Future Current

Ronald Bailey and Jerome C. Glenn at Transvision 2007

Jerome C. Glenn is the Director of The Millennium Project on global futures research of the World Federation of United Nations Associations and the Executive Director of the American Council for the United Nations University. He is the co-author with Ted Gordon of the annual State of the Future of the Millennium Project for the past ten years. His presentation at Transvision 2007 was entitled “Global Challenges in Transition to the Conscious-Technology Age.”

The following transcript of Jerome C. Glenn’s 2007 Transvision presentation “Global Challenges in Transition to the Conscious-Technology Age” has been approved by the author for publication. Audio is also available.

Global Challenges in Transition to the Conscious-Technology Age

I had first written about global warming in 1973, and I have been observing the Academy of Science studies on this theory for a long time. The forecasts that I have monitored personally over the years consistently understated what had occurred. When people say there is a natural phenomenon, there is, but we happen to live here at this time. There is something that we can do, so we had might as well do it.

Futures research really isn’t predicting, per se. The purpose of futures research is to chart a range of possibilities to help you get smarter. During the Cold War, when we did scenarios and “forecasts” about thermonuclear war, the objective was to be wrong. You do the scenario to show where to intervene. So, when someone say, “How accurate are you?” It definitely depends on the purpose. You don’t want to be right about thermonuclear war. The same with the nanotechnology studies we did. You do it to expose the errors and change priorities. So, the business of futurists might be to shape the future, to turn people on to possibilities, and open up the mind, but we do not know what is going to happen. We will take guesses, and we will take bets.

I mentioned about methodologies. Futures Research Methodology Version 1.o has been pirated on Jose’s site, and you can get it free of charge over there. Version 2.0 is now available with 27 chapters and about 900 pages. Half the methods are written by either the inventor of the methods or someone who has significantly contributed to its evolution. If all goes well, in six months or so I will finish version 3.0, which will add another ten chapters of methods.

Conscious technology is something that I penned the early outlines of back in the mid 1970s. I remember because I was talking about Mr. Carter running for president at the time. The current evolution of the ideas, to some degree, have been taken over by the transhumanist movement. Back in the early ’70s, there weren’t too many futurists. I think I was the only one at the time, at least in the United States, talking about the integration of the human and conscious technology making for an alternative future. It was not exactly a popular view at the time. Now, you’ve got a whole movement.

The way that I portray it is, there are two large mega-trends. One is that the humans are becoming cyborgs. I remember that in the ’70s I used to actually go through the patent data for several years in a row on how many patents on inventions were filed in that area, and how many were filed in the other area, of the built-in environment becoming more intelligent. The trends were clearly going up, to the point where I stopped counting. I accepted that the phenomenon was going to continue. I have not really changed my mind about this since the ’70s.

At some point these two trends merge. The distinction between human and technology becomes quite blurred, in the same sense that when we started with computer communications some years ago, the distinction between the telephone and the and the computer you could make. You still can, but you cannot separate them and have email. So, the idea is that there will be a point when you can distinguish between silicon, or whatever it happens to be, and cytoplasm, but they will be so intertwined that you cannot separate them anymore and still have a living being. At this point we would enter into what I would call a post-information age or a conscious technology age.

This is a quick overview. Admittedly, it is an oversimplification of history, but futurists like to divide up the past and future into different categories, so that is what I have done as well. The purpose of this is to give a sense of direction. Where are we going? You can see that power moves from religion, to nation state, to corporation, to individual. In most of the places where religion is very powerful is back in the agricultural extraction, such as the Middle East. Today, your hotshots are in information service economies like Second Life and Youtube, but increasingly they will be in linkage. Whatever has not been linked will be linked.

Let me give you an example. There are nanofibers the military has been using to put into clothing so that you can see inside the body and telecommunicate that information. The fibers will allow then a military helicopter coming in to a wounded soldier to see inside their wound ahead of time. When they hit the ground, they know what equipment to use and what they have to do ahead of time. As we all know, the advanced technologies of the military eventually go to civilians, the price goes down, and we all get it.

Health insurance companies might give you a break for getting “smart socks.” Let’s say I am going to a transhumanist conference in Chicago, I get to the airport in Washington, DC, my socks have alerted my doctor that the circulation in my ankle is bad and I’ve got to take an aspirin. So, when I go to the counter to get my ticket, they say you have a note here, we are not going to give you a boarding pass until we see you take an aspirin. So, you have linked up a whole lot of systems. That could become a business–think of that which has not been connected together, and connect them. New businesses are thinking of things that haven’t been connected yet and connecting them. This was all written in Future Mind, which was translated into Japanese, as well.

Much of this subject comes from a global think tank called the Millennium Project. We have thirty nodes around the world. By “node,” I mean that in the sense of information theory, nodes are where two or more networks intersect. A node would be an intersection of UN systems, government systems, corporate or political systems, universities, NGOs, media, and individual players. We can put in a question to that nodes, like “Tell me who the best people are in the future of energy,” and very quickly we can asses things around the world. We want to make sure that all the institutional categories are represented. Too often, universities just talk to universities and businesses talk to businesses. But, the future is going to involve all of them, so we want to go across institutional lines.

I have been involved in futures research for awhile and worked with a lot of different think tanks, but there was not anywhere to go to do futures research in general, for the species. You can do it for a country, looking at the world on the behalf of the United States. Or you can look at the world on behalf of economics, like the World Bank. But could you look at the whole world with, and on behalf of, the whole world? There ought to be some sort of neutral think tank system, so we decided to keep our research focused on the globe. Even if we look at something very specific, like education or nanotechnology, we would do it through this global system.

This is an idea that was shaped by UN organizations, NGOs, universities, governments and corporations. On the board are these different players. The money comes from all these different categories, except for the universities. As we all know, universities don’t give money, they take it. It means that we can act through these different institutions. When I need to act through the UN, I can do that. When we need to act through corporations, we can do that. This becomes a trans-institution. This is just for future stuff, but you could have a trans-institution to fight AIDS, or to increase intelligence. I would assume that the World Transhumanist Association will evolve as a trans-institution as well. It makes it much more effective.

We have these nodes around the world, these are the places we have them. When people talk about global-local, this is our management answer. This is how we connect global and local views through our management system by using nodes. Jose Cordeiro is chairman of the node in Caracas, Venezuela. Nodes are a novel idea and a good management approach and are extremely cost effective because we work through other institutions. For example, in Moscow and Beijing there is the Academy of Science. So you can get an organization or a group of organizations whose business it is to do what you are doing anyway, so you do not have to pay any overhead.

From the Millennium Project’s work over ten years or so, these are the fifteen global challenges that seem to be the closest consensus we have. Obviously, the world does not have a consensus on the whole, but I would offer that there is not a better synthesis of world views today.

First, how can we have sustainable development achieved by all? It was mentioned earlier about terraforming. By my own quick calculations, there is about 24,000 kilometers of relatively uninhabited coastline beaches around the world that are suitable for mass production of food for agriculture, animals and humans, biofuels, paper products, not to mention carbon dioxide sinks. There are a lot of water-tolerant plants that you could plant in beaches around the world, and you could irrigate them with salt water. 80% of the nutriments that you would need for all this stuff is already available, so you would not have to do as much fertilizing, and insecticide is not an issue. You could have robotics taking care of the nutrition of all this agriculture.

If you start to do the math on it, this kind of idea becomes extremely important for a variety of reasons. Aside from food, the Food and Agriculture Association of the United Nations says we need another 50% of water to feed the world over the next twenty years. We already have water shortages. Where are we going to get the extra water from? As you may know, the water tables are falling in all contexts. 40% of the water consumed today comes from water sheds that are controlled by two or more countries. You put those two facts together and it’s frightening. The idea of just changing water pricing is like moving chairs on the Titanic. It’s a waste of time. What’s important is we need more water, and/or shift water to other places.

The majority of fresh water consumed in agriculture is on food, energy and paper products. If we put those along the coastlines instead, then you are freeing up an awful lot of fresh water for other purposes. Another one for the engineers in the group, think about pressurization. You can take salt water, put it through a system that is wind-driven, where you pressurize water to make water vapor, so your salt water falls out first and your fresh water falls out second. This can be done along most of the coastlines in the world.

The consensus of United Nations forecast for world population in 2050 is 8 or 9 billion people, but it falls off very rapidly after that. I don’t think it really will, but go with me for a second. The lower bound UN forecasts tend to be more accurate than the middle or upper. If you look at the most recent lower bound UN forecast going out to the end of the century, they have about 5.5 billion people in 2100. That’s one billion fewer than we have today. Let’s assume for a second that that’s accurate. I don’t believe it is, but let’s assume it for a second. This means that the vast majority of everybody is old. You are going to need life extension. There are fewer Russians and Japanese today than there was last year. There are actually fall-offs beginning in these countries. We haven’t hit the big fall-offs yet, but there is a large growth curve going up toward 2050, and then a rapid fall-off. That is the current consensus.

When somebody tells you, “Don’t mess with longevity,” tell them, “Look, how are you going to run a civilization without it when the vast majority of everybody is retired?” You will have all sorts of medical bills and very few people running the system. Are you going to have robots doing it? Maybe. Why not have geniuses living a very long time? Would we not have been better off if Einstein had lived a little longer? So the argument about how are you going to support all of these people if you have longevity, it does not hold water, really.

As you may know, there are easy ways to implement viruses to manipulate elections. I do not need to go into details about that because there are already all kinds of stories from different countries around the world. Three elections were shouted down a couple years ago. It seems that we really have to get that done in a much better way than we have. One of the advantages of increasing democracy is that research has shown that democracies tend not to fight each other, and they do better in response to natural disasters. You should have a more peaceful, successful world, but democracy is threatened by a lot of things. One is the manipulation of election data. Another is organized crime. There is about twice the military budgets of the world going into organized crime, and they can buy and sell decisions like they buy and sell heroin.

How can policy-making be made to reflect long-term perspectives? This of course is one of the purposes of this conference. One of the contributing answers to this is in Finland, which has a standing committee on the future. This committee does not allocate money, but it does allocate assignments. So, the agriculture committee decides to have stem cells for meat production, because as people get richer they consume more meat, so otherwise the price of meat will go through the ceiling. How else are we going to get enough animal and fish protein for the world? By the way, Holland has filed for a series of patents on this several years ago. There is also stuff going on in Australia and at the University of Maryland, so, I think this will evolve.

This idea of the Committee for the Future should be in every country in the world. Every legislature in the world should have a Committee for the Future, and it should keep track of the global situation for each country and its people, and then hand out assignments. It has worked very well in Finland. As you know, Finland was dependent upon the Soviet Union and suffered after its collapse, but they quickly recovered. They have come up with a lot of coherent future thinking. The successes of Finland should be replicated in all countries.

How can the convergence of information and communication technologies work for everyone? You all know about the $100 laptop, that is actually $187, but the orders are coming in. I was involved in forecasting some of the computer communications stuff earlier on, and almost all the forecasts understated everything. The one exception was Negroponte overstated how fast Africa would take up computer communications.

Many of the poor, in the Unites States or India, they leave their areas. Often the best and the brightest leave town, and they feel bad, so they send money back. As you may know, the money going back from to the Third World from the First World is larger than what is produced by any of these developing nations, but all that means is development is a matter of how fast I can get to the post office to get my money faster. These people can be put on systems to automate the process. The first country working on this Cape Verde, a tiny country off the coast of Africa. The ambassador there started organizing a way to connect people with their relatives in the Unites States. Beating the brain drain problem has been a losing battle for many years. People are not going to come back from New York to Ghana. So then how do you get the brain power from New York to Ghana? What can be telecommunicated in the development process doesn’t matter where you are. That becomes a classic information problem to solve.

By the way, the people talking about the digital gap are not looking at the data. The digital gap, whether you look at percent of users or level of users, the digital gap is actually closing at an accelerating rate. The income gap, though, is not. It’s important to make that distinction. Fortunately, information communication technology can make a big difference on that.

The threat of new and reemerging diseases is obviously extremely important. Last night we were talking with the Lifeboat Foundation about some of the threats, and this is one of the big ones coming up. We expect that a single individual acting alone will be able to use a computer program and desktop manufacturing to customize viruses that could have an incubation period longer than a couple days. An individual could go around the airports and by the time the impact hits, it is too hard to trace down. So an individual could really reformat the C Drive of civilization. Hopefully it won’t happen, but the object of doing this scenario, as with talking about thermonuclear war, is to figure out how to beat them. Over the last thirty years, if I had asked an audience this size, how many of you think we are going to have a thermonuclear war, half the hands would go up. Well, we got worried about it and we did something, and we can do the same thing about this.

In my experience doing futures research for all this time, there are reasonable answers to all of these impossible problems. There is no reason for despair; there is reason for action. Again, we are not interested in forecasting so much as deciding what are we going to do. The current model is that you take the virus, sequence the gene, you make a vaccination, mass produce it, and ship it around. That was pretty good for SARS, which was sequenced in about two weeks. There were some good controls–Canada was closed down for three days, ut imagine that it accelerates faster. So, not only Canada but other countries get closed down. We’re talking about global depression. So, one way you get around this is by a different approach than vaccinations. Instead of creating a specific antibody for a specific disease, how do you boost the human immune system in general, so much so that it does not matter what virus comes into your body? Sort of like a biological firewall. Just like we put fire extinguishers around buildings around the world, and they sit there until the fire occurs, you build a firewall. I am very optimistic about that because I see a lot of funds going into it, because otherwise the military cannot guarantee the safety of their troops.

In the past, one of the things that we had to form judgments was a bunch of experts, but increasingly, we can have realtime, self-correcting feedback systems. People are not used to doing this yet, but as the world gets used to doing this more, as it has gotten used to doing internet and email, there will be the widespread use of collective intelligence systems. This to me is exciting. What happens if a country says that increasing intelligence is an objective of their Ministry of Education? Not only focusing on individual intelligence, but collective intelligence for a country. South Korea may do it, and MIT has started a collective intelligence center.

The largest war on the planet is a one-directional war. More women are targeted as casualties than other groups damaged by ethnic conflicts or military conflicts. This is very damaging. It’s not just one culture, it is across the board. One thing I used to jokingly suggest, but now I am going to take it seriously because no one is coming up with better answers, is that in elementary education, instead of having children do jumping jacks, why not teach them Eagle Claw? Eagle Claw is the nastiest martial arts in the game. There was a study in the UN some years ago which showed that male-female relationships were better in Burma. Eagle Claw is the nastiest martial art on the planet, and it is taught to women in Burma. There was a UN study in the ’70s that showed that male-female relations were better in Burma. Every boy knows that a part of the body can be ripped out from any direction, so he decides not to attack a woman and let it go. So, martial arts in physical education systems in the world I think is one of the better ways to address the relationship between male and female.

Another issue here is a term I coined, “the feminine brain drain.” It is happening in countries as diverse as Japan and Saudi Arabia. Women in Japan are allowed to attain PhD’s without a problem, but they are still asked to serve the tea. So Japanese women are coming to the United States and few of them ever go back to Japan. That is the feminine brain drain.

By my own calculations, and cross-referenced by a whole lot of people around the world, the amount of money organized crime takes a year is twice that of all the military budgets in the world. Yet, we are not taking it seriously. We need a global integrated strategy. Not simply, “What are we going to do about drugs? What are we going to do about prostitution? What are we going to do about slavery? ” There are more slaves today than there ever were before in history. There are 27 million slaves, most of them in Asia, which is far more than the African slave trade.

Slavery is one component of organized crime. We have attacked organized crime nation by nation and crime category by category, but have not created a global integrated strategy. Every country should have an integrated strategy. To make a long story very short, you monitor the software of check transfers and, like Bill Gates, you make it not backwards compatible, so all the banks have to play. The power of banks is to give and receive money. That is controlled by software. You can run a program to prioritize it. Round one is funded by governments, but round two is funded by assets. Because if the system is still run by countries in round two or three, it will be bought and therefore be unsuccessful. This is extremely serious and is not being taken seriously.

How can growing energy demands be safely met? One of the things that I invite you to think with the Millennium Project on is to do a feasibility study on how you create a global information system and network to make it possible to wrap your mind around the whole picture. We do a monthly environmental security report, and one of these sections is technologies that can make a difference for the environment. I notice that there is a relatively serious innovation almost every month, and because the breakthroughs happen so rapidly it means that government policies are way behind. So we need to get some kind of realtime collective intelligence system going so politicians can make the right decisions.

All of this is available in 2007 State of the Future. Again the book is only about 99 pages. The CD ROM that comes with it is 6,000 pages. You can read the print and use keyword searches to go into more detail.

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