Peter Schwartz
Among the traits that distinguish humans from other earthly creatures is our ability to imagine the future. The ease with which we can project forward into time has been crucial in the development of everything from primitive agriculture to the New York Stock Exchange. Yet, while we are fairly sure that the sun will come up tomorrow and that spring will follow winter, we also understand the future as vast, unknown and unknowable.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped us from seeking out oracles, seers and psychics. But there are also serious forecasters among us, people who use scientific method and rigorous analysis in an effort to identify the forces that will shape our tomorrows. They track current shifts and trends and use them to create a variety of scenarios that describe possible futures. For this they are often handsomely paid by corporations, institutions and governments.
Perhaps the most visible of these “scenario builders” is Peter Schwartz, chairman of Global Business Network, a group of forward-thinkers based in Emeryville, Calif., near San Francisco. Schwartz has recruited an eclectic gaggle of heavyweights to help him parse out possible futures, including former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy and musicians Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel. Last year, Schwartz launched a heated debate when he and writer Peter Leyden published a scenario called “The Long Boom” in Wired magazine. In it, Schwartz proposed that we are now entering an extended period of economic prosperity, which, driven by the biotechnology and telecommunications industries, will have us all rolling in dough well into the next century.
Not surprisingly, Schwartz’s long-boom motif has been shaken by the unpleasant economic events of late. Yet, the 52-year old futurist, who was trained as a rocket scientist, still believes it’s possible. Married and father to an 8-year-old son, Ben, he has two brothers who are rock musicians in Los Angeles. In a conversation from his Berkeley home, he talked about imagining alternate futures as a way of preparing for what’s to come, the crushing pace of change in our society and his dream of an era of prosperity like none ever seen before--the long boom.
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Question: What’s the difference between predicting the future and preparing for the future?
Answer: We recognize that the world is complex and essentially unpredictable. There are a few things that we can predict, that are inevitable and that one can see, but most things are not. Who could have imagined at the beginning of this year that someone named Monica Lewinsky was going to distract an entire government? So, rather than trying to predict the unpredictable, we try to create rigorous scenarios of possibilities--different ways that current forces might turn out. We try to think about all the various possibilities and prepare, so that we’re not surprised. You’ve heard people say, in retrospect, “Boy, I wish I’d thought of that back when.” Careful scenario planning is a way of avoiding that regretful emotion.
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Q: But what if your scenario is wrong? For instance, in the 1950s, popular notions about the future included lots of robots and flying cars, and that future never arrived.
A: Yes, and another good example involves the U.S. military. Today the Cold War is over and the big bad guy went away. But the military prepared for every scenario but the one that occurred, winning the Cold War.
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Q: How does one create scenarios for the future that have a good chance of actually occurring?
A: First, if you can find things that are inevitable, those are very powerful signals. Look at Japan, for instance. In a few years, fully 25% of all Japanese will be over 65 years of age, making it the oldest society in human history. There’s no way to change that, because the momentum of their demographics makes it inevitable. But what is undetermined is how Japan will try to cope with this change. Will it try to import young people? Or will it be so slow in responding that the few young people left will want to leave? One can imagine two radically different responses to the same phenomenon.
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Q: But what about the unknown, unpredictable events in the future, things that we can’t possibly anticipate?
A: We work very hard to identify the seeds of change in the present. There are very few things that are entirely surprising, that somebody didn’t see coming. We work hard to scan as much information about the world as we can. We do that by trying to identify the most perceptive observers throughout the world. We now have a network of about 100 people who are at the leading edge of change--artists, economists, writers, scientists--people who really have their finger on the pulse of change, or who are themselves involved in creating the future.
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Q: The future scenario that you’re most identified with is that of the long boom, an unprecedented, decades-encompassing era of good times. Given the collapse of economies in Asia and Russia, the downturn in the U.S. stock market and unstable currencies in Latin America, are you now somewhat less of a boom booster?
A: Remember, I was talking about a 40-year phenomenon, and what we have here is a short-term crisis. However, one must consider whether this crisis is so large that it could affect the long-term trend. I think the answer could be yes. I never argued that the long-boom scenario is inevitable. I think it’s desirable, and I’d like to see it happen, but it will require action, particularly on the part of the U.S. government, to assure the sustainability of this boom. Yet, we are seeing today a political leadership which is distracted and not taking the kinds of actions it should.
But how might this current economic crisis play out? Perhaps it may be something like what happened after 1987, where you have a short, sharp shock, followed by a pumping up of liquidity. So, if the world responds properly, this could actually accelerate the long boom. In contrast, if the United States, Europe, Russia and Japan all fail in their response to this economic crisis, then it’s likely that we’ll get a major recession, an increase in protectionism and a pullback from the global arena. That’s a scenario which resembles the 1930s, the radical deflation scenario. That could turn out to be a real break in the boom and even lead to worldwide conflict.
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Q: Discounting current economic uncertainty, much of the ingredients for your long-boom scenario are technological, and you foresee great advances, particularly in biology. Just how important is the “march of science” to a happier future?
A: Here, at the end of the 20th century, we’ve made a number of breakthroughs in genetics and molecular biology that clearly indicate we are in the early stages of a very large-scale change. Life extension, cures to ancient diseases like cancer, repairing genetic damage, these advances will impact human beings directly, along with our economy and our ecology.
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Q: But while you see this in an optimistic light, radically extending life spans and being able to manipulate genetic codes could also have dark implications.
A: Perhaps. But I recently read a wonderful article published in the Ladies Home Journal in 1900, speculating about what life would be like in the year 2000. The writer declared that if we make great strides in human health, we may be able to extend the average life span from 35 to 50. If he were right, you’d be near death, and I’d be dead by now. But, of course, we did much better than he imagined, and not many would choose to abandon the last 25 or 30 years of life. And if technology allows us to live still another 30 years, in reasonably good health, I don’t see much of a problem with that.
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Q: It seems clear to me that we are quite capable of shaping our future, but we can’t shape a future we can’t imagine. How much of your long-boom scenario is just that, an attempt to influence people to make this sort of future a reality?
A: It’s very much about attempting to influence the future. We’re saying if we do the right things, this is what we could achieve. The long-boom scenario is at least as much about potential as it is about inevitability. The science and technology is almost bound to happen. But the globalization and integration of cultures are not inevitable, they are very much a matter of human choice. So, at the very least, we’ve succeeded in creating a lot of debate. Many people think we’re wrong, but many others agree with our vision and are working to make it happen.
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Q: You’ve talked about how important it is for someone who thinks about the future to be tuned in to the changes of the present. But by almost any measure, we’re living in a world in which the pace of change seems to be accelerating so fast that we can scarcely keep up. This is as evident today in politics as it is in technology. Will things keep changing ever faster as we move into a future that’s increasingly wired and interconnected, and how will we keep up?
A: People simply know more today and have more information surrounding them than ever before. The ubiquity of the media and the “24-hour news cycle” are all part of that. And there is simply more knowledge out there. At the middle of this century, it took about 20 years for the sum total of human knowledge to double. Today, it’s roughly every five years. In 2020, it will be every 73 days!
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Q: Faced with this whirlwind of change, how will we cope? For instance, we’re already having difficulty with everything from gauging public opinion to measuring productivity.
A: That’s true. When our economy and our society changes its structure rapidly, our tools for analyzing what’s going on no longer work. Here’s an example: Microsoft does not really show up in the gross national product. That’s because we’re used to measuring hard goods and not services and intellectual properties. [Fed Chairman] Alan Greenspan understands this. He’s driving our economy at least in part based on the assumption that the information he’s getting about productivity isn’t very good. Greenspan regularly frets in public about this.
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Q: The popularization of the Internet is one of those surprises that few could have imagined even a dozen years ago. What sorts of scenarios have you created about how it may evolve?
A: Over the next six years a network of low-orbit satellites is going to create a massive infrastructure in the sky, which will make high-bandwidth communications available to virtually anyone, anywhere in the world. We will go from a situation we have today, where 70% of the people in the world have never made a phone call, to one where the entire population of the world has access to a cheap, global telecommunications network, in less than a decade’s time. With a $100 device, a kid in Botswana is going to be able to log onto the Net. There will be a literal explosion in the population of people using the Net, and because of the increases in bandwidth, the functionality will improve dramatically.
A good example is catalog shopping. You go onto the Land’s End Web site, and you realize you’re probably better off with the paper catalog. On the Web, it’s slow, and the image quality is not so great. But as speed increases, and image quality gets better, the paper catalogs will begin to disappear. Having been involved in a couple of catalog companies, and knowing that 97% of the catalogs you print and mail produce no result whatsoever, I understand what impact the Web will have on those businesses. A lot of things that are marginal today suddenly become compelling.
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Q: It would seem that given the pace of change, the ever-changing landscape of technology and the need to understand where things are going, yours is a sure- fire growth industry.
A: It’s really about human freedom. If our fates are all predetermined, if there are inevitable forces in a sort of Marxist sense and human volition doesn’t matter, then my kind of work doesn’t matter at all. On the other hand, if we do have the power to mold and shape our destiny, then looking at alternatives and thinking about how our decisions might play out is an important part of human choice. There are times in history when these choices matter more, and times when they matter less. I think this is one of those times when they matter perhaps the most. So, in essence, all we’re trying to do is help people make intelligent choices at a very critical time in human history.
