Listening

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THE FUTURISTS

1 What are the latest trends and developments that you know or have heard about?

2 The business magazine Fast Company regularly features a column called Futurist. Work in two groups to read the predictions of six futurists they have interviewed. Group A read summaries I – III. Group B read summaries IV – VI. Choose a title for each summary, perhaps using words and phrases from the text.

I

Christopher Dewdney is a fellow of the McLuhan Programme in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. According to him, “None of us is naturally human anymore.” At the moment we are in transition between the human and post-human – a condition he calls “transhuman”. “The goal of transhumanism”, explains Dewdney, “is to surpass our current biological limitations, whether they be lifespan, physical beauty or the capabilities of our brain.” Ironically, just as humans are beginning to play with their DNA structure and become more “artificial”, machines are becoming more “lifelike”. At some point in the future “we won’t be able to differentiate between the two.” But, more significantly, the world may end up being divided into those who can afford to be genetically enhanced and those who can’t, leading to “a new class of beings who will actually look and act like a different human species” – one that might even threaten conventional human beings.

Ian Angell is Professor of Information Systems at the London School of Economics. Describing himself as “an anarchic capitalist”, he firmly believes that “business should be running the world.” His disturbing vision of the future is one where an elite of brilliant business people and technologists will be allowed to run their own enterprises with a minimum of government intervention. Indeed, the wealth-creating skills of these “new barbarians”, as Angell calls them, will be in such demand that countries will actually compete with each other to attract them as residents. But whilst these corporate free agents will be living in largely unregulated tax havens, billions of the less fortunate will be left behind living in crumbling, inefficient and crime-ridden megacities. “Every major technological shift creates winners and losers,” says Angell. “Europe’s disaster because of a sentimental attachment to the welfare state, which is a vestige of the Industrial Age.”

Gary Wright is a corporate demographer for the consumer products giant Procter&Gamble. Although world population, currently around six billion, is set to hit 12.5 billion by the end of the century, in the developed world it’s not population growth but an ageing population that will have the most far-reaching consequences. By 2010 43 % of American adults will be over 50. As Wright points out, that’s 97 million people. And as more and more take early retirement, fewer and fewer working people will be left to support them. Most of today’s successful business grew up in a period of population explosion and rapid economic progress. But will business continue to flourish in the “no-growth” or “slow-growth” environment of the future? “To an extent, immigration will offset population declines,” says Wright, and, indeed, in many parts of the developing world the majority of people are under 35. But this could have serious cultural and political implications.

Michele Bowman is the senior vice-president at Global Foresight Associates in Boston. In her opinion, in the networked world of the future, where you live will have very little effect on where you work, and citizenship will be far less important than “cybership.” As Bowman points out, “Electronic immigrants, also known as cross-border telecommuters, are nothing new.” In fact, with cheaper international telecommunications, many western companies already employ people in the developing world as “back office staff” dealing with such things as customer relations. In 2002 there was a public outcry in the UK when British Telecom proposed routing domestic telephone directory enquiries via India and Pakistan. Bowman claims that: “As the global economy becomes more integrated and interdependent, the ranks of these workers will grow” – and not only in routine jobs. Electronic immigrants may “soon infiltrate high-end technical fields such as engineering and IT.”

V

Peter Cochrane is head of research for British Telecom Laboratories. His specialism is the speed of business. Here’s one of Cochrane’s startling statistics: “A generation ago, the average person had a 100,000-hour working life – 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 50 years.” Today we can do everything that person did in 10,000 hours. In the next generation, people will be able to achieve in just six months took our parents their entire working lives. Cochrane says “We’re addicted to speed” and we’ll increasingly be willing to pay large sums of money to save our most precious commodity – time. This may mean actually prolonging our lives through anti-ageing medical advances or simply packing more into the lives we’ve got by multitasking at work and by combining several leisure activities at once in what Cochrane calls “parallel time.” One thing’s for certain: genuine free time will cease to exist.

VI John Naisbitt is one of the world’s leading futurists and the author of a series of bestsellers on the subject. In his latest blockbuster High-Tech High-Touch, Naisbitt makes the observation that even as we rush to embrace technology that makes our lives easier, we’re also starting to reject technology that makes us feel less alive, less human. Neither a technophobe nor a technophile, Naisbitt sees a great future for this middle way he calls “high tech high touch”. High-tech is wanting the heart transplant, the brain scan, the gene therapy. High-touch is wanting more time with the family doctor. High-tech is chatting on the Internet to someone on the other side of the world. High-touch is chatting with your neighbour on the other side of the garden face. High-tech is the dashed-off e-mail. High-touch is beautifully handwritten letter on headed notepaper. For business the message is clear: give the technology you’re trying to sell the personal touch, or fail.

3 Team up with people from the other group. Explain your choice of titles, summarise what you read and discuss possible implications and opportunities for:

– society as a whole;

– you personally;

– your company/family.

4 Listen to six business people’s opinions on the issues in 3 and compare your views. Choose one extract you like most. Explain why?

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