INTERVIEW:
Question 1
There is a dominant optimism nowadays about future perspectives, particularly in relation
to technological development. However, at the World Future Society's 1998 Annual
Conference you spoke of "Ten Dark Clouds on the Horizon". What do you mean by
that? What are these ten dark clouds?
Answer
We are obviously entering into a period in which opportunities are so abundant that one
cannot help but see the potential for enormous world-wide human progress. The areas in
which beneficial revolutions are occurring are in energy, in Information Technology and
genetics. They are also occurring in the areas of materials - the environmental movement
is becoming a general factor affecting every other aspect of our lives. And, finally, I
would say ranking with all those others is the emergence of a technology of the brain. So
one has to be fundamentally optimistic about the future of humankind.
On the other hand, we ought not to allow ourselves to be so overwhelmed by optimism
that we miss the dark clouds on the horizon, the possibility that there are major
difficulties confronting us. If we don't confront them early, they may end up subverting
the progress that other benefits would bring to us. An extreme example, but an interesting
one because it is inevitable, is the theory that we could be hit by an asteroid or a
meteor. This has happened within historic memory, we have unequivocal geophysical evidence
of it, and yet nobody seems to be willing at the governmental level to put some serious
money into setting up a program to determine when the next risk will be upon us, and what
we might be able to do about it. There is a tendency to shut our eyes to difficulties when
they are either temporally or psychologically remote. There is a whole family of other
problems like that, for example the possibility of controlling earthquakes, the
possibility of influencing weather. Nobody seems to see them as potential applications
that are feasible and important.
But there are other difficulties that we face, virtually in every category. For
example, today we see the spread of democracy in the world; out of 193 countries, probably
118 or so are technically democratic, but when we look at the details, we find that many
of those alleged democracies have only voted into power people who are now ready to abuse
that power, to destroy the focus of the common interest. This happens because the kind of
democracy that has proliferated in Western Europe, in England and in the United States
depends upon another set of values that are not just electoral; it depends on values such
as understanding the rule of law, customary habits, respect for people. So democracy as it
has spread though the world is often being misused as a negative tool to put negative
forces into power.
We have similar examples of course. I am not going to give you a long register of them,
but in my own country, the United States, it is very clear that the founding document of
our democracy, the US Constitution, is an instrument on the road to becoming obsolete. The
structure of the government and the structure of the Constitution reflects the responses
to the arbitrariness of the English crown, to ancient beliefs of how to organize land for
transportation and security, and it was done in a different age, different society. Today
we have an attempt to forcibly fit contemporary change into that old instrument, and it
simply does not work, and the divergence between that constitutional structure and the
needs of the present become ever more obvious. Many people however, frightened of the
prospects of rewriting the Constitution, think that our cherished Bill of Rights would go
by the board, but nevertheless I see that resistance to looking at a new constitution as a
major blockage in the United States to a more effective future.
Then of course we have problems that are much more difficult to pin down, but as the
United States has become an urban society, as people are removed from direct contact with
the land, as they have moved to sedentary work, as they lose hands-on experience, we also
find a mass of the population becoming unfamiliar with the way the world works, which
leaves them open to all kinds of exaggerated claims, fears and threats. For example, how
many people can describe where the water comes from in their sink, or where the water goes
when they flush their toilet, or - a favourite subject of mine - what happens to the
picture when you turn off the TV set. That almost always raises an amused murmur, but that
is a reflection of the fact that people don't know and they are uncomfortable. Being
uncomfortable at understanding the world leaves them open to all kinds of manipulations,
mostly bad. That is a sample of the kinds of things that we see laying ahead as dark
clouds, as threats. Now, playing a moment with the metaphor of the dark clouds, when we
see dark clouds, it is not absolutely inevitable that they are going to descend on us, but
the fact that we can see those dark clouds makes it likely that they will have a bad
effect on us.
Question 2
A recent book, "The Commanding Heights", claims that we are witnessing a
transferral of power from State and public institutions to the market, and that this makes
the future very uncertain. What do you think about this?
Answer
The changing role of business and government is a fascinating and universal topic these
days. Many people, I think, in their enthusiasm and in their ideological commitment see
that the power of government is in decline, and that the corporation is rising, and think
that the corporation is going to be our salvation. I think that is wrong on both counts.
As the world becomes more complex, as it becomes more technologically dependent, as we
have more global knitting together of people, institutions and business, things are going
to go wrong. Complex systems go wrong for at least two generic reasons: they get so
complex that they collapse under their own mass of complexity, or they are so complex that
individuals or groups are able to take advantage of that complexity. The only instruments
ever developed for constraining and controlling the abuses in complex systems are law and
regulation, and the only mechanisms we have for law and regulation are through government.
So, contrary to those who say, "hurrah for the corporation" as an answer to
everything, I believe that as the world gets more complex, government is going to have to
become more sophisticated in dealing with global technology. In fact, I see the emergence
of a fourth layer of government: we have local government, we have provincial governments,
we have central and federal governments, and what is emerging is a level of global
government. In fact it is emerging quite rapidly, when you look critically and incisively
at the many things that are going on in the United Nations. Now, that may not be the
ultimate governmental form, but we see that happening, whether it is concerned about
pollution of the oceans, atmospheric pollution, transportation of goods, immigration, or
something that's technological like managing the radio spectrum.
Now, the other side of these claims that corporation is the great salvation because it
is the answer to all problems is just simply out of register with everything we have known
historically, and is shutting ones eyes to the negative effects we can see today.
Historically the corporation has always stretched its boundaries, to the point where
avarice, greed, monopoly practices have been the things that it sought. In every country
it has been necessary to constrain it, to lay out rules and regulations to stop its
inevitable and intrinsic predatory nature. What we are witnessing today around the world
is the corporation going through new waves of development, abuse, and failure. We see
this, for example, in the United States, in which corporations are undergoing unrealistic
periods of cutting back on labour, cutting labour costs, cutting into benefits and
pensions, telling the workers that they have to be responsible for their own future. We
see corporations attempting to flee the country to manufacture in areas where labour rates
are 10, 15, 20 cents on the dollar compared to what they are in the United States. We see
the American corporations increasingly wanting to picture themselves as global
corporations, meaning that they have no responsibility to anyone but to their
shareholders. Notice what a sweet smooth word, shareholder, is: it's much softer than the
technical term of the past, stockholder. And so, corporate abuses are going to increase,
and eventually they are going to have to be reined in, and that reining in will come both
at the national and the international level. However, keep in mind that the corporation is
not delivering, on a world-wide basis, immeasurable benefits to almost everyone, but we
have to keep an eye on its abuses and learn to rein them in.
Question 3
It is taken for granted that our path toward the future will mainly depend on
technological achievements. Do you accept this conviction in a long-term perspective?
Answer
It is an interesting question, just what the role of technology is in the immediate and
the longer term future. I don't think that there can be any question that the present
proliferation of technological capabilities is an overall boom to humankind. We have
telecommunications and information technology opening up a world of potential of
opportunities for education, information, and sharing, not just to the people in the
advanced nations, not just to the wealthy, but globally. Obviously, most people in most
countries still do not have access and use of that as a positive tool, many of them may
have radio or television, but the interactive element is still eluding many of them, but
that is just a matter of time. In ten, twenty, twenty five years virtually everyone will
be interactively engaged, with all the benefits that that implies. Similarly we have
advances in terms of medicine, which will deal with chronic diseases, epidemics,
contagious diseases. Area after area of technology is delivering benefits. Now, the
problem one encounters is, are these benefits all positive? No, they each carry a certain
burden of potential or real negatives with them, and what we have to do is learn - and the
only real way to learn is by experience, - what those negatives are, and how to deal with
them, how to control their influence and minimise their damage. I think there is nothing
in the short term future, in the next fifty years, that is going to sell benefit to
humankind as the advances in technology. On the other hand, when one turns to the really
longer term future, a hundred, three hundred, five hundred, a thousand years, it is
obvious that other forces that are already visible and influence the short and mid-range,
are also going to become more prominent in the longer term future. If we have an
increasingly prosperous world, we are going to have to decide on certain major things,
like the control of population. We certainly cannot continue to grow indefinitely on a
global scale, even if our doubling time is fifty years. Can we accept that it will
quadruple in a hundred years? I don't think so. So, other considerations than the
technological have to enter in. Then there is the question of the distribution of
benefits: will there be a kind of minimum global entitlements? These are not technical
questions, these are socio-economic political issues, and the world will be increasingly
fraught with those issues as the potential for universal prosperity lies ahead of us. And
so, it isn't an either/or, it isn't this or that determining the future, but there will be
a mixing and continuously altering set of relative priorities among the factors that will
determine our future.
Question 4
How do you think we should reform education to face possible future changes? And how can
change itself, in its turn, influence traditional knowledge acquirements?
Answer
Education has to be crucial to human progress. Education is the single most efficient and
effective way in which intellectual barriers drop, new possibilities are opened to us.
Education is essential to learning the elementary crafts, whatever they may be, for our
own individual prosperity. Education is the basis for national well-being and prosperity;
and yet when one looks at the conditions of education, one cannot help but see that is far
from satisfactory, and in my own country, in the United States, in serious decline. And
there are ironies connected with this. As I see it, elementary and secondary education,
the first twelve years of education in the United States, are in catastrophic cognitive
collapse. Our children are less educated, less informed, less competent than they were
twenty, thirty, thirty five years ago. The school system has become beleaguered by
missions that are not connected with education, standards don;t exist, comparative data
doesn't exist, and what is most important of all, there is widespread complacency, because
this catastrophic cognitive collapse is not new, but it is now in its second generation.
It began in the early 1970s and late 1960s, so we now have a whole new generation of
parents who are the first children cheated in that system; they don't know what education
is about, and they are happy with the mediocre education their children are getting. This
is showing up in the decay in high school, and it is showing up in the decay in the
quality of students entering college. A surprisingly large percentage of American college
students have to go into remedial education; that amounts to repeating the things they
should have learnt in the last four or five years of elementary and high school education.
College education is shrinking in time, it's shrinking in content, and it's shrinking in
performance. The only really bright spot in American education is graduate education,
where we are still the envy of the world, but remember, those people who are in graduate
education programs are the peak of a very broad based pyramid which continually wipes out
others. We are so much the focus of that in science, in the engineering field, that
roughly half of the doctoral candidates are foreign-born. Now, what is going to change
that situation? I think the single most important thing influencing the future of
education is distance learning, information technology. I see in the future a very high
probability that the young people will not be going to college for four years but the only
reason for actually going, in the sense of moving yourself to another location, will be
for two things. Those things that require physical presence, arts, dance, sculpture,
laboratory work, or for making social contacts, basically hunting for a spouse. More and
more of the college curriculum will be delivered remotely by video, by the Internet, by
television and so on. And we see that moving down into high school. Again, the last two
years of high school are a great candidate for that. Of course that implies a radical
alteration in curriculum, in expectations, in grading, in quality control, in dealing with
the potentials of abuse such as cheating, but the economics of it argue so profoundly for
doing that, that I think it is going to occur. Secondly, you have large numbers of parents
of students all the way from the kindergarten child to the high school student, who are
dissatisfied with the content that their children are getting, and are ready to augment
that at home, as computers and other information technology become cheap and readily
available. So we will have more distance learning as a complement to school education at
all levels. Now, when you look outside the United States to countries like France, Italy,
Germany, throughout much of Europe, where there are many more students than there are
places at university, distance learning is going to be a godsend; the ability to deliver
the full university curriculum to any part of the country, at low cost, could be an
educational revolution in those countries of Europe. So, rather than have students
struggling for classes, not attending the best lectures, relying on notes, relying on
dealing with each other, it will add an entirely new level of quality and zest to higher
education. And finally, let me note that in the United States, more common than in all the
advanced nations, and ultimately spreading through the rest of the world, is life-long
learning. As information becomes an increasingly part of every activity, craft, skill and
job, we have to keep up, and keeping up means being prepared to learn throughout your
life, so that life-long learning is going to continue, and I believe a large percentage of
it will be through information technology.
Question 5
In Italy, teachers usually react with a kind of fear to requests for a radical change in
their attitude towards the students and curricula. Is there a similar attitude in the US?
Answer
As you talk about the radical change, particularly distance learning and so on, in the
educational structure, you have to realise that academics are just like everyone else,
fearing and trembling at the prospect of any radical change in their environment. But it
goes beyond the mere question of technique, it goes beyond the mere question of what this
will do to my ten year old lecture notes, what this means to what I do in the classroom.
Those effects are matters of simple learning, relearning and training. The much more
significant effects are that professors will be in competition with the very best
professors in their country, the very best professors in the world. In the United States
for example, would you like to hear the Professor of European History from East Nowhere
University, or would you rather hear the premier professor at Harvard, or better yet, the
premier professor from the London School of Economics, or from Cambridge. So what is going
to happen is opening up a nation-wide, a world-wide competition to deliver the very best
people with the very best knowledge through the media. And that really is the cause of
fear and trembling because it is going to drive the mediocrity out of higher education. I
think it is going to kill tenure. Tenure, a permanent hold on a job, was a great
nineteenth-century social response to the risks of political dissidence; but I think that
today it is totally obsolete. In the United States, for example, if anyone got fired by
the university on the basis of having a extremist political position, they could probably
double their income at another university. So tenure is itself an obsolete way of keeping
geriatrics employed.
When you look at the structure of the university, it is not just the faculty's concern,
but the administration's. The administration exists because it's supporting a large
physical institution taking care of large numbers of people on a day-to-day basis. What is
distance learning going to do to that? The only really positive option for them is to
begin to branch out and look at how the physical institutions that they have can recruit
new clients. For example, in the United States there are now schools, universities, which
have summer events for the Smith family. So, all of the Smiths in the state of Utah who
want to will come to the university and meet all the other Smiths, meet an extended
family. Things are tending towards adult education, the elder hostel movement around the
world is very important: bring mature people with mature interests together with each
other, take them on a physical tour, move them around the country or the world, give them
training, give them a little recreation, give them a little intellectual experience. But
for the universities, one of the problems that is central to the administrative people is
to determine what is their new role, and that is a form of change that's paralysing for
many people. So I think the university is in a period of dramatic change, in which lots of
changes are going to occur for faculty and administration, and instead of embracing these
as a positive opportunity, what we find, at least in the United States, is digging in
their heels, and unrelenting denial. Yet there are exceptions, and the principal
exceptions are in the departments of science and engineering, because they are already
well familiar with the technologies of education and training.
Question 6
The word "evolution" is quite often used in futures studies. Is it used with the
same meaning as "progress"? And if so, do you think it is correct?
Answer
One of the great concepts of the nineteenth century was the concept of progress. It has
its core origins, I believe, in the United Kingdom, but it was adopted throughout Western
Europe and the United States. The sense that as technology unfolded decade after decade,
it was going to in overwhelming balance deliver benefits to people and to society. Now,
that sense of progress has more or less been watered down, as people in the advanced
nations have become more prosperous, as they have benefited from these earlier moves of
progress, they have given more and more attention to the negatives, to the shortfalls, to
the failures, to the difficulties associated with progress. Instead what we find is the
middle classes increasingly attentive, even with regard to new things, to what could go
wrong, the potential failure and how do we prevent it. So a kind of systemic fear has
replaced the Član, the vitality of the anticipation of progress. I would hope, with the
cornucopia of potential benefits lying ahead of us, in genetics, in materials, in
information technology, in brain technology and so on, that we will have a revival in this
positive view of progress. But all of that is separate and distinct from the closely
related concept of evolution. Obviously, societies evolve, your personal attitudes can
evolve, but that is different from the sense of evolution that Darwin introduced us to.
Darwin's sense is that species evolve, one changes into something fundamentally different,
an existing species can survive and yet at the same time spin off and evolve into new
species. Societies evolve in that sense and that evolution is not necessarily progressive;
if one looks at the history of the ancient empires, they are almost all cases of societies
that went through an ascendancy, a period of flourishing, and then a period of evolution
into decline and finally into senescence and death. So evolution is not necessarily all
positive. But when you look at what lies ahead, what I see is an implicit denial, that
people have a potential for evolving, and yet we are animals, like any other animals, and
evolution has not stopped. We are going to evolve, we are continually evolving. Of course
evolution is slow and incremental, it is hard to see it from year to year, decade to
decade, or perhaps even century to century. But one of the interesting questions for the
future is: how do we want to evolve? Because right now, unlike 50 years ago, unlike 25
years ago, we are the first species who will be able to consciously intervene in its
evolution. And that is one of the primary consequences of the emergence of genetic science
and the associated technologies. So we will have this fascinating issue ahead of us, in
what directions we as a species choose to go.
Question 7
Which is precisely what organisations such as Humanity 3000 mean to investigate. Could you
tell us what purpose and usefulness may have such a long-termed program?
Answer
I have recently been involved with an interesting activity of looking out at the year
3000. Of course the millennium is coming, 2000 is right around the corner, if not already
here, and so it is natural to want to skip out and look at what another thousand years
holds ahead. Now, is that just for fun, is it just a silly exercise, is it just some kind
of idle stimulation? I don't think so. I think the value in looking a thousand years ahead
is to look at the long term potential of humankind. What are the four five six ten
different ways in which we could, in a social sense, in the institutional sense, evolve?
What is the sense, in a personal way, in which we could evolve? Would there be new kinds
of people? Could we have subspecies of people? Could there be new kinds of people who are
different because they have information modules in their brain? Could there be new kinds
of people because we are using different genetic tools, and we are diversifying, to use a
shocking example, like chickens or pigs? What could happen in a thousand years, what would
be desirable and what would be undesirable? Now, suppose in those futures scenarios of
alternative futures for a thousand years, we see two or three that are very desirable, and
three or four that are very undesirable. What does that mean to us today? Well, what it
means is let's go past deploring or celebrating what's bad or good, and look in the short
range, what we have to do in the next hundred years, the next hundred and fifty years, to
assure that we are more likely to move in a desirable long-term direction, and less likely
to move in a long-term undesirable direction. Having that millennium-long perspective
should have a profound influence on how we shape our actions and our explorations and our
future planning in the short run, the next hundred, hundred and fifty years, in order to
ensure a better, safer and happier future for all of humankind.
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