The Future is Never What They Say

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 6 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

I don't have an air car. Or a home in the sky. I have never been to space. My home and my car aren't terribly different from what my parents had while I was growing up — in fact the home I live in is a generation older than the one I grew up in.

Point is, the future envisioned when I was a child in the 1960s did not come to pass. A very different future ensued. The futurists who came closest to being right were probably The Firesign Theater, who in We're All Bozos on This Bus envisaged the world as a Future Fair, a computer-directed make-believe, one which an able hacker could disassemble.

The last generation has been the era of Moore's Law, with most attention paid to creating the wonders of our time, chip-and-software based, networked life. We can, from the comfort of our desktops, be heard all around the world. We can, with a handheld device, get the answer to any question. As in the 18th century coffee shops have become our town centers, but they're as quiet as libraries, and most really are.

History has moved in this way because the computer chip changed the world. Chips created a radical transformation, and it was easier to grow in that direction than to focus on making things or going places. So transportation progress has slowed, and millions still make things as our forefathers did 80 years ago, on assembly lines, in sweatshops. The fact that those assembly lines and sweatshops are in China and India disturbs some people. But the route to the 21st century takes you through the 19th and 20th — without that progress how will anyone else get here?

What utopian futurists always fail to account for is radical change, new directions, which often becomes the path of least resistance. What dystopian futurists fail to account for is something similar, man's flexibility and instinct for self-preservation, man's willingness to transform, even his eagerness to do so, to make himself (or herself) better than his father. (The one who made that other prediction.)

So the population bomb, which so obsessed 40 years ago, was defused by prosperity. China's one child policy can go by the board now, because a vast middle class has learned that if they have one or two babies they'll get one or two adults — that 6 or 8 may be more of a burden in old age than a blessing. That's because the goods we can give the one or two are so much more than what we can give the 6 or 8. Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket.

We have the same divide today, between utopian and dystopian futures. Utopians seem to believe we can go on as we have gone, that the Earth will somehow accept our continual burning of carbon. The dystopians see this leading to the world we've known coming to an end.

Both are right. And both are wrong. Both are making the classic mistake mentioned above. They extrapolate from today, keep the same trends moving forward, and discount the chance of radical change, of transformation. Which is all around us.

All futurists do this, by the way. It's what I call a "Megatrends" phenomenon, after John Naisbitt (right), whose books under that name simply predicted the future by looking at recent news stories. Political prognosticators assume present trends will continue indefinitely. Stock pickers draw straight lines from today to tomorrow. They never see the present boom ending, and never see the present doom ending either. They don't see change coming, so how can they hope to ever be right, and how can you hope to profit by listening to them?

What we do know is that the world has undergone a prosperity revolution. In the last 150 years our life spans have more than doubled, our incomes have risen 100-fold, worldwide. Despite famines, and wars, despite urban squalor and pollution, despite disease, despite all of it, more people live longer, in more luxury today, than ever before in the history of man.

Can it continue? I think it can. I think it can because people are brilliant at changing, and because the tools of our time — this PC, this Internet, your iPhone — are all about accelerating change.

Everyone knows the change we need to see. It is time for man to move out of the cave, finally, and onto the farm. We need to stop looking for stuff to burn, defining our wealth based solely on what we can take from the land, and start harvesting energy instead. We're already doing some of that. Even BP admits the share of energy production from renewable sources — the wind, the Sun, the Earth's heat, the tides — is going up while the share held by fossil fuels is going down. The only point in dispute is how fast this change can take hold.

I say, very fast. I say, transformation is possible, radical change is coming to our economic and energy arrangements. I say this with confidence because I have seen what the innovations of my time have done for people, and to them. It's not just that we're all connected to one another. It's how that change transforms the nature of capital.

Human capital is now all important. And not human capital in terms of our ability to use our muscles. Human capital in terms of our ability to use our minds. The more we can imagine, the more we can transform. The freer we are to think, and collaborate, the more space we're given to dream of a new world, the more we can accomplish.

What Richard Florida (above) wrote about in the Rise of the Creative Class is a global phenomenon. But while all societies have creative people within them, they are not all equally free to think, to dream, to invent, and to work together. This difference has little to do with technology. It has everything to do with government and social attitudes.

Wherever thoughts are forbidden human capital is constrained, meaning 21st century economic growth is constrained. To the degree that thoughts are forbidden, any thoughts, to that degree you're constrained. A jail cell didn't stop Aung San Suu Kyi from forcing change on the Burma junta. Real jails are those in our minds, and those we create to limit our minds, or our use of technology to link with, and work with, like minds. Repression now stifles economic growth in ways it never did before.

For the first time, because of the transformations of our time, economic growth and human freedom — true freedom — are now linked. The nation which gives freedom the greatest rein has the advantage. And right now that's America. Our research universities and venture capital networks are the path to economic growth. Our Creative Class comes from every corner of the world, and where they choose to settle will determine which parts of our country grow.

Anything that says no to any human thought (as opposed to action) is hurt, economically, by the transformations of our time. Whether that comes from a government, from a pulpit, from an economic elite, or the blind prejudices of people who can't conceive that All Men Are Created Equal means all mankind — white, black, brown, yellow, male, female, gay, disabled — doesn't matter.

Bigotry carries a price, and that price is paid with increasing speed.

There has, until now, been an exception to this rule. Where money comes from the ground, from whatever we can burn under it or on it, these places have been insulated from the changes transforming the world. Where money comes directly from the ground, economic elites can still be political elites, and pretend that their word is law, that no one else need be heard, that their prejudices will rule and everyone else can pound sand.

 The next transformation, the one from caveman energy to harvesting energy, our ability to finally use our minds, our technology, and our networks to change how we power the world, threatens these arrangments. It will, in time, overthrow them.

That's just as true for those of us in America as it is for those outside it. I have no doubt that the economic interests of fossil energy will try to hang on, will try to deter us from the path we must follow, but history tells me they will be defeated, as they have in every previous generation. The America that's rising is more open, less religious, more accepting, less bigoted, than anything seen before. That's partly out of necessity. Cities stimulate thought and imagination by giving open minds other ideas to bounce off of. You can't close yourself off from change by moving to a suburb, no matter how distant. And you can't grow without that stimulation.

But it's more important to note this is also true outside America. What happened recently in Tunisia is merely a harbinger of what's to come. Any land that now depends upon resources, and the economic power of resource control, to deny free minds their rights, will be under dire threat in the coming generation, from the basic forces of economic and technological change that have now been unleashed.

It won't be utopia. There will be contentions, and battles, and wars. There will be setbacks. There will be madness.

What I know is the world I bequeath to my children is better, with more promise, than the world I inherited. Despite everything, the future is bright.