Back to the Future : Trends: After examining its 1989 forecasts, the World Future Society looks to the ‘90s and beyond to envision major changes at home, on the road and at work.

Every December, the World Future Society engages in the seasonal ritual of looking back over the past year, and in doing so, finds the future.

The society’s editors find it by leafing through their widely respected bimonthly magazine, The Futurist, which is noted for major forecast articles by scientists, demographers, economists, engineers and dozens of other specialists.

This year, to celebrate the arrival of a new decade, Futurist editors combed through the 1989 issues with the idea of isolating 10 special forecasts--for the 1990s and beyond. “These forecasts were chosen because they seem to be the most provocative, the most thought-stimulating,” explained WFS president Edward Cornish. “They are new ideas, but not something off-the-wall for which there is no reasonable basis. And each one represents a trend or development that extends itself to a wide field.”

There was no lack of material. As the new decade approaches, “change is breaking out in just about any field you can name,” Cornish emphasized, noting that the predicted sites of change range from the back-yard garden to the global workplace.

But some changes are bound to have more widespread impact than others, as telephone conversations with some of the specialists whose ideas are represented on the WFS Top 10 Forecasts confirmed.

Take transportation. The decade will throw a lot of new driving experiences into our lives, the editors said, as computer power moves into the streets.

Auto-dependent Southern Californians will be particularly interested in such developments as the “smart car” and “smart corridor,” two parts of a system that would allow a driver, communicating with a central traffic control, to find the best alternative out of a traffic jam . . . or the best route to work on any given day.

Says Robert French, a Ft. Worth-based international transportation consultant: “The new buzzword is IVHS for Intelligent Vehicle/Highway Systems. This is something we could see some amounts of within the decade, if we pursue it aggressively.”

Explained French: “The stage was set in the ‘80s, as the traffic got worse and the technology got better. It’s said that within a year or two, a typical car will have more computer power than the NASA lunar landing module did.”

The “smart highway” concept, French said, will incorporate ideas such as traffic signs that change instructions as highway situations change and a general circuit of back-and-forth information between a traffic control center and drivers in their automobiles.

Smart highways won’t end traffic congestion, he added, but will provide “one way of squeezing the most capacity out of our existing roadway system. We all realize that we can’t double our streets and roadways overnight.”

If computer power is stretching the roadways, it is shrinking the workplace.

Joseph Pelton, director of the Center for Advanced Research in Telecommunications at the University of Colorado, is studying “electronic immigrants,” as companies increasingly move their information services to Third World countries where labor is cheaper.

With the new technologies--what Pelton calls “the integrated service digital network”--U.S. companies can get their computer data entry-work done anywhere in the world. For example, any company, Pelton said, can have its payroll accounts handled in the Philippines.

He sees the “tele-colony” as a future form of neocolonialism: “We haven’t sorted it out yet, but if you have a high percentage of people living in one country and working overseas (via computer), it’s got to make a big impact on the politics of that country somehow.”

On the domestic side, there are already some positive trends, he added. “Some insurance companies have gone to remote rural areas of the United States for their hiring. The training can be provided, so there are alternate strategies to going offshore.”

While satellites, computers and artificial intelligence are whisking us towards what Pelton calls a “global brain,” in the next decade, the environment itself will pose a challenge to worldwide cooperation, says Oliver Owen, professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin and author of “Natural Resource Conservation.” His article on the greenhouse effect made the Top 10 forecast list.

“In the ‘80s, we were really marshaling our energies to tackle isolated pollution events in the United States,” Owen said. “We used a localized approach to fight smog by controlling pollution from plants and automobiles.

“Now we must shift to a regional and a global approach, if the warming trend doesn’t just gallop away from us, and if we are to control the thinning of the ozone layer, and do something about acid rain.

“We’ve been alerted, but the politicians lag behind the scientific consensus,” added Owen, who sees that gap starting to close. His optimistic prediction for the ‘90s is a new emphasis on international action-oriented conferences “where as many countries as possible are represented, not only the industrialized nations, but also the developing nations.”

The complete forecast list, says Cornish, “should get us into the framework of thinking futuristically.”