INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Can you explain the methods you use to produce forecasts such as the report on new
technologies prepared by George Washington University?
Answer
The GW Forecast of Emerging Technologies is based on what we call the 'Delphi Method'. I
have a panel of fifty standing authorities on technology and I survey them every two
years. I pose very sharply defined questions which they respond to with a number. For
instance, I may ask them: "When do you think a certain technology will enter the
mainstream?", and they give me a year. Then I take their answers and treat it as
data. I average their answers to obtain a mean which we consider the best estimate, and
then we take the results, including the reasons why some people estimate that these things
would happen early and others would estimate late. We feed it back to the panel and they
give us a second estimate, and that way the answers converge on what we think is the most
accurate estimate. This Delphi Method has been widely used because it is very convenient.
One can obtain answers to almost any question, by simply finding a group of experts and,
in essence, determining what their consensus, their opinion is. Because it is so easy to
use, and so convenient, it has been used around the world; almost every major country has
conducted Delphi studies of one type or another: The Japanese have done a number of these,
the Germans have, and the French, the Canadians. My method, I think, is a little more
useful because it is very direct, covering all fields of science and technology,
everything, and the data is presented in a very accessible form. It is very easy for
average people to understand the results, and that's why it's been so well received: we
got a wonderful response around the world.
Question 2
How confident can the public be in the forecast of a "Technology Revolution" and
its impact? What is the range of accuracy?
Answer
I don't think that any authority of credibility claims that these forecasts are precise,
that one could place a good deal of confidence in the exact year that we determine, or
other estimates. It's mainly intended to give us a best estimate, in American terms we
have called it the 'ball park', a rough area of the timescale in which this is likely to
occur. I have done this for ten years now, every two years, and the variation in responses
that I see over those ten year periods runs about plus or minus three years. I think that
is remarkably accurate when you consider the fact that over that ten year period the
conditions of society have changed considerably, and the panel changes a little bit,
because the people self-select themselves and sometimes the panel will have a different
composition. But in spite of those sources of variation, the results are remarkably
consistent. I consider it roughly accurate, certainly within five years.
Question 3
How much do you take into account the autonomous development of technological research and
application?
Answer
I would say that our work is, strictly speaking, unrelated to the actual research and
development that goes on in corporate offices and government laboratories and so forth.
But the panellists come from all those organisations. Some of them are scholars who work
in universities and do research, some work for government laboratories and some work for
corporate offices. So, indirectly, this includes all of that information; it may not do it
systematically, but through the judgement, of my panellists I think we tend to reflect an
understanding of what is taking place in actual research settings.
Question 4
Which areas of technology seem to have the most impact on everyday life?
Answer
Let me give you a quick summary of some highlights from the Forecast that I think will be
of particular interest. Obviously, information technology is on everybody's minds. Within
ten years certainly, but perhaps sooner, developed countries - the United States, the
Europeans, the Japanese - should have the ability to conduct almost any sort of
interaction electronically. People should be able to routinely shop using the Internet and
other electronic systems to do their work at a distance, teleworking; they should be able
to study, to take courses electronically; and other even more exotic activities like
religious services. Right now, there are religious services conducted electronically, and
surprisingly they are not cold or devoid of religious feeling, they can be more intense.
It's a myth to believe that the computer tends to rob human interaction of its emotion. If
anything, it can be more intense. With the use of electronic media people we have flaming,
people getting angry at one another, having violent confrontations over the Internet,
which suggests how emotional people can get over the media. Some people meet and have love
affairs and get married over the media. All of these things are possible. I think during
the first decade of the twentieth century, we are going to see the electronic media
flower, and in principle they will be used to take the place of almost any type of social
activity. That doesn't mean that people will retreat into their homes and offices and
become hermits, not meet personally; it means that people will have a choice which you
don't have now. Now when you want to do a financial transaction you have to go some place
and give them the money, and when you have to go to work you drive into your office, but
within ten years I think most people will have that option. They can do these things in
person or they can do them over the electronic media. Let me tell you about a couple of
other areas of particular interest. Biotechnology has received a lot of attention, that's
another revolutionary field. It offers the prospect of being able to control the processes
of life itself, which disturbs many people, of course, because they consider this the
province of the supreme deity. But it is happening, it's a fact of life, and cloning, for
instance, has become notorious. This power will continue, I think, to grow, because,
again, this is the result of the information revolution. The information revolution has
made it possible to decipher the human genome, the blue print for life. Basically, science
and technology is knowledge, and the information revolution has the effect of making it
possible for scientists to gather knowledge more conveniently and more quickly. That is
why we are seeing these revolutionary breakthroughs in all fields and, of course,
biotechnology is one of the fields where it's most striking. This will reach a point,
perhaps in ten to twenty years, where almost all facets of any species should be
manipulable. We are reaching a point where new strains of plants and animals can be
invented, routinely. There are at least half a dozen different strains of plants that have
been invented now, and that will continue. So we will gain, I think, the power to shape
biological life just as now we can control physical life. Now, anything in the physical
world can be controlled: we can create nuclear energy, we can send people to the moon.
Something similar seems likely in the biological world; if somebody wanted to create a
certain type of plant or animal, I think in principle we could do it, and that will extend
to the human domain. Parents, in principle, could choose the characteristics of their
children. Very shortly, they could choose to have children that are more or less
intelligent, the colour of their eyes, their skin, the hair, they could choose the height
of their children, their sexual makeup. Societies may not want to do that, because they
would feel it isn't the natural order of things, but those powers will come: the power to
design species, the power to manipulate the characteristics of species, to cure illnesses
with genetic therapy - in principle we could cure almost all genetic illnesses. There are
at least six thousand or so genetic illnesses that are passed on to innocent people
because they are contained in their DNA. In principle, all of that could be eliminated;
it's an enormous possibility. I might just briefly mention one or two other things:
transportation. The automobile, the internal combustion engine, that type of automobile,
has become the scourge of modern cities: all cities constantly struggle with pollution and
congestion problems. That could also be alleviated over the next ten to twenty years. The
automobile is changing; right now, Toyota has an automobile that doesn't use an internal
combustion engine, it's an enormous promise. It operates with electric batteries and also
has a small gas driven generator and achieves sixty to seventy miles per hour - efficient,
non-polluting, that's just the beginning. Fuel cell-powered automobiles will arrive
sometime. All major car makers are working on fuel-cells, the fuel-cell will virtually be
non-polluting and will really revolutionise transportation. We are also developing
automated highways where people will relinquish control of the automobile and electronic
systems will control the automobile at speed - caravans of automobiles spaced within ten
feet of one another - take care of braking, steering automatically, and intelligent
control systems that will guide automobiles through congested areas to alleviate
congestion as much as possible. So, I think transportation is an area that could be
transformed. Those are just some highlights from technological breakthroughs that I think
we will see within ten or twenty years.
Question 5
Do you take into account what affect your predictions may actually have on research and
technological development and on people's attitudes? Do you think you have some kind of
responsibility?
Answer
The question of what one could call a self-fulfilling prophecy is always brought up. That
is, if somebody like me makes a prediction, and it gains wide attention, does that in turn
bring about the very prediction that has been forecast? If, for instance, corporate
researchers believed that a certain product is likely to be developed, they would not want
to be excluded, so they would go to the laboratory and work for it hard to try and get
ahead of their competitors. Well, it would be nice to believe that I have that impact, but
I don't think that's likely, to be honest. We have received a lot of attention from this
work, but I don't think it has that impact. It's conceivable, though. If enough people
come to believe that a forecast is likely, that belief itself, I think, tends to bring
about the reality. But ultimately it's a false question, I don't think forecasts really
have had that impact, by and large.
Question 6
Would you describe the world that seems most likely to emerge when this Technology
Revolution arrives, and when will that be?
Answer
Based upon this data and other forecasts - there is a wide range of information that is
being created by lots of different sources of this type - I don't want to exaggerate, but
my estimate is that humankind is poised at a very critical juncture. Precisely because we
now have the ability to systematically harness knowledge - all of these developments are
occurring at an unprecedented rate - I think the rate of development will continue to
accelerate, will become even more intense than it is now. When you see other countries
around the world - the Asians, the South Americans - get into this arena, and you see the
best minds of all of these different cultures pooling their knowledge, I think we are in
for some dramatic breakthroughs over the next ten to twenty years. When this is over, I
think modern civilisation will really look very different. The world population is
growing, from five and a half billion to roughly ten billion people by say the year 2020,
or 2030. These will all be educated, which is not the case now, and will all live at
industrial levels of sophistication. Right now, only one billion people of those five and
a half billion people live the way that Europeans and Americans and Japanese do. That is
going to expand to almost the entire population. All these countries want to
industrialise, so I think we are going to have roughly ten billion people living at a very
sophisticated level of development, all educated, all working, in knowledge industries,
sophisticated work, creating knowledge, solving these difficult problems. It is going to
be a very different world, a far more sophisticated world, and a very challenging world,
because all the problems that we wrestle with will increase along with this increased
number of people living at these levels of consumption. This means roughly a tenfold
increase in all these problems. There are now a billion people living the way we do, it's
going to be ten billion. That means a tenfold increase in the extraction of resources,
mining, that means a tenfold increase in the level of industrialisation, of global
competition, of the load on the environment created by all this consumption. The
industrialisation of China alone, which is increasing more than ten per cent per year,
will probably triple all of these factors. So, it's going to be a more sophisticated
world, but it also poses enormous new challenges that have to be overcome.
Question 7
Can you assess the negative and positive results of all this change? Do you think that
people will be able to cope with these challenges and opportunities? On balance, is it
going to be good or bad for ordinary people?
Answer
Based on these previous comments, I think you can see that I am not predicting a utopia, I
don't think that this technological revolution means that life will become blissful or
people will have everything that they want, I don't think that's the scenario at all. Life
will be better, I think that is true, but only because people will rise to the occasion
and solve these enormous problems. So, the net effect really is not that people will be
happier. I don't think that happiness is a meaningful concept in that sense. People will
have better living conditions, certainly they will be more educated, there may be less
war, that sort of thing. Those things will happen, but the net effect is that people will
be forced to mature, to rise to the occasion, that as a civilisation human kind will have
to address and resolve what I call this crisis of maturity. It will no longer be possible
to drift along, as we have done in the past, creating wars and polluting the planet and
disregarding the needs of those who are less fortunate and so forth. I think that as a
civilisation, planet earth is going to have to grow up, and become a mature global society
that works. I think will be very satisfying in an existential, spiritual sense, and in a
human sense, but it's not going to be easy. I do think it will work. I think human kind
has come a long way during the last three million years, out of the swamps to where we are
sitting here now talking about this. I don't see any reason why it cannot continue, but
it's going to be a heroic challenge. We are going to be preoccupied with this as a global
civilisation, for the next twenty or thirty years to come.
Question 8
We have been mainly talking about the future, but we can start addressing the present.
What can people and organisations begin to do now to face these challenges, to adjust to
these changes? What can they do now to prepare and get ready?
Answer
If we could step back a bit from the lofty level that I was discussing as a minute ago,
and take it in very pragmatic terms, daily terms, how this is translated to the work of
average people, and executives, and politicians, those people, scholars. What could we all
do to address this? I think the best thing we could do is to start to learn about this, to
educate ourselves. I don't think most people understand what's happening. I don't think
most people understand the magnitude of what lays just ahead. It's truly historic. I don't
think people have access to the kind of data that we try to provide, these really crisp,
precise forecasts in all field of science, technology with dates, and the magnitude of the
market that is going to be opened up. Most people don't have access to this information.
We need access to this information, because information is what is going to guide this. We
need systems that can help people understand it. I hope to make the George Washington
University Forecast an international system for tracking the progress of emerging
technologies around the world, where anybody can get into a web site, very easily, and get
the latest information, and then they could discuss it over the web site. So, I think that
is the main thing that we could do would be to start developing a better understanding of
this, share the information, discuss it, and reach, step by step, improvements. And this
would guide, I hope, the development of these technologies around the world, their
acceptance. Also, I'd say there are great misunderstandings, apart from the shared
information. There are great beliefs that are unfounded; there are fears that limit our
progress; there is the fear that information technology, for instance, will create a race
of robots, people who do routine boring work, who are controlled by big organisations,
isolated in their homes, for instance. I don't think that's true at all. I think the
reverse is going to happen. It is a great paradox that technology really seems to have, if
used properly, the opposite effect: it humanises us, precisely because the machines take
over the routine work, and they leave us free to think, and to become more human, more
godlike almost, and people increasingly feel the need for their human qualities, their
spiritual qualities. In fact, I think the world of the spirit is going to be enhanced, in
ten years or so, when these developments occur. I think we will talk about the spiritual
age, the way we talk now about the information age. That is how intense the human
qualities of ordinary people are going to develop. So, we have these terrible myths, these
misunderstandings, that we are going to have to address, discuss, and work through, so
that we can see our way through this enormous transition. So, in a nutshell, I think, my
advice is that people around the world develop the means to educate themselves, gain the
information and grapple with it, and use it to penetrate these conceptual barriers that
are the only things really holding us back from a world of infinite possibility. I don't
think that's an exaggeration. With the ability to control knowledge, people around the
world have the potential for creating almost any kind of existence that they want. My
latest book is called The Infinite Resource, because it talks about this very thing,
knowledge. I think it's a very apt title because the possibilities are truly enormous, and
the only limitations are our own understanding, our courage, our imagination, and our
willingness to get in there and recreate the world. Anything is, I think, strictly
speaking, possible.
Question 9
Do you think that when researchers speak of adjustments of people to these changes there
is a common adoption of some kind of technological determinism, and if so, do you think
that's a correct thing to do?
Answer
That's always a key issue on people's minds. That is the view of technological
determinism: because I forecast this, does that mean we have no choice, that we are really
determined? Are we all destined to faithfully develop these technologies and create this
kind of world. Well, that's a very difficult question and again, it deals with a
philosophical issue. In one sense I think that these things are determined, in a very
broad sense, in that I do think humankind has little choice but to cultivate the potential
of the information revolution and develop more sophisticated information technologies. I
think that is almost certain, I don't see any way we can avoid that. That seems to be the
path of historical evolutionary development. We have moved from hunting and gathering to
agriculture, to industry, and then to services and now to knowledge, and I think beyond
that there will be a focus on spirituality, consciousness and so forth. That I think is a
well defined pathway and I feel very confident about that: in that sense, I think it is
predetermined. The place where we have a choice is how to participate in that broad drama;
not every country, not every individual, has to follow the same precise path; there will
be an enormous variation among different corporations, among different cities, among
different nations, and how they cultivate their own niche in that type of scenario, or
whether they choose to participate in it at all. Some countries may not participate in
that kind of development; the Islamic world, for instance. At least at this point, many of
those countries seem not to want to participate in that kind of development. So, I think
it depends on whether one is speaking in general terms or specific terms. Specifically,
we'll still retain the freedom to do this as we choose, or perhaps not to do it at all;
but on a historic scale, I think it's almost certain to move in roughly these directions:
I feel very confident that this is the way that the future is going to unfold over the
next ten to twenty years.
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