WORDWAR

The Process of Change

The Importance of Attitude

About 150 years ago the colonization of North America began in earnest. During the next ten decades a wave of immigration, its scope unknown in human history, swept across America. In the main the immigrants were ordinary people, generally unskilled, having little formal education, and basically unprepared for the arduous life they had chosen in the New World, a world that had none of the few comforts of European town life.
The new settlers had one tremendous advantage. They had the right attitude. They were open to change, wanted a new life, and generally relished adventure. With that outlook, people learned new skills and achieved extraordinary accomplishments. To some degree that still happens with recent immigrants.
As we prepare to enter the third millennium, another monumental task faces us. We must cast off the teachings of the past, just as our forebears cast off, perhaps more willingly, what they had been taught in their homeland. We too, perhaps unknowingly, are about to migrate into another world. It will be even less familiar than the strange land viewed by the pilgrims when they landed at Plymouth Rock.
New information is being filtered and refined into new knowledge at the rate of 100 percent every eighteen months. Virtually everything we now know will be obsolete in a year and a half. With a clean slate, it is easier to learn the new. In fact, it is far easier to learn the new than be taught the past.
When I joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940, wartime demands on aircraft mechanics and flight engineers were overwhelming. First of all, the few instructors available were still learning about the new airplanes and engines they had been introduced to only a few weeks previously. We all learned together. There is nothing to teach when all is new. Everyone is forced to become a learner. Within months thousands of young airmen were able to take apart and put back together a sophisticated airplane they hadn't even known about ninety days earlier. We had the right attitude. Learning was an adventure. Amazingly, the planes continued to fly and function, with very few embarrassing incidents. What we learned in months was later stretched to a lengthy course with a high-flying title that is methodically taught and goes on for years.
As we enter the third millennium, we will encounter the unfamiliar landscapes of virtual reality. We will learn, not be taught, how to create anything our imagination dictates and how to direct voice and sound to near and distant locations through what might be termed electronic ventriloquism. Biotechnology will allow (this has already started) the creation of living chimera, organisms that combine parts from two, several, or many organisms in one living creature. These combinations will not stop at bacteria, plants, or animals.
Startling developments, inventions, and innovations in fields never previously contemplated will change the way we think, work, play, and love -- much like the forests, fields, mountains and streams of the New World changed the thinking, working, and playing of those immigrants from urban Europe.
The process is much the same. Only the attitude is different. We either change to meet the demands of new times or we vanish to be replaced by others more open to adventure. As this bulldozer of change rolls over our planet we have a choice: to become part of the bulldozer or part of the road.

Risk in Chaos

History is replete with stories of the alchemists of yesterday, explorers of the chemical and plant world who tried to mix, merge, and blend the many new minerals, plants, and elements just being discovered. Their main claims to fame were their attempts to create gold out of lead. That never worked, but with today's technology many things believed impossible a few years ago, never mind during the Middle Ages, are now considered probable.
In a time of chaos, the breakup of any old order brings forth the new and realigns cultures, technologies, learning, and politics. This gives rise to greater promise -- the promise of a new alchemy. Not turning lead into gold (even that is remotely feasible via molecular transfer, though not yet profitable), but rather an exciting alchemy that mixes and changes culture, technology, learning, and politics, possibly forming new modes of thinking, living, learning, and working together.
Every piece of newly developed technology disturbs some firmly entrenched process. That in turn disrupts some social system, fixture, or institution. After technological disruption, nothing can return to its previous dominance. A new technology may quickly merge with another piece of only slightly older technology. A synergistic effect makes the two technologies stronger and more dynamic than either innovation operating alone. Larger social disruptions occur. A new technology may be developed to bring back stability, but often it does just the opposite.
The wooden plow displaced the stick. The musket shot aside the bow and arrow. The cavalry replaced many an infantry. The car and tank, the horse. The train, the carriage. The airplane, the ship and train. Movable type replaced the scribe; the newspaper, the town crier. Television has eclipsed radio, and news is now reported as it happens, not when it is over.
Soon we will see television's merger with the computer screen. Gutenberg print is being transferred to CD-ROMs read by beams of light. Movies, long the ruler of epic scenes, are giving way to virtual reality and a cyberspace larger and more indelible than imagination itself.
It has been said that when children born today reach their eightieth birthday, 97 percent of all knowledge will have been produced during their lifetime. Compare this to the sixteenth century: the greatest total of knowledge then -- all one could acquire in a lifetime -- was about what is now contained in one weekday issue of the New York Times. Today anyone who has access to a computer, a phone line, and a modem has access, in one evening, to more information than both his or her parents had in an entire lifetime. A new learner fortunate enough to have a satellite dish can access more information in one evening than all his or her forebears in history.
There is plenty of brain capacity that we have not yet learned to use. The time may be now. These changes cannot happen over a prolonged period without producing a new species. These are evolutionary as well as revolutionary times.
In times of little change, as during the Agricultural Age, "playing it safe" was sound strategy. Even during the early days of the Industrial Age, conservatism paid off. However, as that age progressed, the risk-taker started to move up in prominence because newer fields of endeavor gave greater rewards than conventional work. The risk-takers of the early twentieth century became the barons of oil, rail, lumber, mining, fishing, retailing, and finance. Today those industries are declining as new thrones of power develop in such fields as computing, communications, biotechnology, nanotechnology, optical storage, virtual reality, and the hospitality industry.
So what to do? Prepare for what will appear to be chaos. And remember that the picture really is brighter than it looks through Industrial Age eyes. For chaos is a time of great creativity and opportunity. As the bricks of the past become unstuck and crumble there is the chance to rebuild in new and better ways.
Before the move from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age, people almost everywhere depended primarily on farming to earn a living. Even in North America that was 98 percent of the population. Yet during the past century most countries managed to move into the industrial era without fatal encounters. When the transition was completed, the wealth of the world had increased thirty times. Now even the poorest people live longer, starve less, enjoy more.
It will happen again, although this time the transition won't be as gradual. Much of the turbulence of river rapids is caused by the speed of change as water flows from a more tranquil river section to a narrower channel -- not unlike the experience of moving from one era into another. The ride can be threatening or exhilarating, depending on your view of change.
You can view the future through the negative lens of fear or through the positive lens of opportunity. It is my belief that when the turbulence of transition finally settles down in the Communications Age, the wealth of the planet will have increased another hundred times. There are now five billion people. Many are increasing their income levels dramatically. We can all do much more now with less. Success is just an idea away.

The Change Quotient

For decades we have heard about IQ, the intelligence quotient that supposedly measures intelligence. Now there is a new kid on the block, the CQ, or change quotient, which measures the ability to adapt to change in a changing world. As we approach the third millennium, the CQ is probably a more useful indicator of aptitude.
It is no secret that our institutions did not and do not advocate adapting to change. To do so would be contrary to definition: an institution is "an established law, custom, practice, or system; an organization having a social, educational, or religious purpose." To advocate change in institutions would have been, and still is, heresy ("any opinion opposed to official or established views"). Such thoughts are radical, also by definition: "favoring fundamental or extreme change." Over the centuries the conservative outlook has generally served a useful purpose. However, when radical change hits a culture, such change destroys the culture or society.
As the world globalizes -- itself a radical change -- old institutions have no sense of which direction to follow, what strategy to use, or even where to appeal for guidance. The guides are lost, and the guided are disillusioned, angry, bitter, and afraid. Where are the calm and confident in a storm of chaos? Certainly not among the leaders of the status quo, in the institutions or societies that continually advocated homage to the establishment. Outside their own boundaries, they are strangers in a strange land entering new and frightening forests.
It is worth listening to today's new knowledge navigators, often young computer hackers who seize the new technology of the day and ride it into the unknown. Theirs is a vision of hope, accomplishment, inner satisfaction, and success, not a vision of despair, terror, indecision, and poverty. They search for the unknown because they are bored with the known, and they dream of the new adventures and riches that fall to the risk-takers early in any new age.
What does this have to do with CQ, the change quotient? The new navigators, whether for genetic reasons or simply from self-motivation, have high ratings on the as-yet undrawn CQ chart. They are going where no one has gone before. Aboard caravels of silicon and gallium arsenide, today's Magellans and da Gamas are actually sailing into the unknown, although they may be the first to admit they haven't yet confirmed in which direction they are traveling. Half a millennium ago, the same could have been said of Columbus.

The Next Century

I might properly have called this section "The Ten Most Responsible and Visionary Developments of the Next Century." Or maybe the term visionary should precede responsible. Why? Because the vision must come before the thought of responsibility. An idea, a concept, or a dream may turn out to be a blessing or a curse. Hence, whether something is "responsible" is more in the eyes of the subsequent beholder than in the mind of the creator. Here are some of the most likely visionary and responsible developments for the twenty-first century.

Life Extension

When we were cave people, the dangers of the hard life limited human longevity to twenty years or less. By Roman times the average life span had advanced only to about twenty-two years. During the Dark Ages in Europe, reaching age forty was a considerable accomplishment -- anywhere in the world. Even by the year 1900 if one reached the ripe old age of forty-seven years, that was considered a full life in most advanced countries. Today the average life span is about seventy-six in most westernized countries and eighty in Japan and Hong Kong.
Medical advances, especially in the marriage of biology with hard technology, will continue to accelerate. My own example comes from my weak eyesight. Glasses at age twelve thickened to "Coke bottles" by age sixty-five, and I had cataracts forming. Eye charts indicated I was into white cane country. Today, with surgically implanted lenses, my vision is 20/20 and both my driver's and helicopter/land/sea aircraft pilot's licenses have been reissued. If you think renewed vision doesn't generally extend life, you haven't been blind lately.
Such implants will become more common and will continuously improve in quality and scope during the first century of the third millennium. Today, more than six dozen body parts can be implanted in a human. If my eye implant can make me not only see better but think differently, what do you think will happen when a human becomes over 50 percent bionic?
With increasingly healthy and active lives, older people will not die before being able to leave their accumulated wisdom. With increased population and longer lives, more human imaginations will be available to help solve previously insurmountable problems.

Genetic Conception

Before the middle of the twenty-first century, children will be born outside the womb. These children, produced under conditions of genetically precise conception, will have the advantage of all the new medical and scientific knowledge that we are just now learning to understand. Outdated ideas and the fears of a "master race" will vanish, mainly because people will fear being left behind if they can't match what others are capable of accomplishing.
Young, self-trained biohackers will make startling new breakthroughs in creating new life-forms -- with a basement, $50, and a "gene-blaster." They will resemble the computer hackers of the late twentieth century, without the constraints of thinking that held back the universal use of computers -- until two kids, $500, and a garage showed the world how to produce a computer that created the Apple computer empire.

Government without Governments

Governments can no longer provide the basic activities governments were set up to perform. Can any government in the world protect its citizens, at home or abroad, from terrorists? Can it protect the jobs of its citizens, now that labor can be "imported" electronically? Control fluctuations in currency? Defend borders against illegal or unwanted immigrants? Prevent an influx of environmental and cultural degradation?
Old ways don't work well anymore. Big governments can't compete, because they move so slowly. While communications move at the speed of light, governments operate like elephants with arthritis. They can no longer control information. Almost anyone, once he or she learns the ropes, can collect, interpret, and act upon critical information faster than governments. Something else, yet unknown, will replace them. When we were nomads, we had a tribal chief, then shahs and kings, and now presidents and prime ministers. Tomorrow?
Seemingly endless mountains of information, accessible to all, will bring about an end to secrecy. Present styles of governments, once the solution, have become the problem. A major improvement will evolve. We have seen the Soviet Union break up, but so will China, India, Canada, the United States, Britain, and Brazil. Many will not like the tumultuous change, but none will be able to halt it.

The Electronic Hearth

Education was once relayed from elders to younger family members. As the industrial world developed and sons went out to work, education was ordained as compulsory and turned over to a select elite carrying credentials.
During the last century "credentialism" became a form of knowledge licensing -- following a restricted path dictated by those already holding the necessary documents, who fitted others into the assembly line. It's an assembly line not only of factories but also of people and a linear world of ABCs and 123s, mapped out by academic planners promising continuous employment, a house in the suburbs, and a reward of retirement with generous government and company pensions. In the relatively slow-moving Industrial Age, this worked. Times are changing. Cracks are apparent. Education, modified by modern electronics and photonics, is returning to the home.
As communication modes, speeds, translations, and graphics grow and change, knowledge of the world will become more readily available to all. Satellite dishes now bring me 200 video channels, one thousand radio channels, electronic newspapers, magazines, and an encyclopedia. This information is available to all people who have learned how to tap these new fountains of beneficial knowledge. No public education institution can match this knowledge because the same arthritis that crippled governments has spread to most other Industrial Age institutions, including schools.

The Brain

Humans have learned more about the human brain during the past decade than ever before. "Information overload" is a myth. We are probably using only 1 percent of our brain power and it's time we learned to use the other 99 percent. The Computed Axial Tomography (CAT) scan has shown us the cranium. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has shown us the gray and white matter. The Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanner has shown us where we think (a different part of the brain lights up when we think work rather than play).
Now Quantified Signal Imaging (QSI) is showing what we think! What we learn in this field will change everyday life more than the automobile did. During the early years of the twenty-first century, people will be inputting on computers and editing video with thought waves; they'll be creating artistic masterpieces without physically touching canvas, clay, or a musical instrument. This new creativity will change the world more than Gutenberg's print.

Safe and Sufficient Water

In the field of global health, the biggest bang for the buck comes from providing clean water to humankind. As environmental consciousness continues to increase, people will establish new priorities, and water purity will become even more important, especially when the world realizes that cleaning existing water is cheaper and easier than finding new supplies. Immense filtration plants using innovative techniques and processes will sprout up. According to 1987 figures, developed countries average a gross national product of around $11,300. Developing countries average only $640. With about 75 percent of the world's population living in countries with a low income, pure water there equates with survival. One-quarter of the world's population -- 1.2 billion residents of those countries -- do not have access to safe drinking water. It is estimated that 250 million people in Africa, about 40 percent of that continent's population, will suffer or die as a result of water-related troubles in the next decade. In developing countries about 25 million are dying now from unsafe water; 60 percent are children. One thousand children die every hour from diarrhea. Clean water will dramatically reduce this disgrace.

Global Power Grid

Almost fifty years ago, the American genius Buckminster Fuller proposed that the electrical power grid of the United States be linked to its U.S.S.R. counterpart. Unfortunately, post�World War II political considerations on both sides put that possibility aside. The concept is surprisingly simple. Hook up the American electrical power network, through the Canadian power network, over the north polar region to the Russian network anywhere between Vladivostok and Murmansk.
Why? When it is daylight and the United States is power-hungry, power could flow to North America. When it is night here, power could flow into the Russian network. A win-win situation. Water now wastefully flowing over dams during the night in either country would be harnessed to be beneficial elsewhere. It would save fortunes that are spent on standby coal and oil peak-period generating plants. As with many problems, the solution involves not so much technology as it does arranging the necessary sociological and conceptual channels.

Food Diversity

Purveyors of doom claim that plant and animal diversity is decreasing at a rapid rate. Yet in just the past few years, life-forms that never existed before, with previously unheard of abilities, have been created. The antifreeze gene from the winter flounder now resides in the Atlantic salmon, allowing it too to swim in below-freezing waters. That same antifreeze gene from fish has also been inserted into the canola plant, making it freeze-resistant to early frosts.
The gene that causes the "glow" in a firefly has been transferred across the "impenetrable" barrier from animal to plant! This is the new diversity. Its growth will blossom. DNA revitalization will resurrect lost species.

Virtual Reality

Until recently we only experienced -- physically, intellectually, and emotionally -- what we actually experienced. Artificial, or virtual, reality is about to change the way we experience, the way we view "reality," the way we learn, and the way we think. Although the common term is now virtual reality, artificial better explains these other forms of reality, because the word virtual carries an "almost there" quality about it. Artificial reality can take us up to "there" and then beyond any reality previously known.
The simplest example of functioning virtual reality is the Powerglove, manufactured for use with Nintendo games. The Powerglove is a long, sleeve-type glove that contains, in essence, a computer terminal. When an appropriate button is pressed, the glove knows where it is in relation to your television set. It can then control the action on the screen. Now an advanced type of glove allows supermarket shopping without leaving your chair. You turn on your TV set, see the grocery store interior, put on your glove, and as you "stroll" through the aisles (still sitting in your armchair at home), reach out with the glove, which will electronically penetrate your TV screen, and pick up, for example, a bottle of Heinz ketchup. Description and price are indicated in an upper corner of your screen. You "drop" the purchase into your electronic cart and proceed to the next purchase. No waiting at the checkout counter. Your tally is your checkout. Tied in with forthcoming refrigerated "mailboxes," purchases will be delivered (in actuality) to your driveway fridge, whether you are home or not. Insert a credit card and your driveway fridge opens up to reveal unmelted ice cream and crisp lettuce.
In other fields, the Powerglove would allow a robot or an android to operate on someone on a space station by following the movements of a surgeon on earth operating on a robot patient. The same telemetry that tells us about astronauts in space will work in the other direction and tell the operating robot what moves to make.
Possibilities for this amazing new field go much further. By wearing a sensor outfit similar to a wetsuit, you will be able to have experiences such as wrestling a grizzly bear (if that's your thing) with no physical danger. Once in the experience, though, you might forget that it is an artificial reality and really believe that it's happening to you. Excitement levels will be very high. This may do more to reduce drug abuse than anything else to date because you will be able to get experiences via electronics/photonics that are perhaps superior to trips from hallucinatory drugs. What better way to learn about life in the Arctic than to drive your own dog team across the tundra? With virtual reality, you could live out any fantasy, alone or with a companion. Safe sex is almost here! Such experiences, or something similar, are already possible on prototype units in experimental stages at various research centers around the world.

The Liberation of Technology

Changes in technology will alter the way we live, the way we love, the way we think, the way we dream, the way we create. We are moving from a lowly state as worker caterpillars into creative bionic butterflies. Working our way out of the chrysalis is like escaping from a dark crypt. After a momentous struggle, what emerges is not what existed before. With such massive changes, old ways of thinking and of handling change will also change, because they too do not work. The butterfly doesn't operate like a caterpillar and is not grounded by gravity. Like the emerging butterfly, we have left our formative stage.

Future Survival Guide

1. If you are not there already, start preparing to switch to a sunrise field from a sunset field. (A sunrise field is a new industry at the beginning of a learning and profit curve; young, vibrant, and innovative methods are used to create a product or service in demand; it has no way to go but up. A sunset field is an industry near the end of its life span with products or services that are in decreasing demand and have usually been superseded by new technologies.) Remain alert for change. Word processing is still relatively new, but it will soon be obsolete as voice-activated terminals replace the present keyboards and word-processing secretaries.
2. Don't specialize. Train for a flexible attitude and an open state of mind. Question everything you have ever learned. Did you receive an education or an indoctrination? Your culture can be your prison.
3. Minimize investment in fixed nonportable assets. Rent; don't buy. Everything that's really important today is still invisible because we haven't yet started to produce the viewing "window" for the Information Age.
4. Embrace and learn to understand the new technologies. You can't get in on the ground floor after a new industry is already established. Don't even wait for the ground floor. Look for the excavations!
5. Knowledge is doubling every eighteen months (most of it now coming from outside North America). It is impossible to know everything about anything. Your best hope is to learn how to access information. Utilize new, nontraditional methods for your continuing education. This can be via satellite, fiber-optics, videocassette, interactive video disks, and computer-driven information systems and data bases. Your biggest mistake may be your unwillingness to pay for information.
6. Assume more personal individual responsibility.
7. Do not rely on big government, big business, or big unions. Indoctrination and training from the Industrial Age is no longer an asset; in the new world it is a definite liability. In a rapidly changing environment, the specialist can become obsolete overnight.
8. Reduce nonessential expenditures. Always live below your means so that a drop in your income will not create a crisis. In addition, your fiscal strategy should plan for continuous upgrading of new technology.
9. Prepare to be highly mobile. Don't get locked into Industrial Age virtues like nationalism and patriotism. In the Communications Age the action goes to the mobile. Environments conducive to economic flowering will change rapidly as cities, states, and countries vie for ideas and information.
10. Be self-employed or you may be unemployed.