The Roots of My Optimism

Nature endowed our frontal lobes with the ability to look beyond the present moment into time ahead. However the farther cognitively removed we are from the present, the more likely our predictions about the future will prove wrong. This is especially true when some disruptive event explodes in our midst to nullify our customary way of seeing things.  The printing press did this over five centuries ago. The Internet did this less than two decades ago.

The Internet has altered in measurable ways virtually every aspect of human life. It has radically changed how business operates. Even the most astute science fiction writer could not have anticipated the magnitude of the Internet on business.  For instance who in 1990 would have predicted the emergence of a new business model in which company’s most important consumer products are free – such as they are on craigslist.com, Google and an assortment of social media sites.   

Ponder how Amazon’s has transformed the book selling business.  Think about Wikipedia’s radical disruption of the encyclopedia business. Overnight, a $1,400 set of Encyclopedia Britannica lost virtually all its value to most people. Free Wikipedia was not only a hundred times larger, but according to a study by the British journal Nature, just about as accurate.

Customers talking to each other reveal the pros and cons of products and companies on a daily basis.  People now trade stocks on line at a fraction of the cost in pre-Internet times.   Homebuyers go around the close-knit, incestuous Realtor ® community in search for new homes.  Thanks to Skype and other voice over Internet protocols, you can talk to anyone, anywhere in the world without a long distance charge.

The list of technological, economic, social and cultural disruptions in our lives due to the Internet since 1990 or so is astonishingly long. But, the Internet is only one source of life-changing, world-changing disruptive forces that are radically changing the human experience in virtually every way conceivable.

An aging population is radically changing the dynamics of supply and demand.  With most adults now over 45, big houses, full closets and years of materialistic fulfillment are resulting in falling per capita spending in dozens of categories.  Exacerbating this trend is the shrinking number of people under 45 in developed nations around the world – the result of over 35 years of too few births annually to replace the population.

Advancements in science in portend enormous disruptions – many for the betterment of the human condition. For example, genomic and medical research has caused scientists to cautiously predict the end of diabetes, many cancers (if not all) and a long list of inherited diseases like Huntington’s.

Even the dismal science is seeing benign disruptive developments. Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate for his work in using microloans to bail millions of families out of abject poverty has plans that he claims will eliminate poverty worldwide by 2025 – just 13 years from now. This from a man thought by traditional bankers to be more than a bit unrealistic when he proposed to them using microloans to life people out of poverty. Microlending for this purpose has now become a sizeable industry.

Think back 14 years to 1994 and reflect on all of the unpredicted breakthroughs that have occurred in field after field.  The Internet browser, Netscape appeared in 1994. When asked his opinion of its importance, Bill Gates replied, “It’s a trivial thing.”  Yet, the browser transformed the world in ways that no other communications artifact ever has.

Also in 1994, teams at the University of Innsbruck and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology executed the first successful teleportation task. Granted, their accomplishment was far from the impressive actions of Scottie’s teleportation device aboard the Starship Enterprise. But it still was enough even at the quantum scale to confirm its possibility (though I wouldn’t recommending shorting airline stocks just yet.

And here’s another Starship Enterprise technology just beginning to emerge: remember the replicator that Enterprise crew members used to make ham and cheese sandwiches from assorted atoms and molecules? A primitive semblance of the enterprise’s replicator has reached the marketplace in the past decade – only it’s called a “3-d fax machine.” It is yet to reproduce the organic stuff in a ham and cheese sandwich, but

We are in a period of bifurcation – a “crossroads between death and transformation,” as Margaret Wheatley says, when a system is at maximum instability. The Soviet Union entered a state of bifurcation in 1985, fated to reach maximum instability in 1990 and collapse into separate states in 1991. Many in the U.S. smirked and proclaimed absolute victory over socialism. Yet today, the U.S. economic system has been massively disrupted by actions of the most doctrinaire conservative administration in U.S. history. Several weeks ago it blinked during a moment of “maximum instability” and nationalized much of America’s leading financial organizations.

 Living through times like these is a scary, and for many, a deeply painful experience. In such moments it is hard to see far beyond the present. Yet, I am full of optimism about the future. I feel throughout my entire being the winds of change that are blowing away the detritus of worn-out ideas and ways of managing our governments, our companies and indeed our own lives.  Once more, as Tom Stoppard reminds us in his play Arcadia, “The future is disorder. A door like this has opened up five or six times since we got up on our hind legs.  It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you k new is wrong.”

The political, economic, cultural storms we are living through are precedent to the most extraordinary age of comfort and plenty in the history of humankind. Deconstruction has always preceded reconstruction in the long journey of human progress from the days of the first hand-wrought tools.

 

 

 

Comments

[joared]

Yes, out of this deconstruction hopefully something of value will be constructed. I do hope I live long enough to enjoy the change.

[Josh]

Thanks for the uplifting post. It's nice to hear a voice of reason in the midst of all the chaos.

[Stop Smoking]

Very inspiring!

[Mary]

I think your post is very accurate, but I disagree about Wikipedia. As a college professor, I have had more students give me inaccurate information from Wikipedia. I no longer accept any papers that reference it. Also, Wikipedia has turned into a marketing tool for a lot of people. I know of many authors who promote themselves via Wikipedia.

[David Wolfe]

Mary,

And I agree with your comments about Wikipedia. My main point was to show how an open source encyclopedia radically changed the business model of the genre with minimal differences in integrity in comparison with the Britannica model, at least according to the British journal, Nature.

I in fact use Wikipedia extensively, but more as a a direction finder and cite locator than as an authoritative source. I think it is great that you teach your students how to be discriminating in their research efforts.

Thanks.

[Reverse Mortgage Lender]

What an excellent markup of the last 20 years and the changing shape of our lives, economy, politics and daily information infusion. There are some like Chris Martensen who say that it will look drastically different in the next 20 years. He also points out that humans generally base their perception of the future on the recent past or present. As you noted, a skewed version of reality can affect the way we perceive the future but this is also built in- synonymous with the ability to adapt. I wonder if you can elaborate on your vision of the next 20 years sharing your insights from the not so recent past? Very good post David!

[Sharon Wilson]

An interesting and practical approach. I admire your voice of reason, especially at this time when we most need it.

[Marney Lewis]

Great post. Hopefully some good will come out of all this. Thanks for your voice of reason.

[Perry Gruber]

More and more people are getting a clue that the future offers tremendous opportunity for everybody. How we come out of this financial situation will have a lot to do with what future we live into. Business as usual threatens the future your post alludes to. And yet, I share your optimism.

[Jack Zufelt]

Admirable insight and great post. I am very optimistic about our future.