cautious pause may be in order. The basics of biology suggest that intelligent creatures prioritize their own survival above the well-being of others. We evolved our smarts to better survive in a competitive, difficult environment. If the Internet is a brain, the question becomes, what does it think of us?

About the Reviewer

Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST and director of communications for the World Future Society.

Vertical Farming

An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back

By Cynthia G. Wagner
Like all our precious resources, good ideas should be reclaimed and recycled. Urban agriculture is one such good idea now made new again.

The April 1985 issue of THE FUTURIST featured an inspiring new book by New Alchemy Institute founders John and Nancy Jack Todd, Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming: Ecology as the Basis of Design (Sierra Club Books, 1984). The visionary seeds they planted then are now coming into season.

Among the Todds’ more intriguing proposals were multi-tiered city farms occupying once-abandoned warehouses: Mushrooms in the basement; chickens, eggs, trout, and catfish on the first floor; hydroponic veggies on the second floor; third-floor lettuce; and rooftop wind turbines and solar-energy panels.

Even more intriguing were the Todds’ micro-agriculture visions, such as park fountains used for irrigation, fish raised in bus-stop aquariums, and sidewalks converted to aquaculture ponds.

Now, these visions are being reclaimed, recycled, and renewed in towers that are half workspaces and half gardens, eco-laboratories and pyramid farms, and “living” skyscrapers with decks dedicated to food, fuel, or families. These and other inventive agro-architectural solutions take the ideas of city and indoor farming into a new, increasingly urbanized future.

The Vertical Farm Project, launched in 2001 by Columbia University environmental health science professor Dickson Despommier, collects ideas that promise to reduce agriculture’s ecological footprint — not only by bringing food growers and consumers closer together, but also by extending “farmland” into a third dimension: skyward.

The advantages of raising food crops and animals indoors and in closer proximity to consumers include year-round production, more-efficient use and reuse of water and other resources, and protection from threats ranging from epidemics to terrorists.

The recent resurgence of urban agriculture in popular futurist and science literature (including articles in Scientific American, Time, Popular Science, and the New York Times) illustrates that good ideas may need to be cycled and recycled before their time truly comes.

Like the Todds’ New Alchemy Institute, the Vertical Farm Project envisions the transformation of urban architecture along ecological principles. A 30-story skyscraper on one city block could potentially feed 50,000 Manhattanites, using technologies available now, according to Despommier. And with technologies available in the future, intensive-farming techniques could enable us to settle on the Moon, Mars, or beyond.

About the Author

Cynthia G. Wagner is managing editor of THE FUTURIST. E-mail cwagner@wfs.org.

For more information, visit The Vertical Farm Project, www.verticalfarm.com.

John and Nancy Jack Todd co-founded (1981) Ocean Arks International, www.oceanarks.org; since 1999, John has been a research professor and distinguished lecturer at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.

A Search Engine that Listens Breakthrough in computer speech-recognition.

The Internet may not be making us smarter, but it may be getting smarter about us. Recent breakthroughs in speech-recognition technology point toward a future where Web crawlers recognize more of the words we speak.
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis have developed a type of search engine that works for spoken words in television broadcasts. Other similar speech-recognition programs attempt to match what the system hears to words stored in a digital database. The Fraunhofer program recognizes syllables and pieces together spoken words based on their small parts, allowing for almost 99% accuracy, the researchers claim.

“Our system is based on a syllable thesaurus instead of a word thesaurus,” according to researcher Daniel Schneider. “Conventional speech recognizers can only discern a limited number of words, while the total number of words in existence is too vast to handle. The number of existing syllables, on the other hand, is manageable. With about 10,000 stored syllables, we can make up any word.”

The program is also able to differentiate between speakers and scan thousands of hours of broadcasts in just a few milliseconds, the researchers assert. Users can look for bits of spoken dialogue based on when comments were made, what was said, where, or by whom.

Students, detectives, or snoops could also use the program to analyze surveillance footage (provided people's words are clear enough to be heard on the recording). As more people spend more time under the lenses of cameras, and as more footage from those cameras and devices goes online, some interesting if not troubling implications for privacy emerge. A spoken-word search engine could one day theoretically allow someone with little more than a smart phone to look up any recorded conversation between any two people that's occurred virtually anywhere a microphone was present.—Patrick Tucker

Source: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, www.fraunhoher.de .

Arctic Species at the Cliff’s Edge

Climate change will affect species in the Arctic in surprising ways. Olivier Gilg, Benoît Sittler and Ilkka Hanski, writing in the journal Global Change Biology, warn that rapid arctic heating, already pushing species like polar bears closer to extinction, will also interfere with the breeding habits of the collard lemming. The seemingly small change could have disastrous consequences for a number of species that feed on the lemmings, such as snowy owls, Arctic foxes, the long-tailed skua (a seagull-like bird) and the stoat (also known as the short-tailed weasel), all of which could have further ripple effects on other animals across the globe later this century.
“Small changes for lemmings can indeed induce huge changes at the community level, because lemmings are almost the only prey for the predators in the high Arctic. So if lemmings decline and stop cycling, their predators will either disappear or focus on alternate prey (if any), and in turn the latest will also decline,” Gilg told THE FUTURIST.

In their report Gilg, Sittler, and Hanski present a number of scenarios showing how temperature and snowfall changes will affect lemming behavior. Among the most important factors in their study are the growing likelihood of longer arctic summers and a poor quality snow layer during winter. Lemmings typically dig deep snow tunnels and breed in the snow during the winter so that their offspring can emerge in the spring with several months to feed on freshly thawed vegetation. The sudden arrival of lots of lemmings in the spring (sometimes referred to as “lemming peaks”) provides food for the Arctic foxes, owls, and skua. Only the wily weasel (stoat) can burrow into the lemmings’ dens to hunt them during the region’s colder months.

A longer summer would seem to be good for the lemmings, as this would increase the time available for the younger members of the species to forage and grow before the onset of harsher conditions. But the shorter winter season means less time for breeding. The result is far fewer lemmings in the spring for the predator species to feed on. The change in lemming breeding habits will likely change the predators’ habits as well, the researchers conclude. All of these disruptions will add to pressure the animals already face from encroaching populations of other alien species attracted to the north’s rapidly rising temperatures, like the red fox and seagulls.

The researchers’ scenarios show that the change in the lemming population is likely to reduce skuas’ breeding at both of the two Greenland areas the researchers modeld for, (two completely uninhabited areas of one million square kilometers in size.) In one scenario, the snowy owl disappeared from at least one of the areas and experienced much lower breeding in the second. The breeding success of the Arctic fox was reduced by a factor of two, and the stoat population decreased significantly in one location and went extinct in another.
“Our results underscore the fragility of the dynamic interactions between the lemmings and their predators, because the life-time reproductive success of the predators is much dependent on the years of high lemming density. Even a moderate advance in snow melt has a potentially great impact on the community, and it may ultimately cause the local extinction of some of the predator species,” the authors write. “The lemmings themselves do not commit suicide as foreseen for centuries, but their spectacular high-amplitude cyclic dynamics might as well be ‘thrown off the cliff’ by climate change.”

Many researchers argue that the rapid climatic and biota changes playing out in the Arctic provide a window to how temperatures and animal behaviors will shift as a result of climate change. The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the rest of the planet. By the end of this century, the globe is forecast to warm anywhere from 4 to 7 degrees Celsius; the Arctic is forecast to heat up 6 to 9 degrees. As previously reported in THE FUTURIST, oceanographers have forecast that the Arctic Ocean could experience iceless summers by 2040, and one model holds that the arctic could be ice-free during the summer months in just 11 years.

The Arctic also provides a relatively ideal setting of the analysis of weather patterns on animals, as it hosts the earth’s simplest vertebrate community. There are few species that can survive in the harsh terrain, and their interactions tend to be more direct and more observable. Importantly, the change in the breeding and survival patterns of arctic species will have less-predictable effects for other animals as well.

“The dynamics of this community influence the dynamics of other terrestrial vertebrates through indirect effects and across several trophic levels, hence the dynamics of this community have important consequences for the structure and functioning of the Arctic biota,” the researchers note.

“Changes are now occurring so rapidly and impact the ecosystems so strongly that species and even communities will not be able to cope and to adjust,” said Gilg. “Many arctic species will likely disappear within just years or decades, and what happens in the Arctic should be regarded as a summary of what will happen next in countries with more temperate climates.”—Patrick Tucker
Source: “Climate Change and Cyclic Predator-Prey Population Dynamics in the High Arctic” by Olivier Gilg, Benoît Sittler and Ilkka Hanski, Global Change Biology (2009). Personal interview.

Books in Brief

Can Antarctica Survive?

Antarctica 2041: My Quest to Save the Earth’s Last Wilderness by Robert Swan with Gil Reavill. Broadway. 2009. 290 pages. $24.99.

Antarctica’s long-term survival is in question, warns Robert Swan, a researcher who has led expeditions to both the North and South poles. In 2041, he explains, the international treaty protecting Antarctica from human development is up for review. He fears that human development might win, due to the continent’s vast oil, natural gas, and mineral resources, and the likelihood that—if current consumption trends continue—existing oil wells will be mostly drained and no longer sufficient to sustain industrialized civilization.

Swan tells of his ventures on the tundra and his observations about its already-troubled health: disintegrating ice, accumulating trash, and the permanent discoloration of his own eyes from the solar radiation that penetrated the depleted ozone layer above. He expresses his hope that human civilization will find the will to protect this last wilderness.

Space-Based Energy Solutions

Energy Crisis: Solution from Space by Ralph Nansen. Apogee. 2009. 203 pages. $24.95.

An energy source that is nondepletable, available to everyone, environmentally clean, and in a form we can easily use—we have yet to find it on Earth, but it is there for the taking in space, argues space engineer Ralph Nansen. He presents a bold and far-reaching plan to deploy satellites that will capture solar radiation from the sun and beam it to earth for use in generating immense new quantities of electricity.

Plans for such satellites have been under way since the 1970s, he explains, relating the historical background of America’s space program and technical details of the structures that a hypothetical solar-satellite system would include. It would be a very long-term solution, he cautions: Government agencies and businesses would have to commit many years of development and huge initial investments. But if human beings muster the foresight to go through with it, the reward will be a new era of low-cost energy that the entire world can enjoy.

Futurism, Kid-Style

2030: A Day in the Life of Tomorrow’s Kids by Amy Zuckerman and James Daly Dutton. 2009. 32 pages. $16.99.

Kids in 2030 will still have to eat their vegetables, but genetic engineering will make those greens taste far yummier. School will still be in session, but most kids will be excited to go. What child wouldn’t look forward to teacher-led holograph tours of the pyramids of Egypt; multimedia centers where talking computers help students create dynamic video presentations; and gym classes replete with virtual-reality baseball and “smart” trampolines?

In 32 richly illustrated pages, business writer Amy Zuckerman and education writer James Daly give young readers a snapshot of daily life as it might look when they grow up. Dogs “speak” to people via voice simulators, kitchen appliances interact with users, and humanoid search agents converse with you and help you find whatever information you need.

Other, less far-fetched amenities include energy grids powered mainly by wind and solar generators, recycling of nearly all garbage, and suburban “eco-villages” whose buildings are specially insulated to keep out excess heat.

Many of these marvels will be familiar concepts to career futurists, but they will come alive for the first time to young readers—and maybe inspire them to engage in their own futures thinking.

Career—and Life—Hunting

What Color Is Your Parachute? 2010: A Practical Manual for Job Hunters and Career Changers by Richard N. Bolles. Ten Speed Press. 2010. 311 pages. $18.99.

The job search as career coach is not a matter of looking for available positions; it is one of self-discovery and personal futuring.

In this “hard times” edition of the job-search guide that Richard Bolles has published annually since 1970, he explains that job seekers will have the most success if they undertake a “life-changing job hunt”: taking a thorough personal inventory of what one enjoys, brainstorming of job environments where one will use these skills and interests, and planning to contact individuals who can help find jobs that offer opportunities to use these skills and interests.
With anecdotes, step-by-step instructions, and engaging charts and graphs, Bolles shows how to undertake this introspective job hunt. He maps out the multitude of available aids one can find along the way, such as Web sites, unemployment agencies, networking groups, and many others.

On a Lifetime of Community Building

Odyssey of a Practical Visionary by Belden Paulson. Thistlefield Books. 2009. 757 pages. $24.95.

In the mid-twentieth century, while communists and anticommunists across the world were locked in ideological warfare, futurist and community organizer Belden Paulson went about his own peaceful quest to change the world. Now he tells his story, with all the people who shared in it and the history he witnessed.

Paulson relates his post-college journey to Sardinia in 1950 as a work-camp humanitarian helping towns rebuild from the lingering damage of World War II. He then decided to stay and co-found Italy’s first settlement center and resettlement camp to help Sardinia’s war refugees join the neighboring towns as self-sufficient working citizens.

Paulson continued his community-building in Wisconsin, where he helped establish High Wind, a community powered by renewable energy and designed for maximum cooperation and closeness to nature among its residents. While at High Wind, he established the Plymouth Institute, a futurist think tank.

Paulson’s activism as a futurist led him to participate in the World Future Society’s 1980 globla conference in Toronto, an account of which is included in this memoir.

Through his lifelong “adventure,” as he calls it, Paulson has held fast to the conviction that anything is possible, and that all of us are bound by the ties of global interdependence. He challenges readers to rethink how they see the world and realize the opportunity that each of us has to commit to building a more perfect world.

New Leadership Skills

Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World by Bob Johansen. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. 2009. 191 pages. $26.95.

Self-serving leadership is about to become obsolete, according to Institute for the Future scholar and board member Bob Johansen. He expects the next 10 years to be a “threshold decade” of greater volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Leaders who wish to steer their organizations through all the turmoil will need to be able to look beyond their own personal interests and collaborate with the broader system of which they are parts.

Johansen identifies 10 fundamental skills that every leader will need to possess to be effective, and he explains how he or she can implement them into everyday practice. These skills include the “maker instinct,” clarity, dilemma flipping (turning problems into opportunities), and quiet transparency (being open and authentic without advertising).

Making Education More Effective

The Money Myth: School Resources, Outcomes, and Equity by W. Norton Grubb. Russell Sage Foundation. 2009. 400 pages. $35.

Increased funding does not guarantee improved school performance, according to Berkeley education professor W. Norton Grubb. Despite lavish funding, he says, many U.S. school districts lag far behind others in the quality of education they offer their students. Those students will consequently be at a steep disadvantage throughout their adult lives.

Grubb cites evidence that schools often waste or misallocate the resources they have, in part because they operate by outmoded top-down management styles in which leadership does not work in tandem with teachers and the communities. With more collective decision making, schools might function more effectively.

Grubb describes new approaches to reorganize schools and school districts to make them more collegial, democratic, and equipped for meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Bringing Garbage Cans into the 21st Century

Imagine a trash can that actually sorts your recyclables for you—and then tells you how much money your garbage is worth. Currently being developed at Georgia Tech, Smart Trash receptacles are being touted as an ecologically sound method of waste disposal that’s easy and rewarding to use.

Trash receptacles equipped with scanners that read bar codes and other product tags would record much of what is thrown away, along with the items’ potential resale value. They would then relay that information to recycling centers via WiFi. Recycling centers would set aside anything hazardous or toxic for treatment, storage, and safe disposal. Anything of value would be auctioned off, with proceeds going to the consumer, who would have the option of receiving cash back or applying the earnings to next month’s sanitation bill.

The cash incentive and user-friendliness of Smart Trash technology is intended to encourage more consumers to recycle and also enable them to easily recycle many more items than the current system allows, such as consumer electronics, for example. Developers are betting that the benefits for consumers (not to mention the environment) will outweigh any embarrassment of leaving yet one more digital trail behind.

Source: Georgia Institute of Technology, www.gatech.edu.

Collecting Wisdom About the Future

2009 State of the Future by Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu. Millennium Project. 2009. 100-page paperback plus a CD-ROM with 6,700 pages of research. $49.95. Order from World Future Society, www.wfs.org/wfsbooks.htm.

In October 2008, major U.S. financial institutions crashed, and economies around the world went into recession. In March 2009, an asteroid passed within 77,000 kilometers of Earth; had it made impact, it would have obliterated all life within an 800-square-kilometer area. What do these two events have in common? According to Millennium Project scholars Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu in the 2009 State of the Future, both were near-total surprises.

“No one knew it [the meteor] was coming,” the authors write. “The time between its discovery and close approach was very short. Few people knew the global financial crisis was coming; fewer still forecast its breadth and depth.”

As a commission that advises the United Nations’ global efforts to raise living standards, lower disease rates, and relieve hunger, the Millennium Project anticipates—and seeks to avert—disasters of all kinds. It continually surveys more than 2,700 researchers for which trends they expect will shape world events over the coming years, and releases their combined observations in its annual State of the Future reports.

Like preceding reports, the 2009 edition identifies 15 Global Challenges that only worldwide action will be able to solve. The 2009 also present an overall outlook for life on earth over the next decade in its State of the Future Index, and synthesizes researchers’ analyses about conditions in the world at large via real-time Delphi studies and other forecasting exercises.
On the plus side, according to the researchers, the world now has fewer conflicts, global development assistance is growing, poverty reduction continues, women are gaining a greater voice in governments and organizations internationally, and scientific and technological progress keeps accelerating. On the minus side, fewer countries are governed by democratic governments; population growth trends portend more people lacking food and water; climate change is altering animal and insect patterns; new infectious diseases, including 20 drug-resistant “superbugs,” have emerged over the last 40 years; and worldwide energy demand could double by 2030.

The global recession and its long-term impacts have given the researchers much to discuss in this report. So has the growing concern worldwide over climate change. The authors hope that new national and international systems might effectively respond to both.

“The global financial crisis and climate change planning may be helping humanity to move from its often selfish, self-centered adolescence to a more globally responsible adulthood,” they write.
This year’s State of the Future Index projects global development over the next 10 years post-recession, alongside a “baseline” projection scenario in which the recession never took place. The comparison is a concrete tracker of the recession’s impacts: The first projection shows greater scarcity of food and potable water, higher poverty rates, stifled research and development, and hampered economic growth.

Yet we have an opportunity to build a new, better global economy, the authors argue. In a chapter unique to this edition, 217 international questionnaire participants offer ideas on the elements that this new economy might include: a higher priority on ethics at all levels; new definitions of GNP and GDP; global commons supported by international agreements; “collective intelligence,” by which leaders are able to draw from universal banks of information to guide their decisions; and updated educational systems.

At least one reason for hope is cited: Instantaneous- communication technologies provide the means for people across the world to know the world’s problems and to act collaboratively to solve them.

“Mobile phones, the Internet, international trade, language translation, and jet planes are giving birth to an interdependent humanity that can create and implement global strategies to improve the prospects for humanity,” the authors write.

Ethical decision making also seems to be making progress. More than 5,000 businesses signed on to the UN’s Global Compact, pledging to use global ethics. The International Criminal Court, international treaties, and new International Organization for Standardization guidelines are setting norms for national governance. Social media, ethics commissions, and NGOs all are keeping public officials accountable. Corporate social responsibility, ethical marketing, and social investing are increasing.

If one seeks evidence of new collective intelligence, this report itself surely provides it. With more than 2,700 participants from around the world since 1996 contributing to these assessments, the annual reports are as well-researched and all-encompassing as any. Readers will find a grand overview of the trends—both positive and negative—likely to shape world events in this century and beyond.

About the Reviewer
Rick Docksai is a staff editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review. E-mail rdocksai@wfs.org.

Deciding Our Futures

Futurists offer a toolbox for improving decision making.

As the world becomes more complex, the likelihood of making poor decisions about our future increases, as does the cost of bad outcomes.

Psychologists refer to two types of decision-making strategies: intuition and reason. Intuition is faster and often emotional, while reason is slower and logical. As the pace of our world accelerates, intuition may increasingly trump reason; "going with the gut" can be an efficient way to decide, but it can also lead to more errors.

It is becoming harder to make good decisions because it has become risky to simply rely on expert advice: Expertise has become fractured into smaller and smaller areas, leaving a gap in areas in which we may be unknowledgeable. Experience leaves us ill-prepared for judgments about wild-card events. And intuition is often based on biases that may lead us in the wrong direction.

This special section offers insights from futurists on ways that we can come to grips with the flaws in our decision-making processes and improve our strategies for making critical decisions about the future.

- Editors

The Dymaxion Dream Reincarnate

By Cynthia G. Wagner
Volkswagen showcases the “purposeful aesthetics” of earth-friendly design.

One could not help but smile when Volkswagen introduced its trim little concept car, the L1, at the 2009 auto show in Frankfurt. Smile, with nostalgia for futures past … and for visionary inventor R. Buckminster Fuller.

The future is, and has been for some time, streamlined.

In a description strongly reminiscent of that for the Dymaxion car, which Fuller designed and built in the 1930s, VW outlines its philosophy for the latest car of the future in a press package:

In developing both prototype generations of the L1, Volkswagen simply questioned everything that typically characterised an automobile. The key starting point was body construction, and a core question was raised here: How would a car have to look and be built to consume as little energy as possible? The logical answer: extremely aerodynamic and lightweight.

Thus, aerodynamically designed and built with lightweight materials, the 838-pound, one-liter vehicle (with a fuel economy of 240 mpg) may be on the market by 2013 — realizing a vision for efficient transportation that’s more than 75 years old.

Is this the reincarnation of Fuller’s Dymaxion Car we see before us? The new vehicle is at least a worthy descendent, bearing traces of its ancestor’s noble silhouette.

VW’s L1 is far smaller than Fuller’s Dymaxion car, with room for just two passengers (one sitting behind the other), while Fuller’s vision accommodated a larger American family of up to 10 passengers.

Fuller’s Dymaxion concept extended beyond vehicle design to housing and even global mapping. As the Buckminster Fuller Institute defines it, Dymaxion (dynamic maximum tension) was an engineering concept built on “the idea that rational action in a rational world demands the most efficient overall performance per unit of input. [Fuller’s] Dymaxion structures, then are those that yield the greatest possible efficiency in terms of available technology.”

The principles of energy efficiency are the legacy that VW has inherited from Bucky Fuller, affectionately known as Earth’s friendly genius. But Walter de Silva, head of design for the Volkswagen Group, emphasizes the L1’s more modern appeal — its “purposeful aesthetics” — as a feature no less significant to the car-buying public and, hence, to the future of personal transportation.

About the Author

Cynthia G. Wagner is managing editor of THE FUTURIST.

For more information about Volkswagen AG, visit www.volkswagenag.com. For a review of the L1, see “VW’s One-Liter Car Is Finally On Its Way” by Jens Meiners, Car and Driver (September 2009).

For more about R. Buckminster Fuller, visit Buckminster Fuller Institute, www.bfi.org.

ALL DYMAXION CAR IMAGES: WFS FILE PHOTOS, PUBLISHED IN “CRITICAL PATH TO AN ALL-WIN WORLD: BUCKY FULLER DESIGNS THE NEW AGE” BY BARBARA MARX HUBBARD, THE FUTURIST, JUNE 1981.

The Fate of the Galaxy

The Milky Way has a bright future ahead of it—literally—predicts Ohio State University astronomer Stelios Kazantzidis.

Using computer models, he concludes that, in the far future, the host of smaller satellite galaxies that orbit the Milky Way will merge with it. When they do, the gravitational forces will puff up the Milky Way’s stars and other matter to create luminous stellar rings or flares.

Many scientists expect this merger. They speculate, however, that it would tear the Milky Way apart—one tough break for whatever life forms inhabit the galaxy at the time.

Kazantzidis’s computer models are based on the real-life movements of other galaxies similar to the Milky Way, and project a much more hopeful future.

“The satellite galaxy impacts don't destroy spiral galaxies. They actually drive their evolution,” he says.
It is an evolution that has already been going on for billions of years, he adds. The continous pull from the satellite galaxies might explain why the Milky Way has its namesake nebulous haze.

“Every spiral galaxy has a complex formation and evolutionary history,” says Kazantzidis. “We would hope to understand exactly how the Milky Way formed and how it will evolve. We may never succeed in knowing its exact history, but we can try to learn as much as we can about it.”—Rick Docksai

Source: Stelios Kazantzidis, www.ohio-state.edu.

Foresight Conquers Fear of the Future

By Edward Cornish
Today’s youth are growing up in the midst of radical social and economic transformations. Now is the time to develop the most critical skill for effectively managing their careers and personal lives: Foresight.

“I’m scared,” the young man confessed. “I’m starting my eighteenth year in a world that makes no sense to me. All I know is that this world I’m living in is a shambles and I don’t know how to put it together.”

The young man bared his soul to an invisible audience during a radio call-in show. Other callers agreed with his dismal assessment of the state of the world. Nobody offered an answer for his fears.

Bill Moyers, the TV interviewer, happened to be listening that night and was profoundly affected by what he heard.

“Such lamentations,” Moyers commented later, “are deep currents running throughout the liberal West today. Our secular and scientific societies are besieged by violence, moral anarchy, and purposelessness that have displaced any mobilizing vision of the future except hedonism and consumerism.”

Moyers put his finger on what may be a key challenge faced by many young people today: their inability to think realistically, creatively, and hopefully about the future. Instead, these young people suffer from what can be described as “futurephobia.”

Some futurephobes have an acute version of this malady, like the young man described by Moyers, but most futurephobes simply focus on their immediate circumstances and drift into the future without thinking much about it at all. Either way, they may drift into financial or other kinds of trouble.

The connection between poor foresight and serious problems is widely recognized by psychologists and sociologists. Yale sociologist Wendell Bell asserts that some authorities “go so far as to claim that all forms of deviant, criminal, and reckless behavior have the same fundamental cause: the tendency to pursue immediate benefits without concern for long-term costs, a disregard for inevitable and undesirable future consequences.”

Successful self-management, says Bell, requires understanding and giving appropriate value to the likely consequences of your actions. If you have little or no foresight, you cannot think realistically and creatively about your future, so you cannot steer your career and personal life toward long-term success.

Poor foresight can threaten not just the careers of emerging adults, but even their lives. Young people lacking foresight are prone to act recklessly — drive too fast, use drugs, play with guns, commit crimes, and even kill themselves (or others).

On the other hand, when young people do manage to develop good foresight, they can think realistically, creatively, and hopefully about the future. So empowered, they can aim their careers toward achievable goals and cheerfully accept the burdens of responsibility and self-discipline required for success. Barack Obama is a recent example of foresight-empowered success.

The New Urgency of Foresight

Older people are prone to dismiss the problems of youth as just a normal part of growing up, but the fact is that today’s youth are coming of age in a world undergoing an unprecedented transformation powered by multiple technological revolutions. These technological advances, all occurring simultaneously, are overturning the world’s economies and undermining long-established institutions, careers, and lifestyles.

Amid such turbulence, making a good decision concerning one’s career or private life can be highly problematic, and the demographic group most acutely affected are young people moving into adulthood. These emerging adults have entered a time of life when parents and teachers have diminished power to guide them, so young people must make critical decisions by themselves at a time when their experience of the world is limited and their brains are still immature. (Foresight, scientists say, is largely a function of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which does not reach maturity until about age 25.)

Adding to the challenge of making appropriate decisions in today’s world is the fact that knowledgeable and trustworthy advisors are now less available to emerging adults. In bygone days, most young people lived in villages or small towns where people got to know each other well, enabling the elders to offer wise counsel for a young person trying to find a suitable job or marriage partner.

In today’s highly mobile mass society, young people roam the world and can choose among thousands of potential careers and mates in countless different locations. In principle, the abundance of choice offers wonderful opportunities, but it can pose a baffling conundrum for an emerging adult with little experience of the world.

Making matters worse for many young people, technological advances have eliminated most of the jobs that could be learned quickly and paid enough for an 18-year-old to live on and maybe support a family. Now, getting a decent job is likely to require years of training at a college or university during which time the student earns little or no money and may go heavily into debt.
Improving Youth Foresight

Ironically, it was fear of the future that led to some of our most useful foresight tools.

Relatively little was done to create a science of foresight until after World War II, which had led to the development of rockets and atomic bombs. Frightened that the Soviet Union might use the new superweapons, the U.S. Air Force established the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, as a “think factory.” The main task of RAND’s scientists and scholars was to think about future wars — how to fight and win them.

To fulfill their mission, the RAND scientists had to think seriously about the future, and in the process they developed a variety of methods for thinking more scientifically about the future than had ever been done before. Mathematician Olaf Helmer and his RAND colleague Norman Dalkey developed the Delphi technique, a way to refine and synthesize scientists’ forecasts of future technological developments. In addition, Herman Kahn developed his scenario technique for exploring the implications of possible future events. The scenario method is now widely used in government and business.

Meanwhile, Arnold Brown, Edie Weiner, and others refined ways for identifying and analyzing social trends. Today trend analysis is widely recognized as one of the most useful ways for identifying significant developments in technology and society and anticipating outcomes.

Many of the methods developed since World War II can now be used in simplified forms by young people and by teachers or others trying to help young people gain a practical understanding of what is happening in the world now, where things are going, and the opportunities that young people have to make valuable contributions to human welfare as well as succeed in their chosen careers and personal lives.

The task now is to make foresight into a recognized life skill that can empower young people to think more clearly, constructively, and hopefully about the future. The World Future Society has already initiated several projects for improving youth foresight, and more are under development.

Young people interested in participating in a Society conference now can attend at a reduced rate of $125 ($150 on site) and many members have been donating funds to cover one or more full scholarships for young people.

In addition, the Society recently sponsored a High School Essay Contest, and the first group of winners was announced in July. Other programs will be instituted as funding becomes available.

If we can equip today’s young people with good foresight, we can all be much more optimistic about their future and ours.
About the Author

Edward Cornish, founder of the World Future Society, is editor of THE FUTURIST and a member of the Society’s Board. His book Futuring: The Exploration of the Future provides a readable description of the futures field, including many of the methods now in use. It may be ordered from the World Future Society for $19.95 (member’s price $17.95). Go to www.wfs.org/futuring.htm

Reinventing the Music Business

The music industry continues to search for a sustainable long-term model for the digital age. Recently, industry leaders, musicians, and policy makers gathered to search for innovative solutions at the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit in Washington, D.C.

“It’s chaos, the music industry right now,” said Greg Kot, music critic for the Chicago Tribune, during a panel discussion. “But chaos is not necessarily a bad thing.”

Nowadays, musicians have the option of signing to a label (large or small), relying on outside investment, or finding the time, energy, and money to manage everything themselves—the do-it-yourself approach. Convincing fans to microfinance their efforts is a fourth possibility, and a bit riskier. Each choice comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Speaking at the conference, Emily White of Whitesmith Entertainment emphasized that what’s best for an artist depends on a number of factors, including where artists are in terms of their careers and where they ultimately want to be.

In other words, just because independent musicians now have the power to tap into the global marketplace from their laptops doesn’t mean that the “middle man” is obsolete. On the contrary, White pointed out that having to constantly promote and market one’s own music takes a great deal of effort and leaves less time to focus on actually making music. It is probably a task better left to others.

Nevertheless, even with an army of publicists behind them, bands need to take advantage of social networking sites to connect with fans, spread the word about their music, and gain support. As a number of speakers and panelists pointed out, social networking is a huge component of a successful promotional strategy that also includes giving away MP3s for free.

Ariel Hyatt of Cyber PR insisted that musicians should view MP3s first and foremost as a method of self-promotion that can lead to other financial opportunities. Music sales form only a small fraction (possibly even the smallest fraction) of a band's revenue. There is greater financial opportunity in licensing recordings (for use in movies, television shows, games like Rock Band, and commercials, for example).

Legendary band manager and artist advocate Peter Jenner predicted that music sales will never recover now that anyone can effortlessly copy an MP3 file, arguing that music producers need to move beyond outdated industrial models of mass production. The Internet is a communications medium, and actually functions more like a radio station than a large store, he said. In other words, music is a service rather than a product.

The popular European Web site Spotify is one of a small handful of recent start-ups intent on offering music as a service under a blanket licensing system. As co-founder Daniel Ek explained, Spotify offers subscribers the ability to stream millions of recordings for a monthly fee. There is also a more limited, ad-supported free version.

Such online music services, which enable users to access virtually any music at any time without having to download it, could render peer-to-peer file sharing—the industry’s white whale—a thing of the past. Spotify users can share and collaborate on playlists, there are applications for Facebook and other social media, and the basic interface is simple to use. One music critic has said that it’s like having the entire iTunes library on your laptop or phone. So far, Spotify has been enthusiastically received in France, Spain, and the U.K.

There are no gatekeepers, so independent artists’ creative output is just as easily accessed as that of those on major labels. Ek pointed out that independent music makes up approximately 25% of what users are listening to. A more even playing field for musicians is one of the great advantages of digital media, but it faces a potentially large challenge.

Net Neutrality

Internet service providers, in the interest of increasing profits, could put bumps in that level playing field, warned Michael Bracy, co-founder and policy director of the Future of Music Coalition and co-owner of Austin, Texas-based independent record label Misra. Bracy noted that ISPs can make exclusive arrangements that direct consumers to certain large, corporate marketplace sites and slow down or even block access to competitors’ sites. Some ISPs might offer different tiers of service, where consumers would pay a premium in return for increased options.

The result might be a few large corporations controlling the digital music sphere in much the same way that they have American commercial radio, where independent and local artists face insurmountable obstacles in order to get airplay. Summit speaker Senator Al Franken pointed out that, without regulation, ISPs would have the power to transform a free, open, democratic system into a corporate pay-to-play system where those that can’t compete financially simply aren’t allowed in. Currently, “a garage band can stream songs just as easily as a multiplatinum superband,” he said, “but recently, business executives from top ISPs have declared their interest in offering prioritized Internet service to companies that can pay for it.”

This wouldn’t just affect the music industry. Determining what content moves at what speed across servers threatens innovation across the board, Franken warned. And restricting innovation would adversely affect the economy as a whole. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission is currently working on regulations to keep the Internet neutral.

—Aaron M. Cohen

For further information: The Future of Music Coalition, futureofmusic.org.

Saving a Tribal Language

Cultural knowledge may disappear with dwindling native populations.
When languages disappear, so do oral histories and cultural knowledge. As minority indigenous cultures face rapidly dwindling populations, the future of their heritage grows dark.

In America’s northern Plains, the Assiniboine tribe has shrunk to just 50 living members in Montana who are fluent in its language, Nakota. The Assiniboine separated from the Sioux some 400 years ago, developing their own linguistic and cultural forms, according to Raymond DeMallie, an Indiana University anthropology professor.
DeMallie is leading a project to preserve the oral history of the tribe, with plans to publish a dictionary of the language and two volumes transcribing oral histories that were recorded nearly 25 years ago.

The Assiniboine tribe had long been neglected by linguists and anthropologists because they were believed to have been closely related to the Sioux; they were also incorrectly identified with the Stoneys of Canada, according to DeMallie. This mistaken identity led to neglect by scholars pursuing the larger and better known indigenous cultures.

Armed with new digital audio technologies that can visually represent sounds for precise analysis, DeMallie and his team will be able to replay difficult passages of the recorded material, consult with other experts, and render more accurate translations.

The Assiniboine traveled farther north than did the Sioux, and the culture was greatly influenced through intermarriage with the Cree tribe and with French and Canadian fur traders, DeMallie explains. The oral culture is rich with stories incorporating European folktales.

But of particular importance to cultural anthropologists is the effect of one of the tribe’s key distinctions: It survived as hunters without benefit of horses. Unlike other Plains tribes, the Assiniboine relied on pre-horse hunting techniques, such as communal buffalo drives. Knowledge about their unique survival strategies could thus be preserved in the oral histories and stories collected.
Source: Indiana University, www.indiana.edu.

Stewart Brand’s Environmental Heresies

By Aaron M. Cohen
A maverick environmentalist advocates saving the planet via nuclear power, mass urbanization, genetically engineered food, and geoengineering.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand. Viking. 2009. 316 pages. $25.95.

Futurist and ecologist Stewart Brand believes that the Green movement must move swiftly and decisively to embrace technological solutions to climate change — several of which many leading environmentalists have spent their careers campaigning against — including nuclear energy, genetic modification, mass urbanization, and geoengineering.

Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, and co-founder of The Long Now Foundation and The WELL, has never had any trepidation about seeking out controversial solutions or endorsing emerging technologies. As he sees it, climate change is the single largest threat looming over humanity. It comes down to a simple choice, he writes: “We finesse climate, or climate finesses us.”

The first item on the agenda is a carbon-free future. Brand argues that this is well within reach and that the technological know-how is already in place — all we need to do is get over our nuclear fears.

A 2002 tour of the notorious Yucca Mountain project led Brand to rethink his long-held opinions on nuclear energy. He began to balance potential benefits against potential drawbacks. In the process, he learned that the risk of cancer is much higher from fossil-fuel production and usage; that oil, natural gas, and hydrogen are much more explosive; that trace radiation technically isn’t bad for you; and that nuclear energy is historically associated with deproliferation efforts — not nuclear weapons programs.

Brand makes nuclear energy the leading component of his green energy plan and presents a strong case that it is economical and safe. (The arguments he presents against greater investment in wind and solar technology are far less persuasive, however). He also endorses the proposition, quickly gaining acceptance, that booming megacities are facilitating an increasingly beneficial arrangement between humans and the environment. “Urban density allows half of humanity to live on 2.8 percent of the land,” he writes. “Soon that will be 80 percent of humanity on 3 percent of the land. Consider just the infrastructure efficiencies.”

Brand goes on to declare urban slums, home to more than half of city dwellers, to be the new sustainable communities. Intentionally or not, “squatter cities are Green,” he says. For example, urban farming and rooftop agriculture have their roots in squatter cities, where such practices were born of necessity if not ideology. He argues that squatter cities must be improved and incorporated within larger urban structures.

With the energy crisis and overpopulation under control and everyone comfortably ensconced in megacities, the next question is how to feed everyone. Brand advocates what he sees as the next logical step in what has been an ongoing process ever since humans began domesticating crops thousands of years ago.

Like nuclear power, genetically modified crops have long been the bane of environmentalists, but Brand believes it’s time to rethink the issue. The benefits of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are myriad, he argues. Crops modified to grow without being tilled prevent carbon in the soil from being released in the atmosphere. So called Bt crops (engineered with a gene from the Bacillus thuringiensis bacterium) reduce pesticide use. Other technologies reduce the amount of water or fertilizer needed to grow crops. Still others may help reduce methane emitted from the animals that consume them (including humans).

The main hindrance comes from the private sector in the form of corporate licensing practices and intellectual property law, which can prevent farmers in the developing world from taking full advantage of agricultural aid. Taking his cue from the open-source software movement that he’s been a strong advocate for over the years, Brand pushes for what he calls “open-source biotech,” which he believes is very much a possibility. If environmental scientists develop non-patent-protected seeds with ecology and international aid in mind, they may be able to contain food and water shortages, keeping them at more manageable, localized levels.

Saving what is arguably his most controversial proposition for last, Brand writes that large-scale geoengineering efforts are now imperative. Relying on systems dynamics, he shows that it’s too late to completely prevent or mitigate climate change even if humanity somehow miraculously reverses course at the last minute. More drastic measures must be considered. Finding ways to engineer the planet with a light touch is a tricky proposition, to say the least, and implementing such solutions even trickier, but Brand is cautiously optimistic that it can be done.

The moral of the story is that, in the face of imminent climate change, we must search for innovative high-tech solutions and embrace what Brand calls “the freedom to try things.” This thoroughly researched and highly readable book presents a compelling if controversial argument for how best to confront the challenges ahead.

About the Reviewer

Aaron M. Cohen is a staff editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review.

Tomorrow in Brief

Sustainable Sources of Biofuels

Native prairie plants may provide an alternative source of fuel that does not cut into food supplies. As societies increasingly demand crop-based biofuels to reduce dependence on petroleum, the rapid diversion of corn from food to fuel has many people worried about feeding tomorrow’s hungry. Now, environmental science researchers led by Michigan Technological University’s David Flaspohler advocate the use of diverse native prairie plants for bioenergy instead of relying on agricultural crops such as corn. Native crops are also better for preserving the habitats of birds and other species, and maintaining biodiversity is good for the long-term health of the ecosystem, according to the researchers.

Source: Michigan Technological University, www.mtu.edu .

Pollution without Borders

Most of the world’s air-quality problems are local, but non-domestic sources of pollution are an increasing concern around the world, according to the U.S. National Research Council. As developing countries become more industrialized, they are emitting more ozone, particulates such as soot and dust, mercury, and organic pollutants such as DDT. All of these pollutants can travel across continents; for instance, satellite observations have attributed plumes in central Oregon to polluted air masses that took eight days to travel from East Asia, where man-made emissions are expected to rise in coming decades.

Source: “Global Sources of Local Pollution,” National Research Council, Committee on the Significance of International Transport of Air Pollutants. National Academies Press, www.nap.edu .

Long-Term Impacts of Bad Shoes

Whether it’s a sexy stiletto or a stylish sandal, cute but high-risk shoes could cost you long-term foot pain, warn researchers from Boston University School of Public Health. Women are more prone to make poor footwear choices than men are, and thus put themselves more at risk of sprains, muscle strains, fractures, and a variety of foot pains from toenail to heel. The researchers recommend choosing low-risk shoes, such as athletic and casual sneakers, and avoiding high-risk shoes—high heels, sandals, and slippers. Performing stretching exercises can also help reduce the effects of bad shoes.

Source: “Foot Pain: Is Current or Past Shoewear a Factor?” by Alyssa B. Dufour et al. Arthritis Care & Research (Wiley-Blackwell, October 2009).

Plagiarists Beware: Musical Detection Software

Popular music has frequently borrowed from classical composers such as Mozart and Rachmaninoff, but now when songwriters borrow even a sequence of chord changes from one of their contemporaries, cries of plagiarism can be expected. Melody detectives will soon have new software to help predict whether a specific plagiarism charge would hold up in court, thanks to tune algorithms developed by computer scientists at Goldsmiths, University of London. The program models court decisions for cases of alleged tune theft; when tested on U.S. court cases, the model predicted 90% of the decisions correctly. The benefit for songwriters and their publishers would be that they could test their tunes against any similar preexisting melodies, assuring themselves and their fans of the new songs’ originality.

Source: Goldsmiths, University of London, www.goldsmiths.ac.uk.

Can Happiness Be Acquired?

Are some people just born happy while others are doomed to despair? Psychiatrists have plied patients with psychotropic drugs and long-term therapy sessions without altering their happiness, says Robert Cloninger, professor of psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis. However, by redirecting clinical treatment toward enhancing patients’ character development, their overall life satisfaction and well-being can be improved. To achieve happiness, Cloninger prescribes a psychoeducational program for improving self-directedness (by becoming more calm, accepting one’s limitations, and letting go of fear and conflict), cooperativeness (by working in the service of others), and self-transcendence (awareness of the roots of negative emotions), all traits that are essential for well-being.

Source: Robert Cloninger, Department of Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri 63110; http://psychobiology.wustl.edu/cloninger.html .

Heartbeat Monitored by Phone
A new application for your smart phone will let you send your heart rate directly to your doctor’s office. The iStethoscope, developed by University College London computer scientist Peter Bentley, comprises an audio amplifier that filters sounds from the built-in microphone to transmit clear signals of your heartbeat to the cardiologist. Bentley foresees such devices becoming more powerful and cheaper than traditional medical equipment, eventually putting an array of monitoring and diagnostic instruments in everyone’s pockets.
Sources: University College London, www.ucl.ac.uk. Peter Bentley, iStethoscope Pro, www.peterjbentley.com.

Tech Support for Homeless
Homeless people may be placed in permanent housing more quickly, thanks to portable technologies that reduce the cumbersome paper-based inspection and matching processes of housing services.
New York City’s Department of Homeless Services (DHS) is teaming with IBM and global Bay Mobile Technologies to deploy handheld devices for field inspectors to file reports, photos, and other documentation on available apartments, providing DHS case workers real-time information on what repairs are needed before placing clients in their new homes.The devices have already increased the number of inspections that DHS performs every month by 57%, and in turn the number of leases signed increased by 25% in one year.

Sources: New York City Department of Homeless Services, www.nyc.gov/dhs. IBM, www.ibm.com/services. Global Bay Mobile, www.globalbay.com/public-sector.html.

Retirement Crisis among Hispanic Americans
The future hardships that many Americans are already bracing themselves for as they approach retirement will hit Hispanic Americans even harder, according to a new study by Americans for Secure Retirement and the Hispanic Institute. Reasons: Hispanic Americans have saved less for their futures, are less likely to be covered by employer-sponsored retirement plans, and have inadequate financial literacy. The retirement crisis that many foresee is due to increased longevity and inadequate financial planning. Some 60% of middle-class Americans will outlive their money, according to the study. These trends will become especially critical to the rapidly growing Hispanic American population, who are largely employed in service-related fields that do not provide retirement plans or enough income for workers to save on their own. The study recommends educational programs for the Hispanic American community emphasizing alternative retirement savings options, such as lifetime annuities, which can help build retirement savings and guarantee secure future incomes.

Source: Americans for Secure Retirement, www.paycheckforlife.org .

Kids Need More Places to Play
Two-thirds of American children now fall short of the recommended 60 minutes of daily physical activity, and one reason is that they lack a safe place to play within walking distance.
Building more safe places to play could reduce childhood obesity and improve juvenile health and well-being overall. U.S. child obesity rates have nearly tripled since 1980.
The nonprofit organization KaBOOM has launched a Playful City USA campaign to honor imaginative ways that local groups have promoted play. Among the programs showcased in KaBOOM’s “Play Matters” report:
• Boston, Massachusetts’s Schoolyard Initiative has transformed 70 schoolyards into colorful and engaging outdoor classrooms and places to play.
• Boulder, Colorado’s Freiker Program (for “frequent bikers”) uses incentives to increase the number of children biking or walking to school. Kids can use solar-powered “Freikometers” that count their bike trips, earning points for prizes.
• Cedar Rapids, Iowa’s Switch Program encourages kids to switch what they do (from nonphysical to physical activities), switch what they view (reducing television viewing time), and switch what they chew (to increase fruit and vegetable consumption).
Source: KaBOOM, http://kaboom.org.

Developing “Middle Skills”
The recession may have severely suppressed employment growth, but economic recovery will depend on a workforce that is prepared for the jobs that will open. And the recovery may be led by the middle, according to a study by the Workforce Alliance and the Skills2Compete campaign.
Middle-skill workers ranging from carpenters to radiology technicians will be needed in the key industries that are benefiting from federal funding, such as construction, health care, manufacturing, and transportation. In Rhode Island, more than 42% of job openings between 2006 and 2016 are projected to be middle-skill jobs, compared with 26% for low-skill and 32% for high-skill jobs.
To overcome the middle-skills gap, the study recommends that employers invest more in training of lower-skilled employees, that jurisdictions invest more in vocational and two-year college programs, and that individuals invest more in their own skills through post-secondary schooling, vocational training, or apprenticeships.
Source: The Workforce Alliance, www.workforcealliance.org.
.
Wild Plants as Protein Source
Wild lupins growing in the mountains of Andalusia in Spain could come to be a useful source of protein and fiber, according to researchers at the Fat Institute (CSIS) and the University of Seville.
Lupins are legumes, a principal source of vegetable protein in the human diet, and they are rich in fiber and polyphenols. The researchers studied six wild species of lupins, focusing on their amino acids, digestibility, and other nutritional factors. Whether the plants are cultivated as food or not, their seeds offer rich nutritional properties, the researchers conclude.

Sources: Javier Vioque Peña, Fat Institute (CSIC), www.ig.csic.es. Platforma SINC, www.plataformasinc.es .

Sources: Thom Evans. Iowa Health Care Collaborative, www.ihconline.org.

Sarah Imhof, Concord Coalition, www.concordcoalition.org.
Commonwealth Fund. Web, www.commonwealthfund.org.

Books in Brief

Boomer Selling: Helping the Wealthiest Generation in History Own Your Premium Products and Services by Steve Howard. ACTion Press. 2009. 208 pages. $15.95.

Baby boomers might hold the key to nationwide economic recovery, argues business consultant Howard. He notes that they hold 70% of the U.S. wealth and are responsible for more than half of the nation’s discretionary spending. They are the demographic group most likely to have substantial savings, home equity, and stable jobs. They also tend to spend robustly, even in the current recession—though they are becoming more selective about what they buy.

Howard surmises that a business’s best hope for success is to thoroughly understand boomers, their needs, and how to serve them. Howard lends his observations on boomers’ spending habits, attitudes, and general likes and dislikes. He explains why sales tricks, gimmicks, and pressure tactics commonly associated with sales will not work. Boomers as a group share a unique frame of reference, he says. A seller would be well-advised to learn it and design products that accommodate it.

Building Peace: Practical Reflections from the Field edited by Craig Zelizer and Robert A. Rubinstein. Kumarian Press. 2009. 332 pages. Paperback. $29.95.

“Peace building” operations have increased since the 1980s in response to increasingly complex conflicts around the globe, according to conflict-resolution expert Zelizer, international-relations scholar Rubinstein, and 33 other scholars and field directors. They record the accomplishments of peace building during that time frame in Angola, Crimea, East Timor, Palestine, and other troubled regions.

Describing 13 endeavors in grassroots capacity building, community dialogue, peace education, psychosocial healing, media campaigns, creation of new structures for addressing conflicts, and behind-the-scenes negotiations with government leaders, the authors attest that peace-building operations have made lasting impacts in their zones of operation. They offer practical suggestions for policy makers and practitioners, concluding that, when they initiate a peace operation in a sensitive manner, in accordance with local context and in strong partnerships with local actors, they can hope to make momentous progress toward turning a war-torn region into a society that enjoys long-term peace.

Crime Signals: How to Spot a Criminal Before You Become a Victim by David Givens. St. Martin’s Griffin. 2009. 220 pages. $13.95.

No buyer has to ever heed the salesperson who says “read my lips,” according to Givens, a certified expert in nonverbal communications. He explains how body language can be a telltale indicator of almost any person’s motives—including those of swindlers, criminals, and terrorists. Crime rarely happens without prior warning, he argues.

A savvy eye that knows how to decode body language can spot and avoid many foul acts before they happen, as well as speed up the apprehension of offenders after the fact, says Givens. Citing his own field observations and the accounts of judges, journalists, police, and convicted offenders, he decodes dozens of hand gestures, shrugs, changes of complexion, dilations of the pupils, and other cues that can keep a would-be victim from walking unknowingly into danger.

Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry by Lenore Skenazy. 2009. Jossey-Bass. $24.95.

Columnist Skenazy incited a maelstrom of controversy when she wrote in a news column about having once allowed her nine-year-old son to ride a subway in New York City alone. Many pundits expressed outrage that she would give her child such free rein. In Free-Range Kids, she counters these critics and argues that more freedom is just what children need.

Children who are overly monitored, she argues, will never learn to become independent adults. She cites evidence that many perceived dangers—online predators, germs, poisoned Halloween candy, hazardous playground equipment, and others—are real but are grossly exaggerated. Parents should exercise reasonable caution to keep their children safe without going into excess. Skenazy recommends setting realistic ground rules for using the Internet, playing in the woods, and transiting to or from school, as well as keeping toxic chemicals in household goods out of children’s reach. She also offers ideas on how to approach difficult issues, such as sexuality and school bullies.

Futures Research Methodology: Version 3.0 edited by Jerome C. Glenn and Theodore J. Gordon. Millennium Project. 2009. Approximately 1,300 pages. CD-ROM. $50.

Due to the increasing complexity and pace of change in our world, organization leaders seek better ways to anticipate opportunities and risks. Futures research methodologies—exercises in which participants explore, create, and test both possible futures and desirable ones in order to chart better paths forward—are going into increasingly widespread use, according to Glenn and Gordon, co-founders of the futures-research think tank Millennium Project.

They and more than 27 other leading futurists detail 37 futures-research methods, including Environmental Scanning, the Delphi Method, and Trend Impact Analysis. All methods are widely used by government agencies, private corporations, nongovernmental organizations, universities, and other decision-making bodies across the globe. The authors describe each method, recount its history, and explain how it is used, its strengths and weaknesses, its usefulness in combination with other methodologies, and the prospects for its use in the future.

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2009. 302 pages. $25.

We weren’t designed to be rational creatures, says neuroscientist Lehrer. For centuries, most scholars have said that the human brain is guided by reason. Lehrer begs to differ. He argues that any time the brain must make a decision, it confronts multiple impulses and emotions; often, these emotions and impulses–our “gut feelings”-are our best guides. On the other hand, there are times when we have to use logic, because gut feelings could lead us blindly astray.
Nature gave us brains that are fundamentally pluralistic—amalgamations of reason and emotion—according to Lehrer. The secret, he adds, is knowing when to use reason and when we should let our feelings decide.

Lehrer examines real-life decisions made by airplane pilots, hedge fund investors, poker players, professional athletes, and other individuals to chart how each one thinks in the heat of the moment. He draws conclusions about how the human mind makes decisions, and how we can make our decisions better.

Long-Range Futures Research: An Application of Complexity Science by Robert H. Samet. 2009. 593 pages. Paperback. $39.20.

The sciences of evolution and complexity provide an approach for exploring the unprecedented patterns of global change expected in the future. Futurist consultant Samet views the human civil system’s ongoing processes of development as akin to natural-world evolution. The human system is, he says, as organic and evolutionary as Darwin’s model of biological change. Civil artifacts are a “second nature” that superimposes on the first and yet becomes entangled in it. Civilization is guided by visions of the future, and humans contribute the genetic structure of societal systems in the form of ideas, images, knowledge, blueprints, etc.

Samet provides a guide to evolutionary future research and explains how the concept of far-from-equilibrium stability replaces the notion of economic equilibrium. He applies complexity science to a world city region, derives macrolaws of Ecodynamics, and describes the geopolitical macrostructure and scenarios for the global macrosystems.

The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory by Torkel Klingberg. Oxford. 2009. 202 pages. $21.95.

The human brain’s capacity has scarcely changed since prehistory, but the amount of information it is forced to process has increased exponentially, notes neuroscientist Klingberg. E-mails, phone calls, advertisements, text messages, multiple news headlines, and other bits of information confront us continually. We multitask and become used to constantly seeking more, quicker, and more-complex information. But feelings of inadequacy, distractedness, and information overload are common.

According to Klingberg, the modern work environment is so fast paced and demanding that our brains cannot keep up. But he thinks that this can change. Any continued activity shapes the brain and expands it, he explains. As we learn more about our brain’s limitations, we might learn how to change it and improve our abilities to multitask and gather information. Klingberg describes what is currently known about attention abilities, information processing, and training the brain for expanded capacity.

The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children’s Moral and Emotional Development by Richard Weissbourd. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2009. 241 pages. $25.

Parents, not society at large, are the primary shapers of their children’s moral lives, according to psychologist Weissbourd. He challenges parents to focus on their children’s moral development first and their happiness second.

Many parents, he warns, unintentionally harm their children’s moral development by trying too hard to make their children happy, by striving unnecessarily to be closer to their children, or by becoming too invested in their children’s lives and intensely pushing them to be achievers. All of these impulses can ultimately lead to young adults who are self-involved, emotionally fragile, and conformist.

Weissbourd suggests constructive alternatives for helping children learn to deal with emotions, find motivation to live in accordance with values, and develop a strong sense of self that will resist peer pressure and adversity, as well as attend to and care for others.

The Passionate Mind Revisited: Expanding Personal and Social Awareness by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad. 2009. 362 pages. Paperback. $16.95.

Conscious social evolution is both possible and necessary, according to yoga practitioners Kramer and Alstad. They link many of the problems in today’s world to limited worldviews, beliefs, and identities, and they urge readers to break through this lifetime of conditioning and thereby see life and the world in a new way.

The process, as they see it, involves synthesizing the best parts of Eastern and Western worldviews, valuing and protecting democracy, evolution, social justice, and—most importantly—self-awareness. The expanded social awareness that the world needs is best achieved not by setting our own selves aside, but by understanding ourselves more deeply first, and realizing what brought us to where we are today, and what we must do to continue our evolutionary journey.

The authors argue that humanity has achieved great things, but it has yet to turn its collective intelligence toward moving the world to where it can makes the lives of all its people livable, valuable, and valued, all of which are essential for creativity to flower.

The Penn Center Guide to Bioethics edited by Vardit Ravitsky, Autumn Fiester, and Arthur Caplan. Springer. 2009. 828 pages. $65.

Biotechnology presents us with promising breakthroughs, potential wonder cures, frightening dangers, and many perplexing ethical questions, according to Ravitsky, director of the Penn Center for Bioethics, and Center fellows Fiester and Caplan.

The editors compile 80 essays by bioethics specialists, each of whom presents an overview of his or her area of expertise and where the research in that area is heading. They explore a variety of developments and their implications for society: reproductive technologies, eugenics, biological threats to national security, vaccination, abortion, nanotechnology, organ transplantation, end-of-life issues, the meaning of free will in light of new discoveries of the brain and neural wiring, and more.

The Price of Perfection: Individualism and Society in the Era of Biomedical Enhancement by Maxwell J. Mehlman. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2009. 309 pages. $25.

Altering a patient’s genome or hormones to prevent a disease might be a good thing, says bioethicist Mehlman. But should doctors use such enhancements to improve a patient’s eyesight, brain function, mood, or physique? Biomedical treatments now enable doctors to do all of the above, he explains. And, he adds, its powers keep growing: Before a child is even born, doctors can now screen him or her for genetic traits and abnormalities; in time, they might be able to preprogram genes and weed out undesirable traits.

The potential to mitigate human suffering is exhilarating, Mehlman argues, but we run risks of going too far. Critics warn that we do not know enough about the human genome to tamper with it. Moreover, the benefits might not be realizable for all: What if the affluent use biomedicine disproportionately and become a genetically enhanced “genobility”? Mehlman concludes that biomedicine will continue to move forward, but that we can and should set appropriate boundaries for its use. He outlines several policy recommendations.

ReBound: A Proven Plan for Starting Over After Job Loss by Martha I. Finney. 2009. FT Press. 187 pages. Paperback. $16.99.

There is no such thing as a job-for-life; all of us can expect to lose our job at some point. What can we do when it happens? Business journalist and employment consultant Finney poses a comprehensive answer, proceeding chronologically from what to do prior to a layoff, during a layoff, and in the first few weeks of its aftermath. She offers specific pointers for how to handle the pain, anger, and other negative feelings; what to remember when negotiating a severance package and other final arrangements; what to tell family and loved ones; and how to minimize expenditures and find adequate short-term health coverage while waiting for a new job.

Finney follows with a complete game plan for finding a new job through networking and online resources, succeeding in a job interview, evaluating a new job offer, and—should a job offer prove acceptable—beginning strong and thereby lowering the chances of yet another layoff.

2009 State of the Future by Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu. The Millennium Project. 2009. 100-page paperback plus a CD-ROM with 6,700 pages of research. $49.95.

The combination of a global recession, climate change, increasing migrations, and shortages of water, food, and energy spell difficult times ahead, warn scholars Glenn, Gordon, and Florescu of the futures-research think tank Millennium Project in their 2009 State of the Future report. Global strategies and international coordination will be necessities, as will a greater awareness of the relationship between environmental problems and national security.

Combining research and projections from hundreds of futurist experts, the authors forecast the future with the recession ending in 2010 and with it continuing, a key variable that will hugely impact worldwide quality of life. They also present 35 elements of the world’s post-recession economic system, 300 items related to environmental security, three Middle East peace scenarios, science and technology scenarios, a Global Energy Collective Intelligence Design, the formation of future strategy units in selected governments, and 15 Global Challenges that communities will have to confront.

Taming the Dragons of Change in Business: 10 Tips for Anticipating, Embracing, and Using Change to Achieve Success by Richard Stieglitz. Acuity. 2009. 230 pages. Paperback. $19.95.

Prepare for never-before-seen levels of global interconnectedness and information exchange, says business consultant Stieglitz. Twenty-first-century communication tools—YouTube, Blackberrys, Twitter, etc.—are already changing commerce as we know it: Users can connect with other users anywhere and anytime to disseminate ideas and innovations at lightning-fast speeds, he notes.

By mid-century, he predicts, use of these tools will have brought the world’s businesses into a new global “relationship economy,” in which supply chains link every business on earth, business-government joint ventures the norm, and industry a steadfast caretaker of the environment, and governments across the world join together in powerful multinational ventures. Stieglitz outlines 10 specific ways in which this new economy will be different, and 10 new ways of thinking that business leaders will need to adopt in order to thrive among them.

The Truth About Trust in Business: How to Enrich the Bottom Line, Improve Retention, and Build Valuable Relationships for Success by Vanessa Hall. Emerald. 2009. 264 pages. $22.95.

Trust is fundamental to the life of a business or organization, says Hall, an entrepreneur who has spent most of her career in compliance and risk management in Australia’s financial services sector. She states that, while effective marketing strategies, quality products and services, and winning communications strategies are all important, customers will inevitably do business with the companies that they trust.

Hall defines trust, presents examples of why it is so important, and explains what a business or organization can do to build and maintain solid foundations of it among its staff and with clients and customers. Using diagrams, models, and anecdotes, she explains how to become more trustworthy, build trustworthy brands and businesses, determine whom you can—and cannot—trust, and ensure that trust that has been earned is not broken.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. Perseus Books. 2009. 209 pages. $24.

Scientists are achieving as many breakthroughs as ever, but the U.S. general public barely seems to care, according to science journalist Mooney and marine scientist Kirshenbaum. They warn that scientists and the public are increasingly at a disconnect due to a weak education system, an apathetic media, and concerted efforts by anti-scientific politicians and religious demagogues to sideline science, as well as scientists’ systematic failure to counter all these trends.

This is dangerous, the authors warn. Scientific knowledge is needed now more than ever to help avert such threats as climate change, nuclear proliferation, pandemics, and cybernetic warfare. And scientific perspective is vital to help make sense of developments in genetics and neuroscience that stand to redefine human identity itself. The authors propose initiatives for reopening the lines of communication between scientists and the public before it is too late.

Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom by Daniel T. Willingham. Jossey-Bass. 2009. 180 pages. Hardcover. $24.95.

Teachers need to understand how their students’ minds work, says psychologist Willingham. He sympathizes with teachers who get frustrated because they feel they are not inspiring their students or keeping their interest.

Using graphs, charts, and scientific studies, Willingham offers teachers these insights: how their students’ brains work, why classroom instruction isn’t interesting to them, and what strategies a teacher could employ to make instruction more interesting to them. He explores, and answers the pros and cons of “drills”; the secret to getting students to think like mathematicians, scientists, and historians; and how to meet the challenges of the standardized tests without just “teaching to the test.” He also shares some surprising findings about the similarities between most students’ learning styles and the possibility of increasing their intelligence.

Work Hard, Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising School in America by Jay Mathews. Algonquin. 2009. 328 pages. Paperback. $14.95.

Education reporter Mathews tells the success story of Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, two teachers who refused to believe that low-income, at-risk students could not be taught. Fresh out of college, the two took up teaching in a fifth-grade classroom at a disadvantaged inner-city school and introduced a new model of teaching based on lively lesson plans, high expectations, and involved teachers who believe in their students. Their students responded with gusto—in the first year, attendance went up, classroom participation soared, and students’ scores on the state assessment tests more than doubled.

Feinberg and Levin have since expanded their model into a nationwide network of 66 middle schools, the Knowledge Is Power Program. Mathews describes why Feinberg and Levin embarked on their teaching mission, the challenges they met, and what they did to overcome them. Mathews cites their endeavor as a hope for struggling students everywhere: With an enthusiastic teacher, he says, any young person can learn to achieve.

Coming Soon: A Smarter Internet

Less Web searching, more Web finding.

The founders of a new U.S. start-up called SemanticV have come up with a new weapon in the war against information overload: a search engine that actually learns the meaning of words for which it’s searching.

In June 2009, Americans conducted 14 billion Internet searches; about 40% of adult Web surfers conduct at least one in a typical day. As people post more information to the Internet — digitized public records, medical information, scanned pages from old books, etc. — the search experience could become less efficient, because the act of looking up a simple word or topic on Google in the future will yield a greater number of results than it does today.

That might sound like a good thing, but Google can’t tell you which of the myriad pages it gives you is the most relevant to the topic about which you’re seeking information. In instances when you’re researching a term or a topic that’s ambiguous, the list of results will mostly be irrelevant to what you’re seeking.

For example, the word tank could refer to a piece of military equipment or a storage container for oil. Plug the word tank into the Google query box and you’ll get a wide variety of results. If you’re not sure what type of tank you want to find, you won’t be able to add any relevant tags to narrow your search. The less you know about the subject you’re looking up, the more laborious and inefficient the research process becomes as you’re forced to spend more time going through bad leads.

SemanticV’s “Stingray” engine divines the meaning of words based on how those words are actually used, as opposed to the number of times they show up in a Web page and the popularity of that page (which is what Google does).

Stingray operates based on semantics, or the scientific study of the meaning of words. The program allows you to look up different words in different bodies of text. Wikipedia is one such body that SemanticV uses in its online demonstration; the e-mail archive of Enron is another. You, the user, would add your own, like your own company’s e-mail archive or maybe all the Google results for one particular question. The results change depending on where you’re looking.

“For example, within the scope of Wikipedia, the word tank is used in a variety of ways, mostly military,” says Aaron Barnett, one of the SemanticV founders. “In the Enron e‑mail archives, the word tank also has a variety of meanings and usages that are particular to how energy companies manage storage and transportation.”

The Stingray engine doesn’t just look for the word in the text; it analyzes the surrounding words the same way a human brain trying to figure out the meaning of a new verb or noun will scrutinize the word in context, or within multiple contexts. Stingray uses the information it gathers to show you synonyms, themes, and patterns.

“If you search for God in the King James Bible, Stingray sees two strong subject areas — one heavy with thou and shalt and another having to do with Christ and apostles. While reading through movie scripts however, God is understood in another sense, as an expletive,” says Barnett.

Once you see how different people use the word you’re looking up, you can cut down on your research time by disregarding the clutter, like the expletives that are complicating your search for God. The words are rendered less ambiguous, and the search experience becomes more productive, even conversational.

“By asking for better results, choosing a meaning, you communicate with Stingray,” says Barnett. — Patrick Tucker

Source: SemanticV, www.semanticV.com.

The Dawn of the Postliterate Age

Information technology, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence may render written language “functionally obsolete” by 2050.

By Patrick Tucker

For the literate elite — which includes everyone from Barack Obama to this spring’s MFA graduates — the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over the demise of reading has become obligatory theater. Poets, writers, and teachers alike stand over the remains of a once-proud book culture like a Greek chorus gloomily crowded around a fallen king. How can it be that, between 1982 and 2007, reading declined by nearly 20% for the overall U.S. population and 30% for young adults aged 18–24, or that 40 million Americans read at the lowest literacy level?

The answer that rises most immediately to meet this anguish is: the image makers. Television, the Pied Piper of the last century, has been joined in its march by video games, YouTube, and an assortment of other visual tempters that are ferrying Western culture further away from the nourishing springs of literature. The public appetite for images — scenes of war, staged or otherwise, music videos, game shows, celebrities roaming the streets of Los Angeles in a daze — seems both limitless in scope and apocalyptic in what it portends for the future.

To the literary eye, the culture of the image has grown as large as Godzilla, as omnipresent as an authoritarian government, and as cruel and erratic as the Furies. In our rush to blame the moving picture for the state of our cultural disarray, we’ve overlooked the fact that — as a carrier of data, thoughts, ideas, prayers, and promises — the image is neither as functional nor as versatile as text.

The real threat to the written word is far more pernicious. Much like movie cameras, satellites, and indeed television, the written word is, itself, a technology, one designed for storing information. For some 6,000 years, the human mind was unable to devise a superior system for holding and transmitting data. By the middle of this century, however, software developers and engineers will have remedied that situation. So the greatest danger to the written word is not the image; it is the so-called “Information Age” itself.

Texting, the Brief, Golden Age of Internet Communication

Consider, first, the unprecedented challenges facing traditional literacy in today’s Information Age. The United States spends billions of dollars a year trying to teach children how to read and fails often. Yet, mysteriously, declining literacy and functional nonliteracy have yet to affect technological innovation in any obvious way. New discoveries in science and technology are announced every hour; new and ever-more complicated products hit store shelves (or virtual store shelves) all the time. Similarly, human creation of information — in the form of data — has followed a fairly predictable trend line for many decades, moving sharply upward with the advent of the integrated circuit in the mid-twentieth century.

The world population is on track to produce about 988 billion gigabytes of data per year by 2010. We are spending less time reading books, but the amount of pure information that we produce as a civilization continues to expand exponentially. That these trends are linked, that the rise of the latter is causing the decline of the former, is not impossible.

In a July 2008 Atlantic article entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr beautifully expresses what so many have been feeling and observing silently as society grapples with the Internet and what it means for the future:

“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory…. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.… My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Information Age boosters such as Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good for You), Don Tapscott (Grown Up Digital), and Henry Jenkins (Convergence Culture) argue that information technology is creating a smarter, more technologically savvy public.

These authors point out that the written word is flourishing in today’s Information Era. But the Internet of 2009 may represent a brilliant but transitory Golden Age. True, the Web today allows millions of already well-read scholars to connect to one another and work more effectively. The Internet’s chaotic and varied digital culture is very much a product of the fact that people who came by their reading, thinking, and research skills during the middle of the last century are now listening, arguing, debating, and learning as never before.

One could draw reassurance from today’s vibrant Web culture if the general surfing public, which is becoming more at home in this new medium, displayed a growing propensity for literate, critical thought. But take a careful look at the many blogs, post comments, MySpace pages, and online conversations that characterize today’s Web 2.0 environment. One need not have a degree in communications (or anthropology) to see that the back-and-forth communication that typifies the Internet is only nominally text-based. Some of today’s Web content is indeed innovative and compelling in its use of language, but none of it shares any real commonality with traditionally published, edited, and researched printed material.

This type of content generation, this method of “writing,” is not only subliterate, it may actually undermine the literary impulse. As early as 1984, the late linguist Walter Ong observed that teletype writing displayed speech patterns more common to ancient aural cultures than to print cultures (a fact well documented by Alex Wright in his book Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages). The tone and character of the electronic communication, he observed, was also significantly different from that of printed material. It was more conversational, more adolescent, and very little of it conformed to basic rules of syntax and grammar. Ong argued compellingly that the two modes of writing are fundamentally different. Hours spent texting and e-mailing, according to this view, do not translate into improved writing or reading skills. New evidence bares this out. A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that text messaging use among teenagers in Ireland was having a highly negative effect on their writing and reading skills.

Cybernetics and the Coming Era of Instantaneous Communication

Consider the plight of the news editor or book publisher trying to sell carefully composed, researched, and fact-checked editorial content today, when an impatient public views even Web publishing as plodding. Then imagine the potential impact of cybernetic telepathy.

In the past few years, amazing breakthroughs involving fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging — with potential ramifications for education — have become an almost daily occurrence. The fMRI procedure uses non-ionizing radiation to take detailed pictures of soft tissue (specifically the brain) that tends to show up as murky and indistinct on computed tomography scans. The scanner works like a slow-motion movie camera, taking new scans continuously and repeatedly. Instead of observing movement the way a camcorder would, the scanner watches how oxygenated hemoglobin (blood flow) is diverted throughout the brain. If you’re undergoing an fMRI scan and focusing one portion of your brain on a specific task, like exerting your anterior temporal lobe on pronouncing an unfamiliar word, that part of the brain will expand and signal for more oxygenated blood, a signal visible to the scanner.

In 2005, researchers with the Scientific Learning Corporation used fMRI to map the neurological roots of dyslexia and designed a video game called Fast ForWord based on their findings. The project was “the first study to use fMRI to document scientifically that brain differences seen in dyslexics can be normalized by neuroplasticity-based training. Perhaps of greater relevance to educators, parents, and the children themselves are the accompanying significant increases in scores on standardized tests that were also documented as a result of the intervention,” neuroscience experts Steve Miller and Paula Tallal wrote in 2006 in School Administrator.

Fast ForWord is likely the forerunner of many products that will use brain mapping to market education “products” to schools or possibly to parents, a commercial field that could grow to include not just software, but also chemical supplements or even brain implants. In much the same way that Ritalin improves focus, fMRI research could lead to electronic neural implants that allow people to process information at the speed of electric currents — a breakthrough possible through the emergent field of cybernetics.

Speculative nonsense? To Kevin Warwick, an IT professor at Reading University in the United Kingdom, our cybernetic future is already passé. In 2006, Warwick had an experimental Internet-ready microchip surgically implanted in his brain. Building on the success of widely available implants like the cochlears that treat certain types of deafness, Warwick’s implant research dealt with enhancing human abilities. In a December 2006 interview with I.T. Wales, he discussed an experiment he took part in with his wife, wherein the couple actually traded neural signals — a crude form of telepathy.

Warwick wore an electrode implant that linked his nervous system (not his actual brain) directly to the Internet. His wife, Irina, had a similar implant, and the two were able to trade signals over the Internet connection.

“When she moved her hand three times,” Warwick reported, “I felt in my brain three pulses, and my brain recognized that my wife was communicating with me.”

In April 2009, a University of Wisconsin–Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student named Adam Williams posted a status update to the social networking site Twitter via electroencephalography or EEG. EEG records the electrical activity that the brain’s neurons emit during thought. Williams, seated in a chair with the EEG cap on his head, looked at a computer screen displaying an array of numbers and letters. The computer highlighted the letters in turn, and when the computer highlighted a letter Williams wished to use, his brain would emit a slightly different electrical pulse, which the EEG would then pick up to select that letter.

“If you’re looking at th”” said Williams. “But when the ‘R’ flashes, your brain says, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Something’s different about what I was just paying attention to.’ And you see a momentary change in brain activity.”

Williams’s message to the world of Twitter? “Using EEG to send tweet.”

While advancement in cybernetics and the decline in literary culture appear, at first glance, completely unrelated, research into cyber-telepathy has direct ramifications for the written word and its survivability. Electronic circuits mapped out in the same pattern as human neurons could, in decades ahead, reproduce the electrical activity that occurs when our natural transmitters activate. Theoretically, such circuits could allow parts of our brain to communicate with one another at greater levels of efficiency, possibly allowing humans to access data from the Web without looking it up or reading it.

The advent of instantaneous brain-to-brain communication, while inferior to the word in its ability to communicate intricate meaning, may one day emerge as superior in terms of simply relaying information quickly. The notion that the written word and the complex system of grammatical and cultural rules governing its use would retain its viability in an era where thinking, talking, and accessing the world’s storehouse of information are indistinguishable seems uncertain at best.

Google, AI, and Instantaneous Information

The advent of faster and more dexterous artificial intelligence systems could further erode traditional literacy. Take, for example, one of the most famous AI systems, the Google search engine. According to Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, the company is turning “search” (the act of 220;search” (the act of googling) into a conversational interface. In an interview with Venture Beat, Norvig noted that “Google has several teams focused on natural language and dozens of Googlers with a PhD in the field, including myself.”

AI watchers predict that natural-language search will replace what some call “keywordese” in five years. Once search evolves from an awkward word hunt — guessing at the key words that might be in the document you’re looking for — to a “conversation” with an AI entity, the next logical step is vocal conversation with your computer. Ask a question and get an answer. No reading necessary.

Barney Pell, whose company Powerset was also working on a conversational-search interface before it was acquired by Microsoft, dismissed the notion that a computerized entity could effectively fill the role of text, but he does acknowledge that breakthroughs of all sorts are possible.

“The problem with storing raw sounds is that it’s a sequential access medium; you have to listen to it. You can’t do other things in parallel,” said Pell during our 2007 discussion. “But if you have a breakthrough where auditory or visual information could connect to a human brain in a way that bypasses the processes of decoding the written text, where you can go as fast and slow as you want and have all the properties that textual written media supports, then I could believe that text could be replaced.”

The likelihood of that scenario depends on whom you ask, but if technological progress in computation is any indication, we are safe in assuming that an artificial intelligence entity will eventually emerge that allows individuals to process information as quickly or as slowly as reading written language.
Will “HAL” Make Us Stupid?

How can the written word — literary culture — survive the advent of the talking, all-knowing, handheld PC? How does one preserve a culture built on a 6,000-year-old technology in the face of super-computation? According to many of the researchers who are designing the twenty-first century’s AI systems, the answer is, you don’t. You submit to the inexorable march of progress and celebrate the demise of the written word as an important step forward in human evolution.

When confronted by the statistic that fewer than 50% of high-school seniors could differentiate between an objective Web site and a biased source, Norvig replied that he did perceive it as a problem, and astonishingly suggested that the solution was to get rid of reading instruction altogether.

“We’re used to teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic; now we should be teaching these evaluation skills in school,” Norvig told me. “Some of it could be just-in-time. Education, search engines themselves should be providing clues for this.”

Norvig is not an enemy of written language; he’s even contributed several pieces to the McSweeny’s Web site, a favorite among bibliophiles. He’s not a starry-eyed technologist harboring unrealistic views of technology’s potential. Still, this cavalierly stated proposal that we might simply drop the teaching of “reading, writing, and arithmetic” in favor of search-engine-based education speaks volumes about what little regard some of the world’s top technologists hold for our Victorian education system and its artifacts, like literary culture.

In the coming decades, lovers of the written word may find themselves ill-equipped to defend the seemingly self-evident merits of text to a technology-oriented generation who prefer instantaneous data to hard-won knowledge. Arguing the artistic merits of Jamesian prose to a generation who, in coming years, will rely on conversational search to find answers to any question will likely prove a frustrating, possibly humiliating endeavor.

If written language is merely a technology for transferring information, then it can and should be replaced by a newer technology that performs the same function more fully and effectively. But it’s up to us, as the consumers and producers of technology, to insist that the would-be replacement demonstrate authentic superiority. It’s not enough for new devices, systems, and gizmos to simply be more expedient than what they are replacing — as the Gatling gun was over the rifle — or more marketable — as unfiltered cigarettes were over pipe tobacco. We owe it to posterity to demand proof that people’s communications will be more intelligent, persuasive, and constructive when they occur over digital media, and proof that digital media, and proof that illiteracy, even in an age of great technological capability, will improve people’s lives.

As originally proposed by futurist William Crossman, the written word will likely be rendered a functionally obsolete technology by 2050. This scenario exists alongside another future in which young people reject many of the devices, networks, and digital services that today’s adults market to them so relentlessly. Being more technologically literate, they develop the capacities to resist the constant push of faster, cheaper, easier information and select among the new and the old on the basis of real value. If we are lucky, today’s young people will do what countless generations before them have done: defy authority.

About the Author

Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine and director of communications for the World Future Society.

Debunking the "Depression Gene"

Depression's causes continue to defy definitive answers.

In 2003, researchers reported to great excitement that they had identified what could be called a "depression gene" - a genetic link to the risk of major depression. But new analysis of the groundbreaking study now disputes this conclusion. The new analysis, conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health, finds no strong association between the gene and risk of depression, though it does affirm the study's findings on stressful life events as triggers for the illness.

The 2003 "depression gene" study was influential, as it benefited from advanced technologies emerging in genetic research and suggested possibilities for gene-based therapies. The study found that a gene involved in serotonin activity increased the risk of depression among individuals experiencing stressful life events over a five-year period. The study thus offered hope for genetic testing and treatment for depression.

However, the study's results have not been consistently replicated. Though the role of the presumed high-risk gene was not supported, researchers did find a correlation between stressful life events and depression risk. Moreover, the findings do not exclude the possibility of some other genetic influence on mental health.

"Rigorous reevaluation of published studies provide the checks and balances necessary for scientific process," notes NIMH director Thomas R. Insel. "We are still in the early days of understanding how genes and environment interact to increase the risk for depression."

Depression reportedly affects about 121 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and is among the leading causes of disability. And while researchers debate depression's causes, patients seek solutions. Antidepressant use among Americans nearly doubled in the decade between 1996 and 2005, with more than 10% of people over age 6 reportedly receiving antidepressant medications, reports NIMH.

In Spain, nearly one-fourth of women now take antidepressants and 30% take tranquilizers, according to a new study published by the journal Atención Primaria. Rather than studying the genetic risks for depression, however, the Spanish study focused on environmental factors, specifically problems within the family and stressful life events (SLEs). Again, their conclusions were not clear.

The researchers speculated that family dysfunction was a contributing factor to women's mental health problems, but found this not to be the case.

"The use of psychopharmaceuticals is often related to family or work-related problems. We wanted to see if there was actually a positive link between the consumption of antidepressants and benzodiazepines and any kind of family dysfunction," lead author Sonsoles Pérez, a doctor at the Las Águilas Health Centre in Madrid, told the Spanish science news service SINC.

The researchers used the Apgar test, a protocol for measuring family functionality (e.g., cooperation, adaptability, affection, social maturity), as well as records of stressful life events, or SLEs (e.g., births, deaths, divorces, job loss), which often trigger mental illnesses. They compared these measures with the survey subjects' prescribed use of antidepressants and benzodiazepines, which are often used for insomnia.

"Although one might think that family conflicts lead to greater consumption of psychopharmaceuticals among women, we did not find any such relationship," Pérez reports.

The researchers did find that use of benzodiazepines increased with age, but that use of antidepressants did not, suggesting directions for further research into understanding the relationship among family dysfunction, stressful events, and mental health, as well as what interventions or medications are most appropriate to treat individuals.

"We think that greater training is needed in identifying SLE and family dysfunction, and recording these in patients' records in order to help psychologists, psychiatrists, and primary health-care specialists," Pérez concludes.

Untangling the mysteries of the human mind is complicated by the many interacting risk factors, both genetic and environmental, and finding the exact combinations of risk factors that trigger depression continue to challenge researchers. Meanwhile, depression continues to afflict more individuals - and their families.

Sources: National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, www.nimh.nih.gov.

Plataforma SINC, Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología, www.plataformasinc.es.

Innovation and Creativity in a Complex World

By Cynthia G Wagner; Rick Docksai; Aaron M Cohen
Attendees at the World Future Society's 2009 annual conference in Chicago learned new ways to understand and manage complexity.

Those who fear that we will leave the future in worse shape for the next generation, take comfort: The kids are not just all right - they've got it right, and about quite a lot of things.

For the first time, the younger generation is an authority over older generations, said Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital. The Net generation (aka the echo boom, Generation Y, or millennials) are now "lapping" their parents on the "information track," he told the 850 attendees of the World Future Society's annual meeting, WorldFuture 2009: Innovation and Creativity in a Complex World, held in Chicago July 17- 19.

But if we want to help the Net generation succeed, Tapscott said, our institutions are doing everything wrong. "We do the opposite of what we should," he said, because "we fear what we don't understand." The negative view that society has of this generation now coming of age is not supported by the data.

For instance, the Net generation isn't reading newspapers or books at the rates that their parents and grandparents do, but that does not mean they are less informed. Tapscott quoted one young woman who said that, rather than reading a printed newspaper that only comes out once a day, she likes to "triangulate" the news by subscribing to 60 RSS feeds so that she can form her own opinions. Accused of only getting her news from the Comedy Central program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, she replied, "The Daily Show is only funny if you know the news."

One of the things that institutions do wrong for the Net generation is to ban their tools, Tapscott warned. Social networking enables young people to learn in more collaborative ways and to become more engaged in tasks: They feel that working and learning are the same thing, and they get more out of it when it's social, entertaining, and fun. So Tapscott advised teachers to abandon the "drill and kill, sage on a stage" model of pedagogy, and managers to give workers license to self-organize, then give them the feedback that they need and want to get better.

David Pearce Snyder of the Snyder Family Enterprise focused on the role of education in preparing today's students for tomorrow's world. He argued that most of today's adults are ill-equipped to deal with complex decision making and that most of today's schools are failing to provide tomorrow's adults with "complexipacity" - the cognitive skills necessary for dealing with complexity, including systemic thinking, creativity, collaboration, problem solving, contextual learning, and cyber literacy.

Resistance to teaching beyond "core knowledge" is strong, Snyder noted, as it takes away from history, literature, and other subjects that represent (to the traditionalist's mind) a quality education. "But this silo thinking is what the researchers were saying is why adults can't deal with complex situations. So it's going to be a trick reinventing education," he said.

Resistance to new technologies also can be strong, often to the detriment of a business, said futurist consultant Michael Zey. Traveling salesmen, for instance, couldn't be convinced of the benefits of the first car phones. "They said the car was the only place they could get away from it all. The car phone was intrusive," he noted.

"Think in terms of the big picture - globally and holistically," Zey advised. Technology will continue to expand and population will continue to increase. The United States will have 400 million people by 2050, so technology has to serve that growing population.

Leading for Change

Certainly, hope is not lost for grownups, and futurists offered a wealth of ideas for honing "complexipacity" skills in fields ranging from law enforcement to health care.

In a global environment of weakened nation-states, citizens' overreliance on the government for help leaves them less capable of handling their own problems, said Bud Levin, commander of the Policy and Planning Bureau, Waynesboro (West Virginia) Police Department. For example, local police systems are rapidly overwhelmed when citizens call 911 for minor problems, so "whatever disaster may arise, [be it] terrorism or gangs, will overwhelm police," he warned.

Police departments must start "viewing policing as comprehensive community-building," Levin said, and help communities "focus on parenting and family building." Families have become broken because governments have taken over too many family functions, he said. Future leadership will come from the communities, so we need to build up their self-reliance.

"Remember, we're public servants, not in the business of running lives," he said.

Another challenge to institutions is to overcome resistance to foresight and creativity. As futures educator Peter Bishop of the University of Houston noted, government needs foresight to "increase good, decrease harm"; government leaders are accountable to citizens: If they fail, the public can vote them out of office.

The downside of this accountability is that it "makes government decision makers more cautious," Bishop said. "There are more-frequent public tests on their decisions, and they're not allowed to have significant failures." When failures are averted and crises avoided, the decision makers get very little credit for it, while people who fix the problems created by disasters often do get credit.

"Foresight is difficult; it is strongly resisted because there are risks when [decision makers] use it," Bishop noted. "There are disincentives."

Creativity-studies specialist Marci Segal, president of Creativityland Inc., offered leaders practical advice for breaking those kinds of disincentives for innovative thinking.

"There was a long-standing bias against creativity as 'nutso,' but in the Sixties it began to be looked at as a mental skill," Segal observed. Yet, obstacles to creative thinking remain, and for much the same reason that obstacles to foresight persist, as Bishop pointed out.

"Remember Pandora?" Segal prodded attendees. "'Out-of-the-box thinking' is a bad archetype for creativity." No wonder we become insecure when we are told we think out of the box.

She also pointed to Prometheus, punished for stealing fire, and to Icarus when he flew too close to the sun as mythic warnings against creativity. So how do we overcome the fear of creative thinking?

Segal recommended giving the "Icaruses" of the organization places for "soft landings" for their ideas. Defer judgment of any ideas brought up in a brainstorming session in order to keep ideas flowing, then play "Angel's Advocate" for a new idea by first listing three good things about it. After that, you can address any concerns and what can be done about them.

You Could Be Better Than You Are and So Could Your Kids

Reproductive technologies that enable us to produce perfect kids may be inevitable, and in fact may become the norm, said bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania. "Within 20 to 25 years, there will be billboards proclaiming that responsible mothers won't do it the old-fashioned way," he predicted. Such messages will reinforce the idea that "the responsible way to go is the controlled way" through the use of artificial wombs and genetic enhancements.

Caplan pointed out that arguments against technologies to create "perfect" babies - such as the risk of homogenization, the unfair advantages for the rich, and the treatment of children as objects - are social objections that not only won't stop the technologies from coming, but would still be objections in society even without the technologies. Unfairness is always unfair.

As the technologies advance, moreover, arguments in the abortion debate, such as the issue of viability, will disappear with the advent of artificial wombs. But Caplan warned that we should be careful about overturning abortion rights because throwing out the fundamental right to privacy could give government the perogative to mandate child creation, or even put pressure on parents to perfect their children or to have certain types of children.

Slow, cautious consideration of the consequences of these new technologies will thus be needed, but it won't stop the technologies from coming, Caplan concluded.

Whether we'll change young people in the future or not, it is clear that young people themselves will change the future. One way to do that is to make education more entrepreneurial, argued recent highschool graduate Max Marmer, an intern with the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto.

"Why doesn't our education system nurture the innovative spirit and leadership traits necessary for changemaking in the twenty-first century? Because it is a legacy of the industrial era that was designed to stamp these traits out," Marmer said, arguing that success will require us to flip the education paradigm on its head.

"Instead of filling our heads with knowledge for 15 years, we should want to do something first, of tangible value to the real world, and then learn the skills necessary to do it," he said. "Learning skills on an as-needed basis fosters deeper understanding and greater motivation because it furthers a goal you care about. This also answers the ubiquitous question heard from students, 'Why am I learning this?'"

Walking his talk on the concept of life entrepreneurship, Marmer introduced his startup organization, Force For the Future, whose mission is to "get more young people on this entrepreneurial path and accelerate the learning curve and impact by providing them with foresight, skills, connections, and a support network of peers, mentors, and organizations." It is not enough to want to change the world, he argued; there must be learning environments that allow this to take place.

"Every young person can change the world, and our future depends on our collective ability to do so," said Marmer.

[Sidebar]

Fighting Poverty with Marketing

Antipoverty programs are taking more-personalized approaches, according to Philip Kotler, Northwestern University professor of international marketing. He discussed the trend of "social marketing," which promotes positive behaviors - eating better, smoking less, pursuing education, etc. - by selecting target groups and crafting messages specifically for them, instead of broadcasting generic messages to society at large.

"We don't think a mass-message, Coca Cola approach - 'Coca Cola is good, everybody should drink Coca Cola' - would work," he said.

As a case study, Kotler described how the Romanian government used social marketing for its "Among Us Women" campaign in 2002, in conjunction with the U.S. Agency for International Development. The campaign aimed to encourage contraceptive use among female factory workers. It noted that the target population suffered from a lack of education about contraception.

"They thought that birth-control pills caused facial hair and cancer, two things that obviously none of them wanted," Kotler noted.

The program hired health counselors to go to the factories and speak to assemblies of women about how they could safely use birth-control treatments to prevent too many births. Birth-control use increased substantially, as did the rates of babies born healthy.

The social-marketing strategy also succeeded in lowering resistance among Malawi's farmers to using chemical fertilizers and high-yield seeds. Starting in 2005, USAID and the Malawi government jointly brought farmers together in focus groups to tell them about the benefits of these agricultural enhancements and to dispel misinformation. Farmers listened and achieved record-breaking harvests in 2006 and 2007.

- Rick Docksai

Technology and the Economy

The current recession is not just an economic crisis - it's also a punctuation mark, argued Menno van Doorn of the Research Institute of Sogeti, Amsterdam. The industrial model has come to an end, thanks to the digital technology revolution, which is profoundly changing every institution.

Van Doorn proposed that information technology is not only a cause but also the solution to the global economic crisis, and urged businesses to change their organizational structures in order to stay relevant and be successful in the global economy. For example, harnessing the interactive, collaborative nature of the Internet will enable them to connect better with their customers.

Robert Atkinson, founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, listed a few key public policy principles for driving prosperity in the digital age: looking to digital progress as the key driver of improved quality of life and productivity, actively encouraging the digital transformation of economic sectors, and supporting public-private partnerships to build digital platforms.

Atkinson warned that policy makers should "do no harm" to the digital engine of growth. For example, they should avoid regulatory restrictions, protect intellectual property, and reduce protections for incumbents against digital innovators.

- Aaron M. Cohen

The Future of China

The Internet has had a positive impact on China by creating a more open society and giving citizens a greater voice in their own country, said Ting Xu, senior project manager for the Global Project, Bertelsmann Foundation. Currently, there are 300 million Internet users in China, and as time passes, this number will grow exponentially.

On the other hand, she said, China's rapid development has created disruptions, such as greater income disparity. Very little exists in terms of health care or pensions for the rural workforce, for instance, and rural- to-urban migration is at an estimated 30 million per year.

Gender imbalance is another potential driver of social tensions: By 2030, approximately 30 million Chinese men will be unable to find wives.

Futurist consultant John Cashman of Social Technologies reported that the massive transitions occurring simultaneously across all of the different sectors (social, economic, political, technological, etc.) have created an unusual dichotomy: China is now both a developing country and a world power. As a world power, the country has joined the WTO and wants to be accepted by the rest of the world. Yet, China is still learning the rules of the game and, as a developing country, needs time to learn them.

Cashman forecast that the growing middle class, generally more educated and worldly than in previous generations, will be much more influential at the grassroots level, pressuring the government to change domestic and international policy. They will be more effective at promoting positive change in China.

- Aaron M. Cohen

Energy Wild Cards

Two "energy wild cards" - the commercialization of nuclear fusion energy and cars that run without fuel - could result in improved health, but also in economic and political upheaval, said Francis Stabler, principal of Future Tech LLC.

Deuterium, a form of hydrogen that is abundant in ocean water, is very conducive to fusion reactions, according to Stabler. If a breakthrough occurs in harnessing deuterium and using it to generate fusion energy, nuclear fusion might soon displace fossil fuels and nuclear fission. Fusion-plant construction would boom, as would refurbishment of existing nuclear-fission and fossil-fuelpowered plants into plants that generate fusion energy. Within 40 years, most of the world's power plants would be fusion-based.

"China is currently bringing online one coal plant every week. They could switch over to building fusion plants at that same rate because they need the additional power," said Stabler.

Gas stations could practically disappear if the second wild card occurs. Stabler envisions car engines powered by energy modules that generate either zero-point energy, which draws energy out of a vacuum, or low energy nuclear reactions, which merge neutrons with atoms at low speeds to produce radiation-free fusion energy. Unlike combustible fuel, which vehicle owners have to refill once every few days, these modules might only need "refilling" once every three to four years.

In the short term, the combination of nuclear fusion and fuel-free cars would lead to serious economic trouble for countries whose economies depend on exports of oil and natural gas - Bolivia, Canada, Russia, Venezuela, and most of the Middle East. The hardships might lead to political upheavals and more incidents of terrorism.

- Rick Docksai

Infotech's Impacts on Communication

Information technology's expansion could potentially impact our communication in very different ways: either making us more insulated or making us more integrated, according to Les Gottesman, chair of the Department of English and Communications at Golden Gate University.

On the one hand, information technology allows users to project their own ideas onscreen without anyone challenging them or offering different ideas. Computers, unlike people, do not argue.

"These compliant inputs do not interrogate the inquirer. The customer - i.e., user - is always right," Gottesman said. In extreme cases, users could become literally lost in their own thoughts.

"Atomized, insulated virtual worlds become insulated physical worlds in which the receptors allow us to insulate ourselves and ignore the needs of real people," he said.

On the other hand, if information technology facilitates conversations, then it will bring more users into contact with other points of view.

"However technology develops, whatever mediations it is modeled on, face-to-face conversation can be expanded greatly by information technology and increased on a global basis," he said. More conversation would lead to people who exercise more critical thinking and greater acceptance of other points of view.

"Critical thinking is a process of coming to an understanding. Not necessarily an agreement, but an understanding of where you agree, where you disagree, and why," Gottesman said. "Only in conversation, only in confrontation with another 's thought that could dwell with us, can we hope to go beyond the limits of our present horizons."

- Rick Docksai

Education for a New Age

Expectations for schools and teachers are only going to get higher, according to Gary Marx, president of the Center for Public Outreach. Schools have always taught math, reading, and writing, but curricula needs to broaden to include new subjects: interpersonal skills, information accessing, media literacy, self-discipline, responsibility, and use of computers and other technologies.

He also encouraged teachers to move toward more "active learning," such as group exercises, class discussions, and other exercises that allow the students to interact with the course material.

"Students need to know that they are part of the process. They are not just subjects," said Marx.

He gave the example of Project Citizen, a program in Senegalese schools in which students gather in groups, identify issues in their communities that need to be addressed, and develop action plans to resolve them. One group lived in a community where residents suffered from waterborne diseases. The students researched diseases and water systems, then met with the adults - their parents, the rural administrator, the imam at the mosque, and the head of a rice growers' association - and launched with them a campaign to educate people about the water. Together, the adults and students organized a massive demonstration that drew crowds from communities across the region.

"The older people were saying, 'This is the way it's always been, this is the way it is, this is the way it will always be.' The kids said, 'This is the way it's always been, this is the way it is, this is the way it could be in the future,'" Marx said. - Rick Docksai

Tweeting the Future

The World Future Society's Twitter page enabled conference attendees to report on their impressions of live events - and gave interested readers from around the world an insider's view of the two and a half days of activities.

Here are a few tweets (140-character postings) collected in the WorldFuture09 feed:

@RielM: In Chicago, at #wfs, yesterday taught a course on Jumpstarting the Future, today workshop on future of telepresence
@justinadams: Tapscott gave a great talk to open the conf RT @dtapscott: http://twitpic.com/apgnq - On stage for #WFS opening Keynote
@dtapscott: http://twitpic.com/ar6tc - Booksigning at World Future Society in Chicago
@jenjarratt: Driver of bus back to hotel last night was full of questions about #WFS & ... the future
@ann_feeney: Whether or not you can attend WFS this year, do follow @WorldFuture09 for good, fast notes. Does @WorldFuture09 sleep?
@moravec: ... my "A new paradigm of knowledge production in higher education" article from 2008: http://bit.ly/12UDfv
@WorldFuture09: recommend checking out @busynessgirl's blow-by-blow tweeting from today's sessions @worldfuture09! #wfs #wfs09
@fstop23: Listening to Ted Gordon at #wfs re Probing the Unknowable. Basically, forecasting tends to miss the really big developments
@robspohr: I'm at the #wfs conference in Chicago. They say that by 2020 the computer will have more power than the human brain!
@jdean3: ... great day at #wfs. boys had mixed reviews but look forward to tomorrows sessions. Hard part is limiting book buy to 10
@jenjarratt: #wfs "The future is affinity nations." - Ann Feeney
@jenjarratt: We are all global. How do you govern nationally in a global system? - Joan Foltz, #wfs
@ann_feeney: Teens at #wfs include some of the most thoughtful, creative minds. When looking for hope at sessions, look at audience, too
@busynessgirl: Death to bullet points, enlarge the images, don't write it if you're going to read it to us. Depth not breadth.... #wfs
@jdean3: Terrific final day of #wfs conf. Best session was GrrRank. [Editor's note: Speaker was David Pearce Snyder.] Alex & Nate loved it. Purchased 10 books, too!
@TweetJRmail: Blog post on #wfs09: Notes for July 18. http://tinyurl.com/ljr3cn
@GreenJAV: On the last day of the #wfs conference. Lunch keynote was the scariest talk I have heard, on bioviolence. [Editor's note: Speaker was Barry Kellman.]
@gillysalmon: World Futures conference was very mixed, and largely US not world
@Kjowcatalead: Working the #wfs Conf in Chicago. My favorite part is the global rep & interacting with people that are not like me.
@jenjarratt: Great time ... w/ futurist friends See ya next yr, I hope!

- Compiled by C. G. Wagner

Oceans’ Dead Zones on the Rise

A predicted global increase in food consumption is likely to create an environmental crisis where it’s least expected. Studies link a rise in industrial food production to an increase in the already large number of so-called “dead zones” in coastal waters.

Dead zones are so named because they lack sufficient oxygen to support fish, crustaceans, and other forms of marine life. The World Resources Institute (WRI) recently labeled them a “rapidly growing environmental crisis.” More than 400 have been identified worldwide, and researchers have spotted one in the Gulf of Mexico near the mouth of the Mississippi River that’s roughly the size of a small country — 7,500 square miles and growing.

A major contributor to the problem is industrial agriculture, according to WRI. Too much animal manure and crop fertilizer is entering into and contaminating freshwater and coastal ecosystems. The nitrogen and phosphorous they contain overfertilize the algae and phytoplankton that grow on or near the surface of the water, causing the plants to grow at an unnaturally high rate. The unusually large amounts of algae inevitably die and sink to the bottom of the gulf. As the plant matter decomposes, it exhausts much of the oxygen from the surrounding water. This process is known as eutrophication.

Since much of the manure from factory farms runs off into freshwater streams before being transported out to sea, the problem it isn’t limited to coastal waters. Eutrophication may be the primary reason for freshwater problems in the United States, WRI claims. And eutrophication doesn’t just impact the environment — it affects human health and economic systems as well.

Global consumption of meat is expected to increase by more than 50% within the next 25 years. WRI reports that a surge in livestock production in particular would have serious repercussions for developing countries that lack strong, enforceable environmental regulations.

The situation isn’t much better in the developed world. In the United States, manure from cows, pigs, and chickens does not legally have to be treated (unlike human sewage), so it mostly isn’t. The industry has repeatedly blocked and resisted any regulation of runoff and waste.

There are other causes of eutrophication as well, including fossil fuels and runoff from large urban areas. These are also expected to increase as the world population increases, and as developing nations continue to grow.

The issue has remained largely under the radar because, unlike large catastrophic events, this type of pollution has been occurring at a low enough level over a long enough period of time to avoid drawing attention to itself. The long-term risks are also revealing themselves slowly over time, and for now remain largely unknown, unnoticed, and undetected.

In terms of solutions, one starting point that many policy makers believe is long past due is requiring animal manure to be treated like sewage and regulating its disposal. Several last-ditch geoengineering solutions are being considered, such as large-scale aeration systems that would pump oxygen into the dead zones. Closer to home, consumers may consider supporting organic, locally grown, small-farm produce and to cut down on meat consumption. — Aaron M. Cohen

Source: World Resources Institute, www.wri.org.

The Rapid Evolution of “Text”

An author looks toward a less-literate future.
By Nicholas Carr

The written word seems so horribly low tech. It hasn’t changed much for a few millennia, at least since the ancient Greeks invented symbols for vowels. In our twitterific age of hyperspeed progress, there’s something almost offensive in such durability, such pigheaded resilience. You want to grab the alphabet by the neck, give it a shake, and say, Get off the stage, dammit. Your time is up.

Of course, people have been proclaiming the imminent death of the written word for a long time. When Thomas Edison invented his tinfoil phonograph a hundred years ago, everybody assumed the flashy new device would mean the end of writing. We’d become listeners instead of readers, talkers instead of scribblers. But writing didn’t die. The phonograph proved to be a second-rate medium for exchanging information. We came to use it mainly to play music.

In the 1960s, hip cultural theorists predicted that new media — radio, cinema, television, computer — would soon render writing obsolete. “It is true that there is more material written and printed and read today than ever before,” wrote Marshall McLuhan in his influential 1964 book Understanding Media, “but there is also a new electric technology that threatens this ancient technology of literacy built on the phonetic alphabet.”

Today, nearly a half century later, the familiar letters of the alphabet are more abundant than ever. One of the most astonishing consequences of the rise of digital media, and particularly the Internet, is that we’re now surrounded by text to an extent far beyond anything we’ve experienced before. Web pages are stuffed with written words. Text crawls across our TV screens. Radio stations send out textual glosses on the songs they play.

Even our telephones have turned into word-processing machines. The number of text messages sent between phones now far outnumbers the number of voice messages. Who would have predicted that even just twenty years ago?

The fact is, writing is one heck of an informational medium — the best ever invented. Neurological studies show that, as we learn to read, our brains undergo extensive cellular changes that allow us to decipher the meaning of words with breathtaking speed and enormous flexibility. By comparison, gathering information through audio and video media is a slow and cumbersome process.

I have little doubt that in 2050 — or 2100, for that matter — we’ll still be happily reading and writing. Even if we come to be outfitted with nifty Web-enabled brain implants, most of the stuff that’s beamed into our skulls will likely take the form of text. Even our robots will probably be adept at reading.

What will change — what already is changing, in fact — is the way we read and write. In the past, changes in writing technologies, such as the shift from scroll to book, had dramatic effects on the kind of ideas that people put down on paper and, more generally, on people’s intellectual lives. Now that we’re leaving behind the page and adopting the screen as our main medium for reading, we’ll see similarly far-reaching changes in the way we write, read, and even think.

Our eager embrace of a brand new verb — to text — speaks volumes. We’re rapidly moving away from our old linear form of writing and reading, in which ideas and narratives wended their way across many pages, to a much more compressed, nonlinear form. What we’ve learned about digital media is that, even as they promote the transmission of writing, they shatter writing into little, utilitarian fragments. They turn stories into snippets. They transform prose and poetry into quick, scattered bursts of text.

Writing will survive, but it will survive in a debased form. It will lose its richness. We will no longer read and write words. We will merely process them, the way our computers do.
About the Author

Nicholas Carr’s most recent book is The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. His next book, The Shallows, will be published in 2010.

Scientific Breakthroughs Ahead!

By Rick Docksai
Anthology offers a sneak preview into the next great wave of innovation.

What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science. Edited by Max Brockman. Vintage Books. 2009. 237 pages. Paperback. $14.95.

Young scientists entering their fields today will grapple with perplexing questions that their elders have left behind. What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science offers some of their answers.

Editor Max Brockman personally scouted out 18 of the most promising new researchers and solicited original articles from them. The resulting compilation promises to be “a representative who’s who of the coming generation of scientists.”

Here is a sampling of the questions tomorrow’s scientists are tackling.

In “Our Place in an Unnatural Universe,” Sean Carroll, senior research associate in physics at Caltech, emphasizes how little we know about the universe. We know that it is expanding, but not what is propelling the expansion. Nor can we explain how the universe arrived at its present-day shape. We think that it began as a super-dense, super-hot ball that exploded in a “big bang” — but how did it coalesce into a ball in the first place? We cannot conclusively answer these questions, says Carroll. We can only postulate ideas. It is a matter of trying to make the most sense of the universe that we can.

Joshua D. Greene, a Harvard cognitive neuroscientist, hopes that we will transcend the limits of our moral instincts. In “Fruit Flies of the Moral Mind,” he argues that moral judgment is a complex interplay between intuitive emotional responses and more effortful cognitive processes. Each is controlled by a separate set of brain systems. When we puzzle over moral dilemmas, these neural systems compete; the dissonance between the two is what we know as anguish. This tension may underlie recent debates over stem-cell research, torturing of suspected terrorists, and other issues. Greene concludes that neither brain system is fully prepared to process the increasingly complicated moral decisions that modern life deals us.

Katerina Harvati, now with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, discusses species extinction in “Extinction and the Evolution of Humankind.” Most of the species that ever lived on earth are now extinct, she points out. The human fossil record has two extinctions: Paranthropus, which disappeared a million years ago, and Neanderthalis, which died out 30,000 years ago.

Harvati observes that our species, Homo sapiens, benefited from a varied diet, long life span, adaptability to harsh environments, and ability to spread to diffuse geographic areas quickly. However, our recent activity strains ecosystems considerably, so we must adapt again to the new challenges of climate change and environmental degradation.

What enabled Homo sapiens to evolve into civilized humans? In “Out of Our Minds,” Hominid Psychology Research Group researcher Vanessa Woods and Duke University anthropologist Brian Hare conclude that it was this species’ unique aptitude for cooperation and tolerance. Early humans learned to solve problems by communicating with each other and by cooperating both with strangers and with tribe members they did not personally like. Chimpanzees, by contrast, have nothing to do with those who are not their companions or kin. Some apes are comparatively more humanlike, though, such as the bonobos. We should study them intensively, Woods and Hare conclude; it might be crucial to understanding ourselves.

Other subjects covered in the collection include:

* The nature and effects of dark energy, according to Stephon H.S. Alexander, Haverford College physicist.
* The mind of the adolescent, according to Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, research fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neursocience, University College in London.
* The role of viruses in the planet’s equilibrium, according to Nathan Wolfe, Stanford University biologist.
* Prospects for human enhancement, according to Oxford University bioethicist Nick Bostrom.
* The effects of specialization on scientific output, according to Gavin Schmidt, climatologist with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The volume’s 18 authors speak excitedly about the gaps in what we know and the prospects for filling them. They also evince keen hope that, as our species learns more, it might grow toward greater health, awareness, and sustainability. Readers will be inspired by these authors’ accounts and what directions they might take science, and the global community along with it, in the decades ahead.

About the Reviewer
Rick Docksai is a staff editor for THE FUTURIST.

Second Thoughts on Nuclear Power

By Michael Mariotte
Cancer, toxic spills, and damage to ecosystems from mining might come with nuclear energy production.

What kinds of energy systems are we going to need? And what kinds are going to be sustainable? The answer to both questions is something other than nuclear energy. It poses too many dangers to humans and their environment. Here is a breakdown:

* Mining. The Navajo tribe in the U.S. Southwest sits on top of some of the most productive uranium mines in the world. But the tribe banned uranium mining permanently because it killed so many tribe members during the 1950s and 1960s.

Mining of any kind is inherently a dirty business. When you're mining something that's potentially radioactive, it's an extremely dirty business.

* Storing waste. It has been said that nuclear power could replace fossil fuels and thereby avert human-induced climate change. The truth is that, for nuclear power to play any meaningful role in reducing carbondioxide emissions and reversing climate change, it would take as many as 2,000 new reactors worldwide.

Where would we put the waste from all those sites? In a program where you're constantly building nuclear power plants, where you will have nuclear power from now on, you would need a new storage site every 25 years or so.

* Danger of leakage. Nuclear plants store their wastes in casks of concrete and steel. Eventually, the casks will decay and the waste will seep out. The only question is when. For years, the U.S. government has been developing facilities at Yucca Mountain in Nevada for storing waste permanently.

The Obama administration made it clear that waste storage at Yucca Mountain is going to end. The Energy Department was admitting that the mountain offered no protection: The casks offered 99.5% of the protection. If that's the case, you might as well put the waste on the White House lawn. [Editor's note: The U.S. Senate voted in July 2009 to shut down Yucca Mountain.]

* Monitoring waste. What kind of monitoring would the waste program have? Having teams of people watching it 24 hours a day is not what most people think of when they think of waste disposal.

* Cancer risk. In 1979, a reactor at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant suffered a near meltdown. According to researcher Stephen Wing, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, leukemia rates went up 300%-400% in the communities downwind from the plant, and lung cancer rates went up 600%-700%.

Every reactor releases radiation into the air and water. All radiation exposure carries some risk, and the more exposure, the greater the risk. It's hard to single out which cancers may have been caused by nuclear power plants, but studies done in many parts of the world suggest that there is some effect caused by routine operation of reactors. In Massachusetts in the 1970s, the Pilgrim reactor had a fuel problem and the state health department identified higher-than-normal radiation releases for a period, as well as some excess cancers that may have been caused by that. No one knows how many people have died from nuclear power. We do know that radiation is a carcinogen, however, and that there is no safe level.

Innovation Isn't Enough

Nuclear facilities use more sophisticated technology today to generate, store, and monitor nuclear fuel and nuclear waste. Granted, any technology improves over time. Cars are safer now than when they first came out due to innovations like seatbelts, air bags, and better brake systems. But people still manage to die on the highways.

Nuclear technology is no different. Of course, there have been improvements in computer controls and design, but the fundamental safety problems have not been fixed and cannot be fixed with the technology that we are using now. You can't make an inherently dangerous technology safe.

Are there alternative ways to get our energy that don't involve release of toxic materials? Twenty or thirty years ago, the renewables weren't ready. Today, however, they are. You don't need to release radiation or burn coal to get the power we need. We have a place to get it, and those places - solar, wind, and others - are becoming cost competitive.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

Tomorrow in Brief, November-December 2009

Making Personal Data Vanish

Denizens of online social networking sites have long been warned about leaving unflattering (or even incriminating) information about themselves where it could later be found and used against them by future employers, loved ones, or voters. Even deleting posts does not eradicate them from Internet archives. Now, computer scientists at the University of Washington have put expiration dates on data: After a set time, e-mails, chat messages, and Facebook postings would self-destruct. The prototype system, called Vanish, tags a time limit to any text uploaded to a Web service through a Web browser. The system encrypts messages with a secret key that is divided and spread among random computers in a file-sharing network; as turnover occurs in the network, those leaving the network unknowingly take parts of the key with them, leaving the message undecipherable.

Source: University of Washington, www.u.washington.edu .

___________________________________________________

Cancer Mortality Rates Are Declining

The war on cancer rages on. The incidence of cancer continues to rise across many types; however, deaths caused by cancer have declined steadily over the past three decades, particularly among younger patients, reports the Van Andel Research Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In the United States, the youngest age groups have experienced the steepest decline in cancer mortality, at 25.9% per decade, according to the researchers. And even the oldest groups have experienced a 6.8% per decade decline, thanks to improved screening and treatment.

Source: Van Andel Institute, www.vai.org .

_________________________________________________

Smart Cane Will Help Visually Impaired

More freedom of mobility may be ahead for people whose vision is impaired. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology is now being embedded in the traditional white cane used by people with little or no vision. The new Smart Cane will help users get around more safely and independently. Now under development at Central Michigan University, the Smart Cane incorporates an ultrasonic sensor, and the user carries a miniature navigational system in a messenger-style bag. The device detects obstacles in the user’s path and provides navigational cues, with voice alerts as well as vibration-based alerts for individuals who are also hearing impaired.

Source: Central Michigan University, www.cmich.edu
_____________________________________________________

Portable Food Tester

New sensing technologies developed by researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute may enable food suppliers to determine the right time for bringing produce to market for purchase by fussy consumers. The system, based on metal-oxide sensors, checks the emission of volatile gases that reveal ripeness, over-ripeness, or rottenness of produce. The goal is to make more-portable devices that have the same levels of sensitivity as equipment used in food laboratories, reducing waste if fresh produce is purchased before (or after) its time.

Source: Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, www.fraunhofer.de .

_______________________________________

WordBuzz: Complexipacity

How well can you or your organization handle complexity?

Coined by designer Tom Snyder in 2008, the term “complexipacity” refers to the capacity to “assimilate complex ideas, systems, problems, situations, interactions or relationships.”

In his WorldFuture 2009 presentation on the topic, futurist consultant David Pearce Snyder argued that complexipacity will become a key issue, and that today’s schools are not equipping tomorrow’s adults with the skills necessary to deal with complexity.

Source: David Pearce Snyder, Snyder Family Enterprise, www.the-futurist.com.

“Waste Heat” a Potential Threat to the Climate

A new paper argues that cutting greenhouse gas emissions, switching to nuclear or geothermal power, and even sequestering carbon in the earth won’t stave off massively disruptive climate change. Greenhouse gases are less a threat to stable climate than is the excess heat produced when fuel is burned to create energy, say Swedish researchers Bo Nordell and Bruno Gervet.

About half of the energy that humanity creates becomes waste heat. Depending on the method of energy creation or manner in which it’s used, such as to raise the temperature of water, waste heat can be as high as 70% or 80%. In terms of electricity usage, even extremely efficient devices, appliances, and gadgets