The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Build It (Introduction)
No matter where you stand on various political, social, geographical, and economic divides facing us, it’s hard to ignore the waves of doom and gloom. But perhaps it’s time for a bit of optimism and a reminder that we do have the power to invent, build, and shape the future (as my friends and teachers, Alan Kay and David Reed, have long urged).
We are fortunate to have inherited the immense creativity and incredible tools developed by those who came before us. It’s our responsibility to build a world we can proudly leave to our children and their children.
To hopefully foster that sense of assurance and add a dose of optimism, we’re serializing “A Brief History of a Perfect Future: Inventing the World We Can Proudly Leave Our Kids by 2050” by Paul Carroll , Tim Andrews, and me. Starting with the Introduction we’ll share a new chapter of the book and audiobook every week. Subscribe to be notified of new editions.
Please help spread the hope by liking, commenting, and sharing.
INTRODUCTION: Inventing the Future
When Xerox CEO C. Peter McColough established the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970, Xerox executives were, naturally, curious to know what their corporate crystal ball would tell them about the future of computing. When Alan Kay, a team leader at PARC, was asked for the umpteenth time to say what the future would hold, he snapped there was no easy way to know. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” he said.
That line became a mantra for Alan and for PARC, which did unbelievable amounts to invent the future by laying the foundation of today’s computing experience.[1] It also became a mantra for the three of us, as we worked with Alan for decades, and it drives the narrative of this book. In the following pages, we’ll lay out ways that we, as a society, can harness technological marvels at our disposal and invent a sparkling future.
At PARC, starting in 1971, the mantra played out over five glorious years as researchers invented many of the core elements of information technology. Alan’s team contributed to the development of the first personal computer and gave it the overlapping windows and graphical user interface that Steve Jobs copied for the first Apple Macintosh. Alan personally invented what today would be called dynamic object-oriented programming (which is a big reason you have so many apps on your smartphone; developers can easily incorporate software “objects” others have already written, rather than having to write all the code from scratch). Other teams at PARC developed desktop publishing, the laser printer, peer-to-peer and client-server computing, and Ethernet, which enabled corporate networks of personal computers.[2] And, while PARC didn’t invent the internet, its researchers made such significant advancements that PARC deserves considerable credit for it.
A half-century later, most of the information-technology industry and much of global culture and commerce still depends on PARC’s inventions. Technology companies and many others in downstream industries have collectively realized trillions of dollars in revenue and tens of trillions in market value because of PARC’s work.
When PARC began its work in 1971, what most people thought of as a computer weighed more than a ton, needed to be cooled with water in a heavily air-conditioned room, took about 15 minutes to boot up, and was surrounded by a sort of priesthood of lab technicians in long, white coats to cater to the needs of the machine. Data was entered with punch cards, and results were produced on clackety printers as words and numbers — there was maybe the occasional graph, but certainly no images, and the idea of video on a computer was positively silly. The internet existed, but barely — while tens of billions of devices are connected these days, only four computers were tied together in the early Dynabook days. Not four billion. Not four million. Not four thousand or even four hundred. Four.
Computers in 1970, with far less power than today’s phones, looked like the ones shown in Figure 1.
But Alan had developed a series of very different ideas as a graduate student in the 1960s, and they would lead to what he eventually called Dynabook — a battery-powered laptop with wireless access to a network that let you communicate with anyone and have access to all the world’s information.
In a world full of mainframes, Alan imagined computers more like the ones pictured in Figures 2 and 3:
Then he and the team at Xerox PARC invented that future.
Alan didn’t wait 30 years to say, “Wow, I sure have access to a lot of computing power now; what should I do with it?” He and his colleagues at PARC envisioned a radically different educational tool that they could build around that power and use to provide a new kind of literacy and new meanings for “reading” and “writing” so children could discuss, play with, and learn powerful ideas. Then Alan and PARC imagined all the pieces that would be needed. Some related to the computer itself — the kind of operating system that would tap into the new power, the windows that would let users flip easily between tasks, etc. Some related to supporting devices, in particular to capabilities for networking computers and for printing. PARC then moved in a host of directions at once. The whole computing environment, not just the processor, gained momentum quickly. We’re all better off as a result.
Alan invented a future a second time, too.
As an Apple fellow, he helped pull together a vision for a so-called Knowledge Navigator, unveiled in a video in 1987. The device bears an eerie resemblance to the iPad, introduced 23 years later. While Steve Jobs obviously shaped the iPad in his own brilliant way, the vision in the Knowledge Navigator videos clearly guided research in Apple’s labs for years before Jobs got involved.
For good measure, Apple’s work on the iPad gave the company the biggest gift in the history of business: the iPhone. According to Jobs, when he decided the iPad was still in the distance, he realized the technology could be packaged into something much smaller — a revolutionary phone.[3][4] Et voila! Neither Apple nor the world has yet recovered.[5] (In the pre-iPhone world, in 1996, Apple almost sold itself to Sun Microsystems for about $4 billion; as of this writing, Apple’s market value is $2.34 trillion.)
The idea of inventing the future surfaced anew for the three of as we tried to make sense of the dysfunction in the U.S. in recent years — on politics, race, the pandemic and other public health issues, social media and disinformation. As we write this in the summer of 2021, the Gulf of Mexico is on fire, a condo building just collapsed in south Florida and killed scores of people, and a town in Canada burst into flames and burned down as a “heat dome” repeatedly settled over much of North America. One of Paul’s daughters sent him a panicked text: “There is no Planet B!” One of Tim’s sons told him, “You’re worried about whether your Social Security benefits are going to be cut; we’re worried about whether there’s going to be a planet left by the time that’s an issue for us!” Chunka’s daughter noted that he’s often described as a futurist and once quipped to him, “Well, then you’d better not mess mine up.”
Can we reassure our kids, honestly, or are we doomed to a dystopian future? There sure is a lot going wrong.
As is our nature, we’ve settled on hope. We think we can envision a grand future, putting a stake in the ground for our kids and their kids, then draw on our decades of experience evaluating technology trends to start inventing what we’re calling a Future Perfect.
We’re not saying we can predict the future. We very much abide by the oft-used line that “it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Besides, at their best, predictions represent the most likely outcome, and in pivotal times like today’s, the most likely scenarios might well be ones that we want to avoid. No, rather than predict the future, we want to draw on what we’ve learned from Alan Kay. We want to invent it. More precisely, we want to help you invent it.
Following the pattern Alan has laid out for us, we’ll use this book to take you 30 years into the future and describe technological marvels that will be available to us all. These marvels are hard to envision today. While we can all get our heads around a two-fold improvement in something, it’s extraordinarily hard to imagine three decades of the sorts of two-fold improvements in computing power every 18 months that Moore’s law was providing to Alan and his colleagues at Xerox PARC. How do you even process the idea of the MILLION-fold increase in computing power over 30 years that they were designing into their work? So, we’re going to try to do that imagining work for you and describe seven so-important-as-to-be-almost-magical technological building blocks that will be available to all of us in 2050.
We’ll then paint some pictures of how those building blocks could be supplemented by other technological improvements and novel ideas that, together, will let us construct that Future Perfect. As amazing as these technological marvels will be, the building blocks are not the building. In fact, they could lead to an infinite number of buildings. So, we’ll apply “systems thinking” as much as possible to consider how all factors interact and to point us toward a future that is optimized as broadly as possible, not optimized for each of its parts. As we’ll explain more in the introduction to Part Two, too much planning has historically been done in silos — so we wind up with city streets optimized for traffic, for instance, but not for people (and we care much more about people than we do about cars). We all need to make this difficult mental effort (ecosystems are really complex), or we may waste the fabulous power these building blocks will provide us. We want you to get excited about the possibilities of these technological marvels while also seeing the sort of work we all should be doing now to prepare for their possibilities.
Technology will give us great gifts by 2050 no matter what we do, so we could let development happen on its own and then figure out how to react. But we think it would be much better to start planning for the implications — like experimenting now with how cities could be rethought based on driverless cars and some other technological wonders. Why wait 30 years to start learning when we can already see at least the outline of what’s coming?
To provide the groundwork for that planning, we’ll not only describe the technological marvels but will paint visions of 2050 based on what we call “future histories” — short, provocative “news” articles set in 2050 that describe how key aspects of the world might look in areas such as transportation, health care, and the electric grid. We’ll then provide you with tools you can use to envision and write your own future history, for whatever part of the world you think is especially important and that you could help invent by 2050.
Then we’ll hand the keys over to you, encourage you to start right away on inventing your piece of the future, and wish you luck. So, yes, we’re leaving the hard part to you.
But we hope that, along the way, we’ll have stretched your thinking a bunch and given you a powerful way to get started. If we all do our part, we can at least get close to that Future Perfect. If not, we may stumble our way into what we call the Future Pathetic — think Brave New World or 1984. As we all see from what’s happening around us today, technology can cut both ways. It can produce great gains — but dystopia is out there, too.
Let’s harness the future, rather than just taking our chances.
We’ve done this sort of Future Perfect planning for major corporations for years, both separately and together, since the three of us were partners at Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, which pioneered the idea of “digital strategy” in the mid-1990s. After we all left the firm, Paul and Chunka collaborated on a massive research project that led to their 2008 book , Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn From the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years. They then founded a boutique consulting firm, the Future Histories Group, where they help companies spot potential pitfalls, then project out several years to envision an idealized, but plausible, world. Tim went the big-firm route, taking on senior technology roles that led him to his current position at Booz Allen. When the three of us began working together on a project in 2019, and Booz Allen agreed to co-sponsor a book related to it, we decided to write a future history for those who really matter: our children and theirs.
Booz Allen became the final piece of the puzzle in this partnership. The firm provided access to a broad array of experts who sharpened our thinking in numerous ways and encouraged us to expand our scope to include the future of trust, security, privacy, and government services. Given the firm’s long history of consulting with government on major projects, Booz Allen also enriched our understanding of how government entities can play the key role that we need them to play to get to our Future Perfect. (Although we won’t call out each one, Booz Allen is involved in most of the government examples we cite in the book.)
When writing this book, we took some encouragement from what some are calling “the optimism beat” — a growing body of literature that shows that, despite the pessimism created by the drumbeat of negative news, the world is becoming a much better place. Poverty is way down. Life expectancy has fully doubled globally in the past 100 years. Educational levels are way up, even in developing countries. Crime is down. So are deaths from wars — from terrorism, too, even though it worries so many of us.[6] Now, the gains from all this good news are spread far too inequitably. For instance, while infant mortality is down in the U.S., the improvement is much greater for whites than for Blacks and other minorities. While incomes are rising, the disparity between Blacks and whites has not narrowed since the 1960s. Gender disparities in wealth and income also stubbornly persist. But there are still broad gains around the world, and they justify optimism.
Our tracking of technology trends underscores the cause for hope. The trends are creating so many, many, many more resources for the world to use to tackle its problems. We’ve been around long enough that we aren’t Panglossian about technology — watching something like virtual reality come and go and then come and go again as an all-purpose solution over the past 30 years provides cause for being careful. But we can still look at the future and say, based on the technological marvels we expect to see: “Okay, 30 years from now, what would it be crazy for society not to have?”
We’ve created what we call the Laws of Zero to summarize the seven main building blocks that we’ve promised you and that can be used to invent the future — costs are dropping so fast in these seven areas that you can think of them as heading toward zero(ish), meaning that an infinite(ish) amount of that resource will be available. These areas are: computing, communication, information, genomics, energy, water, and transportation.
The easiest Law of Zero to grasp concerns the cost of computing, because we’ve all seen the stunning and unrelenting improvements in cost/performance for decades now. The cost of a gigabyte of memory, for instance, fell from $500,000 to just two cents over 30 years. We use so much memory these days that no one would say it’s free, but if you’re thinking about something costing you $500,000 per unit today and can imagine a price of two cents, well, that feels pretty close to free, right? You’d certainly be inclined to use a lot more of that resource to address a problem or opportunity. The cost of phones and bandwidth follows the same sort of plunging curve as computers, giving us our second Law of Zero. Because of the plummeting costs of computers and phones in all their forms — including satellites and tiny sensors — the world will be so wired that the cost of information will also head toward zero cost, and any information you want will be available.[7] The rapid reductions in the cost of genomic sequencing (which have fallen even faster than that of computing) give us our fourth law and provide enormous reason for optimism about our health. There’s even reason to project that energy costs are headed toward zero (with some significant caveats). If energy costs plunge, then so does the cost of providing water — which becomes ubiquitous even in many areas that are currently arid. And autonomous vehicles will erase so many considerations of time and distance that the costs of transportation will plunge, meaning it can be envisioned as a nearly unlimited resource. The idea of zero cost may be discomfiting, especially for energy, water, and transportation. We explain our thinking at length in the next section.
Here’s another way to think about why we should come to grips with the Laws of Zero and start planning now for 2050: Do we want to be like Norway or like Venezuela?
Both had windfalls from the discovery of enormous oilfields, but Norway used its strategically, while Venezuela used its tactically and meandered into a disastrous future.[8] When Venezuela began discovering massive oilfields during World War I, they led to an economic boom that gave Venezuela the highest GDP per capita in Latin America by 1935, and that boom lasted into the 1980s. But there was no planning for the long term, just reactions to what was happening in the present — and then oil prices crashed in the 1980s. With nothing beyond oil production to rely on, Venezuela descended into social, economic, and political chaos that led to the authoritarian Hugo Chavez and now Nicolas Maduro. Even though Venezuela has the greatest oil reserves in the world, it had a GDP per capita of just $1,700 in 2020. The country ranks 92nd in the world in life expectancy and last in the Americas, at 72 years. By contrast, when Norway discovered rich oilfields in the North Sea in the late 1960s, it strategically invested in ways designed to increase social benefits, including one of the best education systems in the world and a health system so good that life expectancy is nearly 82 years. Norway even poured money into experimenting its way toward a model prison system. It spends roughly three times as much per prisoner as the U.S. does, largely to focus on preparing prisoners to live a crime-free life once they are released — as a result, Norway has one-tenth as many prisoners per capita as the U.S. does.[9] The Social Progress Index ranks Norway as №1 in the world, while Venezuela ranked 81st out of the 168 countries in 2016 and wasn’t ranked in 2018 because its situation was deteriorating so rapidly that a ranking couldn’t be assigned. (The U.S. ranks 28th.)[10]
We’d rather plan like Norway, and we can.
We realize we seem to be swimming against the political tides at the moment. Political factions can barely agree on what day of the week it is, and the 2020 elections have left us with a polarized government (often, a really, really polarized government) at every level. So, this may seem like an inauspicious time to try to rally people around big ideas that will shape our future. But we take encouragement from history. In 1961, when President Kennedy first told Congress of his audacious plan to land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, the response was tepid, and 58 percent of Americans opposed the plan.[11] Yet Kennedy managed to pull support together, and the 1969 moon landing is remembered as one of his and the country’s great achievements. Even though the political climate in the 1960s was at least as fractious as today’s, Congress managed to pass landmark civil rights legislation. And it doesn’t matter in the long run whether margins of victory in Congress were small, as with civil rights, or huge, as with the Interstate Highway Act passed under President Eisenhower in 1956.
In fact, we think that right now is a perfect time for discussions on a vision like the Future Perfect. Sure, our political divisions can make it hard to sort through all the near-term issues on, say, health care — “pre-existing conditions,” “Medicare-for-all,” “the public option” … the list of terms, alone, is onerous. But it’s pretty easy for everyone to agree that, in 2050, it’d be crazy for us as a society to not have affordable care available to everyone that keeps them healthier and lets them live longer. If, for the moment, we set aside the question of who should pay — the big issue that divides us — it’s straightforward enough to see how the Laws of Zero and breakthroughs in medical technology can get us to both far better care and much lower costs. Long-term discussions simply aren’t freighted the way the short-term fights are, and thinking more about the future can actually get people nodding their heads in ways that build rapport. The resulting discussions can then provide context for the actions that need to be taken and for the milestones that need to be reached in the next 10 or 15 years, which can then be turned into factors that need to be considered in our current planning.
The federal government will obviously play a fundamental role by establishing the rules of engagement, conducting basic research, and sparking markets. In recent decades, federal research has given us the internet and the Global Positioning System (GPS), the core of what’s now Google Maps, and it will give us much more by 2050. President Biden believes so much in basic science that he elevated his science adviser to a Cabinet-level position for the first time in the nation’s history. That new national science adviser, geneticist Dr. Eric Lander, said, “Our country stands at the most consequential moment for science and technology since World War II. How we respond will shape our future for the rest of this century.” State and local governments will have a big role to play, too, and they’re huge drivers of both the supply and demand for technology through their policy, regulatory, and procurement choices. Business will play its crucial role bringing innovations to market, as companies chase those tens of trillions of dollars of market valuation that exist out there. We individuals will have to do our part, too, as citizens, consumers, employers, employees, and so on.
So, let’s set aside the short-term differences for the next 200-plus pages and find a vision that we can all agree on. And let’s get excited. The future can be a great place.
Other parts of this serialization:
A Brief History of a Perfect Future: Inventing the world we can proudly leave our kids by 2050 by Chunka Mui , Paul Carroll, and Tim Andrews
Introduction: Inventing the Future
Subscribe to be notified of upcoming chapters as they are released:
Part One: The Laws of Zero
Chapter 1 — The First Law of Zero: Computing
Chapter 2 — The Second Law of Zero: Communication
Chapter 3 The Third Law of Zero: Information
Chapter 4 The Fourth Law of Zero: Genomics
Chapter 5 The Fifth Law of Zero: Energy
Chapter 6 The Sixth Law of Zero: Water
Chapter 7 The Seventh Law of Zero: Transportation
Part Two: The Future Histories
Chapter 8 Electricity
Chapter 9 Transportation
Chapter 10 Health Care
Chapter 11 Climate
Chapter 12 Trust
Chapter 13 Government Services
Coda What is the Future Isn’t Perfect?
Part Three: Jumpstarting the Future (Starting Now)
Chapter 14 What Individuals Can Do
Chapter 15 What Companies Can Do
Chapter 16 What Governments Can Do
Prologue: Over to You
Footnotes:
[1] Alan tells us that while his well-known line was a spontaneous utterance in 1971, “the idea is a simple one, sure to be invented many times.” Alan nods to many who came up with variations of it previously, including Abraham Lincoln, Peter Drucker and Dennis Gabor.
[2] While Xerox is often derided for not capturing anything close to the full value of PARC’s inventions, we think McColough is one of the unsung heroes of innovation. He invested in PARC for years, taking money out of the bonus pool for himself and other executives, even though Xerox didn’t see the big payoff until after he retired in 1982. That payoff was enormous: more than $100 billion in sales of laser printers. For what it’s worth, McColough also established one of the first affirmative action programs at a major corporation.
[4] When Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, he explained Apple’s decision to build its own phone by quoting Alan as saying: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”
[6] A plethora of books provides stats and analysis both for the trends and for why they’re occurring. Among our favorites are: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined , by Steven Pinker; Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think , by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler; and Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think , by Hans Rosling, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund.
[7] Yes, we’re waving our hands over some real economic issues here. In some cases, we’re talking about zero total cost. In more cases, we’re talking about zero marginal cost — or a combination, such as when someone primarily buys a smartphone to use an app like TikTok or Google Maps and basically gets the ability to make phone calls thrown in for free. For now, it’s enough just to note the trend toward zero. We’ll be more precise as we get into the specifics of the Laws of Zero and the chapters on their implications in key areas of life and business.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
