Related Research Menu
National Education Association: Future of Higher Education Scenarios-MacCollege, Inc
National Education Association: Future of Higher Education Scenarios-Outsourced Tech
The Future of Sex; You've Lost That Loving Feeling. Author: Hazel Marshall
National Education Association: Future of Higher Education Scenarios-Wired University
The Religion of the Future, Excerpted from Religion in the New Age. Author: Swami Kriyananda
The Age of Spiritual Machine. Author: Ray Kurzweil
The Future of Law Libraries. American Association of Law Libraries, Futures Committee
Sarasota 2025: A Strategic Conversation about the Future. Authors: Michele Bowman & Patrick Heggy
Facing The Alzheimer's Tidal Wave: Two Scenarios for 2020. Author: Daniel Kuhn
Regenerative Medicine Is the Future. Author: Peter Schwartz
The Four Vision 2010 Scenarios. University of Michigan
Future of Islam – The Turmoil Within. Author: James Piscatori, Foreign Affairs
The World Health Report 2001 – Mental Health: New Understanding, New Hope. World Health Organization
Scenarios of the Future of Biotechnology – 2010, 2020, & 2040
The Workplace in 2050 – Office Fantasies of the Future
A Scenario of Choice in the 21st Century and New Economy
Visions of the Family in the 21st Century
Strategic scenarios: Planning for possible futures
Scenarios of the Future Demand New Thinking
Using Scenario Analysis to Determine Managed Care Strategy Healthcare Financial Management
Health and HealthCare 2010: The Forecast, The Challenge
Healthcare 2020: Technology in the New Millennium
Forum: Future Scenarios in Health Promotion
The Great Cities of the Future
Transit Officials Predict Future Chicago Commuting Scenario
Three Scenarios for Kentucky’s Future
The Future of Medicine – 21st Century Miracle Medicine
Literacy Will Survive: An Alternative Scenario
Future of Retail – Anderson Scenarios. Jennifer Negley, Discount Store News, May 5, 1997.
Aging in the Next Few Decades. Denver Post On-line: Lifestyles health/mind/body July, 1998.
A Day in the Life.
Wired Staff Scenarios: Special WIRED Edition. December, 1995.
A scenario of a day in the life - Monday, October 19, 2020.
MacCollege, Inc. In MacCollege, the NEA describes a possible future
for community colleges. It is a future in which government support has
decreased and the colleges are trying to manage their situation.
In some respects the community colleges are doing well in this future.
Most have outreach centers in the community, large numbers of part-time
and temporary faculty, and distance education programs that are successful.
But administration’s strategy for dealing with the loss of government funding
–to more aggressively and widely recruit for distance education students
– has not succeeded and an alternative must be found.
Local community college presidents decide to allocate regional franchises
in the MacCollege system. Some colleges resist this move and continue to
offer on-campus programs. But eventually funding dries up and they too,
join the franchise system.
In a move toward creating greater efficiency, MacCollege Inc. closes
its freestanding campuses and instead leases space in local malls. “The
mall centers are staffed by salespeople who sell a specific body of content
knowledge, available over MacCollege's computer system, and educational
enhancements, such as do-it-yourself fetal pig dissection kits.” MacCollege
develops and uses an “educational debit card,” debiting for hours of online
education. And accredited coursework includes "Mall-walking" and "The Sociology
of Video-Arcades."
“In 2011 MacCollege stock is issued as an IPO and snapped up
immediately by public sector pension plans.”
The
Future of Religion and the Future of New Religions. Author: Massimo
Introvigne, June 2001. Center for Studies on New Religion
http://www.cesnur.org/2001/mi_june03.htm
(Note on author: Massimo Introvigne is managing director of CESNUR (Center for Studies on New Religions) in Turin, Italy. He is an author and lecturer on the history and sociology of religious movements).
On June 15-17, 2001, at theAxel and Margaret Axson Johnson Foundation’s
annual Engelberg Seminar in Avesta/Engelsberg (Sweden) on "The Future of
Religion", author and lecturer Massimo Introvigne presented his visions
on the future of religion and new religions.
Mr. Introvigne envisions 2010 to be a time when membership in conservative
religious groups, including conservative charismatic Catholics, Pentecostal
Protestants, independent fundamentalist churches, Hindu nationalists, Islamic
fundamentalists, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, and others, may grow at a surprising
rate. But he also envisions (continued) growth in religions adapted to
“post-modern liberalism,” such as the Buddhist movement Soka Gakk.
By roughly 2020, in Mr. Introvigne’s scenario, small liberal groups
may splinter from the Roman Catholic Church over issues such as abortion,
gay rights, and feminism. At this time, Mr. Introvigne sees a “Darwinian
struggle for life among new religious movements” underway and belives a
movement, unheard of today, will gain prominence. Although liberal groups,
such as the mainline Protestant churches in Europe, will likely (continue
to) decline by 2020, the new groups will not statistically be able to challenge
the largest existing religions.
In 20 years from now, Mr. Introvigne believes, “some "old" new religions,
such as the Mormons or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, will probably grow enough
to be acknowledged as part of the mainline. Other "new" new religions will
emerge - while others will disappear - their total membership remaining
but a small percentage of the total general population. Pentecostalism,
charismatic Catholicism, and globalized Islam are much more likely to be
among the ultimate winners. Official and governmental hostility to religion,
including minority religions and "cults" will become a less significant
phenomenon. Religionists will be very happy to look back and be able to
confirm that rumors of the death of God were indeed grossly exaggerated.
As in the year 2000, however, they will again be unable to control the
global orientation of world culture and society, because competition arising
from more secular factors and forces will remain as strong as ever.”
National
Education Association: Future of Higher Education Scenarios-Outsourced
Tech
From Website http://www.nea.org/he/future/market.html.
A Scenario of “Outsourced Tech” ("http://www.nea.org/he/future/outsrc.jpg").
In this scenario, the NEA describes a higher educational model that is
based on the business practice of outsourcing. The model is designed by
business leaders who, acting as advisors to Outsourced Tech, completely
privatize the institution. As a privatized educational facility, dining
halls, residence halls, buildings, grounds, bookstore operations, accounting
operations are all outsourced and employees are fired and rehired as hourly,
part-time workers. The library becomes an on-line cataloguing and ordering
system that is subcontracted to Amazon.com. Work-study students replaced
the librarians.
Tenure is slowly eliminated for the faculty and most eventually take
a buy out package. Private companies now handle all instruction. Businesses
that have, over the years, been developing their own in-house educational
programs for employees, now contract their employees out to higher educational
institutions to provide education and training. As a final outsourcing
step, the business leaders serving as Outsourced Tech’s advisors, oust
the board of trustees and turn decision-making responsibilities over to
an advanced version of IBM's Big Blue.
The
Future of Sex; You've Lost That Loving Feeling. Author: Hazel Marshall
http://www.hackwriters.com/futuresex.htm
In this vision of the future, author Hazel Marshall describes a time
in which sex is no longer associated with human connection and touch, or
childbearing; rather, sex is associated with robots, test tubes, and created
mates, and is completely divorced from reproduction. Although Marshall
does not see this future coming to fruition, she does admit to its possibility.
In this essay, Marshall envisions sex in the future to be possible
with robots that are specifically made and programmed for that purpose.
One can create the perfect robotic partner from a variety of human shapes,
skin coverings, and hair and eye colors. The children of the future, brought
up by robotic nannies and having never been touched or hugged by humans,
will be very receptive to robotic sex. Robotic sex slaves will emerge,
replacing human prostitution and helping to solve population problems.
Marshall imagines that by 2030 sex will be almost completely divorced from reproduction. Increases in reproduction choices through advances in technologies such as egg harvesting and sperm preservation, will result in an increased use of test tube fertilization. Only the old fashioned or poor will conceive physically and with unknown results. A “GenerationRich” will design their test tube children and a new social class will emerge. These technological advances in reproduction choice will also lead to different family and household structures and society will see an increased number of single parent families.
National
Education Association: Future of Higher Education Scenarios-Wired University
Website http://www.nea.org/he/future/market.html
The Scenario of a Wired University: In this scenario, set in 2011, the
University has gone virtual. It no longer occupies a physical presence
in the community; once academic buildings have been converted to prisons
and university sports facilities have been leased to other teams.
The Wired U, as the University is called here, is seeking to
dramatically expand its presence in the distance education market. To differentiate
itself from all the other on-line universities, the Wired U emphasizes
its use of real faculty in the development and implementation of its courses.
Most faculty now work behind the scenes, developing the materials offered
by the on-line educators. These on-line educators – faculty who are photogenic
and good in front of cameras – are scorned as “blow dries” by the serious
behind the scenes academics. But this is the video age: on-line educators
are “stars,” complete by agents and membership in the Screen Actors Guild.
And because it is the video age, distinctions between scholarly disciplines
change to conform better to the medium. Instead of course groupings such
as English lit, biology and nursing, courses are grouped in Hollywood defined
genres such as historical, drama, or situation comedy.
The
Religion of the Future, Excerpted from Religion in the New Age. Author:
Swami Kriyananda
http://www.ananda.it/en/kriyananda/articles/sk_religion.html
(Note on author: Swami Kriyananda (J. Donald Walters) became a disciple of Paramhansa Yogananda in 1948 and lived with him during the last years of his guru’s life. He is one of the few remaining direct disciples of Yogananda, and the only one now living and teaching in Europe. He is internationally known as an author and composer, having written over seventy books and hundreds of inspiring musical compositions).
In this writing, Swami Kriyananda sets forth a vision of the religion of the future, in which there is reconciliation between the old dogmatic assumptions and new scientific discoveries. This reconciliation will create increasing demands that “religion meet science with methods of its own for testing and experience.”
The Swami describes a shift “toward simplicity, toward emphasizing the needs of the inner man over the demands of church and state.” He also envisions a shift in approach from quantitative to a qualitative; and a shift in focus from outwardly to inwardly. “The religion of the future will be a religion of Self-realization” and the result he envisions, will make yoga a “science of religion.”
The Age of Spiritual Machine. Author: Ray Kurzweil
In his most recent book, Ray Kurzweil puts forth a vision of the 21st century in which machines have not only achieved but exceeded the level of human intelligence. “Before the end of the next century, humans will no longer be the most intelligent or capable type of entity on the planet,” according to Kurzweil, and this state “will have profound implications on all aspects of human endeavor, including the nature of work, human learning, government, warfare, the arts and our concept of ourselves.”
Kurzweil lays out, in significant detail, the drivers pushing the development of intelligent and spiritual machines: the accelerating/exponential pace of technology development; the increasing speed of machine computation; increasing memory capabilities; and brain engineering.
Kurzweil also lays out scenarios for the next 100 years:
“2009: A $1,000 PC can perform a trillion calculations per second; computers are imbedded in clothing and jewelry; most routine business transactions take place between human and virtual personalities. Accelerating returns from the advancement of computer technology have resulted in continued economic expansion. The neo-Luddite movement is growing.
“2019: A $1,000 computing device is equal to approximately the computational ability of a human brain; computers are largely invisible and embedded everywhere; most interaction with computing is through gestures and two way natural language spoken communication; realistic all-encompassing visual, auditory and tactile environments enable people to do virtually anything with anybody, regardless of physical proximity; people are beginning to have relationships with automated personalities as companions, teachers, caretakers and lovers.
“2020: computers achieve the memory capacity and computing speed of the human brain.
“2029: A $1,000 unit of computation has the computing capacity of 1000 human brains. Direct neural pathways have been perfected for high bandwidth connection to the human brain; a range of neural implants is becoming available to enhance visual and auditory perception and interpretation, memory and reasoning. Automated agents are now learning on their own and significant knowledge is being created by machines with little or no human intervention. The majority of communication is between a human and machine. There is growing discussion about the legal rights of computers and what constitutes being human. Machines claim to be conscious and these claims are largely accepted.
“2049: Nanobot swarm projections are used to create visual-auditory-tactile projections of people and objects in real reality.
“2099: Human brain reverse engineering appears to be complete. The concept of what is human is significantly altered. There is a strong trend toward a merger of human thinking with the world of machine intelligence; there is no longer any clear distinction between humans and computers. Most conscious entities do not have a permanent physical presence. Machine based intelligences derived from extended models of human intelligence claim to be human. The number of software based humans vastly exceeds those still using neuron cell based computation. There is ubiquitous use of neural implant technology that provides enormous augmentation of human perceptual and cognitive abilities. Humans who do not utilize such implants are unable to meaningfully participate in dialogues with those who do. Life expectancy is no longer a viable term in relation to intelligent beings.”
The
Future of Law Libraries. American Association of Law Libraries, Futures
Committee, 5/14/2002.
http://www.aallnet.org/committee/scenario10.asp
The American Association of Law Libraries Futures Committee has developed three visions related to the future of law libraries.
Vision 1 describes a collaborative model for the future of library operations. In this vision, law libraries actively work to design and implement new models, products, portals, information systems, standards and regulations in collaboration with campus libraries, legal publishers, the ABA and AALS. They also work with the bar and other library organizations to influence information policy. Law librarians assume a leadership role in developing instructional tools and programs.
The second vision describes a scenario in which the physical library no longer exists, but rather operates electronically. In this scenario, librarians conduct research entirely on-line and are located individually among the appropriate attorney/client and practice group. Librarians take an active role in evaluating and selecting systems and working with vendors to develop appropriate training.
In the last scenario, the library is operated as a business. Management is outsourced to a private company and attention is focused on return on investment. Outsourcing provides the clients/attorneys with an opportunity to reduce their overall costs associated with library tasks and research activities. Because the library is operated by a professional management company that offers a variety of growth opportunities for librarians, high quality personnel are available to service the customers.
Personal Transportation for the
Future: Solutions for the 21st Century. Author: Andrew Abulu
www.hackwriters.com/Futureabulu.htm
In this imaginative and entertaining scenario, fiction writer Andrew Abulu describes a solution to transportation problems of the 21st century, delivered via a speech from Bill Gates to the European Union. Dubbed the Personalized Online Patroller – Connectible Orbital Navigator (POP-CON), Mr. Gates describes “a fully automatic air taxi that interconnects with any of several giant airships for long distance travel. Remotely accessed, this user-friendly transport system is universally controlled by a super computer server.” Fueled by hydrogen from Iceland, the POP-CON is equipped with Vertical Take-Off and Landing capabilities, allowing passengers to be picked up from virtually from any location. In addition to providing “clean” transportation, the POP-CON is envisaged to aid in several global issues, such as balancing out the global supply and demand of labor by allowing migrant workers in all countries to travel safely and efficiently between all parts of the world and breaking down regional trade barriers.
The Environment in Geopolitical Relations.
RAND Corporation, www.hf.caltech.edu/hf/scenarios/envgeo/envgeo.html
Authors: Ike Chang and Lloyd Dixon
In this scenario set in 2050, “a new paradigm of geopolitical relations emerges in which the environment acts as the basis of political, economic and military relations between rich and poor countries emerges in the 21st century. National leaders of rich countries couch their foreign policies in terms of environmental protection.” Polluting countries are labeled environmental terrorists, prompting the use of power to enforce environmental regulations on a worldwide basis. “The rise of the UN EPA begins with the proliferation of international treaties, summits and other agreements among world leaders. Elaborate monitoring and enforcement protocols are adopted...with violating countries incurring punitive tariffs and threats of military action. The UN emerges as a supernational agency with jurisdictional powers above and beyond those of secular governments characterized by the 19th and 20th centuries. Economically, the greatest benefactors of the new regime are the middle-tier countries of South America, East Asia and Eastern Europe, which by 2150 achieve a level of economic prosperity and environmental sustainability comparable to that in North America and Western Europe.”
The Global Infectious Disease Threat and Its Implications for the United States. National Intelligence Council, January 2000. Author: Dr. David F. Gordon, National Intelligence Officer for Economic and Global Issues.
This estimate prepared by the National Intelligence Council explores three alternative scenarios for the course of the infectious disease threat over the next 20 years. The scenarios are based on the interplay of three variables: “the relationship between increasing microbial resistance and scientific efforts to develop new antibiotics and vaccines; the trajectory of developing and transitional economies; and the degree of success of global systems of surveillance and response.”
Scenario 1) Steady Progress: This identified “least likely” scenario projects steady progress whereby “the aging of global populations and declining fertility rates, socioeconomic advances and improvements in health care and medical breakthroughs hasten movement toward a “health transition” in which noninfectious diseases such as heart disease and cancer replace infectious diseases as the overarching global health challenge.”
Scenario 2) Progress Stymied: This more pessimistic scenario projects “little or no progress in countering infectious diseases over the next 20 years. Under this scenario, HIV/AIDS reaches catastrophic proportions as the virus spreads throughout the vast populations of India China, the former Soviet Union and Latin America, while multidrug treatments encounter microbial resistance and remain prohibitively expensive for developing countries.” The estimate judges that although this scenario is plausible, it is “unlikely to prevail because it underestimates the prospects for socioeconomic development, international collaboration and medical and health care advances to constrain the spread of at least some widespread infectious diseases.”
Scenario 3) Deterioration, Then Limited Improvement: According to the authors, the “most likely” scenario is one “in which the infectious disease threat worsens during the first half of the [20 year] timeframe, but decreases fitfully after that, owing to better prevention and control efforts, new drugs and vaccines and socioeconomic improvements.” Essentially, this scenario suggests that progress against the infectious disease threat is likely to be slow and uneven, with advances tempered by renewed setbacks, such as the withdrawal of promising vaccines due to side effects.
Sarasota 2025: A Strategic Conversation about the Future. Global Foresight Associates, October, 2002. Authors: Michele Bowman & Patrick Heggy.
The following scenarios were created as a result of a one and a half day meeting held in October 2002 to explore the futures of Sarasota County, Florida. Taken together, they describe three alternative images of Sarasota as a community in the year 2025. The scenarios are based upon the interplay of three critical uncertainties: the supply and use of water; the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in the community; and the role and use Sarasota’s environmental resources.
Scenario 1) A Tale of Two Sarasotas: In this scenario, the gap between the ‘have’ and ‘have-nots’ in the Sarasota has widened, creating a two-tiered society with intense competition for basic resources. However, even for its most privileged citizens, money can’t buy everything; the shortage of water resources affects the quality of life for everyone in the community. An excerpt: “Although Sarasota’s citizens had grown accustomed to the increased rationing over the years, the latest proposal by the County Hydrologist – the most powerful political position in the county – was causing yet another controversy. Many feared that the two-shower per week policy would only exacerbate the rash of water crimes that have plagued Sarasota since 2017.”
Scenario 2) Red Ink Sunset: This scenario explores
how Sarasota’s water resources become a valuable commodity, and ultimately
a possible antidote, for the county’s poor fiscal health. An excerpt:
“The Board meeting opened quietly and without fanfare. No one really wanted
to be there. It was an atmosphere of weariness and defeat. Having just
last month finalized the sale of the county water system to Global Hydro,
the Board members were without purpose or inspiration. Certainly it had
been traumatic for the entire political structure of the county to lose
the revenues and pride that were embodied in the water system. But
there had been no choice. Like many previous “retirement” communities,
Metro County’s economy is almost completely consumed by the health care
and genomics industries. Few tourist
s come to Sarasota these days. There is little left to attract
them – parks have fallen into disrepair, and many beaches have been closed
for years. The County simply doesn’t have the resources – or the will –
to maintain beaches and bays in the wake of the spiraling health care crisis.”
Scenario 3) Paradise Closed: Sarasota’s commitment to
sustainability and water quality has created a pristine and healthy physical
environment. In 2025 Sarasota is a paradise – for those who can still
afford to live in the newly gated community. An excerpt: “In 2025,
Sarasota County more closely resembles a national park than a city. It’s
been rated as one of the Top Ten Beaches for several years running.
With pristine water and glittering sand, tourists are happy to pay the
$20 per person user fee. The County’s substantial commitment to preserving
the environment over the last decade has paid off – conservation land is
not only the County’s largest asset, it is also a valuable commodity, providing
the infrastructure f
or a healthy eco-tourism industry.”
Facing The Alzheimer's Tidal Wave: Two Scenarios for 2020. Author: Daniel Kuhn, Ageing Today, February 2002. (Daniel Kuhn is education director at the Mather Institute on Aging, Evanston, Ill., and is author of “Alzheimer's Early Stages: First Steps in Caring and Treatment”.)
By the year 2020, the first boomers will turn age 75. In the next two decades, the number of Americans with Alzheimer's disease will swell from about 5 million now to over 8 million, nearly 3.5 million of them age 85 or older. “As the Alzheimer's tidal wave approaches, treatment and care for those diagnosed with the disease is likely to differ from that of today. However, despite advances in understanding the pathophysiology of Alzheimer's, few experts believe that a “magic bullet” will be found in the near to mid-term future.” This illness is unlikely to be prevented or cured. Mr. Kuhn then illustrates two public policy scenarios for handling this crisis to the year 2020. These scenarios are important because they don’t involve any medical breakthroughs, or, what Kuhn calls, “ a magic bullet”.
Scenario One: Continue on an Incremental Path. “Looking back from 2020, the incremental process from the early part of the 21st Century continues to consider care giving primarily as a private responsibility of individuals and families supported half-heartedly by government agencies and voluntary organizations. In this scenario, public and private resources fill some gaps and demonstration programs would point the way to inevitable changes--especially to linkage of family caregivers and professionals through computer technology, case management, cash or vouchers to purchase services or supplies most appropriate to each family's needs, and support programs for those affected by Alzheimer's. Furthermore, state and federal assistance is given in the form of payments and tax relief aimed at encouraging homecare and avoiding more costly care in facilities covered by Medicaid. Subsidies enable a greater number of people to afford private LTC insurance and reduce burdens on the public sector. Additional public funds become available for respite services and other home and community-based programs. An increasing number of state governments would take steps to create "dementia-friendly" programs. For example, Florida and a few other states in the early part of the 21st Century support memory-disorder centers staffed with dedicated professionals who understand the disease and provide up-to-date information, support and counseling. Such resource centers proliferate in 2020. Other states would make home and community-based care a top priority, following the lead of Oregon and Washington. Also, states experiment with reforms in financing nursing homes and assisted living facilities that would make such institutions better places to live. All of these important steps help many more people than are being served in the early 21st Century. The vast majority of people, however, would be left to fend for themselves and would have to rely on their income and savings to pay for care. Increased funding would make services available to many more people trying to keep loved ones with Alzheimer's at home. Overall, the incremental approach by 2020 would not come close to keeping pace with the needs of people with Alzheimer's disease and of their families.”
Scenario Two: Moving Beyond. “This scenario moves beyond the early 21st Century state of denial about the magnitude of Alzheimer's and would involve sweeping changes. In this scenario, the human dimension of the illness finally comes into sharp focus, and care giving is seen as a collective national effort. Family caregivers are recognized as the backbone of LTC and benefit from a variety of informal and formal supports. Old ways of providing care are seen as ineffective, and the case for revolutionary changes in healthcare and social services begin to take hold. The line between health and human services eventually blurs, and the integration of Medicaid and Medicare becomes a major priority. Along this path, federal agencies state governments and voluntary organizations adopt new ways of addressing the myriad needs of those affected by chronic illness. Health promotion and fitness of the body, mind and spirit become entrenched in American culture by 2020. Dollars spent on institutional care dramatically shift to home and community-based programs, and LTC facilities convert to social models of care that emphasize lifelong vitality. Nurse's aides and other frontline workers finally receive recognition for their hard work and achieve decent wages and benefits. A flexible system emerges that allows for meeting a growing diversity of needs.
In 2020, early diagnosis of Alzheimer's becomes commonplace, not just for the sake of medical treatment but to provide those affected by the disease with opportunities for information, support and services aimed at helping them cope at every stage of the condition. Caring for people with the illness and supporting their families would become mainstream roles among helping professionals. Local governments, businesses, schools, and civic and religious organizations become sensitive to people in need of this assistance through a massive public education effort.”
Regenerative Medicine Is the Future. Author: Peter Schwartz, Red Herring Magazine, October 2001.
In this promising article, Peter Schwartz illustrates with quite moving words, the vision of a tomorrow when the code of body repair is finally unlocked. In the same way that the human body “knows” to self-repair a small cut, humanity will someday harness the self-healing power of the body through the advancement of science---The Human Genome Project and the continuing understanding of self-assembling biological systems. Mr. Schwartz dramatically illustrates it in this way: “Today, we often return from the hospital with a bit less of ourselves, as pieces are snipped away. Tomorrow, we will come home with regrown livers and reconnected spinal cords. We will grow new brain tissue to repair the damage of a stroke.” Of course, there are many uncertainties before we get to this vision. We are only in the early stages of research, and, there are numerous moral and ethical issues to be sorted-through.
Scenario One: The Scientific Uncertainty. “We are still in the early stages of research; useful results could come soon--or might take decades. It is even possible that little practical information will result from the research, which may yield scientifically important but therapeutically insignificant information. Another possibility is that a few key ailments--say, Parkinson's disease or diabetes--may find cures down this avenue. While this outcome would be wonderful for those who suffer from these diseases, it would not be a revolution in medicine. However, if the success of early research is any indication, regenerative medicine may indeed be the wave of the future.”
Scenario Two: The Intellectual PropertyUncertainty. “Another key uncertainty, of course, is where the research will take place and who will control the intellectual property. Religious-based opposition in the United States to embryonic stem cell research may cause much of this medical domain to develop abroad. President George W. Bush's proposal to limit research to existing stem cell lines profoundly constrains what can be done. Many researchers are already leaving the United States to pursue this study elsewhere. Several scenarios are possible. First, regenerative medicine may prove to be an illusion. Just because nature can regenerate new tissue doesn't necessarily mean we can turn that capability on and off. Second, regenerative medicine may create niche cures, but more general success may be delayed for decades.”
Scenario Three: A Final Scenario. “And the final scenario might see the surgeon's knife used only for traumas and emergencies. We could see a world in which regenerative medicine transforms the human condition, a world of ever longer youthful life, and one in which humans suffer from fewer and fewer diseases. Of course, we in the United States might have to go elsewhere for treatment.”
The Future of Ideas. Authors: Ina Hilgers, Yoshinori Kishimoto, Daniël Malan, Gino Rhuggenaath, Olivier Simonnot, and Dirk van Sluis, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Graduate School of Business.
“The Future of Ideas” poses a set of unique scenarios that take place in the year 2020. Critical uncertainties explore key questions about the nature of knowledge & ideas and idea ownership. The more significant questions that unfold in these stories include the extent to which ideas will be freely shared in the future and, if so, how will they be protected? If ideas lean toward the proprietary side of the spectrum of uncertainty, then a key question global thinkers would ask would be, Will the ideas be fire walled or barricaded from contributing to potential breakthroughs that could lead to innovation? Could “ownership” of ideas help or hinder the resolution of critical world problems, particularly environmental problems? What about power balance? If ideas are owned, will ownership enable more power to corporations? To the individual? To networks? Will ideas control or be controlled? One interesting question: could the future become a world in which every nations becomes an island of identity, composed of millions of “individual islands” of distinct identities and ideas?
Scenario One: Power to the Corporations. “In 2020, national boundaries will be almost a distant memory. There will still be cultural (e.g. linguistic) ways of differentiating, but the superpowers will consist of a few big multinationals that determine the international political and economic agenda. Companies will have a very strong cult-like culture, where work-life and personal life of an employee will merge to become one. All the employee's and their families` needs, from education, health-care, pensions to leisure-time entertainment, will be provided by the corporation. People will assume loyalty and an identity related to the company that they or their family work for, instead of to a country or political party (e.g. "I work for Shell and I am also Dutch", and not the other way round). Ideas in this environment will be generated by the "citizens" of a corporation with the underlying motivation to advance their corporation and it’s power. This power will mainly result out of the corporation’s fast transformation of an idea or the combination of ideas into useful and/or profitable applications. The corporation will not legally own the ideas of their employees, but they will be the first to receive it and act upon it and thus have the advantage of the "first move", i.e. the possible quickest transformation of an idea into a "sellable" or useful application. The power of consulting firms will be negligible and these firms will probably be disappearing altogether because ideas will generated within the borders of companies and will be freely implemented or shared by those with corporate partners if beneficial to the corporation. We would return to a form of imperialism where instead of countries, corporation will be seek and conquer "mines of free human intellect” by identifying and locking-in creative people into their corporation and it’s culture.”
Scenario Two: Graphomania. “A high-tech return to the classical Athenian marketplace: ideas will be generated for their own sake, and (appreciated and) freely used and "grown" by others and valued/appreciated based on its intellectual quality. Applications of ideas will result out of virtual teams combining to grow or combine ideas and put them into form. Ideas will be turned into applications for everybody’s use and the sake of society’s advancement. Resources needed for this transformation of an idea into an application will be generated through large private funds, resulting out of private, altruistic donations. Corporations will still exist, but only to fulfill the most basic human requirements for survival: real fulfillment will result from intellectual exchanges and growth in a stress-free environment, replacing the currently perceived need for luxuries. An anarchy based on creative chaos will replace today’s existing law & order society. The new respected leaders will be those who contribute most to the advancement of this society, either by intellectual merit (value-added to society) of their ideas and / or by actively supporting valuable ideas into useful applications for society’s use.”
Scenario Three: “Power to the Consultants”. “In 2020, the world will be ruled by the organizations / brokers that hold the largest portfolio of "useful" ideas and/or idea generators, e.g. the Big Six consulting firms. In a world where ideas are crucial for survival, the generation and propagation of ideas will be critical to acquiring and maintaining positions of power. Ideas will be highly protected (i.e. developed and encrypted for exclusive use, and legally owned by the organizations - and not the individuals - that generated them). Their ownership will be guarded and defended. Political and economic power will be determined by domains of influence ("This is Andersen country !") - a new ideological battle will ensue. In a society where the biggest asset is knowledge and the knowledge is owned by organizations, idea generators will want to join the well of all the knowledge. They will want to work in these idea-brokerage organizations, because they get access to a big database of ideas that other people/companies have no access to and can live-out their creativity for the largest financial and personal reward. This attraction and retention of knowledge workers will reinforce the big monopolies' position. The consulting "countries" will prosper on their power of idea ownership. Due to the inherently static nature of this protective environment for ideas, there is low cross fertilization of ideas. Ideas will be generated and propagated somewhat slower than would be possible in a less protective environment.”
Scenario Four: “Power to Networks”. “In a full-blooded network economy the final frontier between producer and consumer disappears. Virtual identities in a virtual reality become the great equalizer - it is not important to know whether one is dealing with a powerful multinational or a bright spark with a powerful notebook sitting at home. Ideas are owned and propagated by their generators, but the network ensures a level playing field - ideas are valued on their quality, not by looking at their generator. The fact that ideas are owned will increase the life cycle of an idea. There is a longer time frame to generate cash flows from an idea. Networks will have to circumvent the current problems of creating trust within the networks and of maintaining equal efforts from each of the members in the networks. However anybody that has a good idea can start a new network. The network will be as good as the idea. The entrance barrier for a new network however is low. Individuals or individual groups, not necessarily companies start networks. There will be a fierce competition (more players, since the players are individual groups rather than companies) for the next idea. Nobody will control the network - there will be creative destruction: leapfrogging forward from one idea to the other (survival of the fittest idea). The fittest idea will provide a cash flow as long as it takes for the network society to come up with a better new idea. Knowledge workers will shift from network to network. They will follow the successful ideas. The fact that they move around with the ideas increases the necessary cross-fertilization chain reaction to generate more ideas. The idea economy will be as efficient (and virtual) as the current free-flow capital markets.”
The
Four Vision 2010 Scenarios. University of Michigan, 2002.
A wide group of scholars, futurists, scientists, alumni, professors,
and university personnel gathered under the auspices of the University
of Michigan to explore the impact of future digital technology, scholarly
communications, and the future of the university.
As a result of this study, two axes were created on a scenario matrix to represent the more significant sets of challenges and uncertainties that universities will undergo in the future. The “Competition” axis represents the spectrum of challenges to the university's traditional role in a world of competition. The “Digital Literacy” axis represents the degree to which information technology has transformed not only the essential skills required of the student, but the very nature of knowledge creation and dissemination within the university.
Scenario One: New York Times Sunday, June 20, 2010. Higher Education: It’s Not Just for College Students Anymore. “It is a magnificent autumn day in the mountains, but the Sawtooth Range is no longer enough to keep Robert Belletzkie here. After 26 years in academia, the last eight as chair of the psychology department at Boise State University, he is packing up. The books and paper records from his carpeted, mahoganies office fill three liquor cartons. His computer and the software he has collected, most of it multimedia CD-ROMs and Divides, require eight cartons. He is a voluble but fastidious man, one who still wears his hair above his ears, and this morning he waxes philosophical about this ratio of analogue to digital. "Three paper to eight electronic. As it ought to be. Unfortunately, in this world I'm leaving behind, that ratio is inverted." To emphasize his point he flips through the most recent catalogue from the Boise State Press. "The works in blue background boxes are digital. The works in white are paper." The effect of the blur of pages is that of the lightest shade of blue, much lighter than the stunningly bright sky outside the window behind Belletzkie. "Not much blue, is there?" he asks. "Eight to three. Just one of the reasons universities are unraveling." The unraveling Belletzkie speaks of has become maddeningly apparent in recent years throughout the nation's university system. It is the unraveling of what he sees as the three primary functional strands in the braid of the traditional university: 1) the preparation of the young for economic usefulness; 2) the fulfillment, especially since World War II, of society's research needs; and 3) the provision of values and ethics to the good citizen, a function that holds over from the university's origins in the medieval European church. This braid has become so frayed that in many cases it is only the final strand that any longer bears weight. The first strand, the university's role as creator of careerists, has been frayed for decades as most professions have become specialized beyond the reasonable reach of an institution whose very name speaks of breadth. In the past decade or more, though, outside competitors have been actively picking at this strand, unraveling it further by providing the specialized educations necessary for individual professions. And more and more students are signing up with these other providers. When adjusted for demographics, the enrollment at U.S. universities has been dropping 2-3% each year for the past five years. Why are these students going elsewhere? The reasons are largely financial. Skills training offered by corporations and other providers promise a more marketable alternative than the traditional college education. Also, the expense of a university education now proves prohibitive for many young families, especially given that student loans are more difficult to come by and cost more to pay off, and that a university degree does not guarantee a respectable income that will allow one to climb out from under the debt load. But financial reasons are not the only reasons. One truth unmentionable at faculty meetings is that these corporate training programs are doing a good job of professional certification. General Electric's Career Path program is indicative of the nature of many of these endeavors. Career Path assigns each student a multimedia notebook computer, the primary learning tool. The pedagogy itself, presented both on DigiDoc plug-ins and on GE's Digital Learning Network, involves learning while doing and is cutting edge. Indeed, most research into human cognition and education these days is done by corporations interested in more efficient training and more productive workers. The trainees of these corporations are the beneficiaries of that research. GE now graduates almost 2000 students each year with associates or bachelor's degrees in narrow fields of professional competency. GE itself hires on almost a third of these graduates. Hundreds of other companies line up for a chance at the remaining 1400…” (Please see the rest of this highly detailed scenario at the University of Michigan website.)
Scenario Two - A Particularly Open Letter to the Faculty from the Provost on the Occasion of the Closing of _____ University's Doors Forever. May 2010. “You are all aware of my deep regret, my personal sense of loss on this occasion. I've been with this institution for 22 years, and it's a small enough place that I know all of you personally. So enough of the official talk of declining enrollments and bad investments and infrastructure debt overload. I owe it to all of you to explain more particularly why we are closing our doors after a century and a half, and why this demise is taking place on my watch. Friends, we have failed. We have been followers in a world that demands we be first. With hindsight our missteps seem clearer and the signposts to the road to success are better illuminated. But only with hindsight. So with these remarkable optics of hindsight, I give you a litany of what we should have done:
Scenario Four: New Wine (Fewer) Old Bottles: “By the mid-90s, the promises of digital information technology seemed to know no bounds. Wall Street hurtled along on its wildest streak of bullishness since the 20s, fueled by the allure of technology stocks. Hardly a week went by without a new blockbuster merger of telecommunications giants. When Microsoft, hot on the heels of sweeping the market with its new online service, merged with Disney/ABC, even Ted Koppel couldn't help but joke that now Big Brother was surely "all ears." Although it was still more of a country road than a major thoroughfare, the information superhighway was transforming U.S. society. The ivied walls of higher education were not spared this assault. Mid-decade many factors came together to rise a collective clamoring within academe for a close examination of the university qua university. The onslaught of digital information technologies was certainly one such factor, but so were cuts in federal funding for research and for students, and the fear that universities were losing ground to institutions that catered to students who were in search of narrow skills training. The proximity of the new millennium also had something to do with this soul-searching; most every university issued some incarnation of the "Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century" brochure. The unspoken subtext in this self-reflection was the question of whether the university itself could survive in this brave new world. Though the results of these university discussions usually showed ambivalence about how fully to embrace these new learning technologies, many individual faculty members were already making good use of them. Interactive "edutainment" programs were becoming sophisticated enough to make their appearances in undergraduate classrooms. The University of Indiana began to make use of Broderbund's Composer Supposer CD-ROM in its introductory music theory classes. Faculty there had concluded that the program's melding of graphics and sound illustrated certain musical concepts more readily than either medium alone could have. Indiana's reputation in music encouraged other schools: as went Bloomington, so went the nation. Those who advocated full adoption of such learning technologies argued that not only were they efficient, engrossing, and self-paced, but they allowed each student to choose the learning style that was best for him. They even argued that such media created new modes of knowledge, knowledge that could not be fully represented in other ways. Such modes of knowledge, they said, represented nothing less than a new paradigm of literacy. Though these multimedia programs were becoming more and more popular on campuses, many voiced fears that they represented just one more force pushing the university away from its traditional--and etymological--breadth of focus into a narrow concern with job training. This chord of concern would be struck again and again in coming years. These fears of "InfoTech" were not baseless. By the end of the decade interactive multimedia programs had become the most widely used learning tool in training programs for business. Many were custom-designed to teach new employees the skills necessary to be productive at a particular job. The one program that was the single biggest target for academics' disdain was the program McDonald's put together for its recruits and touted in its TV commercials: it allowed new employees to practice their serving skills on virtual celebrities--Madonna buying a Coke without ice, Ben Franklin ordering eleven Big Macs. Computer simulation at its most inane, it represented to its critics the mindset that would forever limit digital learning technologies, a mindset, they argued, that despite its profitability had no place in the university. But the digital boom showed no signs of bust. In 1997 the Supreme Court ruled in Buchwald v. Broderbund that the use of short excerpts from copyrighted works in CD-ROMs did not constitute fair use and that copyright owners must be compensated. Rather than putting a damper on multimedia production, this ruling proved a boon for it, for intellectual property owners and creators now had their incomes legally protected. Protection under law didn't guarantee protection in practice, but several technologies combined in the late 90s to bring the real closer to the ideal. Secure "digital watermarks"--electronically imprinted bits of data that, like the watermark on currency, ensure authenticity--were developed and allowed producers to tag their digital information. Buyers of CD-ROMs began to pay for use of all the intellectual property on the disk, but--publishers keeping in mind that pennies add up when volume is in the millions--the cost was kept to a minimum. All of this digital compensation relied on online commercial transactions, which by 1998 were secure 99% of the time--slightly more often than face-to-face transactions. Even online multimedia documents could now be financially profitable for their creators. Adding to the multimedia blitz was a deluge of new digital information. Reelected from a field of formerly Republican competitors, President Bill Clinton in 1997 made good on a campaign promise to open the government's vast troves of information to online access at cost. Within three years all public domain material from the Library of Congress was available through any phone line, as were the public files of most government agencies. The Administration also encouraged competition for databases that had previously been monopolized by one or two suppliers. Westlaw and Lexis, for example, which had charged law firms tens of thousands of dollars for access to their legal databases, were forced to slash their prices to compete with such cut-rate packagers as LawLine. Galaxies of readily accessible information lured academics into multimedia by the thousands. One of the most successful was Hector Chavez, a professor of history at MIT. All the applications ever filed at the U.S. Patent Office had recently been put online. Chavez used this cheap information as the raw material for his immensely popular Invention Strategies course, a course that enrolled almost 20,000 would-be inventors from all over the world each fall. The arts and humanities, to the surprise of many, engaged in more than their share of these endeavors. George Mason University maintained a home page for the nation's poet laureate that included online poetry workshops and readings for high-school students. And the popularity of a multimedia program by Robert Pinsky that allowed the interactive study and creation of formal poetry, ProzCD, caught even its creator by surprise…” (Please see the rest of this highly detailed scenario at the University of Michigan website.)
What to do With Your Life - In the New Year, Times May Be Tumultuous Unless You Make a Virtue of Uncertainty. Author: Joel Garreau, Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, December 30, 2001; Page F01.
This rich article focuses on the individual, providing good advice on scenario planning techniques & tools that enable a person to “plan” for uncertainty. In the wake of the September 11th attacks, many people drew fogs of uncertainty in their minds. In fact, some took drastic action, such as self-sterilization and selling homesteads to wander the West, not quite knowing or planning for their lives, aside from wanting to get out from under the other shoe, were it to drop. Mr. Garreau writes about scenario planning for the individual person, beginning with the drawing of a compelling line of uncertainties in life. Garreau expresses that, oftentimes, we are hesitant to think about our own future, because “decision making usually leads to a fork in the road. A number of outcomes are possible.” This is uncomfortable. Scenario planning therefore, helps build a mental roadmap of alternative futures, so that planning can be more coherent and “comfortable”. This highly instructive article ends with a summary of global scenarios resulting from work among a group of scenarists and executives hosted by Global Business Network. This notable group had gathered in San Francisco to develop a “more rich, real-world, and timely set of futures”. This scenario-set provides a useful backdrop to one’s own personal life, work, and planning.
Scenario One: Walled World. "Walled World," is a volatile place. Government is weak, social turmoil on rolling boil, and selfish me-first instincts strong. The diabolical attacks of 2005 were the icing on the cake. After the terrorists set off the smallpox bombs in Harlem and Anacostia, they let the FBI find a third one in a storage locker in a white-supremacist community in Idaho. It looked like whites had declared war on blacks. The terrorists next exploded gasoline tanker trucks in enclaves of white privilege, from the playing fields of Exeter to the debutante balls of Atlanta, so it would look like blacks were retaliating. Then came the attacks on ethnic groups, from the St. Patrick's Day parade to the assault on the biggest Hispanic cathedral in Los Angeles. The more leaders try to jawbone the public into trusting each other, the more people suspect they are being led to the slaughter. America becomes a collection of protective enclaves. Precious commodities, from information to gold, are hoarded. Some local economies prosper, especially if they have natural resources, and the education to exploit them. But the only large institutions that prevail are those who can portray themselves as deeply rooted in each of these neighborhoods and tribes.”
Scenario Two: Cave World. “A world without trust in markets and especially without trust in any group that does not share a common faith and value system is "Cave World”. In "Cave World," the process of globalization quite suddenly reverses. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt slip into anarchy; suitcase nuclear weapons level Silicon Valley, Tokyo and Moscow; smallpox and other plague weapons make global overpopulation a concern of the past. Xenophobia becomes rampant. Where there are still borders, they are fiercely defended. Visas to the developed world, most particularly the United States, are almost impossible to come by. The values that replace faith in markets take many forms, and some are benign, for unlike in "Walled World," this is less a world coming apart than one in which people cling together, albeit in small homogeneous groups. The monasteries, neighborhood cooperatives and local folk tunes of Tacoma Park and Berkeley are quite beautiful. But other atavistic movements repress women, attack minorities, revert to the rule of warlords and deprive their people of technology. Think Alabamistan.”
Scenario Three: Reformation World. "Reformation World," is one in which all over the globe people are united in finding it hard to remember why, in 2001, people felt the most important things in life were those that could be measured in dollars. In 2010, the shock of the 2001 terrorist attacks seems quaint, compared with the new pace of change. In 2010, people just shrug at headlines that once would have seemed world changing, like the recent report that a 13-year-old, in her mother's fertility clinic, has cloned her dog. No one has figured out who caused the contamination of the Mississippi, Amazon and Rhine River valleys, although of course al Qaeda is suspected. Primarily, the world is reeling from weird weather. Imagine this: The vast amount of fresh water pouring off the melting ice caps has caused the Gulf Stream to shift in mid-decade. That has stopped the melting. Germany and Scotland are now permafrost. It also has started to create deserts in places that have been temperate. The result is migrations. Particularly startling are the educated, sophisticated people fleeing centers of the industrialized world from London to Los Angeles. Folk find themselves with a desperate need for some bedrock; some higher meaning amid these wild swings. Deeply "spiritual" people find it hard to believe bigger designer kitchens seemed important not so long ago. The fundamental things apply, as time goes by. The thing that matters now is character. Also loyalty, trustworthiness, integrity, courage and faith.”
Scenario Four: Market World. “In "Market World," supply and demand trump local values, driving globalization. In this 2010 world, oil is revealed to be thicker than blood. Just as the first acts of terrorism helped seal a new friendship between Russia and the United States, the rest of the world unites to diminish terrorist threats. A global consensus emerges: It is crucial to improve world living conditions to drain the swamp that once had bred terrorism. People prosper, and the global economy claws back. Debts to unstable countries are forgiven. Education initiatives -- especially among poor young women -- flourish. Eliminating disease, starting with AIDS in Africa, becomes a high priority. The message of the marketplace is: We're all in this together.”
Future of Islam – The Turmoil Within. Author: James Piscatori, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2002.
The author compares two highly academic and historical books: “What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response” by Bernard Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press 2001), and “Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam” by Gilles Kepel (Harvard University Press 2001). Lewis and Kepel present a historical overview of Islam, an academic view of the ‘lessons of the history’, and a futuristic outlook. (This annotation includes a normative scenario and a decline scenario.) Both views differ widely: Bernard Lewis, a historian, contends that the history of Islam was marred by victimization over the centuries; yet, he finds plausible reason for the survival of Islam in a modern, 21st century world. Gilles Kepel, on the other hand, considers Islam “a utopian project whose moment has passed,” arguing the plausible likelihood of Islam’s decline. Together, these books depict a passionate debate over the politics of the Muslim world. Both were written before the events of September 11th.
Bernard Lewis argues that the deep roots of the Middle East and Islamic history guarantees it’s potency and staying power in the future. He urges individual Muslims to ask themselves an essential question: What went wrong? He believes that Muslims are capable of learning the lessons of history, and applying them proactively within the context of the harsh realities of modernization. Lewis makes a strong case that one essential lesson of history, among others in the 20th century, was the “accusatory finger”. That is, Muslims blamed the West for economic problems, which led to an introversion among these cultures, that in turn, led these cultures to be the prey to “predatory authority”, such as narrow, clerical rule. According to Lewis, destiny is possible for Muslims if they believe that they can take destiny into their own hands. This doesn’t mean terrorism or radicalism (besides, terrorists couldn’t account for the lessons of history, even if they tried to). Rather, it means taking responsibility for cultural self-confidence. This is leadership. The preservation of Muslim cultures and Islamic belief is just as important as the preservation of the environment. Terrorists understand one thing: the so-called “straight path”. Among other things, the “straight path” dictates that everyone else in the world is an infidel, or, “allies of Satan”. Unfortunately, this perception is unrealistic.
Scenario One: A House in Order: In the future, Muslims co-exist with “unconquered infidels and a global unwillingness to come to terms with the long-term dangers of fusing religion and politics.” It is a world of Muslim reform, where Muslims formulate and re-formulate theories, ideas, and practices of pluralism and political participation that were original tenants of true Islam. The reformers are not “replacement leaders” of the clerics (the clerics are held with reverence), but unlike the clerics, the reformers provide Muslims with global leadership and savvy in matters of Internet, communications, global cultures, and the economy. In 2002, there were already a number of notable Muslims arguing that Islam and democracy were indeed – compatible – taking the debate away from those that consider democracy an “alien system,” where, obedience to the divine rather than popular sovereignty was complete. In 2005… “An increasing number of Muslims intellectuals in societies as diverse as Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, and Malaysia” speak-out about the intrinsic Islamic principles of pluralism, tolerance, and civic participation. The world begins to realize that these principles were never that far apart from the principles held in high esteem in civil society. Mutual implementation within Muslim societies and civil societies successfully maintain the integrity of Islam and the integrity of the principles of civil society. Internationally, and, within the United Nations, the Muslims illustrate passionate, innovative, and creatively new voices & views on pluralism and political participation. Muslims had historically advocated human rights, women, and other special interests, but in a different light. In this scenario, the Islamic realm of the Muslim world is in a continual “process of redefining itself”, while at the same time, Muslims contribute to higher global ethics and goals. In fact, the Muslim’s unique insight into global cultures “disrupts” some of the original planning & implementation goals of United Nation committees in 2005, because they continuously provide fertile thought for reconciliation and diplomacy in a world where there continue to be “rogue nations”. Muslims are a permanent and indigenous presence in the Western societies of Europe, North America, and Australia. They provide an invaluable service to humanity. (End of scenario 1).
Gilles Kepel, a political sociologist, argues the end of Islam. The “Islamist movement has largely passed.” To Kepel, the future is already here. In his thesis, the emerging lessons of history strongly reveal that clerical rule could not possibly withstand, stand against, or, influence today’s civil societies. Kepel describes the confluence of Islam and civil society within the context of modernization, class & ethnic differentiation, and global mass media & education. These “driving forces” have a tendency to isolate Islamic tradition. It follows, then, according to Kepel, traditional Islam could not possibly survive isolation from the rest of the world. If Islam doesn’t survive, then the result will be an evolution into a spectrum of new identities. (What is striking about Kepel’s theory is it’s similarity to Darwin’s “Origin of the Species”; but instead of a mass extinction of species, Kepel discusses a mass extinction of culture.)
Scenario Two: Whither Jihad? A Decline. In this world, social and political changes have contributed to the fragmentation of religious authority, the meaning of scripture, and the fragmentation of religious clerics. The contributing factors in 2002 were a decline in the public confidence of the Catholic Church, due to the hierarchical mishandling of abusive priests; and, the loss of respect for the views of Osama bin Laden, once considered a very respected cleric on a worldview level. This fragmentation in 2002 represented the first of many tectonic shifts that eventually led to the decline of Islam. Clerics are no longer taken seriously when preaching a clerical view of the book of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran. Throughout the world, individual Muslims decide to interpret the Koran on an individual level. By 2005, there is an increasing number of individualistic interpretations of the history of the Prophet Mohammed. These new perceptions begin to spread throughout the developing nations through the enabling technologies of the Internet and the ‘leapfrog’ technologies of global wireless communications. These technologies enable the delivery of the original Koranic scripture on digital application slates, similar to the hand-delivery of the original Ten Commandments on geological slates. Islamic jurisprudence and Koranic prescriptions are, by 2005, held in reverence as a tool for guidance – as had been for centuries - but the interpretation of the Koran in 2005 increasingly rests with the “eye of the beholder”. The administration of justice as an “eye for an eye” declines in favor of the dictate of an individual’s conscience within the context of the Koran’s guidance combined with the morals of an individual society. By 2005, it becomes increasingly difficult to draw the line between pure Islamic jurisprudence & prescription versus blended Islamic jurisprudence & prescription. Radicalization and terrorism become isolated incidences, no longer having just cause or association to any religious belief, or, the “hijacking of a religion”; but rather, terrorism is recognized as a medical disease: a form of insanity. Inspite of the efforts of the World Health Organization (WHO) to communicate an understanding of this disease, insanity continues to bear the “fruit of the vine” of stigma on a global perceptual basis. As the Muslim-Western world increasingly experience encounters with each other, attempts at “clerisocracy” (a term coined by the late political scientist P.J. Vatkiotis), remain only punctuated, isolated attempts. The critical uncertainty remaining in 2005 as futurists ponder the next five-year horizon to 2010, is the question about an Islamic trajectory of adaptation. Islam. Futurists will ask, “In 2010, will Islam become a whimpering revolution, where “radicals have come unstuck” but the moderates have not?” “Will the struggle for integrating democratic ideals with Muslim values define the modern experience? If so, will it be an inspiration? Will it depend upon the extent that “ideological rigidity” succeeds or fails?” “ The modern experience may increasingly become “democratic”, or, a “blended democracy”; or, a fuller-fleshed version of a democracy and Islam.” Or, perhaps, time will mark the death of Islam and innovate a newer, more evolutionary form of culture that is based upon the inspiration of the Koranic scripture. Time will tell. Sometimes, it is the greatest deliverer.
The World Health Report 2001 – Mental Health: New Understanding, New Hope. World Health Organization, Director-General, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland.
The theme of this landmark World Health Organization (WHO) study is to show how science and sensibility are combining to break down real and perceived barriers to care and cure in mental health. Humanity increasingly understands that the nexus of the trends and driving forces of genetics, biological, social, and environmental factors are increasingly coming together to cause mental and brain illness. This WHO report provides a global overview of the mental and psychosocial illnesses that pervade societies globally. The WHO suggests, “About 450 million people today suffer from mental or neurological disorders from psychosocial problems such as those related to alcohol and drug abuse. Many of them suffer silently.” The report makes a startling statement: “Major depression is not the leading cause of disability globally and ranks fourth in the ten leading causes of the global burden of disease. If projections are correct, within the next 20 years, depression will have the dubious distinction of becoming the second cause of the global disease burden. Globally, 70 million people suffer from alcohol dependence. About 50 million have epilepsy; another 24 million have schizophrenia. A million people commit suicide every year. Between ten to 20 million people attempt it.” This report is a comprehensive review of what we know about the current and future burden of all these disorders and their principal contributing factors.
In the last chapter of this very comprehensive report, “The Way Forward – Providing Effective Solutions” the World Health Organization makes ten overall recommendations for action (highly detailed with many examples), along with three scenarios. The actions recommendations are: 1) Provide treatment in primary care; 2) make psychotropic drugs available; 3) give care in the community; 4) educate the public; 5) involve communities, families, and consumers; 6) establish national policies, programs and legislation; 7) develop human resources; link with other sectors; 9) monitor community mental health; and 10) support more research. The scenarios are based on a societies’ resources, which of course, in any governmental action setting, is the most important critical uncertainty to launch any or all of the above ten (10) actions.
Scenario A: Low Level of Resources. “This scenario refers mostly to low income countries where mental health resources are completely absent or very limited. Such countries have no mental health policy, programs or appropriate legislation; or, if they exist, they are outdated and not implemented effectively. Governmental finances available to mental health are tine, often less than 0.1% of the total health budget. There are no psychiatrists or psychiatric nurses, or very few of them for large populations. Specialized inpatient care facilities, if they exist, do so as centralized mental hospitals, which serve more for custodial care than mental health care, and often have less than one place per 10 000 population. There are no mental health services in primary or community care, and essential psychotropic drugs are seldom available. Mental health is not a part of epidemiological and health reporting systems. While this scenario applies mostly to low income countries, in many high-income countries essential mental health services remain beyond the reach of rural populations, indigenous groups and others. In brief, scenario A is characterized by low awareness and low availability of services. What can be done in such circumstances? Even with very limited resources, countries can immediately recognize mental health as an integral part of general health, and begin to organize the basic mental health services as a part of primary health care. This need not be a costly exercise, and it would be greatly enhanced by the provision of essential neuropsychiatric drugs and in-service training of all general health personnel.”
Scenario B: Medium Level Resources. ‘In countries in this scenario, some resources are available for mental health, such as centers for treatment in big cities or pilot programmes for community care. But these resources neither do nor provide even essential mental health services to the total population. These countries are likely to have mental health policies, programmes and legislation, but they are often not fully implemented. The government budget for mental health is less than 1% of the total health budget. There are inadequate numbers of mental health specialists, such as psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses, to serve the population. Primary care providers are largely untrained in mental health care. Specialized care facilities have fewer than five places per 10 000 population, and most of these are in large and centralized mental hospitals. Availability of psychotropic drugs and treatment for major mental disorders in primary care is limited and community mental health programmes are scarce. Admission and discharge records from mental hospitals provide the only information available in health reporting systems. To summarize, scenario B is characterized by medium awareness and medium access to mental health care. For these countries the immediate action should be to enlarge mental health services to cover the total population. This can be done by extending training to all health personnel on essential mental health care, providing neuropsychiatric drugs in all health facilities, and bringing all of these activities under a mental health policy. A start should be made on closing down custodial hospitals and building community care facilities. Mental health care can be introduced in workplaces and schools.
Scenario C: High Level of Resources. This scenario relates mostly to industrialized countries with a relatively high level of resources for mental health. Mental health policies, programmes and legislation are implemented reasonable effectively. The proportion of the total health budget allocated to mental health is 1% or more, and there are adequate numbers of specialized mental health professionals. Most primary care providers are trained in mental health care. Efforts are made to identify and treat major mental disorders in primary care, though effectiveness and coverage may be inadequate. Specialized care facilities are more comprehensive, but most may still be located in mental hospitals. Psychotropic drugs are readily available and community-based services are generally available. Mental health forms a part of health information systems, although only a few indicators may be included. Even in these countries there are many barriers to the utilization of the available services. People with mental disorders and their families experience stigma and discrimination. Insurance policies fail to provide cover for the care of people with mental disorders to the same extent as for those with physical illness.”
Scenarios of the Future of Biotechnology – 2010, 2020, & 2040. Fortune Magazine, “The Amazing Future of Business” series, March 6, 2000. “Blessings from the Book of Life” Author: David Stipp interviewing Francis Collins, The Genome Institute’s chief, Joshua Boger, CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and Cheryl & Diana Jay, University of California at San Francisco.
The author, David Stripp, specializes in writing on scientific topics, and in 1998 co-wrote the "Selling of Impotence" which won a Science in Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers. In this article, the author writes about future trends and the bounty of biotech. He writes, " Decoding the human genome will yield a bounty of biotech miracles that will transform our lives in the next 40 years.” By the year 2010: "We'll start winning the war on cancer. In this scenario - let say, a person experiences back pain, night sweats, and loss of appetite, and then find an egg-like swelling under the arm. Today a doctor would analyze biopsied cells from your lump with an instrument using 400 year old technology, the microscope and make an educated guess: You have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. You'd get a one-size fits all chemotherapy that might work. If it doesn't your doctor would tell you not to despair - other drugs might save you. In 2010, your doctor will scan your biopsied cells with a DNA array, a computer-chip-like device that registers the activity patterns of thousands of genes in cells. It will quickly establish that your lymphoma is actually one of six genetically distinguishable types of T-cell cancer, each of which is known to respond best to somewhat different drugs. Another gene testing device called a SNP ("snip") chip will flag medicines that won't work in your case because your particular liver enzymes tend to break them down too fast.... (see full scenario in article)... the best thing about this scenario is that it is already in the works. Already, researchers have shown that they can distinguish different forms of leukemia according to abnormal patterns of gene activity in cancerous blood cells. " By the year 2020: "Drug developments will be vastly accelerated by techniques akin to testing new aircraft designs in wind tunnels, predicts Joshua Boger, CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, a Cambridge, Mass. biotech company. Researchers will begin clinical trials by giving safe, tiny doses of, say, half-a-dozen possible variations of a new medicine to volunteers. The drug's effects on thousands of genes and proteins will be monitored and analyzed by computer to predict how higher "therapeutic" doses will affect people of various genotypes. That will enable researchers to select the optimal molecules and immediately begin large, pivotal clinical trials, skipping initial phases of testing that now often takes years. The result: Gene-based drugs geared to patients' genotypes will be available for most major killers. Some big diseases will be on the way out--rheumatoid arthritis and other auto immune diseases such as lupus will be essentially curable by drugs that selectively switch off parts of the immune system that attach patient's own tissues. Potent new therapies will be available to treat once mysterious diseases, such as schizophrenia and narcolepsy, at the level of root causes. " By the Year 2040: " Individualized preventive medicine will be the gold standard in this world. Gene therapy, as well as more traditional gene-based drugs, will be available for most diseases. It will be possible to hold most cancers in check for many years. Alzheimer's disease, which will be detectable before symptoms appear, will usually be preventable. The average life span in the developed world will top 90. U.S. health costs will reach a third of GDP. Key genes involved in aging will be identified, and clinical trials of anti-aging drugs will be underway. ...Clinical trials to boost IQ, memory, and other mental powers will be under way....Top of the Page
The Workplace in 2050 – Office Fantasies of the Future. Fortune Magazine, “The Amazing Future of Business” series, March 6, 2000. Author: Nicolas Stein interviewing Carl Magnusson of Knoll Design, Inc. and David Strohl, of AllSteel Division, Hon Industries.
"In these visions of the workplace of 2050, seats float and holograms talk. But whatever happened to the wate cooler? " In this article, the author explores ergonomics of the future - never mind the 8 year studies and attempts by Congress to pass remedies for an "ergonomically correct” workplace. Stein envisions ergonomics and design going hand-in-hand in the future. In future, we will continue to live our entire lives at the workplace, so like Yahoo, we may as well try to make it as comfortable as possible. Stein interviews Carl Magnusson, director of design for Knoll, a design company. Knoll's Scenario "There are no new ideas... only better combinations of existing things." In his vision of the workplace in 2050, people will need chairs to sit in and flat surfaces to work on, but magnetic levitation (maglev) devices will enable them to float on those chairs and move about at will. Technology will have permeated our world, so PCs and phones will have vanished into the walls. Magnussen even believes that noise cancellation --opposite and equal sounds waves neutralizing each other -- will eliminate both the need for concrete walls and the distractions of a cubicle filled office space. Virtual dividers of adjustable opacity... will be made possible by a similar process of image cancellation -- will be activated when privacy is required. As technology recedes, human interaction becomes the focus. That, he opines, is "The DNA of the office.... the ceremony, the ritual, the intangible stuff of social relations." Our movable chairs will also be wireless, linked by a tiny apparatus implanted in our ears. Want to access some information on the network? Simply think about it, and a holographic projector in the chair will display the data at a bandwidth accessible only to you; if you wish, you can pick up the material to show to someone else. How it will work, exactly, is unclear. Even videoconferencing will become more holistic, replaces by hologram-filled séances. They will link workers from different locations in a "shared virtual room". Communication again is the focus; the technology that makes it possible will be virtually invisible." Hon Industries: Everyone Gets a Corner Office: "The relationship between furniture and technology has evolved dramatically over the past 50 years, and according to the design team at Hon Industries' AllSteel division, its further evolution will define the workplace of 2050. Consider the first TV's for example, which were treated like pieces of furniture. Now flat-screen TVs the size of picture frames has morphed into furniture, a trend that will continue. Communication and information devices will be integrated into chairs, walls, and even the work surfaces themselves...resulting in the replacement of keyboards and phones with voice recognition. Just ask, and you'll see data like stock quotes, news -- even the time your daughter's soccer game - displayed simultaneously on a flat screen. It is believed that virtual technology will make telecommuting feel more intimate and realistic. Holograms are central to his vision -- he thinks 3-D images of faraway colleagues will show up at our office to tap us on the shoulder. Such ghostly friendships has better feel real enough to compensate for the absence of human contact, as most centralized corporate complexes will give way to small office clusters. ... The workplace of 2050 is equitable; everyone deserves to see something great out the window. By 2050, look for small, scattered offices designed with domed glass ceilings and walls. The result? Direct sunlight, which will bring both a psychological boon and an environmental one- the easy and efficient collection of solar power.Top of the Page
A Scenario of Choice in the 21st Century and New Economy. A scenario from the book, “The Future of Success”. Author: Robert B. Reich, published in 2000 by Random House, Inc. New York, NY.
The author's premise is that as technology and innovation continue to accelerate and impact society, it won’t equate to productivity as we know it – a productivity that creates a richer world in which wealth can give workers the freedom to work a shorter workweek. Rather, the future holds more work. Reich demonstrates that the faster the economy changes – “with new innovations and opportunities engendering faster switches by customers and investors in response -- the harder it is for people to be confident of what they will be earning next year or even next month, what they will be doing, where they will be doing it. In short, these fabulous new deals of the fabulous new economy carry a steep price: more frenzied lives, less security, more economic and social stratification, and loss of time and energy for family, relationships, friendship, community, and self.” The pattern in every chapter of Reich' book is basically this premise: as innovation becomes a mainstream goal of organizations, and "new deals" increase, talent, brains, "geeks" and "shrinks" will continue to be in high demand - these workers will devote their lives to work, consuming their entire lives within the office; practically doubling the number of hours in their workweeks due to the human tendency is to want more, not less. The number of hours it will take to achieve “more” won’t matter; while non-talented workers who do ordinary things, with ordinary jobs and routine tasks are at the highest risk of job loss, downsizing, and technology replacement – to be caught in a 21st Century aparteid. These workers, like the talented, will work longer hours, but it will be of necessity to survive. They will devote their lives to work as well - working double shifts - consuming their entire lives but for a totally different reason - survival. It will mean no time for school, for continual learning, or self-improvement, much less leisure or family life. This book brings the reader to many visions and scenarios of the future. In the last chapter, "Public Choice", Reich draws a vivid picture of future trends and a discussion of social choices that "society will simply have to make.” Reich’s Scenario: "Though we cannot know for certain the shape of the future, many of the trends that will carry us there are already clear. Today we can see the emergence of vibrant new economy brimming with innovations. In the near future, consumers will be able to get exactly what they want, from wherever, at the best price and value. And when a better deal comes along, they'll be able to switch at the blink of an eye -- or the click of the mouse. Investors will be able to shift their money instantly to better deals around the world. People whose services are in great demand will be able o move to better opportunities with exuberant ease. Jobs will be abundant, many of them exciting and well paid. There is much to in this picture to celebrate; yet there is also much that should at least give us pause. The economic dynamism we're beginning to see also brings financial insecurity, work that's more frenzied and intrusive, widening inequality of income and wealth, and greater social stratification--all of which is eroding personal, family, and community life. It seems an opportune moment to ask whether we are headed down the path of the scenario we wish to go -- that is, to examine many scenarios of the social choices that lie before us. One scenario of choice in the 21st Century is what Reich outlines in "New Economy" . He discusses the two extremes of choice - social consciousness or simply, an acceleration of today. "At the other extreme, we could put our foot on the accelerator and let er' rip. We could choose the path of fastest growth, widest choice, and quickest switch. Pursue this path to its logical end, and we all would be working in a giant global network. Each of our incomes would depend on continuous spot auctions bids for our services. All government supports - regulation, insurance, pooled benefits -- would be dismantled as the sorting mechanism became perfectly efficient worldwide. The spectrum from exceedingly rich to exceedingly poor in every nation would exactly reflect the widest spectrum of wealth and poverty in the world. Your own position on that spectrum would depend on how hard you worked and sold yourself (and your children's eventual position, on how hard they worked to become little paragons of ambition and potential commercial value). We would overflow in material wealth, but no one would feel economically secure. And in the meantime, our society will have been pulled apart, sharply sorted, rendered indistinguishable from any other spot on the globe. Thumbs up? Thumbs down? What do we choose? For most people, neither extreme is especially attractive. So, in the end, we’re left with the question of balance. "Top of the Page
Visions of the Family in the 21st Century. Study commissioned by Xerox Corporation on view, perspectives, and visions of the family of the 21st Century by students around the world. The book is based on the second DocuWorld Authors Competition and a collaborative effort of Cascade Press and Xerox Corporation.
IN 1999, Xerox Corporation commissioned a study, "Looking Inward: Visions of the 21st Century Family." interviewing students from around the world. This study is not a scientific study and the stories described in the book are not scenarios, but just images of the future. However, it gives an insight in the perspectives of students around the world of how they see the future. The book is based on ‘The Second DocuWorld Authors Competition’, and is the result of the collaborative efforts of Cascade Press and Xerox Corporation. Tens of thousands of young people (14-18 years of age) entered the competition, which was held in four cities on three continents in the world, namely Amsterdam, Chicago, Los Angeles and São Paulo. The competitors were allowed to choose any literary form they wanted. In this book the winning stories are presented. Some are shortly summarized below. The future stories focus on family life in the 21st century. They are images of the future, days in the life of people that live in the late 21st century. Youngsters in the 21st century (Brazil) Her story is about the influence technology has on society. She states that in Brazil the influence is very serious and it is not developing in the right direction. Children get in touch with technologies from their early days on and they get a wrong picture of reality. According to her the solution to this problem lies in a greater investment from the government in education. In this way the youngsters are able to absorb the good part of technology. Dutch stories are incorporated in the book: The Netherlands : a story is a dream in which a boy, Ted, thinks he is frozen into hibernation in 1998 and defrosted in 2099. His new parents select him from a Cyber-space-shop. Due to a lot of frightening diseases, people are not allowed to produce children anymore. The people live in a dome city, because the ozone layer has completely been shattered. At the time Ted awakes only ninety thousand people live on earth in this dome. All roads have disappeared and are replaced by belts. The sky has a purple pinkish glow and people take day-trips to the moon. All shopping’s are done by means of video screens in the living room. The eating of meat is forbidden. Another Story: This story takes place in the year 2022 and is about an eighteen year old boy, Alex, who is involved in an accident in which he loses an arm. The arm is replaced by an iron arm of which everybody is frightened. He lives with his mother in a very small old house. Time is very precious these days and nobody seems to know how to cook anymore; every meal is made in the microwave. Public traffic is so crowded that every day people are crushed to death in the crowds. Also the values have changed. Alex once hits a man with his iron arm and he doesn’t even bother to see whether the man is dead or not, although he hears ‘a cracking noise coming from his head when he hits the wall’. Some stories are from students of the USA: 1) The eyes of tomorrow in this story that is written as a poem the future is seen in two ways. For some people the future might be looked upon in a negative way, for others the future might be shiny. Technology plays in both futures the leading role, but for some technology might be the solution for every problem that we see nowadays, while for others technology only strengthens the problems. 2) Once upon a time A thirteen-year-old girl by accident burns down the house she and her mother live in. Her mother dies, but it is 2010 and at this time it is possible to turn a part of the DNA of her mother into a new life. The girl raises this baby. The story tells a day in the life of the now eighteen-year-old girl and her 5-year-old daughter that has nightmares about the fire. The girl doesn’t dare to tell her that it is not just a dream, but that these are real memories. 3) Generation G.E) The story is told from the perspective of a young girl that is ordered by her mother from a catalogue. She has two sisters, that both look exactly like her and one brother.Top of the Page
Her mother has to work all week and even sleeps at the office. During the week there is a kind of uncle in the house that is a tutor for them. They all already know what they are going to do in the rest of their lives. For some this destiny is to work for the catalogue company, because only a few girls can have children. 4) Greg) Greg is a sixteen-year-old boy living in 2084. In this time, people live in cities that are sheltered by a plastic-covered geodesic dome, which stretches across the width of the megapolis and rises two kilometers above ground level. Greg’s father works in a Space Station, where he has to stay for more than a year. They have contact with him by a communication satellite, where they can actually see each other. The most common transport system is the hovercraft. Greg has one himself. His world falls apart the day he discovers that his parents are not his real parents, but that they have adopted him from the cloning agency.
Strategic scenarios: Planning for possible futures. Pharmaceutical Executive Eugene Apr 27, 2000. Vol 20. Issue: 4. Author: Tim George.
This article describes the scenario planning process in detail. In the pharmaceutical industry, scenario planning has the power to develop an array of plausible futures from which strategic options can be drawn. This article outlines the strategy that Warner-Lambert used to plan for continued success while taking into consideration various forces and contingencies that could affect the future of the pharmaceutical industry. In this case study, the approach takes classic scenario planning tools an important step further, linking them to the development of practical business plans that have visible and immediate effects on the business. The article summarizes various planning strategies. Scenario 1. Dangerous Waters “In this scenario; several trends converge-- consumer dissatisfaction with health care and treatment options, lack of breakthrough products; unmet expectations for new treatments, and frustration among physicians and other health care providers. The results are heightened scrutiny by regulatory and government bodies and increased competitiveness within the industry itself. Health care reform would become a primary focus of the 2000 elections, and political pressures and flagging innovation would force industry to reduce costs and further consolidate resources. In the "Dangerous" future; larger companies succeed in containing costs and introduce one or two blockbusters while smaller companies struggle to stay afloat. Smart partnering, alliance formation, and mergers become keys to success. Additionally, consumers become more informed-thanks in part to the increased services of the pharma-industry and more willing to assume responsibility far their health care. Consequently they became major market drivers. Major beacons of the "Dangerous Waters" scenario include: elections focus on health care, public concern over cost and quality of health care, outflow of capital, increase in "hollow"good news. Significant industry implications for that future are industry consolidation , increase partnering , longer approvals by FDA , informed consumers drive health care reform.” Scenario 2. Brave New World “Years of research and innovation begin to pay off in this scenario, Industry makes major breakthroughs in the diagnosis and treatment of disease and in treatment systems. Gene therapy and biotechnology come of age; the pipeline fills with new compounds that promise to have a major impact on health. Progress in communications encourages health plans to embrace the Internet as a means of storing, exchanging, and tracking patient records. Although that situation sounds ideal, the scenario includes factors that will stir up issues on many levels. At the societal level, escalating health care costs, a growing geriatric population, and an increasing economic gap will create conflict. Patients with greater access to health care and treatment information from the Internet will have increased expectations of the medical community. In turn, those expectations will be off set by managed care organizations (MCOs) that are likely to create incentives for compliance and penalize noncompliance with treatment protocols. MCOs will wield greater power over health care providers and will offer tiered coverage options. In this scenario, they may also take advantage of Internet capabilities for storing critical information about patients' health as a means of tracking compliance and treatment options.Top of the Page
In the "Brave New World," companies will thrive by introducing breakthrough treatments and advance their positions by acquiring or collaborating with biotech and diagnostic companies to further innovation and drug development.” Competition will accelerate and the industry's growing attractiveness will lure conglomerates, such as Microsoft and GE, to purchase, merger, alliance, and partner their way in-creating a new industry. Although many of the breakthroughs will result in significant advances in disease treatment, they will also raise hard to resolve ethical issues. Debates surrounding genetic manipulation and cloning already exist and will intensify as progress occurs in cutting-edge biotech research. Companies will be challenged to strike the right balance between medical/technological advances, opportunities for industry profit, and protection of the rights of patients and health care providers. Scenario 3. Rose Garden This scenario represents the best of both worlds-rapidly expanding technological advances met with decreasing external control. Industry introduces innovative therapies that fulfill unmet treatment needs: Advances in gene therapy and genetic mapping facilitate the identification of patients at risk for many diseases, leading to an expansion in the field of preventive medicine.
The Internet and other novel technologies provide immediate consumer access to information about new products and health care breakthroughs. Public awareness of the value of new treatment options grows, and public willingness to assume some financial responsibility to gain access increases. A well-informed and financially secure consumer public demands access to new treatments, thereby limiting the control of government, regulatory bodies, and health care organizations. That chain of events gives rise to a forward-thinking public whose primary concern is gaining access to new treatment options. Realizing those trends; MCOs consolidate and provide access to new therapies. Coverage policies enhance freedom of choice, yet shift some of the financial responsibility to patients. Strong consumer demand forces a streamlining of the approval process. The "Rose Garden" future also stimulates pharmaceutical companies to shift resources toward development of more leading-edge products. Companies with limited R&D resources will have to develop alliances and partnerships with biotech and diagnostic companies and seek ca-marketing opportunities for their successful compounds. With a cache of innovative new prod acts and a public willing to pay for them, savvy marketing strategies-particularly to the consumer audience-will be especially important, Given the increased level of knowledge among consumers, public promotion will require more than just "ads:' Consumers will seek credible and comprehensive sources of information. Thus, companies must also focus efforts toward recruiting and developing topnotch marketing teams with the capacity to optimize the opportunities that exist in this highly favorable scenario.
Scenarios of the Future Demand New Thinking. ENR New York January 31, 2000. Vol. 244. Issue. 4.
The long-range view of transportation in the US is coming into sharper focus and the industry's design community is going to have to adjust its thinking in order to achieve financial and social success.Top of the Page
“Smart Highway” Scenario: One almost certain scenario is that clean-gas, intelligent vehicles will travel on an automated ``smart'' highway paved with rubberized concrete and high-performance asphalt. There will be high-performance composite bridges impervious to icing. High-speed maglev trains will connect intermodal centers, which will provide a quick ride to a modern airport equipped with new, quiet aircraft. Cargo planes will carry supplies delivered via freight trains from high-tech port facilities. Many more drivers will be elderly, and riders on trains will be of all races and financial and educational backgrounds. Many highways will be design-build jobs and bridges will be designed by teams working in cyberspace. And the designers creating this infrastructure can enjoy success with nary an environmental lawsuit, protest or delay. By the highways, the land is green. By the airports, the communities are quiet. By the ports, the water is clean. Scenarios like this bubbled to the surface at any number of sessions at the recent 79th annual Transportation Research Board meeting. The policymakers, designers, builders, researchers and consultants who attended heard certain keywords time and again. Sustainability, livability, environmental justice, ethics and social responsibility were as prominent as technology and testing.
Using Scenario Analysis to Determine Managed Care Strategy Healthcare Financial Management. Journal of Healthcare Financial Management Association, Westchester, Sept. 2000. Vol. 54. Issue 9. Authors: Susanna E. Krentz and Ryan S. Gish.
In today's volatile healthcare environment, scenario planning can help professionals understand the drivers of change, market forces, consumerism, health technology, and economics. The crafting of the scenarios themselves must be facilitated professionally and by health care strategists themselves, so that perspectives of long-term futures can help improve administrative strategy and market positioning of various health organizations and promote general welfare. In the following four scenarios, healthcare inflation and the role of the healthcare consumer combine to construct a matrix illustration of four managed care scenarios. Scenario 1. Two-Tiered System. “In this scenario, the increase in medical costs greatly exceeds general inflation, and the consumer chooses to takes an active role in healthcare decision making. Employers would move to a defined-contribution approach to health coverage and providing employees with a fixed dollar amount every month. Consumers would make their own decisions regarding the purchase of insurance and healthcare services, seeking value from hospitals, physicians, and insurers. The combination of individual purchasing discretion and greater demand for information would lead to new models of contracting. The Internet may emerge as the low-cost channel for individuals to use to purchase insurance and healthcare services either on their own or as part of a group. As new purchasing channels emerge, providers would need to develop relationships and redefine contract parameters with another set of payers. Branding and product differentiation would become important strategies for providers. Scoring well on public "report cards" would be crucial. Direct consumer evaluation of the price/quality trade-off would reward "value" providers. Additionally, hospitals and physicians would need to more closely evaluate strategies traditionally used to sell consumer goods, such as pricing, discount coupon distribution, and product bundling. Scenario 2. Freedom of Choice. “The Freedom of Choice scenario reflects an active consumer and medical inflation that generally is in line with the nation's inflation rate. Because employer healthcare costs would not be growing significantly faster than general inflation, companies would continue to offer their employees a choice of plans and providers with a defined benefit. Consumers would take an active role in making healthcare decisions within the defined limits of their coverage. Although freedom of choice would exist, the market forces of supply and demand would serve to ration care and access. Consumer-driven choice and low inflationary pressure have several strategic implications for hospitals and physicians. Participation on every managed care panel would not be essential. Consumers would migrate to their provider of choice, increasing provider leverage with payers. Consumer watchdog groups, employer coalitions, and payers would attempt to define and measure quality. If these attempts were unsuccessful, consumers would make choices based on their perceptions of quality, causing many providers to put greater emphasis on market visibility and brand recognition.”Top of the Page
Scenario 3. Flashback to the Mid-1990s. “The third scenario, Flashback to the Mid1990s, combines relatively low increases in medical costs with consumer passivity. In this scenario, managed care payers would be the dominant market force, setting contracting and coverage parameters and, thus, making the greatest profits. In an attempt to define and measure provider quality, payers would require providers to submit information that would allow quality evaluation to occur. Because of consumer indifference to choice among healthcare providers, there would be a shift from open-access products to closed-panel models presided over by gatekeepers. Federal legislation would wane because employers would be content with the relatively low rate of medical inflation, and consumers would not demand government intervention because perceived problems would be minor. Hospitals and physicians would consider aggressive responses to the payers' strong market position. Hospitals would consider consolidation in an attempt to increase their bargaining power. Physicians would renew their interest in independent practice associations (IPAs) or group practices as their primary contracting organization. Providers faced with the daunting choice of major rate concessions or exclusion from panels would refuse to enter into contracts with payers who would not pay minimally acceptable rates. Scenario 4. Healthcare Reform Revisited. High medical cost inflation and passive consumers create the fourth scenario, Healthcare Reform Revisited. Concerned with the high rate of medical inflation, the Federal government would pass a series of reforms that would establish active Federal oversight and regulation of both providers and payers. Faced with increased Federal scrutiny, providers would focus a significant portion of their resources on corporate compliance and policy development. Risk would be shifted from payers to hospitals and physicians primarily through capitation. Hospitals and physicians would reevaluate the role of the integrated delivery system to optimally match their organizational structure with the industry's risk-based payment system. Hospitals would reconsider purchasing primary care physician practices to link with their hospital services. IPAs and physician-hospital organizations (PHOs) would be revived as contracting organizations. Risk-management skills and information technology would become essential as providers would be asked to develop risk-sharing, incentive-bas>
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ould develop quality-measurement systems to meet Federal regulations.
Health and HealthCare 2010: The Forecast, The Challenge. Institute for the Future. Prepared by The Institute for the Future Support and conference was provided by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Published by Jossey-Bass Publishers
In 1999, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest philanthropy devoted to health care, asked the Institute to look once again into the future of health care, this time projecting to the year 2010. The forecast was presented to more than 2,000 of its grantees. The result is this thoroughly researched, comprehensive guide for the future of America's health. Scenario One: Stormy Weather “In the Stormy Weather scenario, pressures from rising costs, dissatisfied providers and patients, marked inequality of access to care, greedy profit takers, and repeated health care scandals accumulate through the year 2005. None of the fundamental problems of cost, quality, or access are addressed in a meaningful way. Between 2005 and 2010, the barometer drops, winds converge, and stormy weather erupts. The primary driving forces in this scenario include: Managed care programs that fail to deliver on their promises to contain costs or to improve quality. Instead, they default to more hassling of providers and gaming of utilization management systems.Top of the Page
Consumers and providers who react to the adversarial climate with a strong, unified backlash to managed care. They succeed in getting legislation passed that further erodes the effectiveness of managed care by intervening in a variety of clinical and structural decisions, such as regulation of lengths of stay for various procedures, staffing ratios, and any-willing-provider laws. Health plans that engage in substantial adverse selection and cream-skimming of beneficiaries as Medicare moves toward managed care and a wider range of choices for its beneficiaries. Medicare risk plans manage to get the bulk of low-cost, healthy beneficiaries, leaving the sick, costly people to the conventional indemnity plan. Each attempt at risk adjustment is met with strategies that boost overall Medicare spending. Provider oligopolies, including large group practices, physician practice management firms, national single-specialty groups, and large hospital chains, that are able to sustain high prices in an environment that demands open provider networks. They threaten to leave the networks of plans that don’t pay well and the plans blink first.
Large employers that continue to offer insurance as a benefit of employment in the face of a tight labor market and are unable to demand substantial price breaks from health plans. Many small employers, meanwhile, drop insurance benefits altogether, substantially increasing the number of uninsured.
The march of new medical technologies, which continues unabated. Consumers, prompted both by pharmaceutical companies’ direct-to-consumer advertising and by "gee-whiz" articles in the popular press, demand access to the latest, greatest, and most expensive drugs and medical technologies. Beleaguered health plans concede the point and lose control over cost and quality.
Costly medical technologies for extending life that are not restricted, as no social consensus develops to limit spending on health care near the end of life. Information technologies, once thought to be the way to efficiency, consistency, and higher-quality care, that will prove to be costly and ineffective. Plans and providers find that their investments in the late 1990s and early 2000s don’t pay off, but seeing no better way, they continue to invest after 2005. The public health system, which will be in tatters, with local public health departments retreating from service provision and only minimally fulfilling mandated functions, and no compensatory response from the private sector. Scenario One plays out with a range of difficult consequences. Health care spending, by 2010, constitutes almost one-fifth of gross domestic spending. Even with expenditures at that level, more than one in five Americans remain uninsured. A majority worries about losing their health benefits. Insecurity of benefits is widespread as many people are just one job change away from being without health insurance. Even those who retain insurance are a lot less happy as their out-of-pocket costs rise. The health system exhibits radical tiering, with much poorer access to care for the uninsured and people on Medicaid. Medicaid itself puts enormous strain on states, as the state programs are faced with medical costs that overwhelm recession-depleted state budgets. A number of major public hospitals are forced to close their doors. Although their closing helps bring the supply of hospital beds into closer relation to the demand, it also strands many people who have nowhere else to go.
The Medicare program finds itself unprepared to absorb the baby boomers, who begin to become eligible in 2010. By the end of the forecast period, health reform is again on the public policy agenda. Scenario Two: The Long and Winding Road . In Scenario Two, The Long and Winding Road, incrementalism reigns. The successive attempts at revising a portion of the health care system work sufficiently well that tinkering continues well past 2005. As costs get pushed down in one place, they pop up in another, but the system is able to respond rapidly and keep costs in balance. The primary driving forces for this scenario includes: Employers who continue to pay close attention to health care costs and their benefit structures. They keep substantial price pressure on health plans, limiting increases on the commercial side to 3 to 4 percent per year. They also shift cost and risk to employees by moving increasingly from a defined benefit plan to a defined contribution program. As beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket costs increase, utilization of health care services drops off in response. Health plans that, in turn, increase pressure on providers. They convince employers that they can only control utilization in a more closed network, so the expansive networks of the late 1990s disappear. In their place are more tightly controlled networks that exert both clinical control and strong price pressure on providers. Providers who—stung by the high cost and organizational difficulty of forming large units and integrating care—adopt few of the innovations of the leading-edge provider groups. Instead, they engage in sustained, and largely unsuccessful, resistance to being "hassled" by insurers. The cost-containment provisions of the 1998 federal budget, which rein in both Medicare and Medicaid spending. The provisions stick. That bill sets the standard for budget bills for the first 10 years of the next century. The public health system, which will engage in the dynamic competition with the private sector in service delivery. The period of 2005 through 2010 is one of turbulent, disorganized change. The health care landscape changes as much in those 5 years as it did in the period from 1993 to 1998. In Scenario Two, costs grow only a little faster than nominal GDP growth, reaching 16 percent of GDP by 2010. Federal and commercial cost containment work well enough to make insurance coverage affordable for most employers. About one in six Americans (47 million) is uninsured.
The health care system remains tiered, with about 20 percent of Americans in the bottom tier of public coverage and uninsurance, 60 percent in managed care plans that substantially restrict their choice of providers and limit providers’ autonomy, and 20 percent in high-end, indemnity-type programs.
The bottom tier safety-net providers face tighter conditions, with cuts in disproportionate share hospital (DSH) funding, an end to cost-based reimbursement for outpatient clinics, and tight state and local budgets. But they manage to muddle through as usual by patching together a range of disparate funding sources.
Care delivery is still fragmented, as national players remain relatively rare and small. The majority of physicians now practice in groups of three or more, but most of those are in three- to six-doctor groups. These groups are not large enough to accept global capitation safely, align with a hospital, or influence their physicians’ practice patterns radically. Comprehensive health reform does not enter the public policy debate, as incremental changes each year reassure elected officials that they are "doing something about health care." Scenario Three: The Sunny Side of the Street. In the Sunny Side of the Street scenario, all the hard work and investment from now until 2005 pays off after 2005 in the form of a sustainable, efficient health care system. Competition helps drive excess capacity out of the system. We learn what does and does not work in medicine, and especially how to get providers and patients to work effectively together. Health plans and providers put in place information and management systems that can take the health care system through the next 2 decades. The driving forces for this scenario include: Competition at all levels of the health care system, but especially among providers, which helps drive costs down. Young physicians enter the market with lower income expectations and more of an employee mentality than their predecessors. The wave of consolidation of the late 1990s, which continues through the early 2000s. Efficient health care organizations, which can assimilate the best practices from their constituent parts, emerge. Consolidation also serves to drive some excess capacity, especially of hospital beds although not necessarily hospitals themselves, out of the system. The provider service networks (PSNs) that form to contract with Medicare. PSNs find that they have efficient administrative structures. They begin to contract directly with employers in certain parts of the country. Medicare encourages further growth in its risk contracting as it develops effective risk-adjustment methods that make risk contracting cost-neutral for the program. Innovative payment approaches that are developed throughout the health care system. Prospective payment for outpatient services is put in place first by Medicare, then by commercial health plans.
Health care information systems, which make significant progress beyond their current administrative functions. Clinical information systems are put in places that successfully improve care processes and outcomes. The EMR sees the light of day. Developments in medical technology focus both on improving outcomes and on reducing costs. Regulators favor technologies that can demonstrate their cost-effectiveness as well as their safety and efficacy with more rapid approvals. Health plans and providers, through their improved information systems, develop the capacity to make trade-offs among therapies according to their cost-effectiveness. The public health sector, which will embrace public-private community partnerships, where service delivery occurs in the private sector and government focuses on assessment, development, and assurance. In Scenario Three, cost growth is also just 1 percent above the nominal growth of GDP. By 2010, it reaches 15 percent of GDP. These moderate cost increases make health insurance more affordable. People experience more security of benefits, leaving an uninsurance rate of 10 percent (30 million people). The good news is that the basics are in place—health systems are equipped to minimize unnecessary variation in practices, they operate efficiently, they can track what they’re doing. The time spent cultivating a well-organized health system pays off in the long run.
The bad news is that we still have 30 million people who are uninsured. Medicare and private plans begin thinking about the long term. They put in place incentives to reward population management in addition to individual patient care. They also provide incentives for a longer-term focus on today’s health care decisions. The system appears well equipped to take on the wave of baby boomers who will begin to be eligible for Medicare starting in 2010.”
Healthcare 2020: Technology in the New Millennium. Russell C. Jr. & Trusko, Brett E. Health Management Technology (ISSN: 1074-4770), Vol. 20 No. 11 Pg. 44
The use of technology in health care is expected to increase at an accelerating pace making the wired world of healthcare a reality by 2020. Developments and implications are discussed. Health 2020: Technology in the New Millennium: “Patients become partners in their healthcare using doctors as consultants rather than managers because technology empowers patients to take control of their healthcare. Internet-informed patients become partners in the promotion of their health, a sort of health- presumption. The embracing of technology increases at an accelerating pace. Remote surgery, gene manipulation, cloning, and molecularization of microchips are not only possible but also routine. However, issues of morality, government intervention, and the cost-benefit tradeoff between health and illness increasingly face the nation. The have have-not gap in particular, becomes an intense issue: the wo-tier health systems where the wealthy pay for personalized treatment such as gene therapy but the poor do not. Technology becomes more important but also becomes increasingly invisible. The patients of the new millennium will have access to virtually all of the same knowledge as the providers. Sites like WebMd are increasingly popular, but problems with unverified medical information on the Internet presents treatments that may not have been subjected to the rigors of clinical trials.” New Breed of Housecalls: “As healthcare entities move away from the medical center concept to one of a virtual community, consumers of healthcare acquire the real ability to compare the quality and costs of care. Virtual healthcare provides more alternatives for patients in 2020, and cost-competition increases. Through Internet and two-way video connections, remote home visits by physicians and nurses becomes more practical, including diagnosis via helmets or hats, and gloves with tactile ability. Expert systems and artificial intelligence presents caregivers with best practice options to the delivery of care. Best Product Pricing: “Although it will be a controversial issue, global information technology enables many tests and procedures to be performed "off shore" at the lowest cost site possible in 2020, whether out-of-state or even across national borders. The ability to source the most cost-effective health service from anywhere on the planet may be the most effective strategy in bringing the cost of U.S. healthcare under control. Technology enables managed care to finally coordinate treatments in the most cost-effective way. Electronic medical records follows the patient throughout a lifetime.” Newly Focused Managed Care: “Clinical pathways and protocols are automated in 2020. Managing care is real-time, electronically monitored, and evidence-based. The focus of managed care in the millennium are high-risk people who are not acutely ill and high-cost patients who are already under care.” Differential Premiums: “With access to deep pools of patient information in data warehouses, the concept of differential premiums becomes accepted. Experience can quantify the expected cost differences in providing care to a 30-year old vs. a 60-year old, although both may work for the same company and be covered by the same health plan. This requires that commercial health plans, employers, and government pay more for some patients, but at the same time other patients may be treated for considerably less than the current rates. The treatment of patients at lower prices is one of the trade-offs when health plans and providers have access to databases of patient cost and disease experience.”Top of the Page
Forum: Future Scenarios in Health Promotion. Anonymous, Promotion & Education 9/01/98.
Future health scenarios are a useful planning and decision-making tool for health promotion. By creating visions or scenarios for the future, it is possible to anticipate potential health threats and opportunities to identify the direction and strategies that should be adopted to address the challenges of health promotion in the 21st century. The National Health Education Department, Ministry of Health, Singapore, developed a series of health promotion future scenarios for the Jakarta conference as part of the WHO Health Promotion Action Plan aimed at achieving the goals of Health For All in the year 2020. The scenarios were developed to assist in that process. The Official Scenario or Business-as-Usual: “Taking lessons from the past, planning enables a determination as to what should be achieved in the next 20 years. The scenario contains numerous examples of lessons learned. For example in the area of environmental lessons, the rate of the depletion of natural resources of the world is a cause for concern and deserves close attention. The contamination of food sources and the food chain has affected health throughout the world, unless positive steps are taken to prevent or minimize depletion, there may well be an adverse scenario in 2020. In the area of lessons learned from value systems - establishing scenarios and plans for health promotion, the cultural and value systems of the different communities should be respected; the scenario outlays how this would have an impact on health promotion and intricately explains how this is taken into consideration.” The Worse Case Scenario: A highly detailed scenario that lays out some key points such as, technology's use for training. However, the scenario reveals the trends and circumstances that leads to the danger that the use of the best technology is solely in the developed countries, which wields great power. Developing and under developed countries are at a disadvantage.” The Best Case Scenario: “Gene technology is taken very seriously worldwide in this scenario. Questions are pondered on whether this technology will be developed robustly to such a stage that it can be applied to repair the body's entire system? The scenario then describes how the implications would change the role health professionals evolving and taking a totally different direction.”Top of the Page
Growing Old - Filling Up A Long Life. At age 92, Melinda has plenty – and plenty of years -- to look forward to. Michael Taylor, The San Francisco Chronicle 11/16/99 Final; Vol. 13-221, News Section.
This article in the San Francisco Chronicle outlines a plausible scenario of aging in the year 2020. Filling Up a Long Life: “Shortly before 6 p.m. on New Year's Eve in the year 2020, Melinda wanders out of the kitchen of her waterfront mansion in East Palo Alto. She is trailed by a HomeCheck CRM114 robot that cradles a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin in its titanium-alloy claws and two champagne flutes in its steel mesh side pack. Melinda is 92 years old, yet she moves with the grace of a 30ish dancer. On the sofa near the fireplace is her son, Justin. Melinda began having children early in life, and so the years between her kids are effectively generations: Her older child, Jennifer, is now 72, and Justin is 28. Melinda, in turn, has outlived two husbands -- the first one died during experimental brain surgery to improve his synapses. She lost the second one in 2019 when the shuttle taking him to the space station -- part of it was to become a resort -- malfunctioned and skipped off on a one-way flight toward Jupiter.Top of the Page
Melinda's house is the epitome of urban modern -- wall screens in every room, combination toilet-bidets, a robotic vacuum cleaner that flies around the house in a frenzy, occasionally knocking its owner down.
The manses here all have one thing in common: They cost about $10 million each. In 2005, developers convinced local officials that the only way to enrich the tax base was to persuade landlords to evict the people who lived there, tear down the old homes and apartment houses and replace them with expensive new homes. The area's residents -- most of them quite poor and therefore largely powerless - - were offered deals they couldn't refuse: point-of-sale electronic cash cards and houses outside Stockton, the new jumping-off point for Bay Area commuters. And they were promised jobs as gardeners and house staff in the sumptuous new houses built on land they used to live on.
In 2010, Melinda joined the Athanasian Society, a nationwide network that sought to prolong life. In an outpatient operation that lasted only two hours, doctors implanted a molecular-based microchip in her chest, and for the past 15 years it has been monitoring the health of Melinda's chromosomes and cells.
At the end of the first month of implantation, the chip picked up a minute sign that a few of Melinda's cells had undergone changes. It takes about seven genetic changes for a cell to become cancerous, and the chip had found two of them. Her doctor suggested getting her oxidized genes scrubbed. Tonight is the 10th anniversary of her scrubbing and -- New Year's Eve aside -- she feels like celebrating.
"Justin, can you get Jennifer on the wall?" Melinda asks. He fiddles with the table-mounted console for the wall screen and Matt Drudge, star anchorman and still looking like a Walter Winchell wannabe, is clicked off in mid-sentence and replaced with a screen full of Jennifer, in her home in New York, brushing her hair, then facing her electronic family.
"Well, Jennie," Melinda says. "It's been 10 years since I got the chip and I don't feel like I've aged a bit. Dr. Weber says I'm good for another 20 years. What about you?"
"Mother, I like being a Luddite," Jennifer says. "I wouldn't be so sure of all this whizbang stuff if I were you."
"You know, children," Melinda says, trying to look at both Jennifer on the screen and Justin on the couch, "do you ever think that because we're going to live so much longer than we expected that there are other things to explore? Places we wouldn't have gone because we thought we didn't have enough time?"
"If I'm lucky, I'm only about 20 percent through my life," Justin says. "Drudge had some guy on the other night who said 200 will be average a few years from now and that my kids might live to 500. But then what? Do we get bored with it all?"
"Justin, dear," his mother says, "you always told me there were so many things you wanted to do, and you're just getting started. You've got your law degree, you got through medical school, you have your MBA from Intel, you qualified for the Citizen-in-Space program. You can do anything you want. Maybe the problem is that we have too many choices. It's like having 10 novels you want to write and you never write them because you can't decide which one to start."
"What about you, Mom?" he says. "What's next for you?" Melinda isn't sure what to say. She hasn't told the kids about Marilyn, yet Marilyn is eager to set up housekeeping. For now, they have a water-taxi relationship -- sometimes Melinda goes to the city, other times Marilyn takes the AquaCat down to East Palo Alto.
Marilyn had bought an island off the coast of Maine -- it cost about half what her condo was worth in San Francisco's Hunters Point, the city's newest Gold Coast -- and Melinda thought the two of them might even get a house built there in the next year.
"Well, kids," Melinda says, "figuring I've got a while to go, there's someone new in my life. So . . . have I told you about Marilyn?"”
The Great Cities of the Future. Conway McKinley, Futurist, Jun/Jul99, Vol. 33 Issue 6, p28, 3p, 3c.
A supercity is an urban area with three characteristics: a population of more than 1 million people; has a sustainable capability for meeting the physical and social needs of its residents (food, shelter, safety, health, transportation, and education); and has a healthy and dynamic economic environment that creates, attracts, and nurtures economic investments that produce adequate jobs and public revenues. The United Nations estimates that over 500 urban areas will have a population of more than a million people by 2015, compared with 328 such cities in 1996. Over the same period, the number of cities with a population of more than 5 million is projected to increase from 16 to 26. There may be as many as 100 emerging supercities around the world. Cities are pushing innovative programs to fund the many expensive infrastructure elements they need. These cities want many of the same things other cities want, and they are willing to work very hard to achieve them. Future scenario of Supercity Success: “Is a project-by-project, building block approach.” Scenarios demonstrate that the most successful supercities in the future are those with leadership that implements effective development strategies. A common denominator among supercities in 2015 is the desire to attract great global events that bring both revenue and recognition. The World Development Federation (WDF) is closely tied to helping cities improve global quality of life through the implementation of "super projects" that enhance the environment, create global linkages, and contribute to effective economic development. Supercities in 2015 will have the essentials to qualify as supercities: 1. Water. A city with great prospects for the future can have its hope shattered by a water shortage. Supercities will have more-than-adequate supply. 2. International airport. Fully equipped international airport offering flights to major global cities. Adjacent to the airport is the growth of the "airport city." 3. Hinterland connections. Transport routes that effectively link the city to its hinterland. Circumferential highways are the preferred system. 4. Domed stadium. In order to attract major world events supercities have enclosed stadium offering comfortable seating in any weather. 5. Technology center. A center of excellence in several fields of technology. The technology hub is supercities bring together top scientists from academic, government, and private organizations. 6. Communications center. The city is wired to accommodate the mushrooming global flow of voice and data communications. 7. Public transportation. Efficient rapid-transit system serving all elements of the population. 8. Waste disposal. Landfills are no longer in existence. Cities install sophisticated new resource-recovery systems. 9. Green infrastructure. Whatever plans and projects are undertaken, supercities provide for a substantial amount of permanent open space, including such elements as parks, golf courses, riding academies, and forests. 10. New political mechanisms. Many of the items on this agenda are big projects that cross many jurisdictional lines. In many cases, a new political arrangement is needed.”
The Future of God. Robert B. Mellert, Futurist, Vol 33 Issue 8, p 30, 4p. 3c. 1bw, October 99.
Discusses the future of the belief in God and religion. Today, 96% of the U.S. population say they believe in God. God as Everything Alfred North Whitehead developed a notion of the "consequent nature" of God that encompasses all of reality, every puff of trivial existence. A scenario outlines how the Western world identifies God with the totality of reality (panentheism), and beyond that, God is more than the sum total of everything. It is based upon the notion that the whole is actually more than the sum of its parts, just as a person is more than the sum of his cells or organs. In other words, the whole (God) is more than the sum of His parts (all the elements of reality), yet He is made up of these parts. May the Force Be With You: The panentheists' way of thinking about God will become more widespread in the future. “One often hears the word "force" in discussions about God. "May the force be with you" is how Obi-Wan Kenobi blesses Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars film.” The force is acknowledged as God, but people reconsider the traditional concept of God. The result is an impersonal God, one who, according to the scenario in this article, becomes the force we experience underlying all of reality. This force is dynamic, changing. It is relative to, and perhaps one with, events as they happen. Culture finds it harder to understand an absolute God than a relative one; that a totally separate God is less appealing than an immanent one; and that an eternal God is not as religiously useful as a changing, evolving one. In other words, the absolute, transcendent, changeless image of God inherited from our ancestors may be dead in the future, or at least in its last throes. God is not dead, but reconceptualized.Top of the Page
Transit Officials Predict Future Chicago Commuting Scenario – The Year is 2049. Jon Hilkevitch, Chicago Tribune, October 24, 1999.
Transit Officials in Chicago believe that by 2049, public transit will be shared with other forward-looking transportation modes that allow commuters to switch from one to the other. For example, propeller-powered wind tunnels for bicyclists, pumping air in the direction of traffic, might be built along railway rights-of-way, enabling the cyclists to reach 30-m.p.h. cruising speeds without breaking into a sweat. It is Oct. 25, 2049, and 9 billion people inhabit the Earth: “Some are trying to get home from work. In the evening rush hour in downtown Chicago, several hundred thousand workers walk to the Chicago Transit Authority's elevated trains, as commuters in the Loop have done for well over 150 years. A compromise agreement brokered with preservationists earlier in the century requires the CTA to retain the Loop "L" structure, a national historic landmark, but permits the transit agency to phase in refinements.”
In the mid-21st Century, much of the labor force leaving the downtown at night heads underground, each person waving a multi-purpose, bio-sensor smart card in front of an electronic fare-collection validator. The centerpiece of an expanded CTA subway system is an underground collector-distributor shuttle train that picks up passengers at distant points in the Loop and delivers them to the elevated trains, rapid-transit express buses operating on restricted busways, interconnected CTA-Metro stations and to Amtrak's Midwest high-speed rail network, which is based at Union Station and extends to cities in six states. Symbolizing the evolution of CTA service, the collector-distributor subway is the outgrowth of a mega-project contemplated in the 1960s by Mayor Richard J. Daley, who never fulfilled his plan of building the Monroe Street subway distributor. Nine decades later, the subway collector-distributor trains have removed the need for buses that served the same function, albeit inefficiently, in heavy traffic.””
Three Scenarios for Kentucky’s Future. John Pearce, Lexington Herald-Leader, August 9, 1998, F3.
A meeting held by a number of Chambers of Commerce throughout the state of Kentucky forged three scenarios of the future of Kentucky. Chamber of Commerce Prognosis: “In this scenario on Kentucky in 2010, everything is coming up roses. Kentucky is on top of the information age, has a start in the car-manufacturing business, and boasts all the factors that will attract new, high-wage industry - good highways, railroads and air and river transport, good water supplies, rich soil, fine lakes and parks, a progressive school system and a dependable labor supply. The tourist industry is flourishing and bound to grow.” Caution Prognosis: Caution Corps: “Kentucky has more of the advantages outlined in “Prognosis” for the better part of 40 years, however, too many small towns have lost their small-industry base. Louisville has enjoyed very modest growth. It has gained UPS, but it has lost a half-dozen major headquarters and most of its old money. It is putting its hopes on the airport region and convention facilities. Lexington is spreading out all over the countryside, but that threatens its horse-farm ambiance, the foundation of its tourist business, while empty lots lie idle throughout the urban area.” The Long View or Worried-Look Theory: “Kentucky is, after all, part of the United States, and it cannot avoid sharing the future with the country. The scenarists agreed that demographers warn that U.S. population is slowly flowing out from the center to the ocean rim of the country; already small towns in the Midwest are drying up. Prosperity does not inevitably depend on population growth, but the laws of physics still apply: You grow or shrink; it's hard to stand still. Kentucky enjoys many economic pluses, but growing problems, too. Coal and timber, the backbone of Eastern Kentucky's economy, become limited resources. Unless alternative jobs are found, people will again start leaving, and they do not always come back. The horse industry continues to be sound though threatened by lotteries and casinos, and despite current anti-smoking campaigns, tobacco should remain a profitable crop for the immediate future. And there is a chance that the state will come to its senses and start growing hemp. A lot of our future depends on educated people, ready for the information age. This will demand more than computers in every classroom - smaller classes, better-trained and better-paid teachers and a concerted effort to keep our young people at home. The more we can resemble Silicon Valley and North Carolina's Research Triangle, the more likely we are to dodge the population bullet. But that will take a massive change in attitude as well as investment.”Top of the Page
The Future of Medicine – 21st Century Miracle Medicine. Jennings Lane, The Futurist, Vol 31 Issue 5, p60, 3/4p. 2bw, Sept/Oct. 97.
A brief glimpse of family and medical life in 2050 is adapted from a more exhaustive scenario in 21st Century Miracle Medicine by medical journalist Alexandra Wyke. The book describes new developments in information technology, telecommunications, robotics, and genetics that are converging to create the next revolution in health care and medicine. The Future of Medicine: “ A robot senses a girl's illness in the middle of the night with the help of a bracelet monitor on her wrist. It alerts the parents, scans her, diagnoses the illness, proffers medical advice, then calls the 24-hour neighborhood pharmacy to have the appropriate medicine delivered. “Wykes 2050 Scenario also includes: Patients increasingly taking charge of their own health, the role of doctors and medical professionals as the arbiters of treatment will decline. Computers and robots enlarging their role in diagnosing illness, prescribing medicine, and even performing surgery.
"By 2050, or probably well before that, as huge parts of medicine are automated and patients empowered with the means to gather personal control over their care. With the right computer backup, they might even be in a position to order surgical robots what to do."
Literacy Will Survive: An Alternative Scenario. Dan Johnson, The Futurist, Dec99, Vol. 33 Issue 10, p46,2p.
This article discusses the implications of voice-in or voice-out (VIVO) computers on literacy. Advantages of written language; Limitations of VIVO technology; Factors that contributed to the societal popularity of VIVO computers. Illiterates with Doctorates: The Future of Education in an Electronic Age: The author, educator Peter H. Wagschal believes that sophisticated audio, video, and computer technologies would soon replace reading and writing as the basic tools of communication. Eventually, universities would be awarding doctorates to students who couldn't read. “By 2050 more voice-in/voice-out (VIVO) computers and other technologies emerge. Several "engines" work together to drive society to replace written language/text with VIVO talking computers in the electronically developed countries. These include: 1. Evolutionarily, biology and psychology forever direct man to seek speech-based methods for storing, retrieving, and communicating information. 2. Tendency to replace older technologies with newer ones that will do the same job more quickly, efficiently, and universally. VIVOs will fill written language's job, plus they'll be quicker, more efficient, and usable by all people, whether nonliterate or literate. 3. Young people irreversibly rejecting text as their technology of choice for accessing information, and are replacing it with speech-based and non-text visual technologies. 4. Eighty percent of adults worldwide are functionally nonliterate-four times the World Bank's 20% estimate cited by Johnson. In the twenty-first century, these billions of people increasingly require literacy-free technology that will allow them to store and retrieve information--a huge potential market that will drive research and development of VIVOs.” A Text-Based World in 2025: (Bucky Fuller used to complain about people reading their papers aloud at meetings: "Just give me the paper. I can read it faster than you can speak it.") The other view outlines a scenario of a world in which there will certainly be changes in the mix of media available as voice computers take their place among text and video. VIVO technology will give the option of questioning our computers and receiving prompt answers. We may "converse" with cars that deliver voice warnings when fuel is low, update our time of arrival, or suggest a good restaurant at our destination. “However, in other cases, as with medicine bottles and street signs, text will remain the most-convenient technology. Even if a microchip could recite the list of ingredients on a cereal box, would people have the patience to listen? Society may reject a workplace filled with dozens of VIVOs, each vocalizing about a different task. And while the representational information provided by pictures is useful, it is limited: The concepts necessary for abstract thought may still come to us through written language. VIVO technology could help students easily produce transcripts of their first thoughts. But as many writers discover, revision and editing are essential to refining thought. We don't have photographic memories: It is easier to rework a written text than to "respeak" a VIVO recording because the mind can rely on text to preserve details rather than having to remember them. Oral editing is cumbersome, requiring students to play back, evaluate, remember, and revocalize a series of thoughts; rereading a text allows the editor to quickly reenter his or her thoughts and to make changes in the material more efficiently. “
Three Scenarios of World Population Growth. Robert Livernash and Eric Rodenburg, United Nations World Population Program, 1998.
The earth’s resources, natural systems, and human population are inherently connected. There is a basic philosophical division in the study of population and environment that is often characterized as a debate between optimists and pessimists. Optimists believe that people have the creative capacity to overcome potential environmental harm resulting from a growing population and intense economic activity. Pessimists foresee potential political, social, and environmental deterioration and collapse. The United Nations World Population Program developed projections of three population trajectories from 1950-2150. Scenario 1. The Low Trajectory forecasts world population at 6 billion in 2025, 8 billion by 2050; then down to 3.6 billion by 2150. Potential forces driving this projection depend primarily on trends in fertility rates in major world regions. There is plausibility for both the low and (Scenario 2.) The Medium Trajectory, since fertility rates declined in less developed countries from 6.2 children in the 1950s to 4.3 children in 1997. The U.N. projects that total fertility rates will decline on the over all to 2.1 by 2050, which will involve rapid declines in the world’s poorest regions. The Medium Trajectory forecasts world population at 8 billion in 2025, 10 billion by 2050; then staying level at 10.8 billion by 2150. Scenario 3. The High Trajectory forecasts world population at 10 billion in 2025, 12 billion in 2050; then 27 billion by 2150. Today, world population momentum adds 80 million people per hear. Most demographers expect fertility to decline in less developed countries as it has been declining in developed countries, but the pace of that decline may hinge on a number of social, political, and economic factors that influence the motivation and ability to limit family size. It is hoped that leapfrogging technologies and the education of women remain a bedrock to fundamental fertility decline so that the low to medium trajectories are the preferred and real futures.Top of the Page
Social Science and Public Policy – Future of Homelessness - Three Scenarios and Their Implications. Ralph Hambrick Jr, and Gary T. Johnson, Society Journal, 1998.
The past decade has made clear that homelessness is not simply a passing phenomenon. Many professionals working with the homelessness problem realize that it is necessary to turn the corner from a temporary, emergency response to a long-range strategy. Both social responsibility and realism require it. Hambrick & Johnson After a series of interviews and observations in more than twenty cities and localities around the country, Hambrick and Johnson wrote this essay containing three scenarios on the future of homelessness. Scenario 1. Homelessness Routinized: “In this future, homelessness becomes a routine part of the social and political landscape. An earthquake or hurricane metaphor no longer applies because homelessness is no longer considered an emergency. Clearly, the expectation of a quick cure in this future has long since disappeared. Just as the “war on poverty” is no longer much of a war, homelessness is no longer considered much of an emergency. Indicators of the “normalization of homelessness” abound on the professional and institutional scene. Health outreach and clinics targeted to the homeless are well established. Yet, many homeless reject shelters as too rule-bound and restrictive, continuing to live under bridges that some consider, should be their official address… The Bureau of the Census struggles with how to treat the homeless population in preparing for the 2010 census. Efforts to coordinate organizations are mixed and ineffective. The police “sweep” the streets, but the homeless are generally “recycled” from shelter to transitional housing to subsidized housing multiple times. Tension characterizes the relations between the homeless and society…” Scenario 2. Homelessness No Longer a Problem: “In this future, homelessness is no longer an issue…” Scholars have turned their attention to why it declined so greatly and found a variety of factors: some resulted from policy changes while other factors were less clear. One factor credited was the general health of the economy in 2010. For example, the 32 hour workweek has more evenly distributed work opportunities. A way to value less skilled labor played an important role. Many of the barriers to employing individuals for personal service were removed. Reversing the long trend of technology and complexity to push those with low educational level out of the work force, a comfortable co-existence seems to have developed. The well to do are increasingly likely to hire individuals to provide personal services. And, there is a renaissance of personal service entrepreneurship including both the skilled and the unskilled. A complementary development has been the substantial use of “temps” in almost every occupational category…” Scenario 3. The Homelessness Problem Worsens: “In the first decade of the 21st Century, the homelessness problem surpassed anything experienced in the 1980s and 1990s. Two primary forces accounted for this growth: social and economic conditions that produced a larger, more vulnerable population. The economy was strong, but technology made society more and more complex, and it became more difficult for those who were not able to keep up… School systems, with all the new types of changes away from the traditional way of teaching, were routinely criticized for failure to bring all students to an acceptable level of literacy. The disparity led to radicalism and increasing drug use among the youth, and the drop out rate had gone up to 50 percent in inner city schools… A new “culture of poverty” was a contributor to homelessness: poor communities isolated from the mainstream of the economy and single mothers forcibly had a here-and-now attitude, which made it difficult to plan or even perceive the long-term…”Top of the Page
Future of Retail – Anderson Scenarios. Jennifer Negley, Discount Store News, May 5, 1997.
The year 2010 is much closer than it seems. A child born today, for example, will be just entering high school by 2010. But in retailing terms, it's got the potential to be as different from 1997 as 1997 is from 1984. Jennifer Negley Just how different the retail scene will be 13 years from now is something the think tank at Anderson Consulting sat down to contemplate. Scenario 1. Mega-Retail World: “This world is seen as the ultimate one-stop shopping experience where everything is provided in one venue. Consumers spend more time working, but have less disposable income. Electronic and on-line retailing have not really caught on. consumers want retailing formats to be consistent, reliable and reasonably priced. Each market is dominated by a lone mega-retailer that "does everything to accommodate the shopping experience." Stores, while huge, are easy to navigate, and product information is abundant, much of it provided by touch-screen information kiosks. One-stop shopping reigns supreme. Department stores have added commodity goods, mass merchants have added upscale goods and while there are far fewer stores overall, the amount of total U.S. retail space has remained stable…” Scenario 2. The Main Street World: “The U.S. population has grown increasingly diverse and the total consumer profile is highly fragmented. Electronic retailing has not been embraced by a significant percentage of households, and while retail stores remain the leading shopping arena, consumers have rejected mass-produced, one-size-fits-all product offerings. They have also abandoned mall shopping and demand the convenience and intimacy of neighborhood shopping. Almost a mirror opposite of the Mega-Retail World, the Main Street World model consists of much smaller, more tightly niched stores clustered in neighborhoods. These stores are highly specialized, placing a great deal of emphasis on customized assortments and personal service. They use state-of-the-art in-store databases to profile and respond to each customers' habits and needs. Although large retail corporations still exist, their stores have individual identities tailored to the neighborhoods they serve...” Scenario 3. The Technological World: “Technology is pervasive and has been fully integrated into daily living. Convenience is assumed and service becomes a differentiating factor, whether it's delivered by on-line ordering, phone, fax or electronic catalog. Delivery takes a few hours rather than days, and value-added services such as film development and dry-cleaning pickup are part of any local customer's retail service package. Retailers and manufacturers now link directly with consumers, and the winners are those that have developed sterling brand reputations. Retailers have taken private label offerings to a new level through partnerships with secondary manufacturers, and leading manufacturers use the vast amounts of data they have developed on consumers to create well-defined, targeted brands…” Scenario 4. The Retail Web World: “Consumers demand that individual retailers offer them service through a variety of channels, including on line phone, catalog, television shopping and store shopping. Retail stores no longer devote a large amount of real estate to commodities; those are delivered to the home through electronic ordering. Instead, stores have become entertaining and interactive. By controlling the supply chain, retailers use an array of service offerings to build their own brand identities…”Top of the Page
Aging in the Next Few Decades. Denver Post On-line: Lifestyles health/mind/body July, 1998.
Science cracks the mysteries of aging. As some experts feel will happen in the next few decades - the world could be a different place. The following images of the future accumulate in a scenario of perceptions about the future from experts like Dr. Michael Fossel, clinical professor of medicine and author of “Reversing Human Aging.” Population: “Barring wars, plagues or famines, and if by early in the next century the scientific and medical communities can deliver a treatment that roughly doubles the healthy human life span, the population of any developed nation will double in 75 years. The population goes up proportionately to the increase in life span. Therefore, if you double the life span, you double the population.” Health: “Some of the most promising research today is looking at aging on a cellular level. But before this work blossoms enough to extend our lives, it may lead to breakthroughs on cancer or improvements on immune system function. In general, though, people will look younger on the outside and feel healthier on the inside much longer; age-related disabilities will vastly decrease.” Economy: “The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. The disparity widens dramatically in part because cash-smart people have many more years to build their fortunes. -- At the same time, some underdeveloped regions like central Africa flourish as certain diseases are wiped out through this same anti-aging science, allowing these areas to compete with the U.S. and other markets in farming and agriculture.” Business: “People stay healthy and work well into their 80s, 90s (or even longer as the science is perfected). The result is that companies work overtime to keep their 60- or 70-year veterans who become invaluable experts in their fields.” Military: It may be tougher to have a war as countries won't want to waste their healthy and priceless 120-year-old citizens. Meanwhile, the 20-year-olds - still well within their childhood in the new life span of the future - won't be as willing to risk everything for their countries. It would be akin to sending 5-year-olds off to war today. -- At the same time, terrorism may be more likely. One reason is that with people living longer, they hold onto age-old grudges longer. The economic disparities mentioned above could spark terrorism. Also, younger citizens in their 20s who can't compete with healthy 100-year-olds in the workplace could become disenfranchised and breed terrorism. Crime: Will society be more peaceful or more violent with the incredible changes in life span? It all centers on a debate over wisdom vs. hormones. One theory has it that as people get older and gain more perspective, they are less likely to be violent. Most violent crimes are now committed by people younger than 40. On the other hand, if anti-aging therapies change our hormonal balance to something more like those of current 18-year-olds, future adults may act more like teenagers. -- Prison sentences would need to change. A 20-year-old term for murder won't carry the same deterrent if people are living 50 or 100 years longer than they do now. Culture: Styles of music or clothing may have longer shelf lives in the future as older generations hang on to their tastes. Ageism: It will completely reverse. As the population ages and the smart get smarter, society won't cherish the younger people as much as it does now. If you're not old and healthy, you're not anybody, may be the new buzz phrase of the 21st century. Families: Having children in your 20s or 30s could seem to future people like something you did in your own childhood, before you outgrew it. Nuclear families may lose their importance. At the same time, five- or six-generation families will join for reunions. Lifestyle: Younger people may take fewer risks than today's crop of "X-Game'' adventurers. Anti-aging breakthroughs will do nothing to prevent fatal accidents. If you know you're going to live to be 150, would you still try hang gliding at 30? Politics: As people age, they generally become politically more conservative. As anti-aging breakthroughs lead to grayer and grayer nations, political liberals may lose substantial clout in the world.Top of the Page
The Future of Electronic Education. Danial Erasmus, facilitator, Wharton School of Management, <http:www.rsmcourse.cfm>, 1998.
Today the pieces are in place for the development of a new genre of education: distance learning over the Internet. The technological progress in storage capacity, bandwidth, full motion video and encryption makes the delivery of education a viable means on the “Information Superhighway”. Currently, many educational institutions are using the Internet to distribute and enhance the possibilities of a learning environment. However, several key issues currently limit the wide spread growth of Internet based on education: accessibility, bandwidth, certification, greater variety of educational materials, and user responsibility. Danial Erasmus Scenario 1. High Acceptance of Technology & Homogeneity Within Society: Government administration of standardized tests. A day in the life of a student, Suzy, who scores low in the test; Chelsea Clinton, the Secretary of Education appears in a holographic image recommending that Suzy engage in distance education. In commerce, corporations offer educational services to strengthen skills. Organizations oversee the growth in quality content. Scenario 2. High Acceptance of Technology & Fragmentation Within Society: Privatization of regular schools the previous decade had mixed results. The more expensive schools were doing quite well, especially the ones run by the big three educational companies, but they were too expensive. The non-profit schools were very ideologically bent. The compromise in this scenario is the new government distance education program, providing technology that enables a holistic learning environment. Within the government program, students could choose from a variety of courses: from arts & entertainment to math and engineering. Scenario 3. Low Acceptance of Technology & Homogeneity Within Society. Distance learning programs set up by the Secretary of Education and receives financial funding by the PTA and local organizations, but not considered authoritative educational programs or very effective. Attitudes of frustration toward computer viruses, unorthodox websites, expensive distance learning but with little human contact; and “kinks” in the system that aggravate organizational and process learning at manufacturing plants. Scenario 4. Low Acceptance of Technology and Fragmentation Within Society: The school systems had undergone radical change by 2010. It seemed people were becoming more polarized in their social values, economic status, and their level of formal education. The for-profit schools had become very popular with the affluent sectors of society, but by their nature excluded those who could not pay their exorbitant tuitions. Other private schools that were affiliated with a religious or social belief prospered, especially the ones located in "domains," neighborhoods organized around a set of beliefs. None of the states were successful in enforcing the educational standard of assessment, and many gravitated to the “Idaho Model” of providing a smorgasbord of independent choices of courses on-line.Top of the Page
The Workplace in 2020: Three Scenarios. (Trends: Position Yourself in the Future), Patricia Galagan, Training & Development, Nov 1996 v50 n11 p50(3).
The Council of Governors of the American Society for Training and Development developed three workplace scenarios for the year 2020. Scenario 1. The Wave: Characterized by high market demand for smart products, high level of connectivity and high ability of intellectual capital to attract hard capital. The big enduring corporations of the late 20th century have given way to small, agile groups that come together to capitalize on a business opportunity and then dissolve. The pioneers and heroes of this new era in business are the people squeezed out by big businesses in the 1990s. They understand the power that high connectivity has put in people's hands no matter where they are. Nowadays organizations struggle to adapt to these quicksilver entrepreneurs. In the new workplace contract, the value provided by the organization is the questionable element. Employees are universally known as performers since that term more accurately describes the nature of their role in the workplace. Work and learning are linked through information technologies. Their democratizing influence has smoothed out national differences in economic development, although local culture still determines the pace of advancement and the flavor of a country's engagement with the electronic marketplace. Many countries are more concerned about raising their digital literacy rates than their GNPs. Scenario 2. The Current: Marked by high market demand for smart products, high degree of connectivity and low ability of intellectual capital to attract hard capital. This scenario presumes that market-based economies continue to grow and spread throughout the world. Government regulations have had a heavy influence in shaping world trade and the permitted uses of worldwide digital communications. A worldwide communications infrastructure, similar to today's Internet, connects the globe and several permanent space stations. This net makes the exchange of text, images, and sound easy and widespread. A universal language exists for digital communication, made up of visual images, symbols, and elements from the dominant business languages of the late 20th century - English and Japanese. The spoken language of business is English for people above a certain level, where it has been mandated off and on since the 1990s. Technology has erased some language differences in electronic communication but has also allowed people to return to using their native languages, especially to convey special ways of thinking. Scenario 3. The Wake: Features low demand for smart products, high connectivity and low ability of intellectual capital to attract hard capital. In this scenario, the market for smart products peaks in 2010 and by 2020 is saturated. The numbers of digitally literate customers are not increasing rapidly any more. The capital that briefly boosted the development of smart products has moved away in anticipation of this change in the market. The bar is rising on the basic skills now required to take advantage of high connectivity. Only children exposed from birth to smart products, which are now very costly, and electronic networks, which are now the building blocks of all organizations and communities, can enjoy the benefits of the late information age. All others, the new have-nots, live in poverty and ignorance as extreme as that found among those excluded from the benefits of the industrial economy. Countries with a young workforce and an emerging (i.e., not ossified) infrastructure have an advantage.Top of the Page
Scary Scenarios Spark Action at Bioterrorism Symposium.(Medical News & Perspectives) Charles Marwick 03/24/99 JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies in the School of Hygiene and Public Health. The center, established in August 1998, is headed by Donald A. Henderson, MD, internationally known for his leadership in eradicating smallpox. Scenarios were created to draw attention to the issues involved and the preparations necessary to mount the needed countermeasures. They were part of the program during the first National Symposium on Medical and Public Health Response to Bioterrorism, convened here by the Hopkins Center, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and 12 other sponsoring organizations. More than 900 concerned public health professionals, physicians, and others attended, and 300 more had to be turned away for lack of room. The organizers plan to make the meeting an annual event. Anthrax Scenario: The packed ballpark was tense with excitement. The home team was up by two runs with two outs in the top of the ninth. Nobody paid the slightest attention to a truck that stopped briefly outside the park. Even if anyone had seen it, they couldn't have known that during its brief stop the truck released an aerosolized cloud of anthrax spores that were now wafting over the crowd on a balmy breeze. Two days later, people presented at local hospital emergency departments with nasal congestion and fever. The illness was initially diagnosed as influenza. But in succeeding days, more and more people became ill. Then deaths began to be reported. Finally, 5 days after the exposure occurred, a hospital laboratory identified anthrax as the cause of the outbreak, and antibiotic treatment was begun in those who had been exposed. Even so, of the 20000 people estimated to have been at the ball game, 4000 died.Top of the Page
"Four Scenarios for an Aging Society." Harry R. Moody. The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 24, Num. 5, September, 1994.
Moody's article describes four scenarios about the future of an aging society, based on plausible extrapolations from present empirical trends. Scenario 1. Prolongation of Morbidity: Under a pessimistic assumption, the period of morbidity will grow longer. Even modest medical technology, such as antibiotics, permit survival to advanced ages for those with very poor quality of life. This means that this elderly group would bear the brunt of cost-containment. The choice of death could be made by either the individual or by the society, though the two levels are always intertwined. Scenario 2. Compression of Morbidity: A more optimistic assumption about compression of morbidity results in society doing everything possible to postpone illness later and later into life. Based on a biological assumption that the maximum human life span is fixed at 120 years. The goal in this scenario is to eliminate the signs and symptoms of age that appear before we arrive at it. The proper aim of medicine and public policy would be to intervene, to slow down the rate of aging so that more of us can remain healthy up to the very end of life. Sickness and morbidity would be compressed into the last few months or weeks of life. Scenario 3. Prolongevity: This scenario pushes the modern idea of progress still further by challenging the "natural" limits presumed under the second scenario. In this future, we would think of aging as a disease to be conquered and cured. The entire human life course is open to revision by new knowledge of the biology of aging, especially the genetics of longevity. Scarce health care resources will not be spent on improving the quality of life, but will rather be directed toward basic research into the aging process itself. The ultimate goal is indefinite survival under favorable conditions of technological control. Scenario 4. Recovery of the Life World: In this scenario, the assumption is made that the meaning of old age is in the finitude of human life as a condition to be voluntarily accepted as a matter of collective policy, not individual choice. The fourth scenario seeks an ideal of vital involvement and concern by the elderly for the welfare of future generations. The common good and the needs of future generations are values that support limiting longevity in any one generation. Allocation policies for health care would embody these values by favoring social programs such as hospice or home health care, instead of high-tech medical intervention that provide only incremental gains for those who already have lived a long and full life.Top of the Page
Future Care: Responding to the Demand for Change. Edited by Clement Bezold, Ph.D. and Erica Mayer, Century Health Care Services, Vol 1. NY: Faulkner & Gray, July 1996.
“Future Care” is the first in a series of future-oriented volumes as it relates to health care. It showcases the trend analysis, scenarios, and visions of 14 of the leading thinkers in the health care field today. The objective is to enhance the readers’ capacity to wisely choose the future of their organizations. These highly detailed scenarios are based on various images of the future and fundamental drivers that, interestingly, have changed little since 1991: the movement to accountability and better outcome measures; the movement of biomedical science toward the capacity to forecast disease probabilities; incredible prospects for treatment advances; information and communication systems that will revolutionize and decentralize the state of the art prevention and care; changing biomedical paradigms that move beyond exclusive allopathic and reductionist approaches to a larger array of preventative and therapeutic modalities; and finally, pressure on the nature of licensure in the health professions. Yet, health care will be very different in 2010. These updated scenarios reflect the general patterns that map an array of uncertain futures. Scenario 1: Business as “Usual”: “National health care reform was sent back to the states, resulting in great diversity. Expensive advancing technology and therapeutics, including function-enhancing bionics, help health care’s share of the GNP grow to 17 percent by 2005. Health care providers shift to forecasting and then managing illness far earlier and more successfully. Poverty and lack of access to health care persist.” Scenario 2: Hard Times/Government Leadership: “Recurrent hard times and a political revolt against health care lead to a frugal Canadian-like health care system. Most states follow Oregon in consciously setting priorities. Heroic measures for terminal patients decline and more frugal, yet successful, approaches to innovation are adapted. Health care’s percentage of the GNP is reduced to 11 percent by 2001. Thirty percent of Americans “buy up” to affluent, higher-tech care, and two different systems of health care emerge.” Scenario 3: Buyer’s Market. “Many thought the 1980s was the decade of health care’s entry into the marketplace--that competition would lead to better, less expensive service. What failed during the ‘80s worked very well over the next two decades. Markets, including health care, now do a much better job of giving consumers a range of high-quality services, delivered in convenient ways at relatively low cost over the long term, which maintaining a high degree of innovation. These amazing changes are coupled with better social policies to blunt the inequities and lack of access that accompany the stronger market approach.” Scenario 4: Health Gains and Healing. “ The 15 years before 2010 were a time of vision and design for health care. Health care organizations, their customers, and the communities they served joined to develop and pursue powerful shared visions. These generally led to health gains, through a variety of paths. This noble activity was reinforced by “smarter markets” which allow consumers and large purchasers to understand the outcomes of health care providers both for individuals and for the communities they serve.”Top of the Page
Reinventing The University - A Radical Proposal for the Problem-Focused University. Jan Sinnott, Towson State University and Lynn Johnson, National Resarch Council/National Academy of Sciences. Ablex Publishing Corporation, New Jersey. 1996.
The intent of the book is to offer higher education a model of the problem-focused university, so the reader can consider a radically different method of educating adult learners in a higher education setting. This model is based on several assumption: a creative, learning, nourishing, cost-effective, efficient organization that meets human, societal, and world needs; an organization that involves all of its employees, as well as its students, in the learning process through practical experience, mentoring, seminars, formal, and informal instruction. Scenario of Multisite Problem-Focused University: “ In this scenario, the centers form the building blocks for the transition from the current university system to the multisite problem - focused university. The first step in this scenario of transition from the current university to the multisite problem-focused university is the internal identification of the university’s strengths, resources, and current funding support in one or more problem areas. These problem focus areas could then become the nucleai around which the center(s) could develop, thus providing a starting point for the transition to the multisite problem-focused university. Universities also will need to identify their priorities and problem-focused orientation in accordance with local, state, national, and international goals. Similarly, universities will need to develop an awareness of others working in the same problem focus area and ascertain whether working relationships and funding opportunities exist. They will need to redefine the purpose of those centers that fall within their own selected problem focus areas and terminate or collapse others. At this stage, universities may concentrate on the development of one or a few major centers that address different aspects of the same broader problem, or various problems. A present-day university may specialize in many areas and have attracted top faculty and established an international reputation in many areas. Yet for the university to successfully become part of a multisite problem-focused university, it will need to combine its internal facilities and resources, and concentrate on just a few problem areas expanding those related centers.”Top of the Page
21st Century Miracle Medicine - Robosurgery, Wonder Cures, and the Quest for Immortality. Alexandra Wyke. NY: Plenum Trade, May 1997.
Technology, especially the current trends in imaging, telecommunications, telerobotics, and biosensors, when designed and integrated properly, could help healthcare teams perform their tasks more effectively and at dramatically lower costs than exist today. Technology could enable all persons to reap the benefits of health care and create new suites of healthcare systems that fundamentally alters lifestyles. But more importantly, it is people, in teams, that build systems. This book outlines what might pass within the next fifty years of medicine’s evolutionary journey, particularly if international health care teams are assembled. Presents a plausible scenario of what medicine and medical technologies may mean to an average family on a middle income living in America in 2050. Scenario: The Evermore Family, New York, NY. This scenario has a very captivating storyline. The reader is immediately drawn to a theme that is focused on a family health crisis in 2050. The first paragraph begins: “It is 2:00 AM --- the wee small hours --- and except for the little girl of the household, young Elixir, the Evermore family is fast asleep. In a bedroom whose walls are almost entirely pasted over by three-dimensional posters of horses and equestrian events, twelve-year-old Elixir’s small body is being racked by a coughing attack. Her personal medical monitor, that works as a bracelet at all times, is starting to pulsate and throw out alarm signals, quickly triggering into action the normally silent computer sentinel sitting in the corner of the room...”Top of the Page
Making the Majors - The Transformation of Team Sports in America. Eric M. Leifer. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1995.
The author asserts that every element in the scenario for future major leagues could be found somewhere in the present: the elements only need to be extended and fit together into a new prototype. As of this writing, plans were being laid for a new football league to challenge the NFL, the “A League,” tentatively scheduled to open with twelve franchises. Teams would each have a corporate sponsor. Yet, despite the bold new attachment to corporations, the A League organizers have had difficulty envisioning a detachment from cities. Trends reveal that in the future, major league competition will be scrutinized as never before. Winning will be more important than ever in gaining teams and players international recognition. In this respect, the strange new world ahead will be a continuation of the past 125 years. The scenario, Making the Majors, describes a world in which teams actually represent corporations, and are quite successful. An excerpt: “We have no immutable loyalties to particular teams. Players and teams constantly have to prove themselves to gain our attention and praise. We have our favorites, but there is no team or players who cannot fall from grace as far as we are concerned. The multinational corporations that teams represent encourage this insistence on excellence. We have grown up in a world where rivalries between multinational corporations permeate our daily life. In the daily battles waged over excellence in the marketplace, however, there are rarely any clear winners and losers. The rivalries go on indefinitely, in the marketplace and in protracted campaigns. But when the representative teams meet on the field, there is sure to be a winner and a loser. Although we know that a loss does not really mean that the sponsor corporation has been defeated, or even that its team will not get up and come back again, the playing of a game is still welcomed in rivalries that would otherwise have no resolution. Just the thought that people around the world are eagerly anticipating the outcome makes it seem all the more large and important.”Top of the Page
Future Health, Future Choices. Kathleen Fackelman. Science News Anniversary Supplement, September, 1997.
Scientists have already identified a number of disease-causing genes. Such work has led to blood tests that can reveal who is free of “the tainted inheritance” and who carries one or two copies of the genes. The near future will mainstream simple and cheap tests for genetic flaws. This means that life-saving information will be readily provided, but in other cases, genetic information on computerized medical records or smart cards will lead to serious violation of privacy issues. The author spells this out with what-if scenarios and asking some vital questions. A Scenario: “The year: 2020. The setting: Chicago. A young associate named Susan steps into the conference room of a law firm. She faces a gauntlet of the firm’s best attorneys. They tell Susan that she’ll make partner if she measures up during the next year. They also tell her about a new drug shown to boost cognitive performance. Of course, they say, the drug does have side effects; it can cause cancer in 20 or 30 years. “Its up to you”, they tell her. Susan takes the drug. Was it a free choice? Susan would not be unusual if she felt that she had to take the drug or lose her job, says bioethicist Thomas H. Murray of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.” Another Possibility: "Here is another possible scenario: A lawyer finds out that his client’s ex-wife has had a blood test for the BRCA1 gene. The test is positive, suggesting that she has a heightened risk of breast cancer. The lawyer argues that the husband should get custody of the couple’s children. “Who is more fit as a parent in the long run?”"Top of the Page
World Development Report 1995 - Workers in an Integrating World. World Bank, World Bank Publications, 1995.
Rapid change is never easy for people who spend most of their lives working, and that applies to most of the world. Even among the poorest, there is only a relative few who are idle; the great mass of the poor work hard for little pay. Unemployment afflicts more than a hundred million people worldwide and is a matter of a major concern in rich and poor countries alike. But hundreds of millions more, living mainly in the world’s low-and middle-income countries, remain in poverty not for lack of work but for lack of skills, or for lack of the kind of economic environment in which they can use their skills to work more productively, for higher pay. The World Bank provides two highly detailed global scenarios that illustrate the extent of what is possible and the magnitude of the dangers ahead for workers in each of the world’s principle regions. Scenario 1.) Scenario of Divergence. “The first scenario is one of muddling through and is largely based on persistence of past trends. Because there is the distinct possibility that this path would lead to widening differences between some regions and widening inequality in labor income within some countries, we call this a scenario of slow growth and divergence--the “divergent” scenario.” Scenario 2.) Scenario of Convergence. “Explores the potential implications of strong policy action at the domestic level in all parts of the world, combined with deeper international integration. This we term a scenario of inclusion and convergence.”Top of the Page
Both scenarios are illustrative - the numbers are projections that are based on many assumptions, and certainly not a forecast. But they are a plausible guide to the consequences of success and failure and take into account likely future trends in both economy-wide effects and international integration.
Insights and Action Items for US Global Relations in the 21st Century: Findings from Working Groups of the Project on Intelligence Futures/Future of Global Relations. The Project on the Future of Global Relations/Intelligence Futures Office of Research and Development, Washington DC 20505. Stanley A. Feder, Project Director 703/613-8462.
For several years, experts in fields relevant to national security have participated in a series of structured, analytic working groups on the future of global relations. The working groups convened to examine the implications of a variety of factors for US global relations over the next ten years. Taking traditional political, military, and economic factors into account, five factors were emphasized that many experts believe will increasingly influence global relations: globalization of national economies, technology and telecommunications, ethnicity/communal identity, population and migration, and environment. Four scenarios of global relations and the US role over the next ten years were constructed. Scenario 1.) Global Integration. “Integration of global economy. Most countries pursue open markets, privatization, fiscal restraint. Systemic problems are minimized by operation of markets & nongovernment organizations (BGOs). Mutual benefits of free trade foster peace. Governments reduce roles in global relations and capabilities. By 2005 problems develop that governments and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) lack capacity to handle.” Scenario 2.) Multipolar Mercantilism. “Economic power of the big emerging market countries (BEM’s) increases. Developed coutries compete for economic relations with BEMs in ways that undermine trade regimes and the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Conflicts among BEMs eventually involve use of nuclear weapons.” Scenario 3.) Trouble in Russia. “World integrating; governments, NGOs, IGOs, working to moderate systemic threats. Nationalist coup in Russia revives Cold War thinking in West. Russia lacks capabilities of USSR. Intense policy debates in Western countries over which takes priority: Russia or economic relations with Asia and systemic threats? ” Scenario 4.) Disengagement from the Third World. “Economies of many BEMs falter. State failures, social problems, and civil unrest occur in many BEMS and less developed countries (LDCs). Developed countries lack resources and will to help; adopt foreign policies of minimal involvement. Developed countries focus only on short-term problems.”Top of the Page
The Hemingford Scenarios: Alternative Futures for Health and Health Care. Steering Committee on Futures Health Scenarios. Dordrecht: Kluwar Academic Publishers, July 1995.
As a result of a series of workshops with boards of NHS health commissions, four scenarios framing key uncertainties in the health care field are developed. These highly detailed scenarios provide a backdrop to decision making and strategic thinking. Scenario 1. The Renewed Welfare Order: The NHS Delivers. “In this future an approach to health and welfare services emerges somewhat similar to the one that has prevailed recently. Many of the fears about the sustainability of the NHS are not realised by 2010. The public health care system continues to have a central place in the social fabric of Britain. There is a rejuvenation of the traditional ideas of welfare support. But what is around the corner?” Scenario 2. Health is Wealth: Private Works. “This story tells of a future world where economic and social differences persist within the UK population. However, the concept of the NHS proves remarkably resilient in face of health inequalities and increasing consumerist pressure. NHS Trust hospitals and community services become a thing of the past and are replaced by impressive private provision. Nonetheless, core health services remain available to all.” Scenario 3. Science Makes the Big Push: High Cost, High Gain Health Services. “In this picture of the future, science becomes an increasingly respected part of everyone’s life. The British economy makes the transition to one that fully exploits technological innovation, no more so than in the health sector. Within the NHS significant shifts occur. Patients demand more from their clinicians in terms of effective care and personal interaction. Changes in professional boundaries and a proper focus on the evidence base of medicine shifts the pattern of clinical practice within the NHS in a quite remarkable way.” Scenario 4. Well-Being As You Like It: State Sponsored Feel Good Services. “In this scenario there is the emergence of greater social cohesion. We see the maintenance of a publicly run health service by new regional boards. Health care becomes more responsive to personal differences and preferences. Holistic local services, including new NHS professionals such as chiropractors and aromatherapists, become available from true health centres.”Top of the Page
Health Care 2015: Flight of the Butterfly; Future of Modern Health. Montague Brown, Physician Executive Journal, January, 1996.
Institutional change is slow but the lesson of the butterfly remains. The flap of a butterfly’s wing as taught in chaos theory, can apply as a metaphor to an understanding of environmental and institutional trends that are likely to magnify and become “tidal waves in the future.” Innovators whose innovations succeed can be an impetus of major changes in modern health care. But “for most people, survival and following waves is sufficient.” These exploratory scenarios are presented to envision major change. Scenario 1. ) Who Owns, Who Controls? 2002-2020. “As we look back from a Year 2020 perspective, we see that no group won in every market. In some areas, hospitals bootstrapped themselves into organizational clusters that used managed care and value themes to dominate markets, generally in excess of two or three million population. Physicians came into such systems through PHO-type partnerships; managed care plans; and, eventually, for senior physicians, through the sale of practices. For younger physicians coming into practice around 2002, salaried positions dominate the landscape. Physicians won during the long transition from independent practice to employment in best value systems with a keen sense of how to best do the job. Some of the more senior members of the profession won first by getting preferred status within managed care networks. As integration proceeded, they sold their practices, some to Wall Street-financed firms... Smaller, mostly rural hospitals function as all-purpose health centers, with urgent care, long-term care, some holding beds, and remote diagnostic capabilities.Top of the Page
The butterfly wing flappings of the 1990s brought profound changes by 2005. Unanticipated changes included some very positive development. New not-for-profit foundations sprang up across the nation as not-for-profit managed care plans, Blue Cross plans, and hospitals sold out. A new movement focusing on public health measures and local community action developed from these foundations. Medical and allied health programs found new sources of funds to try out ideas and to establish programs that meet health needs but show no short-term financial gain.
However, the largest anticipated change did not happen. All the market measures passed in the late nineties by a conservative government failed to bring costs down as anticipated. Government and politicians continue to believe that they can anticipate the market, set rules, and have policies that truly change things. But people anticipate rule changes by government and position themselves to do well under the new rules.
Scenario 2. Butterfly Flaps in 2005-2015 Require Repositioning for 2025. Efficiency and value for more modest cost did lead to some major efficiencies in delivering necessary health services. Capitation and fixed reimbursement drove costs down. By 2015, health services research reached funding levels of one-half percent of a 2 trillion plus health budget. While this research brought many efficiencies in providing care, improvement in diagnosis and treatment continued as cost drivers. The net result? Cost increases continuing to exceed inflation. Further, as concentration in the industry led to fewer choices for consumers, it became increasingly clear that government regulation of prices would be necessary. Business might be able to achieve great efficiencies, but when a business has market power, it may prefer, it may prefer to keep a bit more in profit and invest a bit less in continuing to drive costs down.
By 2015, antitrust laws are again being increasingly applied to behavior deemed destructive of consumer choice. Still, the debate rages on as to whether or not large-scale, vertically integrated organizations are necessary for the efficiencies achieved in medicine. Bigness has its own cost. Fortunately for those who yearned for more local control, many of the large systems began to run into profitability problems, charges of price gouging, the indifference to physician and patient concerns, leading them to look for alternatives, including divestment, as buyers relentlessly drive down prices and push antitrust remedies to curtail monopolistic behavior.
Fortunately, foundations created by the demise of voluntary hospitals offered another chance to rebuild the richness of the self-help, community, family, and professional networked life-style. Communities that elected to develop large-scale cooperatives with buyers, patients, and providers as owners found many opportunies to devote substantial resources to prevention and healthy life-styles to improve health status and not just to depend on medical care as a crutch for important personal and family decisions.”
Scenario 3. Butterfly for 2020. “The long-promised baby boom retirement period finally arrives. by now, the normal retirement age is 70, with Medicare kicking in at 67, not 65. Retireees can get their social security checks and work without losing benefits. With this gradual shift to a later retirement and a social policy that encourages work, more and more people engage in paid work well into their 70s. This dramatic shift produced more taxpayers than anticipated and fewer tax-takers. Multiple careers replaced single careers as the norm. Education and career shifting continued into one’s late 60s, with some preparing for careers not to begin until their late 70s. Life is to be lived, and the idea of retiring at 65 has been retired.
Still, the cost burden of health services required ever-vigilant attention to efficiency and Spartan utilization. Health services research emerges from its tar baby status in the 20th Century to star status in the 21st. Medicine benefited ultimately from this transformation by becoming much more of a science-oriented profession and less of an idiosyncratic, independent profession.
Life sciences continue to boom. Many of the genetic promises of earlier years arrived about 20 years later than anticipated, but they are making a difference.
Life span continues to inch up, while the biggest change is that people lead a much more complete life with few disabling problems, fewer professional interventions, and much greater autonomy. Freedom from want has given way to an era in which the freedom to live, independently and actively well into ones 80s has arrived, and not a day too soon, as any “Baby Boomer” turned “Golden Ager” will tell you.”
The Future of Work: A Guide to a Changing Society. Charles Handy, Oxford UK and NY: Basil Blackwell, July 1984/201p. Four scenarios of work to the 21st century.
Handy’s central theme is that the world of work will never be the same again, and we are experiencing more than just a cyclical adjustment. New patterns of work are emerging, such as a full-employment society becoming a part-time one, blue collar jobs becoming while collar jobs; industry is declining and services are growing. Four scenarios are discussed as a way of focusing the future options of work: Scenario 1.) Unemployment Scenario: unemployment is seen as a necessary and inevitable cost of bringing down inflation. High unemployment levels are accepted by society for the greater good. Scenario 2.) Leisure Scenario: this scenario gives unemployment a positive twist by foreseeing a leisure society in which the arts and recreation flourish. What work there is will be done by an elite few with the aid of a lot of machines. Scenario 3.) Employment Scenario: the only real form of work is a job, this scenario says. That means having a place to go and, preferably, useful work to do. But even if it is simply “seat-warming,” a job in this scenario is preferable to unemployment for both the individual and society. Scenario 4) Work Scenario (advocated by Handy): according to this scenario, a job is only part of the work an individual does. Learning, leisure and community service are the other elements of an individual’s work.Top of the Page
The Future Impact of Automation On Workers. Wassily Leontief and Faye Duchin, NY: Oxford U Press, Jan 1986/170p. Automation scenarios to 2000.
This book demonstrates the use of Leontief’s well known modeling to analyze the structural transformation of the US economy. This dynamic model divided the economy into hundreds of industries and looked at the interrelationships from the year 1963 - 2000. These scenarios were used to assess the future demands of labor relative to automation. Four scenarios were formulated. Scenario 1.) S1, The Reference Scenario: assumed no further automation or technological change after 1980. Robots, numerically controlled machine tools, and automated office equipment are used only to the extent that they figured in the average technologies that prevailed in 1980. Scenarios 2 & 3) Scenarios S1 and S2 are identical to S1 through 1980, but differ in their technological assumptions for the later years. Both scenarios project an increasing use of computers in all sectors for specific information processing and machine control tasks and their integration. In all years through 2000, S3 assumes far more computer based courses per student and more teacher - training, and on-the-job training in more sectors and for a greater number of occupations. Scenario 4.) S4 is identical to S3 in all assumptions about the technological structure of the economy, but the final demand projections incorporated into it are different from those used in the other scenarios. Concludes that the intensive use of automation will make it possible to achieve over the next 20 years significant economies in labor relative to production.Top of the Page
Report on Planet Earth: A Perspective for 2044 A.D. Charles Sheffield. Chapter from The World of 2044 - Technological Development and the Future of Society edited by Charles Sheffield, Marceto Alonso, and Morton A. Kaplan. Paragon House St. Paul, Minnesota.
A positive, upbeat scenario of the world in 2044. The grandparents of the 1990s examined the trends of the world and predicted that environmental problems would gravely affect the planet by mid-21st Century. What our grandparents did not realize however, was constancy. The stability of the vast, self-regulating entity that forms Earth’s biosphere proved to be extraordinary by 2044. Gaia’s vast and interconnected total genetic pool was supportive, and basic materials did not come into short supply. The combination of the success of robotization, artificial food, contraceptive pills, drugs, and non-invasive surgical procedure increased the quality of life substantially. The most interesting part of this scenario, is it describes the sheer pleasure of automation and productivity in the world of work: “The shrinking need for human labor as a result of widespread automation was predicted in the 1950’s, but it’s social implications were misread. People foresaw massive unemployment. Instead, we have moved to today’s ten-hour work week, with positions shared by ten or more individuals who are at work consecutively through the week … The move to the two-day work week, plus vastly improved and widespread electronic communications and the freedom to work from one’s home, has also made the words “rush hour” as much an anachronism as “computer error.”Top of the Page
Leaders and Futuring - Making Visions Happen. John R. Hoyle The Practicing Administrator’s Leadership Series, Jerry J. Herman and Janice L. Herman, Editors. Tech Prep: A Scenario for 2015.
This scenario depicts a normative future envisioning a very strong educational system. The factors that drive this scenario are: integrated resources from government, business, and social services; growth of the Internet; the success and widespread use of virtual reality and virtual worlds as a training/simulation tool, faster, more efficient transportation, and a highly educated and productive work force. The scenario illustrates a Tech-Prep program that serves over 3 million people in the Gulf Coast area. The Tech-Prep center is a futuristic masterpiece. It houses specialists in information technologies, urban planners, education and health specialists, and business and family counselors. These specialists facilitate the learning and development of students, teachers, and community members with new job skills and self-esteem. Pegged to be the prototype of learning in the 21st century.Top of the Page
Beyond Health Care. Neville C. Chenoy and Ronald J.C. Mcqueen, Health Management Forum 6:3, Autumn 1985, 52-58. Health scenarios to 21st century.
Trevor Hancock provides an introduction to health futurism and outlines alternative scenarios for health care. Described is a normative scenario for a healthy Canadian population. Factors that need to occur to make this scenario a reality include: creating a healthy environment, emphasizing wellness, providing essential health care services to all.Top of the Page
Scenarios: A Planning Tool for Health Care Organizations. Rene D. Zentnew & Gelb Zentner, Hospital & Health Services Administration Summer 1991 36:2. Three scenarios of the U.S. health care industry to 2000.
An organization’s strategic planners require an understanding of future developments in the environment in which their decisions will be made. However, there is increasing recognition that there is no single predetermined “future.” Therefore, the use of alternative future scenarios can be helpful. This article describes the scenario planning technique as applied to the health care industry and four scenarios along the axis of a high-low scenario matrix. Scenario 1.) The Regulators Return: this scenario is charachterized by strong economic growth, which coincides with a political climate favoring increasing regulation of health care. Goverment planners fear inflation and thus establish effectve regulatory controls over all sectors of the national economy, including health care. Scenario 2.) The Engine Slows: this scenario is characterized by lower-than-historical economic growth. In order to maintain stability in a time of reduced taxes, the federal government in the early 1990s imposes strong controls over all sectors, including health care. Meanwhile, health care costs continue to rise in real terms, denying many unemployed Americans access to health care. Scenario 3.) The Golden Age: this scenario is characterized by strong economic growth through the decade of the 1990s. So long as the inflation rate remains at acceptable levels, the government permits all sectors to grow with minimum regulation.Top of the Page
Educational Futures: Six Scenarios. John D. Haas, Futures Research Quarterly, 2:2, Summer 1986, 15-30. Six scenarios of education to 21st century.
“Knowledge seekers are time travelers, in the sense that learning is a process, a “continuous reconstruction of experience” to use John Dewey’s famous phrase. Learning is an integration of past experience with one’s present condition—in light of future expectations. For educators of children and youth, the future is that broad realm where their clients will spend 80 or 90 percent of their lives. What will education in America be like for young persons in the 21st century?” The author sketches six scenario logics on a very eloquent matrix chart, then describes each scenario in rich detail. Scenario 1.) Contemporary Traditional: some minor changes happen in the school system, but no deep structural or curricular changes will be evident. The author provides four supportive reasons for this forecast. Scenario 2.) Humanistic Traditional: the “climate” of schools and school systems, that is, the health of the organizations, provide greater trust, moral, active learning. Scenario 3.) Partial Technological Deschooling: communications networks that provide cable, television, and computers combine to decentralize the schools into homes, businesses, public agencies. Scenario 4.) Multiple Options: parents are given choices and options. The author provides a good overview of these options, such as placement choice within a school district, voucher plans, and tuition tax credits. Scenario 5.) Experimental and/or Communal Schools: innovative alternative schools become a widespread phenomenon. Scenario 6.) Total Deschooling: an unlikely future calling for the complete elimination of schools from post-industrial societies.Top of the Page
The Changing Workplace: Career Counseling Strategies for the 1990s and Beyond. Carl McDaniels, San Francisco; Jossey-Bass Publishers, May 1989/255p. Three scenarios of the workplace to 2000.
This book is written in two parts. Part one reviews workforce forecasting methods, changes in the workforce and workplace, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics projections for the 21 million new jobs pegged to be created by 2000. Part two considers three scenarios on the future of work. Scenario 1.) Green or Go: the future of work in this scenario is seen as high-tech, high-touch, high visibility, and highly computerized. A period of rapid job change and the emergence of new occupations is forecast. This scenario also looks at new work settings, changing workplace relationships, and automation in the workplace. Scenario 2.) Yellow or Caution: a gradual evolution of the workplace, rather than dramatic change is how this scenario views the future of work. Three key trends outlined are greater individual choices in work, the elimination of unpleasant or undesirable work, and greater concern for human potential in the workplace. Scenario 3.) Red or Stop: the future of work in this scenario is one of low-paying, low-skill jobs for a large segment of the workforce. The major trends outlined are a shift from manufacturing, downscaling of jobs, continuing high unemployment, a dwindling middle class, outsourcing of workers, and few job opportunities for college graduates.Top of the Page
The Catastrophe Ahead: AIDS and the Case for a New Public Policy. William B. Johnston and Kevin R. Hopkins. NY: Praeger, June 1990/238p. Three scenarios of AIDS to 2002.
17 years ago, not a single predominant scientist or medical researcher in the entire world was warning of a 100 percent fatal venereal and blood-borne disease that would strike down tens of thousands of unsuspecting gay men and IV drug users and would threaten to break out into the general population. The authors assert that a decade into the future, forecasts of the course and total affect AIDS will have on humankind may be equally wrong. This careful study projects three qualitative and statistical scenarios of AIDS to 2002. Scenario 1.) Worse Case: describes a society that continues to “muddle through” the AIDS epidemic without significant changes in behavior or great progress in medicine. In this dark view of the future, the changes that take place are gradual and limited. The biggest adjustments in behavior come among gay men, who already have demonstrated the greatest response to the threat of AIDS. There is appreciably less responsiveness in the modification of sex practices among the poor and little long-term and sustained change in drug-taking behaviors. There is modest progress in developing therapies. Scenario 2.) Middle Case: the future is one of cautious optimism. Society responds relatively extensively to the dangers of AIDS, and although these changes take effect over a period of several years , the long-term modifications in behavior that come about are substantial. As with worse case scenario, the most extensive behavior change takes place in the gay community. Projects fairly substantial and rapid progress in the development of therapies against AIDS and viral transmission, with disease progression slowed by three-fourths and infectiousness reduced by 80 percent by the turn of the century. By the late 1990s, a vaccine is introduced against infection. Widespread introduction by early 21st century. Scenario 3.) Best Case: “everything goes right.” Behavioral change and medical progress is nothing short of revolutionary. Nine out of every ten virus carriers are presumed to be inoculated before the middle of the 1990s with an anti-AIDS treatment that ultimately reduces the rate of progression from infection to AIDS by three-fourths and cures infectiousness by 95 percent.Top of the Page
Reviving Rural Life. Joseph F. Coates, Jennifer Jarratt, and Lara Ragunas, The Futurist, 26:2, March-April 1992, p. 21-28. Four scenarios of rural life and work to 2002.
Rural areas today are a mixed bag of occasional successes and numerous failures, with little or no room in between. Successes include retirement and recreation communities, area trade and government centers, academic communities, other types of “entrepreneurial towns,” and exurbs. The failures include everything else, especially those rural areas that base their economies on extracting a natural resource, as in forestry or mining. Four scenarios of rural life and work over the next ten years: Scenario 1.) Business as Usual: “assumes that no major change in the economy occurs and that there are no substantial policy interventions. In this scenario, local-development groups successfully revitalize some rural communities, often by enlisting a corporate employer—even a foreign company—as a primary client for a community’s work force.” Scenario 2.) Women Find Work, Men Don’t: “information technology investment in office work doubles nationwide, and the advances “trickle down” into the rural workplace. The service and information economy moves low-skilled work out of expensive urban offices and into rural communities in the metropolitan fringe and beyond.” Scenario 3.) Infotech Attracts: “telecommuting has become a way of life for an increasing portion of the work force. Telecommuters include all those who work at least part of their workday with telecommunications and computers off site, including at home.” Scenario 4.) Rural Communities: “information technology moves out of the office and onto the road and into the home as portable, hand-held, mobile, laptop, and miniature computers outdistance the desktop workstation. Networks proliferate, served by minicomputer and mainframe with a myriad of access points. Networks revitalize rural America, slowing the flow of people to the cities and returning some of the best educated to small communities.”Top of the Page
Executive Development: Preparing for the 21st Century. Harper W. Moulton and Arthur S. Fickel NY: Oxford U Press, Feb. 1993/200p. Three scenarios of executive development to 21st century.
Two executive educators with experience in industry and academia sketch “the business environment of the 21st century and conclude with three scenarios. Scenario 1.) Divided World: suggests a return to short-term, nationally focused interests, and emphasizes an insular, reactive, and win-lose approach to business issues. Competencies called for would be political and economic toughness in dealing with increasingly nationalistic foreign and domestic governments because of growing concerns for protectionism on all sides. Leadership would call for an innovative and creative ability to deal effectively with a closed system to maximize efficiency and operations that are severely circumscribed. Scenario 2.) Renewed Growth Scenario: national economies would be highly volatile, with sharp swings in the business cycle. Renewed growth would call for quick-acting business leadership in order to take advantage of new opportunities. Flexible and adaptive behavior by managers would be needed, as well as the interpersonal qualities of emotional and physical fitness to handle the stress of radical change. Scenario 3.) Solid Growth Scenario: The most optimist of the three. Indicates a more challenging and stable international business environment. On competency, this scenario calls for global and long-term orientation; ability to create and work with exotic financial structures; intercultural understanding and proactive leadership.Top of the Page
AIDS in the 21st Century: Trend Projections. Richard K. Curtis, Futures Research Quarterly, 7:4, Winter 1991, 39-45. Four scenarios of AIDS to 2028.
The following trends are robust across all the scenarios: population growth will continue at current rates; social and sexual attitudes and behavior will not change significantly. Scenario 1.) The Worst Possible Case: this scenario assumes neither an effective treatment nor vaccine are developed. As AIDS spreads rapidly, more than 1.6 billion people become infected by the year 2000 and hundreds of millions die. Some underdeveloped countries are virtually depopulated by rates of infection of 90%. Scenario 2.) The Worst Probable Case: this scenario also assumes neither an effective treatment nor vaccine are developed. However, the spread of AIDS is not as rapid as in the first scenario. Still, about 600 million people die from the disease by 2028, making it the worst pandemic in recorded human history. Scenario 3.) The Best Probable Case: this scenario assumes an effective treatment for AIDS is developed by 2000. In the decade following the development of that treatment, 500 million people are cured, resulting in a significant reduction in the number of AIDS cases. However, the disease continues to be a serious threat to human health throughout the 21st century. Scenario 4.) The Best Possible Case: this scenario assumes the development of both an effective treatment and vaccine by 2000. At least 50% of the world’s population is vaccinated by 2000, but 500 million people will still be infected and that number will grow to one billion by 2003. As a result, AIDS will continue to be a significant health threat well into the 21st century.Top of the Page
Scenarios for the AIDS Epidemic in Asia. James Chin Asia-Pacific Population Research Abstracts Number 2, February 1995. Scenarios of HIV and AIDS in Asia to 2010.
This report describes the patterns and prevalence of HIV and AIDS in Asia as of mid-1994 and projects the course of the epidemics and their impact on mortality among adults in the 20-40 age group up to the year 2010. The discussion considers the use and misuse of HIV scenarios for policy purposes. Recommendations to policy makers and program managers include the establishment of an expert group in each country to develop reliable estimates of HIV prevalence and distribution, and to project future prevalence levels; the assignment of greater priority to prevention programs, particularly to educational efforts; and policy makers’ support for public health programs that may reduce risky sexual and drug-using behaviors.Top of the Page
Electronic Links for Learning . Edited by Vivian M. Horner and Linda G. Roberts, The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 514, March 1991, 1-174. A scenario of distance learning to 2005.
Key trends driving this scenario include the advances in information technology resulting in increasing bandwidth, and the interactivity of communications channels. The potential capabilities of distance learning are described in this scenario, in which students communicate remotely through interconnected workstations. The workstation identifies students through personal megacards and calls up the correct lesson: an interactive electronic diagnosis/repair simulation exercise. The students using computer-upported cooperative work software work on the exercise together, using voice recognition to give commands.Top of the Page
Scenarios for a Religious Organization with Branches in Five Continents. Eleonora Barbieri Masini. A Paper prepared for the Profutures Workshop, September 27th, 1995. Scenarios on the future of a world religious organization to the years 2001 and 2015.
A fascinating and very extensive scenario study of a religious organization composed of women and created in the nineteenth century as a missionary endeavor. This organization is currently active in five continents: Australia, United States, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and was prompted to look into its future because of two major factors: changes in the environment in these regions and the aging of the organization from the North and influx of much younger members from the countries of the South. The scenarios expanded to the global, regional and local levels, and were written in three forms: “Trend and utopian scenarios would be used and as many normative scenarios as possible or necessary. The trend scenario involved the various geographical parts of the organization, and of the organization as a whole. Was a description of the situation as it could be expected in 2001 and 2015, against the global and local level, should no decisions be taken in 1994. The utopian scenario envisioned the greatest hopes of the organization members and the normative scenarios were those alternative scenarios that answered the possible goals of the organization as a whole and at the regional levels.” Masini concludes that the scenario building exercise achieved it’s educational aim and the scenarios themselves provided an important tool for gaining a better understanding of the overall environment.Top of the Page
The Future of News: Television - Newspapers - Wire Services - Newsmagazines. Edited by Phillip S. Cook, Douglas Gomery, and Lawrence W. Lichty. Washington: Wilson Center Press & Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, May 1992/270p. Scenario of news in the year 2000.
Papers and commentary from a Wilson Center conference on the future of news. In the Epilogue, Peter Braestrup sketches a scenario of news in 2000 where proliferating multimedia technologies give the public overwhelming access to news. Factors that influence the content of news by the 21st century are: dramatically increased efforts to raise the quality of education, and the continuing diversity of the audience. News becomes specialized. “The expansion, dynamism, and increasing complexity of both government and nongovernment activity have fostered the growth of special publications and even cable TV channels for various kinds of news—news about defense, the environment, law, housing, science, religion, international business—inasmuch as no single newspaper or magazine can now chronicle all significant events in all fields.” Stories will also become shorter, as they have been shortening over the past two decades. The attention span of the major news media, already diminishing, will become even more abbreviated. Growing gap continues between the information haves and have nots.Top of the Page
Delphi in a Future Scenario on Mental Health and Mental Health Care. Rob Bijl, Futures, 24:3, April 1992, 232-250. Scenario to the 21st century.
A scenario study on mental health and mental health care in the Netherlands over the next two decades. A delphi inquiry formed an essential part of the study and helped build the scenario model. This article describes the delphi process and the scenario building process, then generated the scenario model that served as a backdrop for four mental health themes: dementia and schizophrenia, emotional and behavioral problems in children and adolescents, and occupational incapacity due to mental disorders. For research into how futures methodology can be applied to alternative scenarios of possible and desirable futures in the field of public health and health care, this is a useful article.Top of the Page
Homelessness: A Prevention Oriented Approach. Edited by Rene I. Jahiel, Baltimore: The John Hopkins U Press, June 1992/409p. Three scenarios of homelessness to the 21st century.
Three scenarios for the evolution of homelessness and its prevention in the United States in the short term (i.e., in the next 5-10 years) are constructed, based on the concepts of dominant, challenging, and repressed structural interests. Scenario 1.) The dominant structural interest drives to accelerate the gap between the rich and poor, without a ‘trickle down effect’ in this social order. People try to ethically justify this situation as the homeless problem becomes more severe. Government does very little , and the homeless problem spins out-of-hand as the homeless are put away from main localities and isolated. Government is forced to increase spending on them, which only develops a ‘homeless industry’ dealing with homeless operation. Scenario 2.) Challenging structural interests drive the government to tackle the homeless problems, but without significant structural changes in economics of housing for the poor or in the power relationships of the repressed low-income groups. Housing still remains a private business and the social welfare system for housing, (e.g., public housing) has not yet developed. Government does not coordinate between challenging and dominate interests and faces many obstacles for legislation and implementation. As a result, only little government funding is spent for selected homeless people. Scenario 3.) Repressed structural interests drives extraordinary efforts at the micro and macro level. Some structural changes occur in answer to the push of homeless organizations and demands on the homeless-makers rather than on homeless people. On the micro level, local governments prevent and terminate homelessness, promoting housing for the poor in various innovative ways. This is “advocate-intensive” and “consumer-intensive” work, covering the areas of people with mental health, substance abuse, or other problems with entitlements, job training, and other career services. On the macro level, the national economy has to change to reduce the homeless-making process and pressures toward homelessness. Each sector, such as housing, employment, health, education, and the family, all have to support low-income families.Top of the Page
Scenarios of Change in Urban Environments. Arthur B. Shostak, Futures Research Quarterly, 11:1, Spring 1995, 5-19. Three urban scenarios to the 21st century.
According to the author, our choices for the future, especially regarding public policy, is influenced by the optimistic view, the pessimist view, and the possible view. These three perspectives are applied to alternative futures of four urban cities in the U.S. Scenario 1.) Hard Edge City: The most deserted case. There is a very stark gap between the rich and the poor. Colored and poor people live in urban areas with a lot of crime; there is a huge lack of public health and other services. Environmental degradation abounds. Scenario 2.) Edge City: development of suburban cities. However, there are problems, such as a very strict regulation of city planning (e.g. uniformity), and no harmonization of ecosystems. Scenario 3.) Soft-Edge City: a most desirable case. Assuming a successful economy and a high-tech world, human well being is realized and harmonized within the ecosystem. There is more free time, no discrimination of any kind, more cooperation, and more voluntary public services. Scenario 4.) No-Edge City: this case can be a transitional case to the other three. This regional “hot spot” is characterized by full cooperation among city, county, research university, and business sector, with entrepreneurial spirit and thus by attractive, cosmopolitan, and high standard of living.Top of the Page
Welfare Versus Work. A report by David Dawson, Policy Analyst, Alabama Arise, 1994. Four welfare scenarios: short-term, but illustrates a principle that applies to all ages, including the 21st century.
A set of short-term but interesting scenarios used to support the idea that, when looking at the facts, welfare benefits do not necessarily discourage people from working. Work is more financially advantageous than welfare. “The benefits one receives on welfare cannot compare to the benefits one receives working even a minimum wage job.” Scenario1.) The Typical Family on Welfare: in this analysis, the person defined as the “typical” AFDC recipient is a woman with two young children living with a family member. In this study it is assumed that the mother makes an informed choice between the combined benefits of welfare and the combined benefits of a minimum wage job. Scenario 2.) The Worker Finds a Full-Time Job at Minimum Wage: here, a woman is able to find a full-time job at minimum wage and leave AFDC, for it is shown that her combined cash and benefit income would increase dramatically. Scenario 3.) Second Year on the Job: assuming that this woman continues a second year at this job at minimum wage with no benefits, her combined benefits do change somewhat. She would continue earning $8,840 per year, her Food Stamps would continue at the same level, her WIC would remain at the same level, and her taxes, expenses, and EITC would remain the same. However, her out-of-pocket expenses for her personal health care and child care would increase. Scenario 4.) First Year at the Typical Job After Welfare: assuming that, instead of earning $8,840 per year working 40 hours per week at $4.25, the woman works at the wages and hours that the average post-AFDC recipient works (29 hours per week at $5.05). Again in this scenario, her income is higher than it would be if on AFDC.Top of the Page
Eight Scenarios for Work in the Future. Martin Morf, Futurist Magazine, June 1983. Eight scenarios of work to the 21st century.
Changes in society and technology could bring a broad variety of possible futures to the working world. Key trends common to all scenarios are: robotics, automation, rate of growth of technology, the amount of work generated by the economy, and the degree to which work is rewarded. Scenario 1.) Extreme Taylorism: increased productivity makes most work superfluous and brings the 10 hour workweek within reach. Everyone serves on the economic front a few hours each day and everyone is entitled to a living wage. Workers are liberated by machines, computers, and robots, and can work less and live more. Scenario 2.) Feudal Unions: a scenario of strong unions with even greater power causing the worsening of some problems like runaway wages; seniority rather than skill or merit determines who will have the privilege to work. Scenario 3.) Underground Work: the feudal union scenario is thus quite compatible with an “underground work” scenario, in which ever-greater segments of the work force cooperate outside of the formal economy. Scenario 4.) Work Coupons: shared characteristics of the feudal union and underground work scenarios is an uneven distribution of the scarce, but essential and possibly interesting, commodity called a job. Both are depressing scenarios, with a large section of the population left to its own devices, and both go against the grain of American egalitarianism. Scenario 5.) Gods and Clods: if the technology that society develops is not accessible to the average person, there could arise a society made up of an extremely busy elite of professionals and a useless majority unable to manipulate the words and mathematical symbols of the information society. Scenario 6.) Shadow Work: in this scenario, there is no need for formal make-work projects. Shadow work is distributed unfairly by the rich and powerful, who need odds-and-ends done; Scenario 7.) The Electronic Cottage: in this future, technology and computers are pervasive and accessible to all. The high economic growth rate generates challenging and profitable work, and the work is distributed fairly. Electronic networking replaces the need for much informal and shadow work. Working in the electronic cottage could bridge the gap between the world of work and the culture in which we live ; 8) Subsistence Work: this scenario demands a reversal of the path toward ever-greater consumption, material wealth, and physical comfort, back to earlier methods of production that are more labor intensive and more clearly linked to the important and meaningful business of subsistence.Top of the Page
Looking Back to School. James A. Mecklenburger, Phi Delta Kappan, 67:2, Oct. 1985, 119-122. School in 21st century.
A scenario of the past 20 years looking back from 2005, written by the president of the Productive Schools Association of North America in 1994-97. Education in 2005 included the following changes: learning goals replace curricula; influx of portable computers; new patterns of school organization; “expert systems” for use in teaching.Top of the Page
Three Scenarios for the Future of Teaching. Arthur E. Wise, Phi Delta Kappan, 67:9, May 198, 649-652. Three scenarios of the future of teaching to 21st century.
Scenario 1.) Business-as-Usual: “yesterday’s practices and today’s policies remain in effect. The supply of teachers runs low while demand increases, and alternative certification is instituted. But this does not attract well-qualified candidates, and education-minded parents respond by pulling their children out of public schools.” Scenario 2.) The Two-Tiered Scenario: “the structure of the educational system parallels that of the US Army during the era of the draft, with a permanent cadre of senior teachers and administrators who supervise ever-changing contingents of temporary teachers (many of the current proposals for career ladders expect that a permanent cadre will rise through the ranks to assume these duties.)” Scenario 3.) The Professional Scenario: “the states cooperate with education organizations and others to reform the training, induction, and certification of teachers. High and carefully enforced standards restrict the supply of professionals, and working conditions appropriate to a professional conception of teaching evolve. This scenario holds the greatest promise for producing professional teaching in the public schools. Realizing it will depend on the willingness of policymakers to improve teacher salaries and working conditions, and will enforce entry standards in the face of unstaffed classrooms.”Top of the Page
2020 Visions: Health Care Information Standards and Technologies. Edited by: Clement Bezold, Jerome A. Halperin, and Jacqueline L. Eng. Three scenarios on health care technologies to 2020.
This report is based on a September 1992 Conference Sponsored by the United States Pharmacopoeia Convention, Inc. on the future of health care information standards and technologies. Scenario 1.) High Technology/Continued Growth: technological progress, good management, and a resilient global ecosystem combine to allow economic growth. Health care therapeutics advance dramatically. Health care emphasizes the prediction and management of illness. Scenario 2) Hard Times/Focused Innovation: recurring economic hard times slow growth, but lead to Canadian-like health care system with a frugal universal basic benefit that utilizes nonphysician health care providers and encourages home care/self-care, aided by advanced information systems. Scenario 3.) Global Business: because multinational companies are growing, most national economies are also growing. The need for effective global operations leads to horizontal standards for most manufactured items, with the International Standards Organization taking the principle role. Scenario 4.) The New Social Contract: as the social contract becomes more clear and more accepted, and as societies become more diverse, dramatic changes take place in business, health, and health care. Diagnosis and treatments in health care are increasingly varied.Top of the Page
White Collars Turn Blue. Paul Krugman New York Times Magazine Sept. 29, 1996 . An economic transformation scenario from 1996 - 2000.
A scenario in which society looks back from the first part of the 21st Century and finds that many popular assumptions about the information age were wrong. For instance, people believed that the major forces driving economic change would be the continuing advance of digital technology and the spread of economic development throughout the world. The future would bring an ‘information economy,’ mainly producing intangibles. This assumption was wrong. In looking back, it was realized that five major transformations were missed. 1.) Souring Resource Prices: it was assumed that the prices of commodities would always be low, but price surges inevitably occurred. 2.) The Environment as Property: appreciating the real price of environmental use and consumption wasn’t fully realized until 2043. 3.) The Rebirth of the Big City: during the second half of the 21st century, the big city seemed to be in decline and replaced by sprawling suburbia. The reality was that the city flourished and the center of true “multimedia” was New York City. 4.) The Devaluation of Higher Education: in the 1990s everyone believed that education was the key to economic success. But many of the jobs that once required a higher education were eliminated or exported. In the early part of the 21st Century, jobs that required only 6 months of vocational training paid nearly as much, if not more, than jobs that require a masters degree or Phd. 5.) The Celebrity Economy: since the information economy made it easier for creative works to be distributed with very little pay for royalties, the only way to make money in this future, is to endorse a product by promoting sales of something else. Instead of an information economy, it became a “celebrity economy.”Top of the Page
The Future of Intellectual Property. Copyright TaskForce, University of Michigan, 1995. Internet: http://www.taskforce. File:///B!/IP2.HTM. Four scenarios on the future of intellectual property to the 21st century.
This study resulted in four scenarios for improving the management of copyrights at research universities. Scenario 1.) Enhancing Current Practices: this scenario envisions individual university members mounting strong programs for campus information, discussion, involvement and support through model languages, contracts, and licenses, copyright advice, information about academic publishing and publishers. Scenario 2.) Faculty Ownership of Copyrights: faculty authors allow publication or other forms of access to each of their works on a case-by-case basis or by a statement of general principle. At a minimum, authors continue to grant to publishers the right to reproduce and distribute the work in a specific publication. Authors are responsible, either directly or through a central agency they or the university might create, for registering the copyright and granting permission to use their work. Scenario 3.) Joint Faculty/University Ownership of Copyrights: envisions shared ownership between the faculty member and his or her university. The scenario relates in general to non-royalty producing works or works that are unlikely to produce royalties. The university and the author determine what rights to transfer to the publisher, whether to license certain uses of the work, etc. Thus, control is not automatically transferred to publishers. In order to implement this scenario, new employment contracts would be required to specify joint faculty/university ownership of these works. Scenario 4.) Joint Faculty/Consortium Ownership of Copyrights: in this scenario, copyright is jointly held by the author (s) of the work and a consortium of universities. This only applies to work for which the authors do not receive and do not have a reasonable prospect of receiving royalties and which does not fit under the category of work-for-hire. Any of the copyright holders has the right to copy or distribute the work or otherwise make it available, with the following significant exception: the author or authors retain the right to assign an exclusive distribution license to whomever they choose for a period not to exceed five years. This right would have to be exercised within a fixed time period after completion of the work – perhaps three years.Top of the Page
Where’s Main Street USA? Gail Garfield Schwartz, Westport CT: Eno Foundation For Transportation, 1984/91p. A scenario of suburbanization to 2015.
A book on suburbanization in the future, concluding with a scenario for 2015. The author describes the most likely distribution of activities over the metropolitan landscape after all present leases for space have expired and after all present mortgages on downtown structures have been fully amortized.Top of the Page
The Futures of the Poor. S.P. Udayakumar Futures 27:3, April 1995, 339 - 351. Six scenarios of the poor to the 21st century.
“It is common to think that the poor have no future, or that their predicament will only get worse. These reactions are not very thoughtful or helpful when thinking about the future of the poor.” Adopting a different approach, the author submits that poverty is a systemic oppression of a particular class of people and that the oppression is so severe and systemic it can be characterized as a ‘structural genocide.’ Seven possible future scenarios. Scenario 1.) Hand-Outs but No Help-Outs: “donors lack political will or a sense of justice to remedy the poverty situation permanently.” Scenario 2.) Waiting for Godet: “the poor long for consumerism and comfort; the fittest survive and the rest perish.” Scenario 3.) Preach the Gospel for the Poor: “the rich reinvigorate their patronizing policies and underhanded schemes, ranging from conservative crookedness to liberal wimpiness to social democratic sham: states become economies, societies become markets, and the poor become even more miserable.” Scenario 4.) Viva Zapata: “similar to the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas, rebels with nothing to lose demand justice and better treatment.” Scenario 5.) View from the Mountain Top: “the rich embrace a simple and less selfish lifestyle.” Scenario 6.) To Be or Not to Be: “the poor renounce modernity, recognize their cultural roots, and return to former ways of life with traditional technology.” Scenario 7.) One Species, One Destiny: “both the rich and poor realize that the well-being of the poor demands cooperation of the rich, and the safety of the rich relies on justice for the poor. The last scenario is seen as desirable, the first six are undesirable.”Top of the Page
Methodology: A Scenario Method for Forecasting. Ove Sviden Futures October 1986. 18:5 Four scenarios on automobile usage strategies in a future information society to the 21st century.
This article presents the scenario method developed in connection with the author’s time spent with the Saab Aerospace Corp. The method was then used and improved when the author worked for Volvo as manager for energy forecasting. Four early-stage scenarios on the future of automobile usage in an information society are sketched on two axis: Information Quality & Mobility. Scenario 1.) Stagnation: policy - survival and conservation; economy - recession; industry - slowdown; cars per capital - 350 per 1000 inhabitants; annual driving - 15000 km/car; traffic - restrained; technology - mass transit. Scenario 2.) Automotive: policy - mobility and clean environment; economy - growth; industry - R&D oriented; cars per capital - 900 per 1000 inhabitants; annual driving - 20000 km/car; traffic - congested; technology - advanced engines and fuels. Scenario 3.) Information: policy - inform yourself; economy - trade expansion; industry - information systems oriented; cars per capital - 250 per 1000 inhabitants; annual driving - 10000 km/car; traffic - substituted to a large extent; technology - computer/para-transit. Scenario 4.) Synergy: policy - decentralization and info-moblity; economy - international synergy growth; industry - systems oriented; cars per capital - 700 per 1000 inhabitants; annual driving - 20000 km/car; traffic - rapid/safe/controlled; technology - semi-automatic highway network.Top of the Page
Education and Community: Four Scenarios for the Future of Public Education The Core Framework: Developing a Scenario Matrix. Global Business Network, Emeryville, California http://www.gbn.org
Global Business Network and the National Education Association came together to create scenarios on the future of public education. Trends that cut across all scenarios are: the decline of the nuclear family, the issues surrounding special education, and the promise of technology. Scenario 1.) Orthodoxy. Hierarchical (traditional), Inclusive: “this scenario assumes a turn toward traditional values, and the effort to enlist educators to impose those values on any and all who might resist them.” Scenario 2.) Orthodoxies. Hierarchical (traditional), Exclusive: “like the last scenario, this one, too, plays out the reaction against value-free public education. Today's public education would seem to avoid imposing any one set of values in order to avoid offending other sets of values. The last scenario accepts the risks of offending marginal groups by imposing one set of red, white, and blue values. Here, values are also central to education, but different values guide different schools.” Scenario 3.) Wired for Learning. Participatory (radical), Exclusive: “this scenario revolves around new applications of information technology. Information technology influences all of the scenarios, but this scenario is distinguished by an evolution of information technology more rapid and far-reaching than most people now anticipate. That info-tech will influence education is predetermined. How, and how fast, is uncertain. This scenario assumes that the evolution is very fast, and that information technology is the biggest story in the transformation of education over the next decade.” Scenario 4.) The Learning Society. Participatory (radical), Exclusive: “in this scenario the pieces come together. Technology moves faster than in the first two scenarios, making his a radical change scenario. But the technology serves the ideals of inclusive community by facilitating a more participatory process than in the last scenario. Technology is a tool, not a driver. It serves the interests of play as well as work. Technology is designed to enhance humanity rather than to make money. The marketplace is less central than public space. While every bit as ubiquitous as in Wired for Learning, technology fades into the background of the Learning Society. It is a servant, not hero.”Top of the Page
Global Employment: An International Investigation Into the Future of Work, Vol. 1. Mihaly Simai, ed. (March 1995), UNU/Wider, London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ. UNU Press. Global employment scenario to 2018.
A scenario of a new social policy in the year 2018, global in scope, aiming to guarantee a minimum part-time job of about 20 hours per week or 1,000 hours per year to secure a person’s minimum basic needs. “Full employment policies of governments now concentrate on guaranteeing this first basic layer of employment.” Other important developments in the world of 2018 also include global agreements on a new system of wealth accounting (based on net value-added indicators related to non-monetary activities). This world has entered the age of total retirement, generally ranging from 72 to 78 ( the notion of compulsory retirement has almost disappeared, except for very specific jobs), and extensive retraining programs. There is a universal consensus that all workers should expect to learn new skills over the course of their work lives.Top of the Page
The Futures of Women: Scenarios for the 21st Century. Pamela McCorduck and Nancy Ramsey (1996), Addison-Wesley Press Mass. Four scenarios of the future of women to 2015.
In this book, the authors explore dramatically different alternatives for the future of women. The authors collaborated with Global Business Network, applying the scenario planning technique to four very distinct, global futures. Scenario 1.) Backlash: “ the priorities, mores, and values of religious rights in a depressed, no-growth, regionally oriented economy. Group rights prevail over individual rights. The global economy is depressed. For women, things have seldom been so grim: they rediscover that in bad economic times, societies East and West, North and South, consider them expendable.” Scenario 2.) A Golden Age of Equality: “Western notions of individual rights, rule of law, and personal privacy take hold and prevail in a globally integrated growth economy. Individual rights generally prevail, the global economy grows robustly. A profound shift in consciousness has permitted both women and men to begin to think of women as different from, but not less than, men. The search for equality in the workplace brings about a new balance between family and work, and generates new energies and creativity.” Scenario 3.) Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back: “Western notions of individual rights prevail, but the world economy is largely depressed and sluggish. Environmental protective measures are suspended in the name of the economy, disrupting what had begun as a movement towards global sustainability. The age is characterized by huge international migrations, people in search of jobs, housing, even food. The most basic needs of the world’s women, such as nutrition, child spacing, protection from domestic violence, and workplace safety, are hard pressed to be addressed. Scenario 4.) Separate -- and Doing Fine, Thanks: “in this scenario, group priorities, mores, and values tend to prevail over the Western notion of individual rights in a globally integrated, growth economy that allows absorption of the international baby boom of the 1990s and its echo. Outside the Western democracies, which prove durable, governments of new nations and newly liberated states have resumed relatively authoritarian ways to force social order and achieve the stability necessary for economic growth on the Singapore model. The individual rights generally prevail over group rights. The global economy depressed. Under these circumstances, the rights of women are deemed unimportant and in some places, sacrificed. “For their own protection,” women are treated as less than equals.”Top of the Page
Savior of the Plague Years. Wired Staff Scenarios: Special WIRED Edition. December 1995. A global scenario of a pandemic to 2020.
An interview with Dr. Amy-Jessica Castillo of the Virtual Bioresearch Institute of Montecito, California, year: 2020. In this scenario, Dr.Castillo describes how she headed the research process that conquered the deadly Mao flu in 2020. The scenario describes the global spread of the plague that resulted in world panic and the death. “1998: Futile attempts at air terminal sterilization spelled doom for the airline industry. Two years into the Plague, domestic flights stood at 3 percent of their 1995 levels. All trips required complex paperwork, health screenings, and quarantine periods.” “ 2007: The United Nations tried to implement the not particularly successful “hygiene card.” By 2007, fear of outsiders was too firmly a part of life to be mollified by bureaucracy.” “2018: A cure, yes - but how to deliver? In the end, capitalism proved a most effective means, its soothing slogans able to deprogram decades of entrenched paranoia...”Top of the Page
Time Travel Kit to the Year 2195. Sandra Noguchi Scenarios: Special WIRED Edition. December, 1995. Interesting questions about traveling to 2195 and what would one bring with them? Useful to scenario work.
Packing tips for your trip to the year 2195. Imagining the changes in culture, currency, weaponry, and the environment 200 years from now. What would you pack on a two week trip in a time machine to 2195? “Money? What’s Money? Gold, platinum, or thorium may well be valueless in 2195. What artifacts from now might you bring if you had to trade in order to get, say, food? Remember, chances are that the things of value in the future are the things you could have had no way of knowing would be valuable: an autograph from Button Gwinnett; IBM stock; fertilized passenger pigeon eggs. Future citizens might also end up ransacking you for semi-random items. Some packing ideas: comic books, fruit juices, celebrity autographs, Star Trek dinner plates, drugs, baseball cards, freon.”Top of the Page
Sex Objects. Douglas Coupland. Scenarios: Special WIRED Edition. December 1995. Images of pharmaceutical products useful to scenarios of the future of intimacy and reproduction.
Very colorful images of products envisioned to impact the future of intimacy and reproduction through the next millennium. “2066: American law dictates that the ‘Angel of Mercy’ - an intrauterine device - be implanted immediately upon detection of pregnancy. The abortion inhibiting device recognizes any trace of RU 486, analogs, or other abortifacients, then releases neutralizing compounds and an electronic signal. Unlicensed removal triggers a mild lobotomizing drug, Depensazine, which renders the host mother comatose for a minimum of nine months. Made by the US Department of Energy, Sheridan, Wyoming.” “2034: Illegal in many countries, but still very common: a battery-powered sperm centrifuge used to separate XX sperm from XY. Made by Bally-NASA’s facility in Guantao, People’s Republic of China.”Top of the Page
A Day in the Life. Wired Staff Scenarios: Special WIRED Edition. December, 1995. A scenario of a day in the life - Monday, October 19, 2020.
A scenario of a typical day in the life of the average media consumer. Interactive newspapers can be read anywhere, anytime. Examples of some of the news on October 19, 2020 are: “UnDeath Spray Closer to Human Trial: Virgin Stock Soars Heavenward - Virgin BioPharm last night narrowly won phase one of its on going battle for EU approval of human clinical trials of its controversial new ‘UnDeath gene’ therapy. Chairman Richard Branson made no effort to conceal his pleasure over the EU Bioethics Board decision to allow the approval process to proceed - a decision that caused VPB stock to rocket from USNew $221 per share to $302, a near market record. Branson joyfully stated afterward, “If we’re not working toward life, then what are we working toward?” If human trials confirm the animal models, Virgin expects the use of its patented viral-vector to extend the average adult life-span anywhere from 15 to 18 years. The one-time-only nasal spray treatment is estimated to cost USNew$5 to manufacture, but industry insiders ecpect...” Other news items: “Bank Cops Nab Canadians in Liberian Bank Fraud.” “French Prez Poisoned. ” “Hacking McDonald’s: The Real Tale Behind the ‘Meat People’.Top of the Page