Future Through Multiple Lens
Is the future of the future a dream or a definite certainty? Former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam once said: “You have to dream before your dream comes true.” All the tech revolution around us is a result of human vision and dreams. Like dreams, predictions can either alert or drive innovators. In Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, a soothsayer alerts Julius Caesar: “Beware of the Ides of March or you will die”. It would be unfair to look at the future with only one or the other lens. Only when we rise above the ebb and flow of time and perform a temporal assessmentwould we realise that the human society has shown consistent and secular improvement across tens of thousands of centuries. We have only gotten better with time!
The future of the future means over a long period of time. What and how things would change? What are the necessary conditions for change? Over a long period of time, it is never the life of a individual but the perpetuity of humanity that matters. Let us look at some of the glacial movements that would take place in following spheres over a long period of time.
The problem of technology diffusion: Is the future of the future completely attributable to technological innovation? The renaissance period directly and indirectly and through many ways has had a significant impact on the world of technology and sciences. Technology cannot progress without corresponding anthropological changes to the social order and fabric of the contemporary value system. Technologies of the future and present would continue to depend on mass acceptance also called network effects. Clearly, this very aspect of consumerisation will drive societal change as we see with social media and other communications-related innovations. While we can argue the positive and negative impact of technology on human society, it is equally important to not over expect from what technology can deliver.
According to the most recent estimates from the World Bank, 11 per cent of the world population live on less than $2 a day. The work to end poverty is far from over. The fact that more than half of the extremely poor are from sub-Saharan Africa in spite of all the technological breakthroughs is a testimony to the fact that we cannot depend on technology alone for an equitable diffusion of technology. Technology hopefully would become secular and will have uniform distribution channels reaching all parts of the world and the strata of the society.
Third or fourth industrial revolution? The world is still not in agreement on whether we are venturing into a third or a fourth industrial revolution. Each industrial revolution is considered to be always based on new infrastructure, which has three components to it. Those are communication technologies to manage economic activity, transportation to move economic activity and energy is feed the transportation systems. Coal was the primary energy source that helped manage and move the first industrial revolution. Then came in the cheap Texas oil that lead to newer ways of managing and moving the economic activity through telephone networks and the use of internal combustion engines.
Coal and oil are still the most significant drivers of the contemporary economic system. It would be premature to call out the end of the second industrial revolution till most of the world pivots onto an alternative and sustainable source of energy. We would eventually venture into a third industrial revolution with a new form of energy that would power the Internet and the Internet of things (IoT) as its communication and transportation backbone.
The challenges of urbanisation: A United Nations report says that the number of megacities in world has increased from 14 in 1995 to 29 in 2015. All cities across the world are growing due to rapid urbanisation. This agglomeration has made cities a formidable centre of productivity to access to large pool of workers and consumer markets.
Over a long period of time, governments will have adopted a decentralised governance model giving more autonomy to the urban areas giving them freedom to solve their problems. Access to common public services like utilities, social security, education and health would be assured to all urban residents. The participation of urban citizens in governance would go up due to phenomenal digitisation.
It is certain the urbanisation would stagnate the overall population growth due to more women at work and decreasing fertility rates in urban centres. The world cities would become popularly classified into high-, low- and medium-risk categories as risk to life become the universal benchmark for evaluating urban centres.
Reliable and consistent energy: The primary energy source driving the third industrial revolution may not be renewables in spite of all the innovation on the grid and in storage of electricity. Why do we say this? Renewable energy is highly inconsistent. Over a long period of time, the human race hopefully will move to a sustainable and pollution free fuel – nuclear fusion. Around 34 countries have pooled resources to advance the knowledge of fusion by setting up a nuclear fusion plant in the south of France. A fusion power plant when functional can produce 500 MW of power with an input of 50 MW of power.
Personalising health: Over a long period of time, the human race would have completed the fundamental research in development of immune-oncology to save lives from cancer. Immune therapy depends on bodies innate ability to target rogue invaders. Another advancement is in the field of gene therapy, where edited genes within a patient would help him fight off a disease. Big data analytics would lead to practical realisation of personalised medication routines, a significant shot from one-size-fits-all medication approach that is followed today.
The internet of transportation: Over a long term, all modes of transportation would become ‘self-driving’. Transportation would eventually become another grid on the information highway with massive IoT bringing locomotion to the economic activity. The concept of ownership itself has undergone a change with newer generation choosing the convenience and choice offered by the sharing economy over the overheads of property maintenance.
The future of education: Consumer internet has made information secular. The proof of literacy today is the ability to use a mobile device. With information available at fingertips, the literacy rate are bound to grow. Academic success would be defined not by the access to information but application of information. Most of the entrance examinations would under go alteration as it is no more relevant to memorise history to get a Civil Services position. For example, a civil servant would be voted in a truly democratic process based on his ability to bring change and implement policies.
The future belongs to precision agriculture: The world population is stated to grow to 9.6 billion people by the year 2050. The food production will double , witness 100 per cent growth, in spite of the limited availability of arable land, limited fresh water through “precision” agriculture. With increasing use of sensors, drone technologies and big data analytics, human race would be able to optimise the use of the inputs like water, fertilisers for higher yield and all this at zero marginal cost to the farmers. Genetically modified food will be pervasive and without most of the bad that we attribute to it today thanks to fundamental leaps in our understanding of the food biology.
Is technology a self-fulfilling prophecy? Technology defines the future of the future as it has in the past. As the cliché goes, necessity is the mother of invention. The future of the future also holds the point of singularity. Till such time that we come close to singularity, the human endeavour and vision is going to be key in moving the human race further. It will always start as a idea before it becomes technology.
Over a long period of time we will realise that all ideas carry a latent potential within them to fulfil themselves. We know that the proof is always in time, hindsight is 20:20. The human curiosity assures us a true understanding of everything that we touch. As we measure the progress of humanity on a time scale, its equally important to note the true nature of time, which in itself is measured and expressed by motion. So long as there is motion, till then there is time and therefore the human progress.
