Part 1 (2/2)

AND NOW MANY wonder: who are we? Aristotle wrote that the end of a thing defines its essential nature. If we are forced to contemplate the possibility that we might become the architects of our own demise as a civilization, then there are necessarily implications for how we answer the question: what is our essential nature as a species? As a scientist once reframed the question: is the combination of an opposable thumb and a neocortex viable as a sustainable form of life on Earth?

Our natural and healthy preference for optimism about the future is difficult to reconcile with the gnawing concerns expressed by many that all is not well, and that left to its own devices the future may be unfolding in ways that threaten some of the human values we most cherish. The future, in other words, now casts a shadow upon the present. It may be comforting, but of little practical use, to say, ”I am an optimist!” Optimism is a form of prayer. Prayer does, in my personal view, have genuine spiritual power. But I also believe, in the words of the old African saying, ”When you pray, move your feet.” Prayer without action, like optimism without engagement, is pa.s.sive aggression toward the future.

Even those who understand the different dangers we are facing and are committed to taking action often feel stymied by a sense of powerlessness. On the issue of climate, for example, they change their own behaviors and habits, reduce their impact on the environment, speak out and vote, but still feel they are having precious little impact, because the powerful momentum of the global machine we have built to give us progress seems almost independent of human control. Where are the levers to pull, the b.u.t.tons to push? Is there a steering mechanism? Do our hands have enough strength to operate the controls?

More than a decade before writing Faust, Goethe wrote his well-known poem ”The Sorcerer's Apprentice” about a young trainee who, left to his own devices, dared to use one of his master's magic spells in order to bring to life the broom he was supposed to be using to clean the workshop. But once animated, the broom could not be stopped. Growing desperate to halt the broom's increasing frenzy of activity, the apprentice split the broom with an axe-which caused it to self-replicate, with each half growing into another new animated broom. Only when the master returned was the process brought back under control.

DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS.

The idea of making truly meaningful collective decisions in democracy that are aimed at steering the global machinery we have set in motion is naive, even silly, according to those who have long since placed their faith in the future not in human hands, but in the invisible hand of the marketplace. As more of the power to make decisions about the future flows from political systems to markets, and as ever more powerful technologies magnify the strength of the invisible hand, the muscles of self-governance have atrophied.

That is actually a welcome outcome for some who have found ways to acc.u.mulate great fortunes from the unrestrained operations of this global machinery. Indeed, many of them have used their wealth to reinforce the idea that self-governance is futile at best and, when it works at all, leads to dangerous meddling that interferes with both markets and technological determinism. The ideological condominium formed in the alliance between capitalism and representative democracy that has been so fruitful in expanding the potential for freedom, peace, and prosperity has been split asunder by the encroachment of concentrated wealth from the market sphere into the democracy sphere.

Though markets have no peer in collecting, processing, and utilizing ma.s.sive flows of information to allocate resources and balance supply with demand, the information in markets is of a particularly granular variety. It is devoid of opinion, character, personality, feeling, love, or faith. It's just numbers. Democracy, on the other hand, when it operates in a healthy pattern, produces from the interactions of people with different perspectives, predispositions, and life experiences emergent wisdom and creativity that is on a completely different plane. It carries dreams and hopes for the future. By tolerating the routine use of wealth to distort, degrade, and corrupt the process of democracy, we are depriving ourselves of the opportunity to use the ”last best hope” to find a sustainable path for humanity through the most disruptive and chaotic changes civilization has ever confronted.

In the United States, many have cheered the withering of self-governance and have celebrated the notion that we should no longer even try to control our own destiny through democratic decision making. Some have recommended, only half in jest, that government should be diminished to the point where it can be ”drowned in the bathtub.” They have enlisted politicians in the effort to paralyze the ability of government to serve any interests other than those of the global machine, recruited a fifth column in the Fourth Estate, and hired legions of lobbyists to block any collective decisions about the future that serve the public interest. They even seem to sincerely believe, as many have often written, that there is no such thing as ”the public interest.”

The new self-organized pattern of the Congress serves the special interests that are providing most of the campaign money with which candidates-inc.u.mbents and challengers alike-purchase television commercials. It no longer responds to any but the most emotional concerns of the American people. Its members are still ”representatives,” but the vast majority of them now represent the people and corporations who donate money, not the people who actually vote in their congressional districts.

The world's need for intelligent, clear, values-based leaders.h.i.+p from the United States is greater now than ever before-and the absence of any suitable alternative is clearer now than ever before. Unfortunately, the decline of U.S. democracy has degraded its capacity for clear collective thinking, led to a series of remarkably poor policy decisions on crucially significant issues, and left the global community rudderless as it faces the necessity of responding intelligently and quickly to the implications of the six emergent changes described in this book. The restoration of U.S. democracy, or the emergence of leaders.h.i.+p elsewhere in the world, is essential to understanding and responding to these changes in order to shape the future.

One of the six drivers of change described in this book-the emergence of a digital network connecting the thoughts and feelings of most people in every country of the world-offers the greatest source of hope that the healthy functioning of democratic deliberation and collective decision making can be restored in time to reclaim humanity's capacity to reason together and chart a safe course into the future.

Capitalism-if reformed and made sustainable-can serve the world better than any other economic system in making the difficult but necessary changes to the relations.h.i.+p between the human enterprise and the ecological and biological systems of the Earth. Together, sustainable capitalism and healthy democratic decision making can empower us to save the future. So we have to think clearly about how both of these essential tools can be repaired and reformed.

The structure of these decision-making systems and the ways in which we measure progress-or the lack thereof-toward the goals we decide are important have a profound influence on the future we actually create. By making economic choices in favor of ”growth,” it matters a lot which definition of growth we use. If the impact of pollution is systematically removed from the measurement of what we call ”progress,” then we start to ignore it and should not be surprised when much of our progress is accompanied by lots of pollution.

If the systems we use for recognizing and measuring profit are based on a narrow definition-for example, quarterly projections of earnings per share, or quarterly unemployment statistics that don't include people who have given up looking for work, those who have been forced to take large pay cuts in order to continue working, or those who are flipping hamburgers instead of using higher-value skills hard won with education or prior experience-then what we are seeing is an imperfect and partial representation of a much larger reality. When we become accustomed to making important choices about the future on the basis of distorted and misleading information, the results of those decisions are more likely to fall short of our expectations.

Psychologists and neuroscientists have studied a phenomenon called selective attention-a tendency on the part of people who are so determined to focus intensely on particular images that they become oblivious to other images that are present in the field of vision.

We select the things to which we pay attention not only by curiosity, preference, and habit, but also through our selection of the observational tools, technologies, and systems we rely on in making choices. And these tools implicitly mark some things as significant and obscure others to the point that we completely ignore them. In other words, the tools we use can have their own selective attention distortions.

For example, the system of economic value measurement known as gross domestic product, or GDP, includes some values and arbitrarily excludes others. So when we use GDP as a lens through which to observe economic activity, we pay attention to that which is measured and tend to become oblivious to those things that are not measured at all. British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called the obsession with measurements ”the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”

Here is a metaphor to ill.u.s.trate the point: the electromagnetic spectrum is often portrayed as a long thin horizontal rectangle divided into differently colored segments that represent the different wavelengths of electromagnetic energy-usually ranging from very low frequency wavelengths like those used for radio on the left, extending through microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, and the like, to extreme high frequency gamma radiation at the right end of the rectangle.

Somewhere near the middle of this rectangle is a very thin section representing visible light-which is, of course, the only part of the entire spectrum that can be seen with the human eye. But since the human eye is normally the only ”instrument” with which most of us attempt to ”see” the world around us, we are naturally oblivious to all of the information contained in the 99.9 percent of the spectrum that is invisible to us.

By supplementing our natural vision with instruments capable of ”seeing” the rest of the spectrum, however, we are able to enhance our understanding of the world around us by collecting and interpreting much more information. During the eight years I worked in the White House, I started every day, six days a week, with a lengthy briefing from the intelligence community on all the issues affecting national security and vital U.S. interests, and it routinely contained information collected from almost all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. It was, as a result, a much more complete and accurate picture of a very complex reality.

One of the current realities in the business world that has been most surprising to me is the near consensus that markets are ”short on long and long on short”-that is, there is an unhealthy focus on very short-term goals, to the exclusion of long-term goals. If the incentives routinely provided for business leaders-and political leaders-are focused on extremely short-term horizons, then no one should be surprised if the decisions they make in pursuit of the rewards to be gained are also focused on the short term-at the expense of any consideration of the future. Compensation and incentive structures reinforce these biases and penalize most CEOs and businesses that dare to focus on more sustainable longer-term strategies. ”Short-termism” has long since become a frequently used buzzword in business circles. In both business and politics, short-term decision making is dominant.

”Quarterly capitalism” is a phrase some use to describe the prevailing practice of managing businesses from one three-month period to the next, and focusing budgets and strategies on the constant effort to ensure that each quarter's earnings per share report never fails to meet projections or the market's expectations. When investors and CEOs focus on a definition of ”growth” that excludes the health and well-being of the communities where businesses are located, the health of the employees who do most of the work, and the impact of the businesses' operations on the environment, they are tacitly choosing to ignore material facts with the potential to make real growth unsustainable.

Similarly, the dominance of money in modern politics-particularly in the United States-has now led to what might be described as ”quarterly democracy.” Every ninety days, inc.u.mbent officeholders running for reelection and challengers in political contests are required to publicly report their fundraising totals for the previous ninety days. At the end of each of these quarters, there is a flurry of fundraising events, email solicitations, and fundraising telephone calls to maximize the amount that can be reported-much as a puffer fish increases its perceived size in the presence of another puffer fish encroaching on its territory.

Our evolutionary heritage has made us vulnerable to numerous stimuli that trigger short-term thinking. Though we also have the capacity for long-term thinking, of course, it requires effort, and neuroscientists tell us that distractions, stress, and fear easily disrupt the processes by which we focus on the longer term. When elected officials are under constant systemic stress to focus intently on short-term horizons, the future gets short shrift.

This is particularly dangerous during a period of rapid change. Some of the trends now under way are so well doc.u.mented by observations in the past that projections of those same trends into the future can be made with a very high degree of confidence. The rate of advancement in computer chips, to pick a well-known example, is understood more than well enough to justify predictions that computer chips will continue to advance rapidly in the future.

The speedy drop in the cost of sequencing DNA has occurred for reasons that are understood more than well enough to justify predictions that this trend too will continue to shape our future. The acc.u.mulation of greenhouse gases in the past and the rise in global temperatures they have caused is also understood more than well enough to justify predictions of what will happen to global temperatures if we continue to increase emissions at the same rate in the future-and what the consequences of much higher global temperatures would be.

Other changes, however, burst upon the world seemingly fully formed: a brand-new pattern that represents a sudden s.h.i.+ft from an older pattern that persisted for as far back in the past as humans can recall. In our own lives, we are accustomed to gradual, linear change. But sometimes the potential for change builds up without being visibly manifested until the inchoate pressure for change reaches a critical ma.s.s powerful enough to break through whatever systemic barriers have held the change back. Then suddenly one pattern gives way to another that is entirely new. This ”emergence” of systemic change is often difficult to predict, but does occur frequently both in nature and in complex systems designed by human beings.

MANY WHO WERE once fascinated and excited about the possibilities of the future are now focused solely on the implications of the future's potential for the business, political, and security strategies of the present. As the Scientific Revolution accelerated in the last decades of the twentieth century, corporate planners and military strategists began to devote considerably more attention to the study of alternative futures, motivated by a concern that the potency of new scientific and technological discoveries could threaten the strategic interests-or even survival-of business models and the balance of power among nations.

What is our present conception of the future? How does our image of the future affect the choices we are making in the present? Do we still believe that we have the power to shape our collective future on Earth and choose from among the alternative futures one that preserves our deepest values and makes life better than it is in the present? Or do we have our own crisis of confidence in humanity's future?

If the spectrum of past, present, and future were displayed as a long thin rectangle similar to that used to portray the electromagnetic spectrum, the birth of Planet Earth 4.5 billion years ago would be at the far left end. Moving to the right, we would see the emergence of life 3.8 billion years ago, the appearance of multicellular life 2.8 billion years ago, the appearance of the first plant life on land 475 million years ago, the first vertebrates more than 400 million years ago, and the first primates 65 million years ago. Then, moving all the way to the right end of the rectangle, the death of the sun would appear 7.5 billion years from now.

The narrow slice of time to the left of the midpoint in this spectrum-the one that represents the history of the human species-is an even narrower slice of the spectrum of time than is visible light of the electromagnetic spectrum. The thoughts we devote to these vast stretches of time in the past and future are often fleeting at best.

There are ample reasons for optimism about the future. For the present, war seems to be declining. Global poverty is declining. Some fearsome diseases have been conquered and others are being held at bay. Lifespans are lengthening. Standards of living and average incomes-at least on a global basis-are improving. Knowledge and literacy are spreading. The tools and technologies we are developing-including Internet-based communication-are growing in power and efficacy. Our general understanding of our world, indeed, our universe (or multiverse!) has been growing exponentially. There have been periods in the past when limits to our growth and success as a species appeared to threaten our future, only to be transcended by new advances-the Green Revolution of the second half of the twentieth century, for example.

So the positive and negative sets of trends are occurring simultaneously. The fact that some are welcome and others are not has an effect on our perception of them. The unwelcome trends are sometimes ignored, at least in part because they are unpleasant to think about. Any uncertainty about them that can be conjured to justify inaction is often seized upon with enthusiasm, while new hard evidence establis.h.i.+ng their reality is often resisted with even stronger denial of the reality the evidence supports.

Just as naive optimism can amount to self-deception, so too can a predisposition to pessimism blind us to bases for legitimate hope that we can find a path that leads around and through the dangers that lie ahead. Indeed, I am an optimist-though my optimism is predicated on the hope that we will find ways to see and think clearly about the obvious trends that are even now gaining momentum, that we will reason together and attend to the dangerous distortions in our present ways of describing and measuring the powerful changes that are now under way, that we will actively choose to preserve human values and protect them, not least against the mechanistic and destructive consequences of our baser instincts that are now magnified by technologies more powerful than any that those in previous generations, even Jules Verne, could have imagined. I have tried my best to describe what I believe the evidence shows is more likely than not to present us with important choices that we must consciously make together. I do so not out of fear, but because I believe in the future.

* The Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future had a very able executive director, Anne Cheatham.

For a larger version of the following image, click here.

1.

EARTH INC.

THE GLOBAL ECONOMY IS BEING TRANSFORMED BY CHANGES FAR greater in speed and scale than any in human history. We are living with, and in, Earth Inc.:* national policies, regional strategies, and long accepted economic theories are now irrelevant to the new realities of our new hyper-connected, tightly integrated, highly interactive, and technologically revolutionized economy.

Many of the most successful large enterprises in the world now produce goods in ”virtual global factories,” with intricate spiderwebs of supply chains connecting to hundreds of other enterprises in dozens of countries. More and more markets for goods-and increasingly services that do not require face-to-face interaction-are now global in nature. Higher and higher percentages of wage earners must now compete not only with wage earners in every other country, but also with intelligent machines interconnected with other machines and computer networks.

The digitization of work and the dramatic and relatively sudden metastasis of what used to be called automation are driving two ma.s.sive changes simultaneously: 1. The outsourcing of jobs from industrial economies to developing and emerging economies with large populations and lower wages; and 2. The robosourcing of jobs from human beings to mechanized processes, computer programs, robots of all sizes and shapes, and still rudimentary versions of artificial intelligence that are improving in their efficacy, utility, and power with each pa.s.sing year.

The transformation of the global economy is best understood as an emergent phenomenon-that is, one in which the whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but very different from the sum of its parts in important and powerful ways. It represents something new-not just a more interconnected collection of the same national and regional economies that used to interact with one another, but a completely new ent.i.ty with different internal dynamics, patterns, momentum, and raw power than what we have been familiar with in the past. There are limits to cross-border flows of people, of course, and trade flows are stronger among countries that are close to one another, but the entire global economy has been knit together much more tightly than ever before.

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