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If you don’t go far enough back in memory, or far enough ahead in hope, your present will be
impoverished.
Let’s begin by going back in memory. My grandparents Tache and Fiemke Hiemstra left Friesland in
1911 and headed to Montana to attempt to become wheat farmers. Inspired by a post-card
photograph of Montana and driven by an image of the future, they took the risk to go.
What is your image of the future? Your image of the future is vital, as it directs many of your actions
today. To understand your image, you must ask three futurist questions about the future, what is
probable, what is possible, and what is preferred?
When my grandparents arrived in Montana they lived in sod house. After nearly 20 years they gave
up and moved on. Sometime in the late 1920’s they must have looked at each other one evening
and said, “you know, it is unbelievable how much life has changed since we were young children in
Friesland.” In fact, everything had changed, as they had lived through the last “Techno-EconomicSocial Revolution” which was the electro-mechanical revolution. In about 30-35 years, they had seen
the movie camera, the telephone, X-rays, the discovery of the cause of malaria, the use of electricity,
the automobile and the assembly line, the radio, World War 1, airplanes, and more.
Now, we are living though our own techno-economic-social revolution as once again a set of
transforming technologies are creating economic and social change, which then accelerates the
technology, which leads to greater change, a virtuous cycle. Ours is driven by energy technology,
biotechnology, nanotechnology, and of course digital technology, all of which are driving us toward
the knowledge society.
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World Fertility Patterns 1997
China 1.7
Japan 1.4
India 2.8
Germany 1.4
Italy 1.3
Mexico 2.4
Canada 1.6
US 2.1
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We are going to address the technologies of the techno revolution, but before we do, let’s address one
more powerful driver, the shape and nature of the population.
World demographics are changing, as the population becomes old, young, and gone. It is well known
that populations in Europe as in the US and the rest of the world are getting older, much older.
Historically people lived to be 65 but they were rare. Now it is common, and the percentage of the
population over 65 will increase in the next 15 years from 10 or 12 or 14 per cent to 20 or 25 percent
or more. What does this mean. We are conducting a grand social experiment, and the experimental
question is, how shall we organize society when so many people are over 65?
The population is also getting young, in a special way. Some regions or countries of course have
large youth populations, but in much of the world this group is not dramatically large. What makes
them special is that they grew up with computers and later the Web. This makes them the first ‘digital
natives”, born since about 1981. The rest of us are digital immigrants. We might be good with
computers but the digital world is always new to us. For natives computers and the digital world are
normal, the way it has always been. The word always is important, because if something has always
been, you both take it for granted, and you extend the use of the technologies beyond what digital
immigrants can conceive. Since it takes about two and half generations, historically, for a technoeconomic-social revolution to move from the early inventions to the point that the new way is the
dominant social economy, the digital native generation is key. Baby boomers invented the Internet,
Generation X’s built it into what it is, and the Digital Native generation will make it the norm but in
ways not yet even imagined.
Finally, this map shows, we are reaching the end of population growth. A birth rate of less than 2.1
means that eventually your population will shrink. More than half the world is below replacement.
Germany has a birthrate of 1.4, Netherlands 1.7, UK 1.7, France 1.8, Italy 1.3. Eventually this will
mean shrinking populations, as Japan begins to experience this year. And, it means a fascinating
economic question. How do you maintain a growing economy when there are fewer customers each
year. The first reaction is to bolster national birth rates, but there are better choices which would
enable a higher standard of living.
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3-D Communications –
The Next Stage
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Four technologies drive the techno-economic-social revolution and contribute to the creation of a
knowledge society.
First on energy, we are nearing the moment of “peak oil” when half the world’s supply is used up.
That could be 2027, next year, or some time in between. Whenever it hits, we will have about 10
years to replace half of what we do now with oil
The biological revolution is leading to enhanced longevity, so much so that we may increase the life
span by 10-20 years in the next 30 years.
The nanotechnology revolution is well known at the Club of Amsterdam through your previous
programs. This ability to manipulate matter at the atomic level is already yielding real products.
Finally there is the computing revolution. In 10 years we will see things like omnipresent sensors,
ubiquitous computing and broadcast, fragmentation of content, credit-card sized computers as
powerful as your laptop, national biometric ID systems, and spherical, holographic crystal memory
devices the size of a golf ball holding one million gigabytes of data.
A significant and fascinating possibility, not yet a probability, is illustrated in the accompanying video:
live, 3-D communications on the Web. The video sample comes from a software developed by Mark
Billinghurst, now Director of the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Canterbury in
Christchurch, New Zealand, a sister lab to one with the same title at the University of Washington in
Seattle, where I am a Visiting Scholar. The video illustrates that using desktop PC’s and today’s
Internet, it is possible to send live 3-D images of people over the net to remote people wearing
Augmented Reality glasses. Put the glasses on, you see the other person in full 3-D plus you see the
rest of the real world you are currently in. Take the glasses off, and you see only your current world.
This is the eventual future of communication.
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Pillars of 21st Century
Knowledge Society
‹ The
Stint, not the Job
‹ The end of RETIREMENT
‹ Back to future HOMES
‹ Learning beyond SCHOOLS
‹ Processes for making, buying,
selling…
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As we shift to a knowledge society, what kinds of social economic changes will we see and
must we adjust to?
Stints or short time and temporary work will replace traditional jobs for a growing percentage
of the workforce, eventually a majority. Stint workers will move from project to project and
company to company in very fast cycles, necessitating a new way of looking at work and
understanding your skills.
The end of traditional retirement looms as more people live longer, and we begin a
reinvention of this third phase of life.
Homes will go back to the future, to being centers of life where you do some learning, some
of your work, entertaining, and so on, more like what homes were for tens of thousands of
years.
Learning will be available anywhere anytime, making the learning enterprise without
boundaries or walls.
Finally, in a knowledge economy we will see revisions in how we make things, how we buy
and sell things, how we communicate, how and when we travel, how our home relates to
where we work, and so on, the basic stuff of the social economy. All will be re-thought and
reinvented, requiring new models and new knowledge.
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What does the Future ask of us?
‹
‹
‹
‹
‹
‹
‹
A new enlightenment…EU
can take the lead
Build learning societies
Convert to the next energy
era – Hydrogen or beyond
Accelerate shift to no-waste,
less energy, less cost,
cradle-to-cradle
manufacturing
Develop integrated,
intelligent global labor
system
Broad-band communications
the last mile to all earth
inhabitants
Back to Space Ship Earth
†
†
Preserve the planet
Peace
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That is a look at some of the drivers creating a knowledge society, and a few of its characteristics.
What will it demand of us?
If you listen carefully to the future, you can hear what it is asking of us, what the future wants us to
do.
A new enlightenment in the world is desperately needed, one that takes forward to the old concept of
space ship earth, the idea that we are all in this together for the long haul. This means preserving the
planet and seeking peace.
The future asks us to build learning societies, because the acquisition of new knowledge on a
continuous basis and the application of that knowledge is the key, and learning is the only pathway to
get there. And a learning society must include the whole society, not just a few innovators.
The future asks us to convert to the next energy era as soon as possible, entering even crash
programs to do so, for the sake of the planetary environment, for security, but most of all because it
is so smart to do so. This shift, which will occur over the next 25-50 years will constitute the biggest
business opportunity in the history of the planet.
The future asks to accelerate the shift already under way to manufacturing that uses less energy,
wastes less, and is cradle to cradle in product design.
The future asks us to figure out how to develop an integrated intelligent global labor system, moving
beyond battles about the export of jobs.
Finally, the future asks us to built out the broad band communications system, bringing it the last mile
to every inhabitant of the planet.
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The future is
something
we do.
The future is not
something that just
happens to us.
Glen Hiemstra
Futurist.com
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In the end the future is not something that just happens to us. The future is something we
do. Let’s use the Summit for the Future 2005 to do the future better, to create the future we
prefer.
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