Today on CNN’s site, there is a section that contains a bunch of commentaries by various people from different disciplines about the future and what they think it holds in store (my comments are blocked out in brown).
One of these individuals, a man named Ian Pearson, foresees the rise of a “care economy,” in which skills such as teaching and nursing will be very much in demand. His thought is that robots will do much of the rough manual labor that we do now and sophisticated AI applications (“artificial intelligence” for the uninitiated) will perform sophisticated business functions. The futurists have been talking about AI for years, by the way, but we may actually be getting closer to realizing that vision.
Also, in Pearson’s words, “We will be spending more time on human interaction and doing personal services for other people -- jobs like fitness gurus, lifestyles gurus, feng shui consultants, color therapists, job's that reduce people's stress, these sorts of things will expand dramatically and a lot of people will be working in these jobs.”
“Color therapists?” You mean like than man and wife in that goofball singing family in the folk music parody “A Mighty Wind”? “Oooh, honey….I’m stroking aqua velour fabric while chartreuse is permeating my being. Ommmm….”Also, Dr. Jakob Nielsen, the web usability guru, basically says that we will be able to do so much without leaving our homes that the price of real estate will fall through the floor, since, theoretically, it will make less of a difference where you live because you can do anything anywhere. Also, he says that “small hospitals will have the world’s greatest medical specialists on standby to diagnose patients through remote sensing.”
To be serious about that for a minute, though, I should point out that I once worked with a very nice lady who left our employer to start her own personal services company (picking up cleaning, taking care of the house, overseeing the landscaping, etc.) to do the work that well-to-do or uber-rich people can’t do because they either don’t want to or they’re so busy with their jobs that they can’t be bothered. The last time I spoke with her, she was so busy that she barely had a minute to herself. I don’t know how profitable the venture was, though.
“Oh, honey, can you please dial the interactive medical channel for me on our 50-inch, high definition, plasma TV? I think I need some hormones for male dysfunction again, and my urologist is having an online diagnosis session beginning in a few minutes. I tried the orgasmatron, but I didn’t have any luck with it.”Regarding travel, Ronald G. Larson, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan, says that because we are increasingly mobile, viruses such as SARS and avian flu “pose a continual threat of a worldwide pandemic” (oh, great), but “novel, ‘lab on chip’ technologies are emerging that offer the potential for rapid, inexpensive, portable genotyping of viruses, allowing for the possibility of ‘on the spot’ diagnosis”.
From the New York Times, date 6/11/05:Finally, Dean Kamen, inventor of The Segway (remember how our MSM cousins, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, went ga-ga over this novel but, for now, irrelevant piece of machinery?) had this interesting thought:
Two reported new outbreaks of avian flu among birds in western China have raised fears that the virus is being spread widely by migrating birds and mutating rapidly.
The regional director for the World Health Organization, Dr. Shigeru Omi, told reporters in Beijing yesterday that the two recent outbreaks in remote areas in which hundreds of birds died were worrisome because they involved migratory waterfowl and domestic geese, birds that until now had been fairly resistant to the disease.
More than 13,000 geese were destroyed in Tacheng, in the Xinjiang autonomous region, after about 500 died of H5N1 avian flu, China's Agriculture Ministry reported.
Upon hearing of the news, the Bush Administration immediately questioned the scientific validity of the data, lambasted the Times as “a clearing house for liberal propaganda,” and stated that “the progress of free market reforms will enable China to implement health care measures to ensure public safety to a greater degree than ever before while we continue to run up irresponsible trade deficits with an oppressive regime that continually violates the basic human rights of its citizens.”
(OK, that last paragraph wasn’t really in the story – you got me. Nothing funny about this stuff, actually.)
“The largest single cause of human disease, the cause of 80 percent of illness, is water-borne pathogens. This year 5.2 million people will die because of bad water. Yet in rich countries we use drinkable water to wash our cars and flush our toilets. I think in the next century you will see that all but disappear. Water will become more costly than oil.
The goal in my mind is to give people a way to take any source of water and make it pure -- to put a box in the middle of a village that would supply drinking water, no matter what the contamination, for 100 people. We're testing a device now and we're very excited about it.”
I can see it now – “Coming to a multiplex near you, that big-summer blockbuster everyone has been talking about: ‘Oilworld,’ starring Kevin Costner and Dennis Hopper, with Reese Witherspoon as the gratuitous bit of T&A. Special appearances by George W. and George H.W. Bush, Jim Baker, King Fahd, the president of Venezuela, and the Unocal Corporation.”(back to me…)
Actually, this makes it all the more urgent to deal with global warming and climate change (to be serious again for a minute), since that is probably hurting Africa more than any other continent, drying up more and more of the country and leading to subsequently more of the tribal chaos and civil wars that we’ve seen to date (that behavior happens for more than just environmental reasons, I know).
By the way, I’m not for a minute saying that we should own Africa’s problems. All I’m saying is that we should keep our eye on “the big picture” since, when it comes to other continents, we have an interest in each other because we all share the same ecosystem.
Of course, we can’t even realistically consider a more active role in the problem of African drought until after January 2009 at the earliest, when Bushco departs (ugh).
As I read all of this, though, the one thought I have over and over is this. Who on earth is going to be able to afford all of these great innovations that will enable people to do everything from the safety of their homes and hardly ever interact with the outside world? All of this will surely come at a cost, though that is never discussed in these types of stories. Under the Bushco world of the “haves,” “have mores,” and “have nothings,” I hate to admit that I think I know the answer.
Also, I don’t think anything that makes us retreat unto ourselves is such a great development. When we do that, we hurt our ability to interact and communicate effectively with each other (an ironic observation I admit, as I type onto my keyboard and get ready to publish this to a location where it will hopefully be read by an unknown audience:-). I don’t think that, as a nation, we’re doing that great of a job of communicating with each other anyway. We have the Internet, Email, voice mail, iPods ™, Blackberries™…all kinds of means to reach out to each other. The irony to me is that so many of us are too busy to do that.
I applaud the visionary observations of the people that CNN profiled in their feature today. I would just like somehow to see this information presented in more of a present-day context, so that, one day ten years down the road, we aren’t watching our TVs talk to us, our appliances start to perform functions without our command, and our computers tell us what medicines to take without saying, “How the $#@! did this happen?”
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