Hurtling to a scary future

Hurtling to a scary future

The world is changing at an unprecedented rate and the value of forecasting is at a premium

There is a tree bearing orange and green fruit in the toilets of the Institute for the Future. The plastic fruit carries labels reading “enhanced memory”, “awake” and other promises for a new, improved you. Sadly, the tree and the promises at the institute’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California, are fake. At least for now. The plastic tree is just one of a number of items dreamt up by the Silicon Valley think tank to illustrate what may be coming.

Besides the mind-expanding fruit there is a camera that can track your car keys, mobile phone or any other object you often mislay.

There is also a huge computer game that allows people all over the world to team up and co-ordinate responses to man’s imminent extinction. Set in 2019, the game, Superstruc!, assumes man has 23 years left on Earth unless he can sort out a doomsday scenario that includes a food crisis and climate changes that have turned 250m people into refugees.

Just as objects from the past spur a conversation about civilisations that have long gone, Marina Gorbis, the institute’s executive director, hopes that these artefacts from imagined tomorrows can “make the future tangible”. It may sound silly, but it all has a serious purpose.

For 40 years, the institute has been assessing trends for governments, businesses and the general public. But never, said Gorbis, has the future come at us so fast. The internet has changed global communication at a speed and scale unseen in history and old forms of business and government are under pressure.

The new trend in science is “programmable” biology — which might make Dr Frankenstein shudder — and at the same time population pressures and scarce resources are causing ructions that threaten our very existence. There’s never been a better time to be a futurologist.

“Things are more volatile than they have ever been,” said David Pescovitz, the institute’s research director, “and we are barely at the beginning. The world wide web emerged in 1993, which wasn’t really that long ago. It’s an incredibly transformative time.”

The institute’s most famous research project is its Ten-Year Forecast — the 2010 forecast comes out in April and will cover what the think tank believes will be the big trends for the next decade.

Among the topics being researched are the “carbon economy”, with forecasts for the costs of energy consumption and the potential solutions. The institute is also looking at water, an increasingly precious resource that it is predicting will cause as many problems as oil has in years gone by.

In the past, the institute relied on interviews with panels of experts to collate its forecasts. That too has changed thanks to the web. The organisation was started in 1968 as a spin-off from Rand, the think tank sponsored by the American government, and used the Delphi method of forecasting in which experts are asked to answer questions about trends in their fields and the answers are collated and assessed.

The method has proved useful in many areas, providing accurate forecasts for the growth of broadband internet for example, and the popularity of certain products. “It turns out that if you ask the right people the right sort of questions then you can come up with pretty good forecasts,” said Gorbis. “But you lose a lot of richness, a lot of context. Delphi worked very well for predicting broadband penetration, energy prices but it’s not good at large patterns of change.”

The institute’s latest forecasts attempt to merge the arts and the science. Online games have been used to assess how “ordinary” people would react to extreme events, researchers are following business deals, scientific discoveries, bringing in “crowd sourcing” ideas such as Twitter as well as consulting experts.

The Institute for the Future now is all about “blobs”. Instead of timelines, its maps of the future show blobs of interesting areas where important trends are appearing.

Often these blobs overlap. Take one of the institute’s old blobs — the rise of DIY culture. Pescovitz, co-editor of the popular weblog Boingboing.net and also editor-at-large for Make, the DIY technology magazine, points out that the new DIY includes blogs, YouTube videos, and arcane home science projects that have all been enabled by the internet in recent years. It’s been a huge trend, one that’s still making waves across the world. One big blob they are now investigating has been labelled “programmable everything”.

“It seems to be a metaphor for what’s happening in our world,” said Pescovitz. “We are programming our world from the molecular scale with nanotechnology, programming our minds, our cities. The idea is that we are living in a controlled system and that we can tweak that system.”

We may or may not be able to tweak the system, but that’s not going to prevent plenty of people trying. Scientists and governments are considering “geo-engineering” solutions to global warming — for example, spraying sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight. Other scientists are working on artificial limbs activated by high-tech devices attached to the brain. Microbes are being made that don’t exist in nature, bugs you can sprinkle in a field and will glow red in the presence of environmental contaminants. At nearby Berkeley, germs are being re-engineered to turn sugars into biofuels.

Part of the institute’s role, said Gorbis, is to highlight the signs of what is coming. “We are surrounded by the past, in the buildings, in the objects around us,” said Gorbis. “This is one of the reasons why it’s so hard to think about the future. How do you make the future tangible?”

But thinking about the future matters even if the predictions turn out to be wrong, said Pescovitz. “We can’t predict the future and don’t believe anyone who says they can — especially if they are in California,” he said. What they can do is start a debate by looking at where we might be heading.

“Look at the paperless office — we didn’t do that forecast — but it was totally wrong. But if you are a newspaper, say, the kinds of questions you would ask yourself about having a digital presence would still be very useful.

“If the forecasts about global warming were all totally wrong, decisions about making things more sustainable would still be good decisions,” he said. “Thinking about the future is always better than not thinking about it.”

FIVE KEY AREAS THAT WILL SHAPE OUR DESTINY

The Institute for the Future’s 2010 Ten-Year Forecast will focus on five main areas.

The future of global power: The “global south” economies of South America, Africa and other developing nations are emerging as powerful political and trading blocs. The development of south-to-south relationships and disputes over territory are likely to have a profound impact on the world in the coming decade.

The future of water: Water is a “huge issue” that has yet to surface in the developed world, says Marina Gorbis, the institute’s executive director. A “blue economy” is likely to emerge as the cost of water increasingly hits energy, food, manufacturing and other sectors. Local conflicts are already emerging over water.

The future of urbanisation: Growing populations, pressures on resources, globalisation, and the changing nature of the workplace are redefining urban and suburban living. In the past 10 years once thriving cities such as Detroit have collapsed as others like Mumbai have exploded. In the coming decade even greater changes could occur.

The carbon economy: The institute’s experts are working on forecasts for the costs of energy production over the next decade, the potential for energy efficiencies, and how the development of carbon markets to trade greenhouse gas emissions will affect energy strategy.

The future of identity: Identity is in flux in a world where anyone with the resources can have their genes decoded. Online identities are becoming as important as real life ones. Technology is fusing with biology in ways that will challenge our definitions of what it means to be human.