Elon University

Archives: Expert Predictions

The New World Economic Order: Implications for Insular Areas

Communication technologies will continue to destroy the need for human manual and mental labor in the production, distribution, and repair of most goods, and many services, humans want. This will, on the one hand, make it impossible for most people to find a job, even if they want one, and eventually will require all of us to reorient the purpose of our lives away from work for wages or profits to something else – probably to environmental protection and amelioration. At the same time – again, barring too rapid social disintegration – these communication technologies will continue to transform the meaning and effect of time and place. For those whose labor is still needed, it will no longer be necessary or often even desirable to go to work … the work can and should come to you … And so will education, and soon, I can assure you, so will governance.

Coming Ready or Not: The World We Are Leaving Future Generations, and Our Responsibility Toward Them

The transforming power of the Internet, and all of its possible successor netwoven communication technologies, are in the process of completely destroying all of the institutions, behaviors, and values which arose around the industrial technologies of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries – economic, military, political, cultural – just as industrial technologies destroyed – or at least marginalized and substantially changed – the institutions, behaviors, and values of pre-industrial, agricultural societies.

Coming Ready or Not: The World We Are Leaving Future Generations, and Our Responsibility Toward Them

The components of this Net are getting more numerous, more ubiquitous, more inexpensive, more powerful, and more intelligent. And, among the many things they are doing, and will continue to do, they are replacing humans in almost all aspects of traditional or industrial life … We simply do not need, and never will ever need again, so many people “working” as we did in the more recent centuries of human history. We must understand that the old economic system is utterly obsolete and dangerously misleading in this respect, and that we must begin to orient human life around something other than “jobs” which are less and less available to more and more people. At the same time, we must find ways to keep people meaningfully and peacefully occupied even though they are not working.

Coming Ready or Not: The World We Are Leaving Future Generations, and Our Responsibility Toward Them

Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement – “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us” – is … true for the future … The most potent technology transforming the present … is the vast array of electronic communications technologies which are now being widely touted as composing the Information Superhighway … Many once-separate and expensive technologies are being woven together into a gigantic, global, and comparatively inexpensive information network which, among other things, is destroying the necessity of traveling to a single centralized location to work, or to trade, or be entertained, or even to govern. It is now increasingly possible, and preferable, to telework, to telemarket, to teleview, and to telegovern. It thus is no longer necessary, nor desirable, anywhere in the world to continue to create huge urban centers … It can all come to you.

Coming Ready or Not: The World We Are Leaving Future Generations, and Our Responsibility Toward Them

The technologies of the present and immediate future – I’m thinking here of electronic information and telecommunication technologies – have already marginalized and bypassed, if not utterly destroyed, all major institutions of the present – including many of the reasons cities – and megacities – came into existence to begin with. But when I look at what the completing of the human genome project, and all the other aspects of the biological and nanotechnological revolution are about to do to our ideas about and fund of “information,” “intelligence,” and even “life,” then I realize that the impact of electronic technologies on our old institutions and beliefs is nothing compared to what these new technologies are about to bring.