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Understanding the Future of the World in the Next 100 years It seems that most of our life's work is preparing for the future. Like most of you, I've worked at preparing our children to step into their future, for they are the messengers
we send to a time we will not see. If we could step back one thousand years and ask, what will the future be, there may have been a few who would have said, some day we will go to the moon, but it is not likely.
But then again, there were trends that gave some clues. Much of what I present today is based on a number of sources, and from the World Futures Society conference Nancy and I attended in Washington D.C. this past
summer. The predictions I present are not mine, but have been selected from readings of a number of experts in the various fields including Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of the Spiritual
Machine: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence Graham Molitor, Vice President of the World Futures Society, To look forward with any accuracy, it is necessary to also look back, and identify the trend. For
example, we know the size of farms is not likely to get smaller since the trend, for a number of years, has been to larger and larger farms. Graham T. Molitor says: "The time line of history is
extraordinarily incremental and continuous." We also know that some types of problems have existed throughout the time of humanity and in most cases, continued to expand. Trends, if you like. You know, traffic
gridlock is not new. Julius Caesar banned chariots and carts from Rome during the daylight hours 2,000 years ago, because of the congestion, dust and noise pollution. Listen to this quote: "The budget must be
balanced, government indebtedness must be reduced, the arrogant authorities must be moderated and controlled, people should learn to work again instead of living off the public dole." The speaker is Marcus Cicero
who lived from 106 to 43 BC. Biometrics Lucy, the oldest hominid, from about 3.2 million years ago, measured about 4 foot 8 inches tall. By 1776, 5 ft. 7in and today in advanced countries about 5 ft. 10in is the
average. The projected height for the year 3,000 is 6 ft. 2 in. Lucy was estimated to weigh between 60 and 72 lbs. In 1975, the average woman weighed around 116 to 131 lbs. and about 25 percent were overweight.
The average now is about 124 to 148 lbs. and about 47 percent are overweight. By 2025 the projected weight will be 145 to 170 pounds with 75 percent overweight, and by the year 3000, 180 to 210 lbs. What will our Miss
America look like by 2050. Of course, there will be counter-trends and maybe along the way a truly effective weight control pill, or gene alteration, will be found to reverse this trend for both men and women. If not,
chairs and beds will need to be larger and stronger, as will cars, and the 15 inch seats at Ross Ade Stadium will no long fit. The size of the brain 5 million years ago was (for an ape-like creature) 325 to 600cc,
and 450 to 750cc for Lucy and today it is 1200 to 1500cc, and perhaps 1800 to 2000cc by the year 3000. Life expectancy 2000 years ago was 18 years; in 200 AD. it was 22 years; in 1900 47 years; 1960 69.7 years; 1997
76.5 years, and by 3000 maybe 130 to 160 years, if the trend continues. All of these changes will have a major impact on food requirements and population. The implications of population growth and its
characteristics will have enormous consequences for the fabric and structure of society. There has been a concern for a number of years that we would not have adequate food for a growing population and that we were
headed toward an over-populated world. One can find an argument in the literature for almost any projection, but the one I found most realistic estimates a decline by 2150 when the world population is expected to
reach 8-9 billion, compared to the present 6 billion. Birth rates in many places in the world are declining. A straight-line of Italy's birth rate of 1.1 children per family, the lowest, in the world, projected to
the year 3000 indicates there will be no one living in the Boot. In the United States the birth rate has dropped by almost half since 1957. Why the declining birth rate? The most significant reason is
the education of women. As a general trend, educated women have fewer children. Some of the changes will have a very positive effect on the education of women, and thus most likely predict a decline in population. Food
Will we be able to continue to meet the needs of a growing population? The world's natural resources are capable of supporting sustainable food security for all people, if current rates of appropriate technological
changes are used. We have the means to assure a food-secure world. The doubling of grain production and tripling of livestock production since the early 1960's has resulted in about 2,700 calories available per person
per day. However, 820 million people are denied sufficient food to lead healthy and productive lives. Most of this is not for the lack of food, but because food is used as a weapon of war against groups of people. Energy and minerals
What about running out of energy and minerals? I continue to focus on the trend as a way of looking to the future. By 2009 very likely we will have two electric meters on our homes�one incoming and one outgoing.
The trend is toward distributed generation, putting electrical generation closer to consumption. Output from solar panels on your roof will give you the opportunity to sell back energy during days of high demand.
Some generators will run on manure, others on palm oil, natural gas and other sources of energy. In time we will run out of fossil fuel, but not energy�not as long as there is a sun, wind, or a variation in
temperature. As long as the free market exists, there will be minds in search of more energy. The projection for minerals is much the same. In 1950, copper prices were high, and it was projected that we would soon run
out. The end of the world as we know it was at hand. High prices forced a change in buying, and imaginative people found other sources of copper. They reused what they scrapped and found substitutes for other uses. For
example: copper wire for communication is being replaced by fiber optics and by satellites, and since 1950, copper prices have continued to drop to very low levels. One of the most positive influences has been
innovative and imaginative people working in a free market economy. It is difficult to see these forces working in a controlled economy. Would a controlled economy have developed the Walkman or CD technology? By now
I trust you appreciate my point that there are few surprises to be expected in our near term future, because most will be only a projection of the current trends.
Our basic needs of food, energy, and minerals appear to be safe for the present. Trends in the workplace and our increased leisure time Economic development is the mainspring of all society. It is your
livelihood. You have to have a way to make your way. So for most, jobs is what it is all about. In colonial times about 90 to 95 percent of the employed people were working in agriculture, fishing, hunting and mining.
That has all changed. In 1880 less than 50 percent of employed people worked in agriculture. Now the number employed is about 2 percent. At the same time we are exporting about 70 percent of our major crops. In
1920 the decline in the percentage of the industry work force began. In 1950 the U.S. was the first country to have over 50 percent of its work force engaged in service.
Since 1970, the knowledge industry has been the dominant employer. However, by 2015, over 50 percent of the jobs in the U.S. will be in the leisure sector�recreation, hospitality, entertainment, sports, art, theater,
and museums. In 1990 we spent about 40 percent of our time in leisure activities; by 2015 it will be over 50 percent. Two years ago 50 percent of every dollar we spent on food was spent away from the
home. The innovations in transportation permit us to travel longer distances in a shorter time. With more leisure time, and people living longer, we can go further, stay longer, and make more trips in a lifetime. The trend is obvious here in our community and state. More restaurants, demand for larger sports facilities, and increased traffic to riverboats are indicators that we have more leisure time to fill. Work place One of the trends I believe will
have great impact on our cities and how we live is the future of the work place. It is reasonable to expect a continued worker shortage, created by consumer demand, coupled with an educated employment population too
small to meet the demand. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 151 million jobs by 2006 and only 141 million people employed. Some folks are going to have to work two jobs, or we will need to change our emigration
laws. There is also the possibility that more job opportunities will continue to move out of the country. The impact of technology has and will continue to make American business more productive with the use of
computers and with, robots doing the work of two to three people By 2005 Japan's robot population will pass one million. A few years later we will see fire-fighting robots and some completely automated factories in
the U.S. Another trend: Last year the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 27 percent of the civilian labor force worked flexible schedules. That is an increase of 83 percent from 1991 when only 15
percent of workers had flexible hours. The next transportation revolution will make jobs, goods, and services more accessible while allowing people and businesses to spread into less crowded locations
It is becoming less important when a person does his or her job than if deadlines are met. Management style will change as will the need for central city office buildings. Who is doing the work is
changing also, and will continue to change. The day of the unskilled manual laborer is fading. Computers have made an impact in the repair and maintenance field. Your auto mechanic, for instance, is just as likely to
hook your car up to a computer terminal, as he or she is to remove your carburetor. The result of such technological development is that new opportunities have been created for women in fields that traditionally have
been dominated by men. In 1996, 61 percent of U.S. technicians, engineers, sales engineers, and technical sales support staff were women. This trend is likely to continue. All this demand will mean a change in
education. Training will become one of the next boom industries as employers are forced to take on the responsibility of educating unskilled workers. Employers will be the public schools of the next generation. As we
look 25 years forward, work will be more independent and self-directed and companies will need to form partnerships with educators to prepare young people for the high-tech workplace. The day of my father or for that
matter myself, as boss, is fading. Supervision of tomorrow's workers will not require managers. Managers want to control tasks. The term will be 'company leadership' and that is going to be a tough job when the work
force is spread out from cars, to homes, to states, to the world. The task of the leader is to inspire greatness, and today we do that by personal contact. Tomorrow it must be done by other means, and this will be a
major challenge. The future of education Education must always be a part of any discussion of the future, and in my judgment, this is going to be one of the biggest changes of
all. Schools we are building in Tippecanoe County and all over the country will be like the barns of yesterday that are setting idle on today's farms. I believe by 2050 the new schools we are currently building will
be as much a part of the museums of the future as the little red schoolhouse is to us now. For many years school buildings have been 9-month institutions, designed around the needs of farm labor. Families no longer
work 8-5 or work one job. In time, the school year as we know it now will be history. Currently there are schools on the Internet. Diana J. Hanson, administrator of the Iowa Digital Education Association in Iowa City,
Iowa operates a K-12 plus post secondary school on the Internet. In three years she has grown from one student to 15,000 throughout the world. (www.idea.edu) She has a K-12 accredited program, not by home school
standards, but by the State of Georgia. There are now over 5,000 Internet schools. While there is no college on line yet that awards an undergraduate degree, it will happen.
In countries with limited educational facilities, the potential is unbelievable. Changes will take place at the university level, including the closing of many colleges.
There will be a variety of universities here and around the world. The University of Phoenix, for example, awards degrees but has no campus. There will be more corporate universities. Motorola University
currently enrolls 900,000 students for long and short courses. Peter Drucker says that in 25 years, universities will be a big wasteland in the United States. It is predicted that one-third of the private
residential colleges in this country will close in the next 10 years. Course work will be offered by professors from all over the world and chat rooms will permit interaction between student and professor. Experiments
will be offer by virtual reality. By 2020 half of the private traditional liberal arts colleges will close. The 2000 educational businesses producing courseware will drop to 300 in 2010. The
300 will produce 90 percent of the courseware material. There will be no new campuses after 2015. Many will close because they will be caught in a cost versus value dilemma, and because of their inability to deliver
a quality education. There will be two types of institutions�value-added universities and degree awarding. The University of Phoenix is a degree-awarding institution without a campus. Those university
and colleges that do survive will be outsourcing more of their courses, and will be primarily research institutions. It is my understanding that there are only about 60 to 100 primary research institutions now. They
will most likely remain because of their value and political clout. Those geared toward secondary research will disappear. By 2025 half of the universities in the United States will be closed and there
will be a national university consortium referred to as the big 20. The 20 or so members will include a combination of public, for-profit and corporate universities, publishers and software firms and entertainment and
telecommunication platform companies. The big 20 will originate 70 percent of the courses for credit, and will sell directly to students and industry and license courses for resale to government, business and other
colleges. For adults to continue to be viable in the new economy, they will be required to take at least 30 credit hours over a 5-year period. Studies show that there are 25 courses in college
that account for 50 percent of the enrollment. Those 25 courses are going to be ripe for a publisher to delivery digitally. As you can see, major changes are going to be happening, and although many of you in this
room today shake your head no, I firmly believe much of what I've talked about will happen. I know many of these same things were said of television and education in the past, but the impact of the internet is
different. There is interaction. There are economic pressures that demand changes like this if we are to have a vital work force. One of the major keys will be motivation of the student. Students will work at their
own level and at the level of their personal goals, but their success will depend on their motivation. This is not too much different from today except the personal support will be missing. Education and business will
share the same problem of motivating students and workers from a distance. Illiteracy I tremble to introduce the next prediction to a club that prides itself on literacy. The advent of talking computers will make literacy unnecessary by 2050.
According to William Crossman in his book CompSpeak 2050: How talking Computers will Recreate an Oral Cultural by Mid-21st Century, the voice-in/voice-out computer will be the last nail in the coffin of written
language. We will be able to store and retrieve information simply by talking, listening, and looking at graphics, not at text. The trend for many years was an oral culture, but the need to store and retrieve
information developed about 6 to 10, 000 years ago. The written language became the bridge. Now we can get back on track with talking computers. Crossman believes the written language, our stored-information access of
choice, has hit its limits and is failing us, first because it is no longer able to do the task we created it to do. For most literate people, communicating, storing, and retrieving information by writing and reading is
still far slower and more tedious than doing it orally. A great majority of the world's people�by conservative estimates, 80 percent of humanity, including many living in the so-called print-literate nations�still
can't use written language effectively. Few of the world's societies possess both the enormous human and economic resources and the political will required to fully train their population to write and read.
Computers that we can talk to and that can talk back to us will be a big evolutionary leap. For the past 125 years the trend has been set as the scientific sector has been developing oral and not text-visual
technologies, all the way from wax-cylinders and phonographs to the talking computer. Check the local library to see the number of Books on Tape that are in circulation. I have enjoyed a chance to listen to over 400
full-length books on tape (not from the library) most of which I would not have read. Barnes and Noble in a recent advertisement in the New York Times showed a device to store 500 books for reading. Very
soon it will be the same for listening. The declining literacy rate among school children is a symptom of these deeper processes. As a group, young people in the electronically developed counties have
chosen oral and not print/visual technologies as their preferred method for accessing "live" and stored information. They ask, why should we read and write, when we can listen and speak? By 2005 when a
student is assigned to write an essay, she will be able to speak into a voice computer, use the voice grammar-check to organize and correct it, "proofread" it by listening to the computer, repair, print it out
and submit it to the teach for a grade. Millions of people will be freed from the bondage of the printed word which they cannot read, and aided by simultaneous language translation which will help many of us overcome
language barriers. Up to this point I have talked about major changes and trends in population, food, energy, minerals, education, and literacy. This is also a good time to restate some of the
earlier premises. Much of what we will see in the future will be based on trends which are already well established now, and there is little reason to believe they will be altered, however some may develop more quickly
while others more slowly. One of those counter trends of new technologies is the public fear of adverse consequences. Computers/ Artificial Intelligence/Genetics It is
said that today's computer are less complex than the brain of an earthworm, but this will change. Intelligent computers are inevitable. In 1957 I worked on computers that guided missiles to an airborne target at
60,000 ft. The size of the computer was equal to a small house trailer. Today you have more computer power in your car than we had in those trailers. Our first digital computer could generate only a 54-bit message. It
was housed in a cabinet the size of a small closet. Moore's Law in 1965 predicted the geometric growth of semiconductor power. He said that silicon intelligence would evolve to the point where it would be hard to
tell computers from human beings. Raymond Kurzwell said: "We will have the raw computing power of the human brain - 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections � in a $1,000 computer by around 2019. By 2030
a $1,000 computer system will have the power of a thousand human brains: by 2050, a billion human brains." He also predicted that previously intractable problems in science, engineering, and medicine will be a snap
and after 2050 robots will rapidly displace humans from tractors and farmland and will provide basic human necessities to all people. Cars, planes and trains will operate themselves, and the carnage on the highways will
end in the 2030s Kurzweil projects that by 2030 direct links will be established between neurons in the human brain and computer circuitry. If this happens it means that our brains could be supplemented with enormous
amounts of digital memory . He says that the "Size of the technology is shrinking so rapidly that within 30 years, both size and cost of this scenario will be feasible." And he goes a step, I
hope, too far. By 2099 he says only a small group of people will still inhabit biological bodies. Most humans will have transferred their minds into electronic circuits�and attained immortality as result.
Mr. Kurzweil is a fascinating futurist and his recent book, The Age of the Spiritual Machine: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence is a must read. By 2050 when babies are born, they will have their own
complete genetic code determined before they leave the hospital. A tiny card will be handed to each baby's parents. This will determine their predisposition to a particular illness. We will take pills to lower the risk.
The earth by 2010 will don an electronic skin. There will be trillions of telemetric systems, each with a microprocessor brain and radio. According to physicist Horst Stormer, wireless sensors will go
anywhere and measure anything like traffic flow, water level, number of people walking by, temperature. This is developing into something like a nervous system or a skin for the earth.
Biologist are just on the doorstep of a journey that will take a thousand years. By the year 2100 life sciences will be the leading economic force, and as was discussed earlier, we are just now building
the base for biotechnology, genetics, and cloning. The benefits can be beyond our belief, but so will the ethical and legal problems. It may speak well for a growing number of lawyers. Thermonuclear energy will be
urgent around 2050-2100 as petroleum resources dwindle. Molitor suggest by 2200-2300 will be the era of quantum physics, nanotechnology, and high-pressure physics. Megamaterial technologies, including the
ability to disassemble and reconstruct matter at the atomic and subatomic levels, will radically transform the physical sciences. Overlapping the megamaterials era will be the New Atomic Age when thermonuclear fusion
will usher in a New Atomic Age. Fusion uses virtually limitless hydrogen as fuel, and so it has the potential to satisfy unlimited energy needs. And by 2500�3000, the last half of this millennium, we will
be looking to the new space age. All of what has gone before will make it possible. There will be the need for spacecraft, for exploration travel, resource gathering. "To go where no one has gone before." I know I speak for each of you in this room when I say that with all of the forecast made, we all hope a little of the Old World survives, and I must admit I would love to live and see it all. References
American Outlook Winter 1999, Spring 1999 Business Week August 30, 1999 21 Ideas for the 21 Century Christian Science Monitor: Craig Savoye Predicting 2099 November 29, 1999 William Crossman in his book CompSpeak
2050: How talking Computers will Recreate an Oral Cultural by Mid-21st Century Harry Dent The Education Source Newsletter Educating Children in the 21st Century September/October, 1999 Samuel L. Dunn Vice president
for academic affairs, Northwest Nazarene College World Futures Conference Frontiers of the 21st Century a collection of articles for the World Futures Society Conference
The Futurist November 1999 December 1999 January �February 2000 Diana J. Hanson administrator Iowa Digital Education Association World Futures Conference. Ray Kurzweil The Age of the Spiritual Machine:
When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence Paper by Polly LaBarre Graham T T Molitor World Futures conference. New York Times Magazine December 5, 1999 New York Times Nov 6, 1999
Ian D. Pearson January-February 2000 The Futurist. Time, November 8, 1999 Visions 21
www.futureconceptlab.com Wired January 2000 Frontiers of the 21st Century (Collection of articles from
conference)World Future society |
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Copyright © 2000 Lafayette Indiana Rotary Club. |
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