Every Friday, I post a new E-mail chat with a forward-looking thinker about the road ahead. Today, our prescient Friday Forward prognosticator is Futurist.com founder and owner Glen Hiemstra, a professional futurist who consults with business and government. In addition to being a visiting scholar at the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Lab, Hiemstra has advised Universal Pictures on the new CBS legal series, Century City, debuting March 16, which is set in the year 2030. He is also a technical adviser to 20th Century Fox Television for a revival of Lost in Space.

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Next News: What trends—technological, social, economic, political—do you see developing over the next 10 to 25 years that most people today have little awareness of?

Hiemstra:

1. Real nanotechnology products will become commonplace—such as Nano-Tex fabric treatments for clothing—and other amazing products will enter the market, such as supercomputer memory devices that store 25,000 pages on a postage stamp (IBM Millipede technology, Spintronics), superglues based on the biology of bacteria that enable them to cling [more firmly] to surfaces the harder you try to wash them off, solar cells that can be printed on inkjetlike printers, and so on. In this time period, we will experience a manufacturing and materials revolution. There will not be a stock market bubble similar to the dot-com era, for two reasons. First, that experience will still be fresh in memory. Second, this scientific field limits the number and nature of entrepreneurs, i.e., there will be no nanotech companies started in garages or back bedrooms with a computer.

2. Biotechnology bears more fruit as science adopts the perspectives of systems biology, learning the complex interactions of DNA, RNA, and proteins in producing health and signaling disease. Within this time frame, when you get a blood test, rather than receiving readings on a dozen or so health indicators, you will receive readings on several thousand indicators, leading to major advances in "upstream" or preventive medicine.

3. Declining birthrates in most of the world lead to the gradual dawning of the realization that we face a choice that is brand new in human history. We can choose the social and environmental benefits of allowing human populations to begin to decline or give in to economic, political, and cultural pressure to grow the human population forever, until it is actually unsustainable on the planet.

4. The U.S. economy will continue to grow by most measures in the early part of this period because of the spending wave (the number of people in their peak spending years of 24 to 50). However, the rationalization of the global labor force (which we call outsourcing) and advances in automation and machine systems intelligence will make job creation a permanent problem. Then, later in the 25-year time period, deeper economic challenges will emerge as the true extent of the Bush deficit takes hold, drives up interest rates, and retards economic growth, at just the time that the spending wave wanes as a smaller population group, generation X, hits its peak spending years. The only two ways to avoid this coming crunch in the midterm are successful economic development in the Third World that increases demand for products and investment in a new energy era.

5. An oil crisis looms when it becomes clear that oil production has finally peaked and begun its course down the backside of the supply curve. . . . What is startling is that the slide down the backside of the curve occurs at several times the speed of the climb up. That is, once the peak is reached, supplies dwindle more quickly than seems logical, simply because so much of the world, especially China, has reached a dependence on oil that is very great. Crash programs to move away from oil begin.

Next News: What trend(s)—technological, social, economic, political—do you often hear talked about but think may not play out the way people expect, if at all?

Hiemstra:

1. U.S. population. People believe that the historic global population boom means the United States will double in population again. But estimates of the eventual size of the U.S. population are exaggerated, unless people succumb to inevitable government incentives to have more children. This will become a big issue. How do you sustain a growing economy with fewer people?

2. Limits on stem-cell research. Already we see private efforts emerging in the United States to conduct stem-cell research, which come in response to legitimate fears of giving this entire field of science over to other countries because of political restrictions.

3. Global warming. People expect that either a) it will get warmer or b) this is all exaggerated, the result of misguided science. A possible scenario, however, is that parts of the Northern Hemisphere are rapidly transformed into a mini ice age, because of the collapse of Arctic ice sheets, release of massive fresh water into the oceans, and resulting changes in deep ocean currents—as happened not so long ago, about 1,000 years past. See the Pentagon's scenario planning, which, admittedly, is a possible, not probable, scenario, yet instructive. The key point is that such a cooling could occur quickly, within a few years, rather than take decades to develop.

4. Aging of the population. This trend is becoming well known, but people assume it means more retired people. What it is more likely to mean, especially if Social Security is significantly altered, is vastly more older people wanting and needing to stay in the labor force. Companies will need to adjust to keep older workers in, rather than moving them out, which will be a challenging task when other factors combine to hold employment growth down.

5. Terrorism. The conventional wisdom is that this is a long war, perhaps lasting generations. But the war on terror will begin to wind down, particularly if Osama bin Laden is captured in 2004. Terrorism as a somewhat random fact of 21st-century life will remain, but the global war will have turned the corner. As author Tom Clancy has observed, terrorist attacks will come to be seen as insect bites rather than catastrophes. The hotbeds of terror in the Middle East will turn increasingly inward, more focused on internal progress and struggles. (At the same time the biggest wild card will remain a successful weapon-of-mass-destruction terrorist attack somewhere in the world, which would deal a blow to the global economy.)

6. The idea of picture phones is always off in the future, to be made fun of. But a big winner in telecommunications in this time period will be the emergence of true 3-D, visual communications on the Net, along with gradual introduction of augmented reality into everyday, wearable computing devices. This means seeing and interacting with computer data via a wearable device while in the real world. (See the Human Interface Technology Lab.)

Next News: What kind of computer do you have?

Hiemstra: Sony Vaio laptop (1.5 years old, Pentium, DVD, thin, light); Compaq desktop 3-plus years old but with add-ons for additional memory and storage; Ethernet home network; HP iPAQ Pocket PC.

Next News: What is the most recent electronic device that you have purchased?

Hiemstra: An iPAQ, Windows hand-held PC. Extremely useful, best device I have. I am not a nut for buying the latest gadget. Generally, gadgets have become too feature rich, for most users about 50 percent overcapacity. Wanted: "smart paper" or "nanopaper" that would act as flexible computer display, and wireless Internet device.

Next News: Which magazines or Web sources do you read that the average person may not have heard of?

Hiemstra: Strategic News Service; NanoelectronicsPlanet.com; Foresight Institute; World Future Society publications (my professional association); TrendWatching.com (Netherlands, consumer trends); Global Future Forum (United Kingdom); ak13.com (U.K., social commentary); wisdomcore.com (Japan, Web site of "the Intelligentsia"). There are others—for example, a futures group in Iran that I E-mail with occasionally.

Next News: What is the last book you read that gave you some insight into the road ahead, and what did it tell you?

Hiemstra: Not a new book at all but one picked up at a used-book store: Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling, 1996. It's a science fiction novel (everyone should read at least one science fiction book per year to stretch his or her image of the possible future). It takes place near the end of the 21st century, when life-extension technologies have enabled very long life and deep biological renewal processes enable a kind of regeneration to a younger age. The story follows the lives of a group of young people in the United States and Europe (and one older person who has regenerated to a youthful age), exploring their hopes and frustrations. The key insight is stunning in simplicity: What will be the impact on youth if longevity means that older people never leave their jobs, never "make way" for the next generation?

# posted by James M. Pethokoukis at 12:00 PM EST
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