ThinkingShift

Due to teaching over the last few weeks, I’m WAY behind on bringing you stuff. So you may have seen this already but maybe not! The New York Times recently had a ‘green issue‘ that includes advice on how to make your carbon footprint smaller. The issue is divided into 7 sections that you can browse: Act, Eat, Invent, Learn, Live, Move and Build. Each section is stuffed full of great articles and advice. I must say I hadn’t considered Pig Power before (in the Invent section). There are 150,000 pigs in Reynolds, Indiana doing their bit for the environment by eating, sleeping and…eliminating their waste, which is collected into a massive, US $15 million “anaerobic digester” where the pig’s waste is converted to methane, synthetic gas and biodiesel. Reynolds is hoping that the pigs’ efforts will generate 100% of the town’s electricity demands and part of its transport-fuel.

You know, we need to educate ourselves around how to live more sustainably so check out the green issue. At the same time, arm yourself with information about rising food costs - this is going to be the real dark age ahead I think - riots over scarcity of food and a global food crisis. There have already been food riots in Haiti, Egypt and the Philippines. Basic food stuff is going to become unaffordable and forget about purchasing organic food because it will be too pricey. The UN recently named 36 countries as staggering under a food crisis, of which 21 are in Africa.

A ThinkingShift reader in Thailand says that the price of B grade rice has increased to AU $950 per ton, rising from $383 per ton at the beginning of 2008. According to stuff I’ve been reading, the rice crisis is being caused by a variety of factors: support and financing for agriculture has been neglected whilst Asian countries build cities; overpopulation; climate change; the credit crisis. But the crisis has hit us fast. In the last 18 months, a commodities super-cycle has risen its ugly head. This means that investors who used to plough their money into equities and mortgage bonds (and who have been spooked by the sub-prime mortgage debacle) are now taking their money and investing in food and commodities: gold and oil, sugar, wheat and rice, cocoa and cattle. So investors reap a profit out of the very basic food stuff and commodities that those who live on $2.00 per day depend on. Poor people simply will not be able to afford the basics of sugar, rice, wheat and so on. The World Bank estimates food prices have risen by an average of 83% in the past three years and is warning that at least 100 million people could be tipped into poverty as a result.

We should all be arming ourselves with information on this global food crisis because it will threaten global security. So check out the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN - their website has two reports looking at crop prospects and the food situation in 2008. Read the recent speech by the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, delivered in Bern on April 29, 2008. As a result of the impending food crisis, the UN has established a task force.

Are we going to witness a revolution of the hungry? In the Ivory Coast, for example, thousands of hungry people marched on the home of President Laurent Gbagbo, chanting “we are hungry” and “life is too expensive, you are going to kill us”. In Egypt, at least 10 people have died over the past two weeks, in riots that erupted at government-subsidised bakeries. According to the UN, 1 out of every 80 people relies on somebody else to provide for basic food requirements.

We have basic rights as humans: the right to privacy (which as you know I think is stuffed in our society) and the right to food. How dark is our future going to be?

Chartered Management Institute has just released a new report called Management Futures: The World in 2018 (March 2008). It looks at what the world of work and management will be like in 2018. Another 10 years, not long really. And it asks what we need to get managers and leaders doing now to enable business leaders to deal with tomorrow.

A number of scenarios are outlined. The Probable Future:

• Brazil, Russia, India and China (the so-called BRIC nations) will have transformed the business landscape
• virtual community-based organisations will be prevalent
• KM will be alive and kicking because organisations will need to know what it is they should know
• emotional and spiritual intelligence will be big as companies grapple with a diverse workforce who need stimulation and creative outlets
• work-life balance will no longer be uttered. It will be work-life integration
• organisations will face the growing power of the employee and offer personalised working patterns

Sounds good so far. Then there’s the Unexpected Future:

• 16 potentially unforeseen events and developments are identified ranging from cyber-attacks to the world being run by robots
• to meet unforeseen events there needs to be multiple back-ups for intellectual property and a knowledge bank on the use and misuse of enhancement technologies and the use of robots for basic management practice

Then there’s the Desired Future, which took all plausible scenarios into account:

• more organisations will be wholly virtual
• organisations that remain physical entities will be run by managers who create a sense of control and calm (mmmmm… a few fiery bosses I’ve known should think about resurrecting themselves in 2018 )
• collaboration and political skills will be necessary

There’s a lot more detail in the report, which you can read here. Thx to Dora, one of my students at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, for alerting me to this report.

I was pretty useless with Maths at school. All those boring numbers and equations. History was far more interesting - full of rich, colourful stories of people living in a time long ago and long forgotten. But recently I’ve been getting into figures and numbers - not because I’m making up for lost time but because the future of humanity may depend on a certain number. And that number is 134 trillion. I can’t even imagine such a whopping big number. Does the world even have a trillionaire?…let me check…does Google recognise the term? Is it Bill Gates?

So….apparently, Wired magazine predicted in 1999 that Bill Gates would be a trillionaire by 2005. But that prediction was bombed by the dot.com meltdown. Okay, so could it be de facto Prez, Dick Cheney with his fingers in the “golden oil fields of Iraq” pot? Is it those two smart dudes who came up with the whole Google algorithm thing? Or is it some rich sultan or sheik in some Middle Eastern country? Or is it Queen Elizabeth II?

A little sleuth work…. the combined wealth of the Rockefeller family in 1998 was approximately $US11 trillion and the Rothschilds $US 100 trillion - but I’m looking for a single, extremely wealthy person, not a family. Actually, there does seem to be a very mysterious bunch of dudes, the Global Elite - families with wealth beyond our wildest dreams and who make Buffet and Gates look like small change. But that’s another blog post.

Back to finding my trillionaire. I searched Wikipedia for “trillionaire” and it took me to the “billionaire” page where I found some very rich dudes like Anil Ambani (only worth US$45 billion) and Mukesh Ambani (older bro of Anil and only worth US$20.1 billion). Mmmm….if I combine 45 and 20.1 billion I still don’t get to one trillion (which is 1,000 billion, although remember I flunked Maths) and what’s in the water in India I ask that they have so many rich dudes?

Continuing my search for the world’s elusive trillionaire. Could it be Guy Cramer? Who you ask? In 1993, Cramer discovered a number of algorithms that accurately forecast stock market indexes. In case you’re seriously brainy, you can check them out here because Cramer has very kindly made these algorithms free. He’s not the world’s first trillionaire because, as a Christian, he felt it morally wrong to keep the secret of the algorithms to himself. Now, if I could just work out what the heck all the tables and numbers mean, I could become a trillionaire!

Didn’t end up finding a definitive answer as to who is the world’s first trillionaire if in fact there is one (although I suspect it’s some very shadowy person who is part of that Global Elite mob). But I did find out that 134,000,000,000,000 (wow, check out how many zeros) is a serious, scary number. According to The Optimum Population Trust, if the global population keeps growing at its current rate, it will reach 134 trillion by 2300 (and this is despite Europe’s population decline). World population is expected to reach 6.66 billion in April 2008 (anything in that number: 666?!).

Can you imagine? 134 trillion sweaty bodies trying to hustle and bustle around our cities. I can’t even navigate Pitt Street Mall in my lunch hour without bumping into people or having to avoid idiots who refuse to get out of your way. Forget global warming: population growth could be THE most serious threat to the human species’ continuing existence.

Of course, some global epidemic could wipe a large proportion of us out or we’ll snuff ourselves out with ongoing violence and stupidity. But the UN predicts the world’s population will stabilize at 10 billion in 2200. That’s a whole lot less that 134 trillion. Even so, can you imagine all the food necessary to feed this amount of people? The cattle that will need to be raised to provide meat and the forests that will need to be chopped down to make way for cattle and so on.

Now, before those neo-Nazis I recently had an email tussle with say “let’s revisit eugenics”, let me say I’m not suggesting we should mandate one child families, enforced contraception or that we should all turn to vegetarianism to avoid 33% of the world’s grain being fed to cattle (although there’s a good idea). But it does seem that population growth is going to be a significant future issue. And how many of the 134 trillion (should it come to that) will be poor I wonder? And to what extent will we see a huge gaping divide between those who can spend, spend, spend in our materialistic society and those who will struggle just to feed themselves on a planet over-burdened by the heaving mass of 134 trillion people?

And if you’re wondering how on earth you could spend one trillion dollars, here’s a fascinating fact for you:

• if you spent a million dollars a day, it would take you 2,737.8 years to spend your one trillion (assuming you earned no interest). That’d make an awful lot of lip gloss I’d have to buy

Inspiration: AlterNet

I always like reading about what the future has in store for us. I’d love to pop back in 1000 years or so - would humans still be roaming the Earth or would we have snuffed ourselves out? I imagine a forlorn landscape of abandoned cities being reclaimed by the jungles and forests. Okay, I probably watch too many dark sci-fi films.

So what are the futurists saying we can expect beyond 2008? I always like to read The Futurist’s predictions and they have just announced their Top 10 forecasts. Here’s a taste:

1. By 2025, there will be a million billionaires in the world. Globalisation and technological innovation mean increasing opportunities and prosperity. You only have to look around to see how quickly some people seem to be able to come up with an idea and cash in quick to figure that this prediction is probably a goer. And I wonder how many of the billionaires will be Russian?
2. We’ll all be wearing clothes made of smart fabrics and clothes that are wired to sense temperature or change colour. I sure like this one - I can never decide what colour to wear each day, so I usually end up in black of some sort. I’d love to wear a shirt in red and if I didn’t like it one hour later, have it turn itself into green. Wristwatches that hold every piece of data about you and which you can use to pay bills by swiping it at point of sale. Shoes that tell you “watch out for that pothole”. Or clothes that clean themselves.
3. I’m not at all surprised by this forecast - a new Cold War hotting up with China or Russia, replacing terrorism as the bogeyman.
4. A cashless society. If you read just a little bit about new technologies, you’d know for instance that passports with RFID chips can be read by a mobile scanner nearby and you could be the victim of identity theft. And so with sophisticated scanning technologies - they may provide counterfeiters a golden opportunity for printing fake currency. The world may move to adopting a cashless economy.
5. The Earth is on the verge of a significant extinction event. No surprise with this one either I reckon. The 21st Century could see a biodiversity collapse 100 to 1,000 times greater than any previous extinction since the dawn of humanity.
6. Water will be what oil was to the 20th Century. I’ve blogged before about my fear that water wars could erupt as this precious commodity becomes scarcer. Recently, I saw a marked car that had Water Conservation Police written on it (might have been Authority but either way it said “Water Conservation”). It was parked outside a house of a chap who loves his garden and waters it regularly. Now, the car may have belonged to a friend or relative. But maybe it was the first signs of a world in which our consumption of water will be very tightly controlled and watched.
7. By 2050 the world’s population may be a whole lot more than expected, mainly due to longer-living and healthier people. The UN has increased its forecast from 9.1 billion to 9.2 billion.
8. By 2080, the number of Africans threatened by floods will grow 70-fold. The natural flow of water is being disrupted by increasing development and urbanisation in Africa, which may result in flooding. If climate change causes global sea levels to rise by the predicted 38cm by 2080, then 70 million Africans could be affected.
9. There will be a stampede to the Arctic. No surprise with this one I think, not when you think about Putin’s recent grab for a large chunk of the Arctic region. The Arctic has glittering resources like copper, zinc, forests, fish etc. I think this will be too much temptation for our greedy world and the pristine Arctic will sadly be exploited.
10. And finally…and a bit scary I think - more decisions will be made by “non-human entities“. Well, frankly a lot of people who make decisions in this world could be accused of being “non-human”! But the forecast is talking about robots and intelligent, non-carbon networks that will make financial or even political decisions for us. And the reason for this? Humans’ competency is not keeping pace with advances in technologies well enough to avoid human error.

Well, I think most of these are pretty sensible forecasts. If I had to predict things, I would include the declining power of the USA and the rise and rise of China and Russia. So any future Cold War might not factor in the US. But who knows: once the US kicks out Bush, it could be a whole different ball game. I think too we’ll see portions of society breaking off into smaller communities in an attempt to get away from the chaos of the world. We may see a return to caring more for each other and the environment - focusing less on the individual and more on the collective. A return to a simpler life perhaps.

What are your predictions?

Strike me down! In a post just a few days ago, I told you about poor Leon, the French bulldog, and the possible dangers inherent in RFID technology. VeriChip is the US company at the centre of criticism over its plans to microchip medical patients. VericChip won approval from the FDA to implant microchips into humans. And it has started doing so.

VeriChip has just announced plans to conduct a 2 year pilot study to test their RFID technology. It will implant 200 Alzheimer’s patients located in Palm Beach County, Florida with tiny electronic capsules that contain a 16 digit unique patient identifier. The patients will be scanned and their medical and personal information held in a database, which can be accessed by medical staff.

I really do have a problem with this. VeriChip says that the patients have volunteered for the pilot study. Last time I looked, Alzheimer’s was considered to be a progressive form of dementia with symptoms of impaired thought and degeneration of brain function. This means that these patients may not be truly capable of giving informed consent. I’m wondering if this is exploitation of a group of people in society who really can’t stick up for themselves. We also know from my previous post that there are questions being raised about the medical safety issues of microchips, with animal studies pointing to a possible causal link with cancer.

VeriChip is saying that microchipping Alzheimer’s patients will give families peace of mind as any patient who wanders or gets lost can have their arm scanned to identify them. But it’s no secret that RFID technology can be used for tracking purposes and it’s no secret that hackers can nab medical data as it is transferred from chip to reader to secure database.

It’s the notion of tagging people that gets me. Tagging for folksonomies, okay; tagging for Flickr okay. But tagging humans? Not okay - very Orwellian. I think once you get acceptance of tagging a small population of medical patients, it’s an easy jump to say the prison population, then parolees or sex offenders, then perhaps to get through immigration - then the whole population. Always the argument would be - it’s to protect the population from criminals; it’s to protect military bases or nuclear power plants; we need to identify wandering Alzheimer’s patients and so on. And then it’s a small jump from the chip carrying medical information to holding other information about you, for example, chip-based payment for groceries would require your credit card details be recorded on the chip. I see no reason why airline tickets couldn’t be disposed of in a future of microchipped humans - pay for your ticket and when you get to the airport a scanner verifies payment and processes you through immigration. And to keep kids safe, how about a future where a baby is microchipped at birth - the parents can track their movements or police could find a missing child. One microchip in the human arm can hold an infinite number of potential uses to track and control humans albeit some uses might be beneficial or innocent. But well-meaning and innocent can often turn into exploited and abused.

No doubt a whole new crop of evasive technologies would spring up to evade the signals being emitted by RFID chips (if they’re emitting a radio signal) and a black market in avoidance. Special clothing material to block the signal from being omitted might be invented for instance and dodgy back street “implant extractors” (people who will surgically remove the microchip should you wish to avoid being tracked and monitored) will offer their services. The microchip black market would be full of counterfeit chips that you could swap for your implanted one and take on a whole new identity.

If you want to read more on a potential future of humans chipped like cattle or if you wonder if VeriChip’s microchip can be duplicated easily, go here and read the interview with Liz McIntyre, author of Spychips: How Major Corporations Plan to Track your Every Purchase & Watch your Every Move. The creepiest part of this interview is when you read that VeriChip, like vultures circling, swooped down on corpses following Hurricane Katrina and had coroners implant chips. Scary stuff; scary interview. I even find the slogan on VeriChip’s website creepy: “RFID for people” - I guess they point this out just in case we confuse ourselves with cattle or domestic pets!

Photo credit: Spychips.com

A University of Oxford ethicist believes that new technologies should be used to “make humans better”. This is just plain scary if you ask me. Australian born ethicist, Julian Savulescu, was recently in Sydney where he gave a lecture entitled “The Ethics of New Science and Human Enhancement”.

Savulescu spoke about radical technologies currently available such as cloning, artificial reproduction and stem cell developments. Now, I’m all for these technologies if they are used to improve human well-being or cure diseases, but I get a tad concerned when I hear ethicist’s like Savulescu say that we could use genetic testing to “select better children”.

We are already in the grip of a society obsessed with human enhancement, which produces plastic looking people or people willing to inject botox into their bodies (let’s recall botox is a botulism toxin). We are a society more interested in self-image, beauty and money - so where would we draw the line on human enhancement?

The good professor makes a comparison between fish oil and direct genetic intervention when he comments that parents try to intervene in their children’s’ lives with supplements like fish oils to hopefully improve brain functioning. And because we intervene, he believes this should give us license to meddle from the start of life - through IVF - to test for factors we may not desire in our children such as depression or neuroses. He’s also a great fan of using performance enhancing drugs in sport, calling for a change in rules so that safe performance enhancers could improve sport for athletes and fans.

This just doesn’t sit well with me. Did the good professor ever watch Gattaca - a film about a future society in which your DNA determined your status in life? Ethan Hawke’s character was born with a congenital heart condition, which snuffed his chances of being a space traveller. So he assumes the life of someone whose DNA would allow him to achieve his dream of space travel. The plot of this film was all about how natural babies, who were born into a genetically-enhanced world, didn’t stand a chance against babies whose DNA was twigged in the womb so they would live a long and disease free life. Great in theory, but it led to a society that discriminated not along racial lines but according to genetics.

Why is that we are never satisfied with what Nature has given us? What is it about humans that we seem to strive for homogeneity rather than diversity - we want to look alike toting the latest huge designer hand bag; we want the perfect pert nose or Angelina Jolie lips; we buy magazines with glossy photos of Barbie-doll looking celebrities who are lauded as the idealised standard. Why can we not accept flaws or imperfections and simply be happy and get on with life?

UNESCO has released a statement into the nature of knowledge acquisition and sharing in a technology-mediated world. Adopting the “Kronberg Declaration on the Future of Knowledge Acquisition and Sharing” it highlights the following key points (and I’m quoting):

• knowledge is the key to social and economic development;
• Creation, acquisition and sharing of knowledge have been going through dramatic changes because of rapidly emerging new information and communication technologies (ICT) and the societal transformations that they generate;
• New approaches are needed to bridge international knowledge gaps while ensuring cultural and linguistic diversity;
• The Internet and new education technologies provide manifold opportunities for all;
• There is a need to continuously harness new technologies and processes to develop knowledge societies that are people-centered, inclusive and development oriented.

It goes on to suggest some political and structural changes that might be needed to improve knowledge acquisition and sharing. The most interesting one I thought was the “concept of universal “knowledge norms”, which is defined as “…assessment and certification models for measuring competence in various areas of skills and knowledge”. But other changes were noted:

• The impact of technology on the evolution of knowledge societies;
• The impact of emerging technologies on models of knowledge acquisition;
• The future role of classical knowledge acquisition structures including those of teachers/trainers;
• The role of public-private partnerships in knowledge acquisition and sharing;

Specifically, looking at the next 25 years, the group of visionaries involved in the assessment anticipate that:

• knowledge acquisition and sharing will increasingly be technology-mediated (ie online) and will create new knowledge communities;
• there will need to be more focus on social and emotional abilities and skills;
• the importance of acquiring factual knowledge will decrease, whereas the ability to find one’s way in complex systems and to find, judge, organise and creatively use relevant information, as well as the capability to learn, will become crucial;
• the importance of the role of teachers as instructors will decrease or rather morph into one of coach, guide, facilitator of learners, whilst their role as validators and interpreters of knowledge creation, sharing and acquisition will increase;
• learners will play a more active role with content creation and dissemination and open access to and free flow of content will be of increasing importance;
• face to face knowledge acquisition settings will remain important (ie communities of practice) and will provide socialising environments.

The assessments calls for all stakeholders to come together to ensure that developing countries are included so that the digital divide is lessened. And very interestingly it states that diverse languages should be preserved but at the same time competencies for knowledge acquisition and sharing need to be identified “in one or more global languages”. New and creative business models need to be created it says to provide “high quality content”.

You can download the Kronberg Declaration here.

Now here’s some interesting statistics: internet access and online social networks have given an advantage to 61% of the UK population - they can enjoy social interaction; access to job information and Government services; instant communication; and consumer empowerment. But 39% of the population are digitally excluded and therefore socially disadvantaged. The latest research into the so-called digital divide was commissioned by UK Online Centres and the research carried out by FreshMinds. The report is entitled Understanding Digital Inclusion, which you can download here from the UK Online Centre’s Reading Room.

When you consider the digital divide concept, there’s a tendency to think the older generations are the ones at a disadvantage and that when they die off, the world will be filled with younger cyber-savvy people. But the report highlights that 11% of 16 to 24 year olds are digitally excluded rather than included and that digital inequality is increasing and becoming more like a chasm. The report has also found that three in four people counted as socially excluded are also digitally excluded - a double whammy. So if you’re not employed, in poor health, live in social housing and are part of the lowest socio-economic strata, then you are part of the social and digital poor in the UK. But surprisingly, a good proportion of non-users of the Internet reside in connected households.

So digital exclusion is not just about access: it’s about capability and skills to use digital technologies; engagement with digital technologies; confidence and creativity to interact with digital technologies and be a self-sufficient user. It was somewhat trendy to utter the words “digital divide”, “information rich” and “information poor” in the 1990s, but seems these words might still serve as powerful metaphors in a world we thought was wired up.

At the other end of the spectrum, a piece in CBS News echoes comments I made in an earlier post about the MySpace and Facebook generation not being as concerned about privacy. Those who are digitally included are busy sharing their digital biographies and archiving their youth: revealing their secret thoughts, connecting with friends, uploading photos and videos.

But the digitally rich should spare a moment to think about how anyone can find out anything about you on the internet. We recently heard of Miss New Jersey being embarrassed by private photos that suddenly and inexplicably entered the public domain. While we are all busy building our online reputations and constructing our digital (often fictional) lives, employers are equally hard at work checking out social networking sites to see what your online activity reveals about you. What may have seemed fun to share with friends when you were 16 years old may come back to haunt you when you’re 25 years and seeking a top paying job. An 18 year old rather bravely said: “I feel that if I do those types of things, it reflects my personality, so I don’t care what’s put up on the Web…. because I am who I am and it reflects that. And if people have a problem with me, then I wouldn’t want to work with them or know them.”

And even if you’re careful about what you reveal or post online, we all run the risk of others talking about us on some social networking site somewhere. So the gateway into our personal lives and the information that can be trolled by a third party who then makes decisions about us is vast. I read recently of a college professor in North Carolina who scanned Facebook profiles to determine which students to accept into his class. And apparently getting fired by your employer for blog entries is so common now that it’s come to be characterised by the term “dooced.”

But the last laugh surely has to be with those who plan digital autobiographies for their funerals for future generations to watch. Touch screen computers allow a person or family to capture photos,videos and audio of themselves to be preserved. No worrying about past private indiscretions coming back to haunt you - just construct the life story you wish!

A number of my posts have looked at what the world of the future may be like. There will be some great technology and medical advances, but there will also be a widening gap between rich and poor; the rapid growth of megacities in the developing world; increasing scarcity of conventional oil resources; loss of species and habitats. And the one that really worries me: flash mobs - groups of criminals and terrorists who suddenly gather in a public space to organise themselves into action, responding to socio-economic issues.

But here’s a threat to global security that I perhaps didn’t pay much attention to before I read this article in Reuters. A United Nations study has been released and highlights the issue of desertification. Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia are facing the environmental challenge of desert areas encroaching on lands and agriculture. The report was put together by 200 experts from 25 countries and says that tens of millions of people could be forced from their homes, creating an international refugee problem and social turmoil. Specifically, some 50 million people could be displaced within the next 10 years. One third of the Earth’s population could be vulnerable to desertification and surrounding societies may be threatened by instability.

The causes of desertification are numerous: land over-use, climate change, unsustainable irrigation practices, degradation of soil and so on. Here’s a BBC map - showing the human impact on deserts in 2000 and 2050. Interestingly, the UN Report points the finger of blame at climate change. You can get a copy of the UN Report here from the United Nations University site - pdf version entitled “Rethinking Policies to Cope with Desertification“.

New Statesman has news of another UN Report that highlights the rapid growth of the urban population in Africa - it will double in size to 742 million by 2030 and the result will be a dramatic increase in the number of teenagers living in extreme poverty. By 2030, 80 per cent of the world’s urban population will live in the developing world and 60 per cent will be under 18. This is consistent with what I’ve been reading about the world of the future: inhabited by a majority of young people living in less well-off circumstances. It’s referred to as the “youth bulge”.

The consequences of jam-packed megacities are obvious: squalor, infections and disease, lack of access perhaps to essential services, civil unrest and violent crime as people struggle to survive, fortress mini-cities existing side by side with slums and so on. Without a solution to this problem and well-planned cities, there will be growing pressure on natural resources as the Earth herself struggles to cope with an expanded and demanding population. In East Africa, the average time spent waiting for water increased from 28 minutes each day in 1967 to 92 minutes a day in 1997 - how will the region cope when the population doubles in 20 or 30 years from now?

You can check out the full copy of the UN Report entitled “State of the World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth” here at the United Nations Population Fund site.

So many pet topics; so little time to blog! Apart from carrying on about the surveillance society, I’m always curious to read about predictions for the future. Usually they’re dark prophecies of civil unrest, but I came across an article focusing on future technologies that have a positive spin to them. Here’s a run down:

• Robots - can you believe that the “father of robotics”, Joseph Engelberger, is now in his 80s! he wants to see robots developed as “life support partners” to help and care for the elderly. Considering the huge numbers of Baby Boomers verging on retirement, robots that could help comfort a senior citizen is a great idea. Regular ThinkingShift readers will know my mother has been very seriously ill and the prospect of a nursing home doesn’t thrill any of us. Wouldn’t it be great if in the future intelligent robots could dispense medication; assist the elderly to walk; or do other task-specific things. Apparently, Australian universities are at the forefront of robotics research.

• Mind-controlled interfaces: I remember when I first saw Minority Report, I found the ‘touch and move’ interactive computer screens amazing. Now it seems Microsoft is getting us closer to this fantasy - they’ve recently unveiled a coffee-table shaped computer that allows users to touch and move around objects on the screen. I wonder if the next step forward might be controlling a computer screen with your thoughts. Seems this may not be far off - Emotiv Systems, a start-up company, has designed a bicycle-helmet style controller that monitors brain signals and converts thoughts into game movements. So gamers can sit back, relax and electrical activity in the brain will cause avatars to zoom left, right, up, down on the screen. Aside from games, this mind-controlled technology could allow the disabled to use their minds to overcome physical impairment.

• Personal networking: no more business cards to collect. Future technology will allow us to meet and exchange information purely by touching skin. Sounds a bit creepy at first and let’s hope there’s no nasty electric zap! Major Japanese mobile provider, NTT DoCoMo, has transmitted data at rates of 10 megabits per second over skin.

• Smart buildings: as you walk into a room, the glass automatically adjusts to provide the best light for occupants or the right temperature; robots live in walls and absorb impurities from the air; solar cells are embedded in window glass. Smart paints are already here: you can you buy kitchen and bathroom paints that prevent mildew, such as Perma-White or paint your house in Ecopaint, from Millennium Chemicals, which absorbs smog-producing molecules, specifically nitrogen oxides.

• Smart fabric: a suit that never gets dirty or creases? Or jeans that self-cleanse? or a jacket that can give you directions if you’re lost? The future will see clothes with nanotechnology embedded in the fibre. Companies are already producing smart fabrics: Burton ski wear has teamed up with Motorola to create the Audex jacket with embedded Bluetooth systems for control of phones and iPods, with speakers and microphone; and DuPont has launched tops containing Kevlar to protect against knife attacks (mmm….the latter might be particularly useful for knowledge management practitioners who fear that stab in the back from senior management). Obviously, the armed forces would greatly benefit from smart clothing - jackets that diagnose wounds or treat injuries. MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies is developing battle suits with muscle-enhancing properties, light-refraction for near-invisibility and sensors for constant medical feedback.

• The magic of nano: nanobots might be able to build whatever we need, including food, from ambient atoms and molecules; they could cruise our bodies and blood vessels on the look out for disease, healing wounds and zapping unhealthy fat levels. Also on the drawing board is a “utility fog”, a cloud of networked nanobots running errands in the air around us, whether related to health or business.

Can you imagine what the world of the future will be like for Peem - a baby born just days ago in Thailand, nephew to my lifelong friend Lalida. Perhaps Peem will never have to worry about the spectre of cancer; his clothes might protect him from UV rays; nanobots will take care of his health. And when he sees photos of first generation mobile phones; or the original Internet topology; or any computer from 2007 - he will perhaps mutter ‘how quaint’, much as we do when we look back on early technologies.