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A 50-year look ahead
Technological Forecasting & Social Change 113 (2016) 63–64
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Technological Forecasting & Social Change
From my perspective
A 50-year look ahead☆ Joseph F. Coates Coates & Jarrett, Inc., 3738 Kanawha Street, NW, Washington, DC 20015, United States
It was my great good fortune to participate in a commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the landing of the Allied forces in Normandy, in Paris. The scene was “50 Years Later: The True Victory is the Landing of New Ideas.” The overall theme of the meeting was a fifty-year look backward and a fifty-year look forward, the latter being my primary responsibility. What follows are my remarks on that special occasion. We are here to celebrate the landings in Normandy, a critical event in a crucial decade, a decade that fundamentally saved the future of a large portion of humankind. As we look ahead a half century, continuing, accelerated, and radical change will characterize the first half of the 21st century. The most important of these developments will lead to or reflect new ideas about the world, its organization, and our relationship to it. But first, we must recognize that the world over the next half century will divide into three worlds: World 1, those living in the condition of the advanced nations; World 2, the bulk of humanity living in conditions in which needs and resources are fairly balanced; and World 3, an enormous pool of two or more billion people living in destitution, poverty, on the brink of starvation, and in abysmal conditions. Let us now consider some of the most important positive developments over the next five decades. Genetics, particularly the developments in molecular biology and the understanding of the human genome, will for the first time give any species-us-direct control over its own evolution. Most visible to us will be the effects on body, brain, and behavior. As the genetic base of those three elements of our lives become clearer, there will be many successful positive interventions. Genetics will also bring separate waves of benefits to humankind in agriculture and industrial processes. After a third of a century of the environmental movement, we are now beginning to move to a positive organizing principal concerning the future of people and their relationship to the globe. The emerging central concept is sustainability-enjoying the good things that the earth offers today while preserving the opportunity for our descendents to equally well enjoy those good things. Sustainability will be a core global value 50 years hence. Sustainability as an economic metaphor is a concept whereby we would live off the interest which the capital of the earth provides, while preserving that capital ☆ This article is a reprint of a previously published article. For citation purposes, please use the original publication details http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0040-1625(94)00042-U; Technological Forecasting, Volume 48, Issue 1, January 1995, Pages 103-105.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2016.10.021 0040-1625/© 2016 Published by Elsevier Inc.
and even enhancing it so that future generations may in turn live off its interest. Derivative of the concept of sustainability is the emergence of global management. We will be able to understand the forces at play, to anticipate their potential outcomes, and to choose how we collectively move among the choices. Tightly linked to global management will be: • Effective population control. No more central problem exists than overpopulation. After all, people directly and indirectly consume the goods of the earth, stress the environment, and pollute our common heritage. Were the population of the earth one-tenth of what it is today, with our current level of knowledge there would be few or no global problems. As global population expands twofold or threefold every core problem will be aggravated. • Macroengineering, those engineering projects that exceed the territorial responsibility and even the financial budgets of individual nations. These are the projects that change the situation in dramatic ways, not merely offering incremental improvements but fundamental alterations in the structure of our world. • A space program that reinforces the idea of global unity, and will be a primary tool for global management. Planetary thinking will fully flower over the next five decades. Information technology is a steadily unfolding cornucopia of benefits. As the world becomes increasingly laced together electronically in business, commerce, and in culture, information technology promises to be the greatest democratizing force ever to result from the human enterprise. The keyboard or the microphone makes us all anyone else's equal. Derivative of that will be a world in which everything becomes smart, that is, capable of accessing external and internal environments and responding accordingly. Violent national and international conflict will be behind us by 2040. The current epidemic of violence will crest around 2010–2015 and then slowly diminish as we move toward more effective global management and more specifically to the emergence of global governance. Global governance is inevitable, not merely to deal with conflict, but to deal with the increasingly complex networks, systems, and relationships that surround us. Intrinsic to complexity are two forms of potential failure. First, the complex system itself may fail from its mere elaboration, and second there are always those who will take advantage of a complex system to the disadvantage of others.
64
J.F. Coates / Technological Forecasting & Social Change 113 (2016) 63–64
The only social mechanism ever invented for effectively dealing with complexity is regulation and the supporting structure for regulationgovernance. Formal education will be more common worldwide. Whether it is in a classroom partially augmented by information technology in World 3 or largely conducted by information technology for a college student in World 1 is a matter of detail, albeit important detail. Education will constantly raise standards of awareness, the pressure for democracy, and the desire for an enhanced quality of life. This trend was pointed out two centuries ago by the Marquis de Condorcet, the greatest of futurists and the inventor of the contemporary study of the future. He saw expanding education as one of the longest-term trends in our history. The quality of life will vary on a worldwide basis. Surely those in World 1 will increasingly see the quality of their lives framed around intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and psychic development because by and large their physical and animal needs will have been securely met. Those in World 2 will be in an intermediate stage with a steady move up toward that psychic level. World 3, unfortunately, will still largely be a world in which survival, personal security, and a sharp focus on the short-term will dominate lives. As Henri Bergson has taught us, the organic world evolved in two forms. One is completely programmed and controlled, like the ant. The other is the evolution of humankind with creativity and surprise as its hallmark. That focus on the mental will receive radical impetus over the next decades as there emerges a practical science and technology of the brain.
We will witness the likely disappearance of such blights as schizophrenia and psychotic depression. A dozen different routes will be available for influencing our cognitive, sensory, and emotional states. Chemical, acoustic, photic, meditative, and genetic tools will be at our disposal to allow, for the first time, the individual to shape, choose, and influence his or her mental state. These choices often will be an instantaneous, short-run, and episodic way for thrills and excitement. Other choices will offer continuing and stable ways to enhance our interpersonal, cognitive, and emotional states. A revolution in materials, that is, the things out of which our world is constructed, built, and manufactured, is steadily unfolding. As new artificial materials are developed that combine characteristics in ways not found in natural materials, we will be continually liberated from the constraints of traditional materials. That liberation implies new design, the use of new materials, new architecture, new construction, and new devices. Social sciences as a steady contributor to our understanding of the world will continue to add insights to public and private judgments, expand the options and choices that we are individually and collectively confronted with, and provide a continuing and expanding base for evaluation of conditions and consequences of public interventions. Once social sciences pass through the present era of intense concentration on the empirical, we will move to a new era of theory formation. Oh, to be 10 years old again.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Technological Forecasting & Social Change
From my perspective
A 50-year look ahead☆ Joseph F. Coates Coates & Jarrett, Inc., 3738 Kanawha Street, NW, Washington, DC 20015, United States
It was my great good fortune to participate in a commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the landing of the Allied forces in Normandy, in Paris. The scene was “50 Years Later: The True Victory is the Landing of New Ideas.” The overall theme of the meeting was a fifty-year look backward and a fifty-year look forward, the latter being my primary responsibility. What follows are my remarks on that special occasion. We are here to celebrate the landings in Normandy, a critical event in a crucial decade, a decade that fundamentally saved the future of a large portion of humankind. As we look ahead a half century, continuing, accelerated, and radical change will characterize the first half of the 21st century. The most important of these developments will lead to or reflect new ideas about the world, its organization, and our relationship to it. But first, we must recognize that the world over the next half century will divide into three worlds: World 1, those living in the condition of the advanced nations; World 2, the bulk of humanity living in conditions in which needs and resources are fairly balanced; and World 3, an enormous pool of two or more billion people living in destitution, poverty, on the brink of starvation, and in abysmal conditions. Let us now consider some of the most important positive developments over the next five decades. Genetics, particularly the developments in molecular biology and the understanding of the human genome, will for the first time give any species-us-direct control over its own evolution. Most visible to us will be the effects on body, brain, and behavior. As the genetic base of those three elements of our lives become clearer, there will be many successful positive interventions. Genetics will also bring separate waves of benefits to humankind in agriculture and industrial processes. After a third of a century of the environmental movement, we are now beginning to move to a positive organizing principal concerning the future of people and their relationship to the globe. The emerging central concept is sustainability-enjoying the good things that the earth offers today while preserving the opportunity for our descendents to equally well enjoy those good things. Sustainability will be a core global value 50 years hence. Sustainability as an economic metaphor is a concept whereby we would live off the interest which the capital of the earth provides, while preserving that capital ☆ This article is a reprint of a previously published article. For citation purposes, please use the original publication details http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0040-1625(94)00042-U; Technological Forecasting, Volume 48, Issue 1, January 1995, Pages 103-105.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2016.10.021 0040-1625/© 2016 Published by Elsevier Inc.
and even enhancing it so that future generations may in turn live off its interest. Derivative of the concept of sustainability is the emergence of global management. We will be able to understand the forces at play, to anticipate their potential outcomes, and to choose how we collectively move among the choices. Tightly linked to global management will be: • Effective population control. No more central problem exists than overpopulation. After all, people directly and indirectly consume the goods of the earth, stress the environment, and pollute our common heritage. Were the population of the earth one-tenth of what it is today, with our current level of knowledge there would be few or no global problems. As global population expands twofold or threefold every core problem will be aggravated. • Macroengineering, those engineering projects that exceed the territorial responsibility and even the financial budgets of individual nations. These are the projects that change the situation in dramatic ways, not merely offering incremental improvements but fundamental alterations in the structure of our world. • A space program that reinforces the idea of global unity, and will be a primary tool for global management. Planetary thinking will fully flower over the next five decades. Information technology is a steadily unfolding cornucopia of benefits. As the world becomes increasingly laced together electronically in business, commerce, and in culture, information technology promises to be the greatest democratizing force ever to result from the human enterprise. The keyboard or the microphone makes us all anyone else's equal. Derivative of that will be a world in which everything becomes smart, that is, capable of accessing external and internal environments and responding accordingly. Violent national and international conflict will be behind us by 2040. The current epidemic of violence will crest around 2010–2015 and then slowly diminish as we move toward more effective global management and more specifically to the emergence of global governance. Global governance is inevitable, not merely to deal with conflict, but to deal with the increasingly complex networks, systems, and relationships that surround us. Intrinsic to complexity are two forms of potential failure. First, the complex system itself may fail from its mere elaboration, and second there are always those who will take advantage of a complex system to the disadvantage of others.
64
J.F. Coates / Technological Forecasting & Social Change 113 (2016) 63–64
The only social mechanism ever invented for effectively dealing with complexity is regulation and the supporting structure for regulationgovernance. Formal education will be more common worldwide. Whether it is in a classroom partially augmented by information technology in World 3 or largely conducted by information technology for a college student in World 1 is a matter of detail, albeit important detail. Education will constantly raise standards of awareness, the pressure for democracy, and the desire for an enhanced quality of life. This trend was pointed out two centuries ago by the Marquis de Condorcet, the greatest of futurists and the inventor of the contemporary study of the future. He saw expanding education as one of the longest-term trends in our history. The quality of life will vary on a worldwide basis. Surely those in World 1 will increasingly see the quality of their lives framed around intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and psychic development because by and large their physical and animal needs will have been securely met. Those in World 2 will be in an intermediate stage with a steady move up toward that psychic level. World 3, unfortunately, will still largely be a world in which survival, personal security, and a sharp focus on the short-term will dominate lives. As Henri Bergson has taught us, the organic world evolved in two forms. One is completely programmed and controlled, like the ant. The other is the evolution of humankind with creativity and surprise as its hallmark. That focus on the mental will receive radical impetus over the next decades as there emerges a practical science and technology of the brain.
We will witness the likely disappearance of such blights as schizophrenia and psychotic depression. A dozen different routes will be available for influencing our cognitive, sensory, and emotional states. Chemical, acoustic, photic, meditative, and genetic tools will be at our disposal to allow, for the first time, the individual to shape, choose, and influence his or her mental state. These choices often will be an instantaneous, short-run, and episodic way for thrills and excitement. Other choices will offer continuing and stable ways to enhance our interpersonal, cognitive, and emotional states. A revolution in materials, that is, the things out of which our world is constructed, built, and manufactured, is steadily unfolding. As new artificial materials are developed that combine characteristics in ways not found in natural materials, we will be continually liberated from the constraints of traditional materials. That liberation implies new design, the use of new materials, new architecture, new construction, and new devices. Social sciences as a steady contributor to our understanding of the world will continue to add insights to public and private judgments, expand the options and choices that we are individually and collectively confronted with, and provide a continuing and expanding base for evaluation of conditions and consequences of public interventions. Once social sciences pass through the present era of intense concentration on the empirical, we will move to a new era of theory formation. Oh, to be 10 years old again.