Future Perfect

by Robyn Williams

  Joseph Schumpeter was one of the most important economists of the twentieth century. In a world where technology and innovation are so important for us all, he was one of the first to examine their impact on the economy. He was quite a character. He was Austrian Finance Minister, a Harvard professor, and always proclaimed to have three rather immodest ambitions: to be the best economist in the world, the most skilful horseman in Austria, and the greatest lover in Vienna. On his deathbed, he glumly accepted that there was probably one person who’d always been better on a horse…

  Schumpeter used wonderfully colourful and evocative language. He argued that innovation unleashed ‘the gales of creative destruction’. It arrives in great storms of revolutionary technologies like steam power and computers that fundamentally change and improve the economy. Innovation is creative and beneficial, bringing new industries, wealth and employment, and at the same time is destructive of some established firms, many products and jobs and the dreams of failed entrepreneurs. For Schumpeter, innovation offers the ‘carrot of spectacular reward or the stick of destitution’.

  This eruption of a new kind of innovation is happening already. Amory and Hunter Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, have written Natural Capitalism, containing enough ideas to help us tackle the next 50 years. Dave Suzuki has covered similar ground in Good News for a Change. In London, the Forum for the Future, chaired by Jonathon Porritt, has a magazine called Green Futures, in which these ideas have been promoted for over ten years. It invites corporations to submit a £5000 joining fee and a statement about how they are, as organisations, facing the future. Promotion puffs written in the customary corporate way are unacceptable and immediately returned to sender. Only realistic grapplings with possibilities, good or bad, are accepted. Then there is the comprehensive The Natural Advantage of Nations, Business Opportunities, Innovation and Governance in the 21st Century, edited by Karlson Hargroves and Michael Smith, two Australians from the Natural Edge Project. Gradually business is learning that being green is a supremely serious venture, and profitable. Environment Business Australia is taking its own approach, successfully. It suggests that green enterprise in Oz will be worth $40-50 billion a year by 2010.

  What Kahn did not foresee 30 years ago, I repeat, is that his four distinct types would soon morph into one on today’s world stage. The Australian Business Round Table was launched in 2006 by six magnificent CEOs (whose companies included Westpac, Visy Industries, I AG, Swiss Re, Origin Energy and BHP). Put them together with leaders such as Lord Oxburgh and Cathy Zoi (who now runs Al Gore’s office but promises to return to Australia) and you have the beginnings of lift-off.

  * * * *

  I was born in January 1944. Hitler was still going strong. The atomic bomb had not yet been tested, nor dropped on two Japanese cities. Martha Gellhorn was yet to write about the hitherto unsuspected (by the public at least) outrage of the concentration camps. I arrived in a world not dissimilar to hell. So I know, as you do, how bad things can get. We also know how good they can be, some of us.

  Today, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, our bad things are bad in different ways. This is how our problem is posed by Martin Rees:

  We are entering an era when a single person can, by one clandestine act, cause millions of deaths or render a city uninhabitable for years, and when a malfunction in cyberspace can cause havoc worldwide to a significant segment of the economy: air transport, power generation, or the financial system. Indeed disaster could be caused by someone who is merely incompetent rather than malign.

  Martin Rees is a calm, immensely courteous Welshman. He is the last person on Earth to be inclined to histrionics. He is also one of the most distinguished scientists alive, combining, somehow, the positions of President of the Royal Society of London, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, member of the House of Lords and professor of astrophysics (he had to give up being Astronomer Royal!). Yet this sensible man was willing to have a wager on oblivion. In his book Our Final Century (note, no question mark!), he wrote:

  I staked one thousand dollars on a bet: ‘That by the year 2020 an instance of bioerror or bioterror will have killed a million people.’

  Of course, I fervently hope to lose this bet. But I honestly do not expect to. This forecast involved looking less than twenty years ahead. I believe the risk would be high even if there were a ‘freeze’ on new developments, and the potential perpetrators of such outrages or mega errors had continuing access only to present-day techniques. But of course, no subject is forging ahead faster than biotechnology, and its advances will intensify the risks and enhance their variety.

  To Lord Rees’s nightmare add mad mullahs, myopically dim US presidents and a few million folk waiting and even wishing for Armageddon, and you have a mixture that even my contemporaries in 1944 might have found too dreadful to contemplate. At least back then you had some almost Utopian optimism about possible futures. One monster, Hitler, was about to be vanquished; another, Stalin, would last but another nine years. Little did we imagine that the end of the world would come, not through the agency of the Devil but by the actions of idiots. To misquote T.S. Eliot: ‘This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a blunder.’ The whimper comes afterwards.

  In his book Last and First Men, published in 1930, Olaf Stapledon wrote a two-billion-year history of the human race. In his tale we grow wings and take to the sky and move from Earth to the outer reaches of our solar system-though we do not leave it. Stapledon was a philosopher trained, like Richard Dawkins, at Balliol College in Oxford, though he later went west to the University of Liverpool to lecture. His narrative is not enlivened by winsome or wicked characters or personal vignettes, but proceeds, almost like a formal history, to leap through the centuries and millennia. He was boldly optimistic that we have many millions of years ahead of us, even though we have managed only about 120,000 so far as modern humans and barely ten thousand years of civilisation.

  My concern is for the next TWENTY years.

  So, will we make it? I am afraid I can’t answer that.

  It’s up to you.

  * * * *

  The Hunches of Nostradamus

  2008 Three American teens develop prehensile ears for mobile phone use.

  2009 Shias and Sunnis in Iraq agree to put twenty children out in public each night to be shot by the other side-to save time.

  2010 George W. Bush voted worst American President in history. Hides in a Texan retreat with remaining loyal buddies. Both of them.

  2011 Climate change projections worse than expected. Nay-sayers claim they knew it was bad but didn’t want to frighten people.

  2012 Evacuation of coastal zones rehearsed in Europe and Pacific.

  2013 Robert Mugabe dies. International rejoicing.

  2014 Only 127 great apes left in wild.

  2015 Weather oscillates in extremes of hot, cold, drought, rain, terrifying winds. Storm surges wipe out several coastal communities on three continents.

  2016 Earth summit. No agreement. Leaders wear peculiar costumes, enjoy banquet.

  2017 Animals revolt, take over planet.

  2018 Turmoil.

  2019 United Nations emergency meeting.

  2020 …

  Postscript

  A few years ago, I wrote a short book entitled Our Final Century. I guessed that, taking all risks into account, there was only a 50 per cent chance that civilization would get through to 2100 without a disastrous setback. This seemed to me a far from cheerful conclusion. However, I was surprised by the way my colleagues reacted to the book: many thought a catastrophe was even more likely than I did, and regarded me as an optimist.

  I stand by this optimism.

  – Lord (Martin) Rees, President of the Royal Society of London,

  Master of Trinity College, Cambridge

  Further reading

  Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Harmony Books, 1979.

  Appleyard, Bryan, Understanding the Present: Science and
the soul of modern man, Picador, London 1992.

  Barlow, Tom, Australian Miracle: An innovative nation revisited, Picador, Sydney 2006.

  Bloom, Barry, ‘Public health in transition’, Scientific American, September, 2205.

  Bodanis, David, The Electric Universe, Little, Brown, London 2005.

  Clarke, John, Working with Monsters: How to protect yourself from the workplace psychopath,

  Random House, Sydney 2005.

  Cooper, Cary, interview with Dr Norman Swan, ‘Job satisfaction and health’, ‘The Health Report’, ABC Radio National, 22 May 2006 ‹abc.net.au/rn/healthreport›.

  Davies, Paul, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the universe just right for life? Allen Lane, London 2006.

  Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion, Bantam Press, London 2006.

  – -, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1976.

  Dunbar, Robin, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, Faber & Faber, London 1996.

  Eagleton, Terry, ‘Lunging, flailing, mispunching’, London Review of Books, ‹http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html›.

  Ehrlich, Paul, The Population Bomb, Ballantine Books, New York 1968.

  Frayn, Michael, The Human Touch, Faber & Faber, London 2006.

  Gould, Stephen Jay, Rocks of Ages: Science and religion in the fullness of life, Ballantine Books, New York 1999.

  Graebsch, Ahnut, and Schiermeier, Quirin, ‘Anti-evolutionists raise their profile in Europe ’, Nature, vol. 444, 23 November 2006, pp. 406-7.

  Greenfield, Susan, Tomorrow’s People: How 21st century technology is changing the way we think and feel, Allen Lane, London 2003.

  Haskell, Yasmin, ‘Ockham’s Razor’, 21 October 2006 ‹abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor›.

  Huebner, Jonathan, ‘A possible declining trend for worldwide innovation’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, October 2005, vol. 72, pp. 980-6.

  Hughes, Ted, quoted in Phillips, Adam, The Beast in the Nursery, Faber & Faber, London 1998.

  Kahn, Herman, Thinking About the Unthinkable, Avon Books, New York 1962.

  – -, The Next 200 Years, Sphere, London 1978.

  Lernley, Brad, ‘Waste into oil’, Cosmos, issue 9, June/July 2006.

  Lovins, Amory B., ‘More profit with less carbon’, Scientific American, vol. 293, no. Ill, pp. 74-82

  (29 August 2005), ‹www.sciam.com/media/pdf/Lovinsforweb.pdf›.

  Hawken, Paul, Lovins, Amory B. and Lovins, L. Hunter, Natural Capitalism, Little, Brown, New

  York 1999.

  Maddox, Brenda, Beyond Babel , Andre Deutsch, London 1972.

  Meadows, Donella H., Meadows, Dennis L., Randers, Jorgen and Behrens III, William W, The Limits to Growth: A report for the Club of Rome ’s project on the predicament of mankind, Signet, New York 1972.

  Needham, Kirsty, A Season in Red: My great leap forward into the new China , Allen & Unwin, Sydney 2006.

  Newman, Peter and Kenworthy, Jeffrey, Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming automobile dependence, Island Press, Washington DC 1999.

  Norris, Pippa and Inglehart, Ronald, Sacred and Secular: Religion and politics worldwide, Cambridge University Press 2004.

  Paul, Gregory S., ‘Cross-national correlations of quantifiable societal health with popular religiosity and secularism in the prosperous democracies’, Journal of Religion and Society, vol. 7, 2005.

  Rees, Martin, Our Final Century: Will the human race survive the twenty-first century? William Heinemann, London 2003.

  Rose, Steven, The Conscious Brain, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1973.

  – -, The 21st Century Brain: Explaining, mending and manipulating the mind, Jonathan Cape, London 2005.

  Roychowdhury, Anunüta and Sharma, Anju, Slow Murder: The deadly story of vehicular pollution in India, Center for Science and Environment (CSE), New Delhi 1996.

  Seddon, George, The Old Country: A sense of place, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne 2005.

  Stapledon, Olaf, Last and First Men: A story of the near and far future, Methuen, London 1930.

  Suzuki, David and Dressel, Holly, Good News for a Change, Allen & Unwin, Sydney 2002.

  Sykes, Bryan, Adam’s Curse: A future without men, Bantam Press, London 2003.

  Ward, Keith, Is Religion Dangerous? Lion Hudson, London 2006.

  Weinberg, Steven, ‘A deadly certitude: On God, Christianity and Islam’, Times Literary Supplement, 17 January 2007.

  Williams, Jessica, 50 Facts That Should Change the World, Icon Books, Cambridge 2004.

  Williams, Robyn, Normal Service Won’t Be Resumed, Allen & Unwin,

  – -, Unintelligent Design, Allen & Unwin, 2006.

  – -, 2007: A true story waiting to happen, Hodder Headline 2002.

  Wills, Garry, ‘A country ruled by faith’, New York Review of Books, 16 November 2006.

  Wrangham, Richard and Petersen, Dale, Demonic Males, Bloomsbury, London 1997.

  Wright, Ronald, A Short History of Progress, Canongate Edinburgh 2006.

  Wrong, Michela, ‘Blood of innocents on his hands’, The New Statesman, 11 April 2005.

  About Robyn Williams

  Robyn Williams has presented science programs on ABC radio and television since 1972. Early in his career he made guest appearances in The Goodies, Monty Python's Flying Circus and Dr Who. He is the first journalist to be elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, was a visiting fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, and is a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales. In March 2006, a star in the constellation Carina was named after him. He is planning a visit.

  ***

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