FUTURES
RESEARCH
7203 Unpublished – Next 50 Years
By David Mercer
Centre for Strategy & Policy,
Open University Business School (OUBS),
Walton Hall,
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
Tel: 01908 232165 or 01908 655878 Fax: 01908 655898
Email: d.s.mercer@open.ac.uk Web: http://oubs.open.ac.uk/future
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The author is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Strategy and Policy, at the UK's Open University Business School where he chairs its Future Marketing programme. He is also Director of its Futures Observatory, is chairman of the WFS United Kingdom Chapter and has been advisor on long-range planning to a number of multi-nationals and governments.
We have now entered a world which - in the Third Millennium - is already different to that we so recently left behind in the twentieth century. But many in the developed world, barely recognising the world-shattering changes taking place around them, still limit themselves to the urgent task of acquiring the goods and services which were the symbols of the previous century's affluent society. For those of them who are as yet ignorant of what awaits them, this short article seeks to set the future record straight; by examining the major trends which will revolutionise all our lives.
To put these changes in perspective, let us first look back, to 50 years ago. In those earlier times, even as late as the 1950s, we still toiled long hours in the fields, driving teams of horses, or used our aching muscles in dirty factories, hammering metal. We then returned home to a simple meal of bread and jam, with cheese only put on the table for special occasions; and too many of us, especially the native inhabitants of our remaining empires in the Third World, starved. For entertainment the whole family clustered around the radio and the only real treat was the weekly the visit to the cinema, where we shared a dream of living in Hollywood. Our personal transport probably was a bicycle, household appliances were only for the rich, and television usually wasn't available even to them. The handful of computers, the size of houses, were being used by the US in the development of the hydrogen bomb; as the Cold War, following a half century of global conflict, posed a constant threat to all of us. It all seems so very long ago, so much so that we are starting to think of these privations with a degree of nostalgia. But, looking in the opposite direction, from the middle of that last century to the present, all our lives would have been seen as incredibly rich.
Looking forward to the middle of the century to come, therefore, we can expect changes which will be at least as great!
This short history of the future is most directly based upon the work of the Futures Observatory. Funded by a number of multi-nationals and governments, this is a joint venture between the Open University, the WFS UK chapter and the Strategic Planning Society. It has spent a decade surveying the future expectations of more than 5,000 organisations world-wide.
Even so, in looking to the world as it might be fifty years ahead in 2050 AD, we still face problems of imagining the inconceivable. The pace of change is still accelerating and the coming half century will almost certainly encompass the most dramatic changes humanity has ever seen.
The good news is that, unlike our widespread fears at the end of the twentieth century, we will happily tolerate this pace of change and will even have become addicted to the excitement this generates. In particular, the technology needed to underpin these developments is already emerging from the laboratories, and offers a sound basis for many of the predictions offered in this article. Most important of all, with our growing maturity in decision-making, the changes will be firmly under our own control. Indeed, the key impacts of the new revolutions will be based on consensual social decisions, following the trends which are already evident across society. These will almost certainly lead not just to a richer world but to a better one for all of us; including those of us, in the developing world, who have been previously excluded. Even so you should be aware that, although - for brevity - all the predictions here are couched in terms of seeming certainty, the very essence of long-range planning still is managing uncertainty.
Perhaps the most important trend, which will shape future of the whole world, is that of the continuing development, and especially empowerment, of every individual. By 2050 we will have learned to effectively enforce the whole range of our personal rights; as, even more radically, will the citizens of the developing world. In particular, we will have positively welcomed a move from macho competition to feminine co-operation; helping justify the popular claim that this will be the 'Women's Century'. Even the most aggressive commercial organisations will have replaced hierarchical management by networking between self-managed teams; most often led by women.
We will positively shape every aspect of our lives, to at last fulfil all our potential. We will draw on a rich library of lifestyles to suit every mood; downloading the resources needed for these - physical products and especially the new knowledge and ideas - from the worldwide web of electronic delivery systems. This trade in ideas will by then have become the main business transacted across these networks. Most lifestyles will then, however, be so inner-directed as to be almost spiritual. Sales of most physical products will have plateaued, with many of our purchases made for us by software implemented buying agents, and conspicuous consumption will be seen as a major social faux pas.
Instead, we will pursue knowledge, to meet our personal development needs; especially in terms of Life-Long-Learning, delivered on demand wherever we are. Most of us will have a number of post-graduate qualifications. Self-education, which will occupy much of our leisure time, will be positively seen as the most fulfilling pursuit. Distance learning, the leading e-commerce industry over the decades until then, may have just lost its first place but will still be lying in second position; generating trillions of dollars of revenue for both the private and public sectors, as well as dominating the networks linking our social activities.
Perhaps the most important, and certainly the controversial, aspect will be our right of control over our own bodies. With average lifespans already exceeding a century, the major new developments - led by the widespread use of genome surgery and spare parts replacement - will promise to more than double this. The impact, especially in terms of tripling the length of working lives, will be to make society so much richer that questions about funding the welfare state need no longer be asked; and a far more equitable distribution of wealth will seem natural to all but the extremists.
Beyond this, though, we will return from social evolution, which has characterised human progress for several centuries, to that focused on the individual; though this time it will be under our own control rather than by Darwinian chance. We will positively use drugs, and implants, to control all aspects of our lives. Our health will be constantly monitored, and the necessary corrections made at the cellular level by gene-manipulating drugs and micro-machines, where doctors will increasingly become managers of our individual health systems and social well-being.
Above all, though, our most revolutionary move will be to gain positive control of our brains. In part this will also be through drugs; enhancing performance at work, by improving memory and even intelligence, and enriching our private lives with pleasure enhancing chemicals - by then legalised and produced safely by the pharmaceutical industry. The major evolutionary developments are, however, likely to arise from the increasing availability of chip implants in the brain. These will enable us to communicate direct with the computer networks; to create a symbiosis which represents a genuinely new form of being. They will allow us instant access to almost all global knowledge. This will at, one extreme, undermine the monopolies in expertise held by many of the traditional professions. At the other, it will revolutionise the nature of education; which will by then be concerned with managing the overwhelming flood of data rather than adding to it.
Crucially, however, it will facilitate a form of telepathic communication, brain to brain, between individuals. We will even be able to share our emotions direct, and this will give a dramatic boost to the virtual reality industry. But, even so, the real impact will come from the symbiosis, linking each of us to the computer networks spanning the world, already under way even before any chips are implanted.
This will also lead to a new definition of who we are. Increasingly, we will spread parts of our intellectual selves, especially our memories, across the computer networks. You have only to see the disorienting effect of someone's PC crashing to see how insidiously these have already invaded our lives; so think what the position will be in fifty years! This may even result in a form of immortality. So much of ourselves will be on our databanks that the death of the physical body will become almost irrelevant; and legislation may even be proposed to protect the increasing numbers 'living' in such limbo.
Contrary to some predictions, though mediated by impersonal new electronic channels, these new forms of communication will actually serve to enhance personal contact. In 2050 face-to-face meetings, even with family and friends, will most likely be through the medium of wall-sized three-dimensional video screens. These will be so realistic that it will seem as if you are in the same room as the other person. With the world criss-crossed by webs of fibre-optics, the cost will be so negligible that extended families, backed up by life-long friendships, will once more provide an important support for individuals.
These developments, along with tax incentives justified by reducing car travel, will also encourage home-working. By 2050 we will spend most of our working week at home; though irrational social needs will still drive us into our offices - or to local business groups - for frequent flesh-pressing contact. The necessary electronic technologies will be simple to handle. The greatest social advantage, however, will be that families will once more be able to put down very strong local roots, confident that their many coming changes of job will be able to be effected electronically, without the trauma of uprooting their home life. Just as important, this will also lead to the resurgence of community life as a whole.
The main limitations will be posed by the physical problems of converting homes. Such a home office, even though it will at last be genuinely paperless, will still need the space equivalent to a large double bedroom. With the housing stock only turning over once a century, this will have led to a boom in companies mass-producing the components for plug-in offices, to replace the double garages and conservatories which were so popular at the end of the last century. The merging of home and workplace, not generally seen since the 18th century, will lead to significantly different family - and community - lives.
In any case, the very nature of work will have changed. The uncertainty, caused by the move from industrial to post-industrial society at the end of the 20th century, will have been replaced by decades-long booms in demand for the new services. The resulting shortages of skilled labour will have dramatically altered organisations' attitudes to their workers, who will have by then taken their place as the new stakeholder group to be cosseted. Their intrinsic knowledge, the 'gold in worker's heads', will have become the main item on any organisation's real balance sheet. In order to retain them, their employers will make their 'work' increasingly attractive to them. All the tools of marketing will be used as assiduously on this group as on customers.
Above all, these will include designing the 'product' to meet their exact needs; here the total work package for older contract workers as much as career development for younger staff members. In this way, the borderline between work and leisure will gradually dissolve; and our new 'hobbies', supported by electronic learning on demand, will permeate all parts of our lives. Despite the views of their critics, large multinationals will still exist, though a significant amount of the new business, in a knowledge society, will have returned to individual 'guild-workers'. These will be registered experts, in literally millions of new fields of human knowledge and endeavour, some working as contractors with large organisations and some self-employed.
Through their large-scale ownership of loyal memberships, the portals, who will control customers at one end of the spectrum and individual suppliers at the other, should become the most powerful, and profitable, organisations. They, in particular, will have solved the new economic problem of releasing significant value from e-commerce; by using the old trick of skimming fractions of a penny from trillions of transactions in the new Consumer-To-Consumer market-places. Indeed, the global economy will be dominated by the anarchic business of one-to-one networking. The portals may be more powerful than governments but the inherent dangers of monopoly will have been recognised and the relationships with their individual members, needed to generate the essential levels of trust in the system as a whole, will be strictly regulated.
Overall, barring global catastrophe, it is virtually certain that the wealth available to humanity will have escalated exponentially. On the one hand, the main technological revolutions will start to deliver many more of their ultimate benefits. On the other, demand will move from resource-rich physical products, with their economics of decreasing returns, to intellect-rich knowledge and communication services, which can tap continuously-renewable knowledge assets. This - led by the exponential growth in the value of one-to-one knowledge networking - is likely to lead to the replacement of economics by new forms of sociology, based more on pragmatic experience-based management practice than academic theory.
Above all, despite the blinkered vision of current Western governments, the high rate of global growth will largely result from the consumer demands of the 90% of the population in the developing nations. This will fuel their local economies so that - with the global population stabilised and much of the food supply coming from above and below the oceans which cover three-quarters of the Earth - their activity levels can rapidly approach those of their developed counterparts. In addition to the almost unimaginable impact this will have on the developing nations themselves, this will also benefit the Western economies. But it will still result in significant political stresses, especially in the US, when the economic hegemony of these is sidelined by a genuinely global economy; based on the new mass markets emerging in those developing nations.
In any case, by 2050 much of the power of nations - especially that of the US which will at last be experiencing the end of its period of global hegemony - will have evaporated. In part it will have been usurped by the newly-envigorated local communities, but in the main it will be by transfers to the new super-regions. By then NAFTA will have grown to also encompass much of South America, though some members of Mercosur will have turned their attention to the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking old world. It will, however, still be an economic club; with any hint of a political challenge to the remaining - weakened - US sovereignty being vetoed. Although still leading the world in the development of new technologies, especially in military hardware, the US will be increasingly troubled; externally by the European challenge to its global position and internally by the divisive fissures amongst its own ethnic groups. In the Far East, China will have settled its differences with Japan, along probably with Indonesia, and will lead the third of the rich triad of super-regions; again economically focused, but in this case moving rapidly to political union.
Most important, the EU-derived 'Western Federation' will stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific; with its main philosophy enshrined in empowerment of the individual and 'subsidiarity' its key application of this. It will have finally managed to absorb Russia, after considerable difficulty bringing this nation's criminally infiltrated institutions into line with the demands of its own, passionately-democratic, parliament. In particular, though, the real driving force for its growth will by then be coming from the rapidly growing populations of the African states which have recently become full members. They will use this, along with their greenfield advantages, to secure their positions at the leading edge of the new, knowledge-based, technological developments.
Where the problems of merging disparate national institutions into the central administration will have been largely solved, the most active internal debate of this 'Western Federation' will probably revolve around the potential cultural conflicts posed by India's application for full membership. This nation, by then one of the richest in the world, probably will not wish to join the Eastern Federation, since that will be dominated by its long-time enemy China. In contrast, the related external debate is likely to concern the emergence of global government. What would happen should India join, and push the Western federation over the psychologically important threshold of one third of humanity? Would the Eastern Federation then start negotiations for some form of rapprochement?
What also would the US reaction be? Would it deploy the threat of its nuclear arsenal? But that threat would no longer lead to inevitable global annihilation. Indeed, the likely detonation of at least one terrorist nuclear device should have strengthened the desire for global institutions; though the UN, still also dominated by the US veto, will barely feature in such moves. In any case, the wider international community should have seen its willingness to intervene in domestic unrest not merely result in more than half a century of global peace but in a dramatic improvement in human rights everywhere; now broadened to cover individual empowerment for all, including women.
In all parts of the world, led by the new political institutions running the supra-national groupings, the old compendium parties will have become peripheral; not least as governments use the new interactive representation processes to help them with their main role of managing national assets to best meet the needs of their citizens. Even in the case of the more controversial topics they will largely content themselves with judging between the arguments, put forward by the competing single issue groups.
The most exciting developments of all will be getting under way outside of the Earth itself. The increasing number of manned space stations orbiting the planet will be doing a profitable trade in tourism, while also acting as hubs for the vast amounts of data now flooding the world below and providing defensive shields against the feared cometary impacts.
In 2050, though, they will at last also be acting as stepping stones towards colonisation of the planets and the space between. The existing colony on Mars may still be little more than a laboratory, and construction of the first interplanetary colony will probably have only just begun, but the moon colony - the source of the raw materials for these new ventures - is likely to already have a population numbered in the thousands. After completing their role in solving the otherwise intractable problem of global warming, the new technologies based there will be used to influence weather patterns on Earth; using their mass drivers to selectively seed dust clouds into its upper atmosphere.
On the other hand, despite conclusive proof of the existence of basic forms of life elsewhere in the galaxy, we will not have heard from any other intelligent species. The consensus of scientific opinion, however, will probably have shifted to the view that this will not be forthcoming until we have proved our right to join such higher civilisations. The justifiably optimistic view at the heart of this article is that - as we by then reach out to the stars - we will be well on the way to meeting that condition!
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