INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Would you tell us something about the World Future Society, about its history and members?
Answer
The World Future Society is the largest popular futures organisation in the world. It was
founded in 1966 and since then has been a forum for bringing together people who think
about the future, people who are concerned about the future. It primarily operates in the
US but it has members and focus world-wide, and it has the largest circulation magazine on
the future and also has the academic journal called Futures Research Quarterly, and it
publishes the best single scanning report called Future Survey.
Question 2
You are the president of the Institute for Alternative Futures. Would you tell us what
kind of role this Institute has in the field of futures research?
Answer
The Institute for Alternative Futures is a non-profit organisation, founded by myself and
others in 1977. Our mission is to help communities and organisations more wisely choose
and create the futures they prefer. In that role, we work with governments, from the
European Union and the World Health Organisation down to local comm. We also work with
associations and non-profit organisations, like the American Cancer Society, or the
American Society for Quality in the US. The Institute also owns a for-profit consulting
for Alternative Future associates, and we provide similar services to multinational
companies. The services we provide are basically helping those organisations understand
threats and opportunities, what the future will bring, how the communication revolution
will be different, what healthcare will be like. We help them to understand that, and then
use it inside their organisation. In addition to helping them to understand, we help them
better choose and create the futures they prefer, what the organisation or community truly
wants to create, what is their vision, their preferred future. So the range of services
goes from corporate consulting and change management, to encouraging communities to do the
same thing, as well as writing reports on some of the visions.
Question 3
Some of the institutions and foundations that sponsor or promote futures studies are also
in relation with for-profit consulting organisations. Do you think that futures research
may become a business in the next years?
Answer
Let's separate futures research from futures work. First, there's a variety of futures
work, like visioning, that engages people and communities in asking what they really want,
and that aspect of futures work is one set; futures research and futures analysis say what
might be out there. Now, which of that is commercial? It's both commercial. In many cases
communities and organisations, including big companies, will buy those. In some cases
foundations will pay for it in ways that makes it easier for communities, and pretty poor
communities, to get access to it. But basically, someone has to pay for this, it won't be
done for nothing. I work in a non-profit Institute, but we have no endowment, so we have
to go out and operate like a small business; and we own a for-profit business. We have
discovered that in the for-profit market you can make money in many cases easier, for big
companies. We still deliver for community clients, and it makes us able to charge less for
some communities, but the issue is: will having to sell futures research affect the
quality? And that's an important question. I'd argue that, since some futures research has
to be paid for by someone, even if it is the volunteer effort of the person writing it,
that person has to get a salary from somewhere. We find that the most powerful futures
research is that which is done and used by specific communities or companies. So it's
research that has some value. But the question about integrity and trust in that research
depends on the standards of the person and organisation doing it. In other words, taking
money in order to do research can be good or can be corrupting, and it depends on the
organisation. You can have corrupt research that people have volunteered to do. So the
worry is not someone paying for it, because someone is always paying for it; it is, is the
research done independently and thoughtfully and well? The flipside of this is, is the
research used? In many cases having it paid for by an organisation or community ensures
that it is more likely to be used, than if it was given to them for nothing. We have
learnt the hard way that you can give people information, but they are more likely to use
it if they have come to you and purchased it, or sought it from you in a specific way.
Question 4
It has been said in Future Research Quarterly that futures researches sometimes adjust
their findings to please those who have commissioned them. What do you think about this?
Answer
An article in Future Research Quarterly mentioned that someone is lamenting that futures
researchers will sometimes change what their findings are, due to who's sponsoring the
study. I would say that that is not a good thing. In fact, if the group was charged with
developing an independent look at the range of possible futures, and because the client
didn't want to hear something, it was suppressed, that's a bad thing. On the other hand,
much of the futures work we do fails if the organisational client can't absorb it, if the
community can't absorb it, and so we adjust the nature of our scenarios, to develop
scenarios that they can hear. So it's a very subtle issue. Is there an objective truth
that the researchers should pursue? In the futures arena there is no objective truth
because there are no facts about the future, we have to use our judgement and our inside
wisdom to develop a range of forecasts and scenarios. In many cases future should be
bought, in order to get scenarios which affect the learning of the group or the community.
We work with physicians in the United States all the time, and there are many forecasts
for the future of healthcare, which they do not like. Our job is to get them into a
position to understand the threats and opportunities. Doctors became physicians in order
to be healers, but in the United States we believe that in addition they should be
affluent, independent, and relatively above the fray in terms of meeting people's needs.
We gave them that authority; we gave them that training. Now in the United States there
are a number of depressed physicians, because we're also at the same time producing many
more physicians than we need in the United States, and we are doing that even as nurses or
nurse practitioners can deliver about 60% of primary care contacts. So we have this
interesting system, where I have just worked through, many doctors groups don't want me to
say. My job as a futurist is to get them to open their ears to that, and that involves a
variety of techniques. On the other hand, there are probably fifteen things like I have
just said that physicians should hear. What if I only get them to listen to ten? They
sponsored it, they are not listening to five things, is that good or bad? It depends. If I
as a professional think, they absolutely have to, then that's a bad thing. If on the other
hand I think that having them listen to ten threatening changes is better than nothing, it
becomes an important professional ethical issue. Again, the question is, is my job to get
the forecast right, or is my job more importantly to get a community, a group of
professionals or an organisation to think about the future? I would argue that my success
is only weakly tied to the accuracy of our forecasts; it is more tied to whether or not
that organisation can use it. Let me give you an example. We have done scenarios of the
future of the healthcare system in the US for more than twenty years. In the early 1980s
we had the largest for-profit hospital system in the world. And we said: how much demand
would there be for hospitals, expressed as in-patient care? In 1980 in the United States
out of a hundred thousand in the community, a hundred thousand people, you'd have twelve
days in bed, so about 1.2 days in bed per year per person; that's a lot, only Canada did
it more that we do. We looked at the future, we developed scenarios at our Institute, and
we took them to this company. They did this exercise, estimating the future of in-patient
hospitalisation; they said, well, the only question is whether it's going to drop 50% or
90%, whether it's going to be cut in half or cut or it's going to be cut to one tenth of
what it is now. In 1982 that company was still buying hospitals, and it couldn't perceive
this change. What was interesting for us is, we finished that exercise, and they said:
"Bezold, we don't know what we just did but there's the door." I have been more
successful if I had adjusted our scenarios, because in fact ten years later in the United
States in-patient demand dropped by 50%. Those are in the range these folks produced, and
by the year 2000 it will be in the 10 to 20% range of what it was in 1980. So there is
this dilemma in our job. We failed, and in some cases you can get communities and
organisations to see the future, and the future is either too threatening or the
opportunities are so wonderful that they can't provide the internal leadership to go off
and do it, and to make themselves create the future they want. So we decided that an
important futures tool is vision, the development of shared visions for communities or
organisations, because in most cases if you develop a powerful vision which is your values
and your creativity, looking at the future, a vision is the statement of the preferred
future, then you are committed to create it. What we found is the only way to get around
the fact that the future is so frightening - either because it is so bad or so good - the
only way to make people move is to have them connect to their deeper values and deepest
creativity in a shared way: that's what visions are about.
Question 5
What kind of effect do institutions and foundations that sponsor or promote futures
studies have on the development of communication technologies and on the consumer market?
Answer
The question is in fact the future of the consumer market and what effect will various
players have on the future of consumer products, particularly electronics. The way I see
that field, most of the developments are coming from the major technology entertainment
and communication providers, so the real decisions are being made in Microsoft, at Sony,
at Disney, and those will continue to be a major place, in those kind of companies there
are competitors as well. But the question is, how will that play out in terms of consumer
electronics and consumer products, and will there be any difference in the future about
what's happening? The differences that I see in terms of developing consumer products is
that there is a trend I am optimistic about, and that is consumers being able to clearly
understand what they need something for, and how well it will meet their needs. So they
will be able to shop smarter, will be able to rate products better: in Europe and in the
US there are magazines and services that rate products. What's interesting is that they
will become more sophisticated in terms of rating the products, not only do they work
well, and with the Internet we will be able to understand where we can buy them most
cheaply. There is a book in the United States called Shopping for a Better World, that
rates food in the grocery stores in the United States against a number of values, and then
people can choose to buy or not buy products. Think of the attention given to big name
clothing manufactures in the US who attach their name to clothing which is made by
children in sweatshops in the Third World. Attitudes towards that kind of practice are
hardening. At the same time there are other market developments that support this. One is
the development of the International Standards Organisation. There will there be other
marketplace tools for regulating quality. But even other groups, like the one that
publishes the Shopping for a Better World, are coming out with a social accountability
standards that we will be able to buy for. So, will the major forces continue to drive
things like the consumer market for electronics? As consumers we will also have a much
clearer set of choices not only about whether the product does what it's supposed to, but,
is the product one that will help build a world that I would like to see, as a consumer,
given my values?
Question 6
A recent research in Italy reported that there is a kind of mythology about I.T. and that
this favours the diffusion of hardware and software. But precisely because of this
mythology, consumers are somehow deluded when they make a personal experience with new
technologies. What's your opinion about this process?
Answer
It's clear that in effect personal computers and other things often carry a mythology, and
it transcends what they can provide, and advertisers in some cases encourage people to
think that the computer is going to solve all their problems. There are many things that a
computer can do and many things that it can't. Consumers don't understand how much effort
is involved in getting familiar with these tools, and how much effort it takes to be able
to use them. In the future those computer tools and technologies will be both cheaper and
easier to use, but there still remains the question of how much can these things do for
us, and how much do we expect, and are advertisers overselling? With the Internet we'll
increasingly be able to ask what kind of things that computer can do for me, and we will
increasingly have trusted sources of information that we can go to. I have got two kids or
three kids, this is how I take care of my checking account, this is how I order my
services, what can this computer do for me? And it will have a much clearer sense, it will
be easier to use. In the meantime the mythology that computers can do things is sometimes
overdone. We have computers that are more than what we need, and often more than we can do
with. Windows is a great advance in many ways, in terms of the operating interface and how
we can plug into it, but could we have more efficient, less costly computers? Well, we
probably could. I think the mythologies will be more easily challenged in the future, and
the mythologies of over promising computers we will deal more effectively with. However,
advertisers will always try to push the margin of what they can promise, and in an
environment where the market penalises them for over promising, where we have consumer
reports, like Which magazine in the UK, that will accelerate getting rid of the
inappropriate myths and mythologies about computers.
Question 7
Leading American scientist, Michio Kaku, states in his book Visions that human knowledge
is now doubling every ten years, computer power every eighteen months and the Internet
every year. What do you think of such claims?
Answer
There are two important points about the claim that knowledge is doubling every ten years,
computer power every eighteen months and the Internet every year. Is that, are those
assertions accurate, and secondly, if they are, what difference will it make? I tend to
agree that knowledge is doubling every ten years: it's actually somewhat slow in the
biomedical area, in other areas it may take a little bit longer, but over all, it is the
case that we are learning so much that knowledge is doubling. The question is, if you
think about a ladder that begins with data, and then goes to information, and then to
knowledge, and then to wisdom, if our knowledge is doubling, is our wisdom doubling? And
so the challenge is whether we train to turn knowledge into wisdom, and that in fact will
be a big challenge. In terms of computer power, I think some say eighteen months, some say
two years, and usually as the power doubles the cost halves. So we are going to have very
powerful computers in our clothes. Wearable computers exist now; they will be inexpensive;
we'll have them in our eyeglasses, those exist now. The eye is the only place in the body
where you can see blood flow, so some of these developers say: why don't we put the
computer on the back of our eye glasses, have a little laser go in and read our blood flow
and get a lot of information about that. That's a wonderful idea. The Internet will become
more and more accessible, and smarter as well, it will meet our needs better. Let's take
the example at health. In healthcare the good news is that cancer, heart diseases,
Alzheimer's, arthritis, are likely to be fully preventable or curable in the timeframe
some time between 2010 and 2025. Our knowledge will contribute to that, and that's great
news. In terms of computer power and the Internet, we will be able to take the best
knowledge of the best specialists. Again, this is doubling all the time. There's a story
told about the dean at a medical school at the graduation saying: "Ladies and
gentlemen, as you go out to be physicians, there is some good news and some bad news. The
good news is that medical knowledge is doubling every five years; the bad news is that in
five years half of the medical knowledge that we taught you in college, in medical school,
will not be relevant." The good news is knowledge is moving ahead, the bad news is we
may not know which half of that knowledge is not good. I would argue we can structure our
systems, so that there could be a lot of bad news, and we'd still be using all the
information. Again, the Internet can help us in healthcare by ensuring that anyone who is
using information - experts systems, protocols - or any physician who is telling you what
you should do, that their knowledge, the critical decision trees that they have developed
in their head are always as accurate as they can be, and are updated daily or weekly. That
would ensure that this knowledge doubling is actually brought to bear. There is this
Italian American community in Pennsylvania that didn't have very good lifestyle habits,
they tended to be overweight, ate a lot of fatty foods including Italian fatty foods,
drank a lot. But what was interesting is that for all of that there was this tight-knit
community: they had friends, relatives, and neighbours and they liked each other, they had
a community. If you compare the Italian Americans in this community to the same sort of
group of people with the same lifestyle in other American communities, this Italian
American group was much healthier, because of the community they had identified. As our
knowledge in biomedicine doubles, we come back to say, that having a community that has
meaning for you, that has friends for you, that gives you people to be intimate with and
to talk with, has important beneficial health effects. Likewise we'll find that personal
meaning has a very significant set of health effects. The World Health Organisation has
forecast diseases in 2020, and they argue that depression is one of the fastest growing
ones. At the Institute for alternative Futures we looked at that data, and think there is
probably a category of diseases that we will come to call "diseases of meaning"
and depression is one indicator of those. There are others - including violence, homicide,
suicide, and a number of cancers, heart diseases - that are related to a lack of coherence
and personal strength that we have in terms of our meaning. When people's faith, family
and community are not together, it makes a big difference. Likewise, we find spirituality
an important aspect of health. In fact I was interested lately in doing a study of
complementary alternative approaches in US healthcare, and I ran across this idea of
"distant intentionality", which is the politically correct and scientific way of
saying "prayer". It is being shown that if you are unhealthy, you can have your
health improved by people praying for you, whether you know that or not. They have done
controlled studies and there is evidence that prayer can have a clinically effective
benefit on people's health. So in terms of knowledge doubling in time, there are
incredibly great things still to be learnt.
Question 8
Would you tells us about Humanity 3000?
Answer
Humanity 3000 is a major set of conferences in exploration of what humanity will be like
in the year 3000. It is being supported by the Foundation for the Future in Seattle,
Washington. It represents an effort to bring some of the best minds of the planet together
to think about what humanity could be. I am an advisor for the Foundation for the Future,
as well as a futurist, and what is interesting about it is that most of our work on the
future deals with the next ten to fifty years, but this group is asking about the next
thousand years. I came away with a sense that in the next thousand years there is a host
of very important issues about the environment, about space, but the biggest issue is
consciousness evolution. Humans have been evolving for millions of years, but humans in
terms of the self as we know it, have only been around two thousand years. There's a book
called The Future of the Self that notes that when Homer wrote the Iliad, the concept that
we think of it in the West of a "human", an independent self, capable of rights,
didn't exist but it was there by the time of Plato and Aristotle. So the identity in the
Western sense of an individual capable of rights is a moving target, and it has evolved.
If you ask about the next thousand years, and if you think just what happened between two
thousand years ago and now, there have been major shifts. If you are in your twenties, or
younger, you will be faced with choices when you go to have children: which genetic
characteristics should be included or not, which genes and characteristics that your
parents gave you would you want to remove. For certain diseases this may be a wonderful
thing; on the other hand, if you don't like your hair color, there may be a frivolous
change. We will be faced as a society with this question immediately: people now alive, in
their reproductive time frame, will have the choice of consciously evolving the human
race. The H3000 - Humanity 3000 - activity has made me reflect on the question of us
humans. How do we want to accelerate this evolution? Over the next thousand years clearly
we will do it; will we do it wisely, are we playing God? In some respects, we are. Do we
have to be as wise as the Spirits that we think of as God to do that? In the Christian
tradition, there is an invitation to see God as brother, or sister of Christ. And the
question for me in this evolutionary issue is that we will have the capacity to evolve
consciously. Let's remember that humans have intervened in evolution at the genetic level
since the development of antibiotics. People who would have died of diseases, now live to
reproduce. And we will do more that and more consciously. It raises much larger questions
about us as humans and it also raises what kind of world we as humans are responsible for
creating as we do that.
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