The Future (4 page)

“Quarterly capitalism” is a phrase some use to describe the prevailing practice of managing businesses from one three-month period to the next, and focusing budgets and strategies on the constant effort to ensure that each quarter’s earnings per share report never fails to meet projections or the market’s expectations. When investors and CEOs focus on a definition of “growth” that excludes the health and well-being of the communities where businesses are located, the health of the employees who do most of the work, and the impact of the businesses’ operations on the environment, they are tacitly choosing to ignore material facts with the potential to make real growth unsustainable.

Similarly, the dominance of money in modern politics—particularly in the United States—has now led to what might be described as “quarterly democracy.” Every ninety days, incumbent officeholders running for reelection and challengers in political contests are required to publicly report their fundraising totals for the previous ninety days. At the end of each of these quarters, there is a flurry of fundraising events, email solicitations, and fundraising telephone calls to maximize the amount that can be reported—much as a puffer fish increases its perceived size in the presence of another puffer fish encroaching on its territory.

Our evolutionary heritage has made us vulnerable to numerous stimuli that trigger short-term thinking. Though we also have the capacity for long-term thinking, of course, it requires effort, and neuroscientists tell us that distractions, stress, and fear easily disrupt the processes by which
we focus on the longer term. When elected officials are under constant systemic stress to focus intently on short-term horizons, the future gets short shrift.

This is particularly dangerous during a period of rapid change. Some of the trends now under way are so well documented by observations in the past that projections of those same trends into the future can be made with a very high degree of confidence. The rate of advancement in computer chips, to pick a well-known example, is understood more than well enough to justify predictions that computer chips will continue to advance rapidly in the future.

The speedy drop in the cost of sequencing DNA has occurred for reasons that are understood more than well enough to justify predictions that this trend too will continue to shape our future. The accumulation of greenhouse gases in the past and the rise in global temperatures they have caused is also understood more than well enough to justify predictions of what will happen to global temperatures if we continue to increase emissions at the same rate in the future—and what the consequences of much higher global temperatures would be.

Other changes, however, burst upon the world seemingly fully formed: a brand-new pattern that represents a sudden shift from an older pattern that persisted for as far back in the past as humans can recall. In our own lives, we are accustomed to gradual, linear change. But sometimes the potential for change builds up without being visibly manifested until the inchoate pressure for change reaches a critical mass powerful enough to break through whatever systemic barriers have held the change back. Then suddenly one pattern gives way to another that is entirely new. This “emergence” of systemic change is often difficult to predict, but does occur frequently both in nature and in complex systems designed by human beings.

M
ANY WHO WERE
once fascinated and excited about the possibilities of the future are now focused solely on the implications of the future’s potential for the business, political, and security strategies of the present. As the Scientific Revolution accelerated in the last decades of the twentieth century, corporate planners and military strategists began to devote considerably more attention to the study of alternative futures, motivated by a concern that the potency of new scientific and technological
discoveries could threaten the strategic interests—or even survival—of business models and the balance of power among nations.

What is our present conception of the future? How does our image of the future affect the choices we are making in the present? Do we still believe that we have the power to shape our collective future on Earth and choose from among the alternative futures one that preserves our deepest values and makes life better than it is in the present? Or do we have our own crisis of confidence in humanity’s future?

If the spectrum of past, present, and future were displayed as a long thin rectangle similar to that used to portray the electromagnetic spectrum, the birth of Planet Earth
4.5 billion years ago would be at the far left end. Moving to the right, we would see the
emergence of life 3.8 billion years ago, the appearance of
multicellular life 2.8 billion years ago, the appearance of the first plant life on
land 475 million years ago, the
first vertebrates more than 400 million years ago, and the first
primates 65 million years ago. Then, moving all the way to the right end of the rectangle, the death of the sun
would appear 7.5 billion years from now.

The narrow slice of time to the left of the midpoint in this spectrum—the one that represents the history of the human species—is an even narrower slice of the spectrum of time than is visible light of the electromagnetic spectrum. The thoughts we devote to these vast stretches of time in the past and future are often fleeting at best.

There are ample reasons for optimism about the future. For the present, war seems to be declining. Global poverty is declining. Some fearsome diseases have been conquered and others are being held at bay. Lifespans are lengthening. Standards of living and average incomes—at least on a global basis—are improving. Knowledge and literacy are spreading. The tools and technologies we are developing—including Internet-based communication—are growing in power and efficacy. Our general understanding of our world, indeed, our universe (or multiverse!) has been growing exponentially. There have been periods in the past when limits to our growth and success as a species appeared to threaten our future, only to be transcended by new advances—the Green Revolution of the second half of the twentieth century, for example.

So the positive and negative sets of trends are occurring simultaneously. The fact that some are welcome and others are not has an effect on our perception of them. The unwelcome trends are sometimes ignored, at least in part because they are unpleasant to think about. Any
uncertainty about them that can be conjured to justify inaction is often seized upon with enthusiasm, while new hard evidence establishing their reality is often resisted with even stronger denial of the reality the evidence supports.

Just as naïve optimism can amount to self-deception, so too can a predisposition to pessimism blind us to bases for legitimate hope that we can find a path that leads around and through the dangers that lie ahead. Indeed, I
am
an optimist—though my optimism is predicated on the hope that we will find ways to see and think clearly about the obvious trends that are even now gaining momentum, that we will reason together and attend to the dangerous distortions in our present ways of describing and measuring the powerful changes that are now under way, that we will actively choose to preserve human values and protect them, not least against the mechanistic and destructive consequences of our baser instincts that are now magnified by technologies more powerful than any that those in previous generations, even Jules Verne, could have imagined. I have tried my best to describe what I believe the evidence shows is more likely than not to present us with important choices that we must consciously make together. I do so not out of fear, but because I believe in the future.

For a larger version of the following image,
click here
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T
HE GLOBAL ECONOMY IS BEING TRANSFORMED BY CHANGES FAR
greater in speed and scale than any in human history. We are living with, and in, Earth Inc.:
^*
national policies, regional strategies, and long accepted economic theories are now irrelevant to the new realities of our new hyper-connected, tightly integrated, highly interactive, and technologically revolutionized economy.

Many of the most successful large enterprises in the world now produce goods in “virtual global factories,” with intricate spiderwebs of supply chains connecting to hundreds of other enterprises in dozens of countries. More and more markets for goods—and increasingly services that do not require face-to-face interaction—are now global in nature. Higher and higher percentages of wage earners must now compete not only with wage earners in every other country, but also with intelligent machines interconnected with other machines and computer networks.

The digitization of work and the dramatic and relatively sudden metastasis of what used to be called automation are driving two massive changes simultaneously:

The transformation of the global economy is best understood as an emergent phenomenon—that is, one in which the whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but very different from the sum of its parts in important and powerful ways. It represents something new—not just a more interconnected collection of the same national and regional economies that used to interact with one another, but a completely new entity with different internal dynamics, patterns, momentum, and raw power than what we have been familiar with in the past. There are limits to cross-border flows of people, of course, and trade flows are stronger among countries that are close to one another, but the entire global economy has been knit together much more tightly than ever before.

Just as the thirteen American colonies in North America
emerged
as a unified whole in the last quarter of the eighteenth century—and just as the ancient walled city-states of Italy eventually became a unified nation in the second half of the nineteenth century—the world as a whole has now
emerged
as a single economic entity that is moving quickly toward full integration. At least that is the reality in the world of commerce and industry, in the world of science, and in the rapid spreading of most new technologies to centers of commerce throughout the world.

In the world of politics and governmental policy, nation-states remain the dominant players. Psychologically, emotionally, and in the ways we frame our identity, most of us still think and act as if we are still living in the world we knew when we were young. In fact, however, where the economic realities of life are concerned, that world is receding from view.

This powerful driver of global change—sometimes loosely and inadequately referred to as “globalization”—marks not only the end of one era in history and the beginning of another, it marks the emergence of a completely new reality with which we as human beings must come to grips.