Maclean´s

October 10, 2005

 

Chicago Hope

Half the people at the World Future Society conclave are old white men with mortality on their minds

By Allen Abel

THE BALLROOM is rich with gilt and crystal and murals a la Versailles, avant le deluge. High above me, eager swains and tender maidens dally in the gardens of a doomed empire. I look up and wonder: will we do any better than they did at predicting the revolutions that will shake our lives?

On a steaming July weekend, I am at the annual conclave of the World Future Society, sitting in the audience in the magnificent Grand Ballroom of the Chicago Hilton. I am taking notes with ink and paper, the same technology that the royal secretary used when Marie Antoinette commanded, "Fifi, take a memo: 'Let 'em eat cake.'"

At the podium, a riveting public speaker, trend-spotter and self-promoter par excellence named Ken Dychtwald is regaling us with anecdotes of demography, opportunity and doom.

"What if we get part of the future right?" he challenges. "What if we beat heart disease and cancer but we can't beat Alzheimer's? The rate of dementia in Americans over age 85 is 47 per cent -- what if we have tens and tens and tens of millions of people demented, and this is the sinkhole into which the 21st century falls?"

He brightens. "Can we imagine a Viagra for the mind?" Dychtwald sings.

"Human life expectancy was around 20 for a hundred thousand years," the keynote speaker goes on. "Extending the human lifespan is the greatest revolution since we began to walk upright. Two-thirds of all the people in the history of the world who've lived to the age of 65 are alive today."

About half of them seem to be at the Hilton this weekend. The majority of World Futurists at the convention are old white men like me. It occurs to me that the fuel of our deep desire to explore the future is our own mortality. But I am only 55, and in Dychtwald's world, I still am a long way from my prime.

"Is it possible that your greatest dreams will come when you are 90?" Dychtwald asks. "Is it possible that the love of your life will come when you thought love was over?"

Others will tell me, as the convention goes on, that neither love nor life need ever end at all. Chicago is where I meet the Transhumanists and their plans for eternal life as a silicon chip. It also is where I first encounter Jeanine Recckio ("The shower knows you ate that illegal cheesecake") and John Smart ("We'll be the computers' favourite plants") and Raj Bawa ("How about a bedside-tabletop DNA reader?").

The futurists' congress breaks up into three days of seminars and panel discussions and lectures by consultants, academics and management gurus: the Future of Brain Enhancement Technology; the Future of Peace; Emerging Trends in Crime and Terrorism; the Coming Conflict Between Religion and Cognitive Science; Why Everyone Should Care About Nanotechnology; the Future of Futures Studies.

In one lecture, a super-sharp New Yorker named Edie Weiner rattles off so many revolutions that my carbon-based brain barely can keep up: "A pill for shyness. Full sexual pleasure with no outside stimulation. Digitize feelings and artificially stimulate the brain to feel them. Internet suicide. Smart skin."

She keeps reloading and firing: "Avatars for sale. Quantum dust. Femto-seconds. Military exoskeletons. An alarm clock that reads your brainwaves. Careers without hierarchy or geography. Virtual work. Virtual society. Virtual play."

At a rare break in the hailstorm of information and speculation, I sit in the hotel lounge with Peter Bishop and we stare out at the vacationing crowds and the addled beggars who compete for the Michigan Avenue sidewalk. Peter Bishop runs the futures studies program at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, the only place in North America where you can earn a degree today in guessing about tomorrow. "The biggest challenge," he says, "is that the future is not so determined. There is always the matter of choice."

It is refreshing to hear a professional futurist admit that the future is largely unknowable.

"Let me tell you what you won't see," Bishop says. "A world that looks different. All the changes are going on inside of things. The past future was all about 'stuff that does stuff" -- jet planes, skyscrapers, streamlined transportation and technology. Today, it's about the way we can customize our informational space, and how I can customize my personal space."

Bishop acknowledges that he and his fellow futurists failed to forecast a few minor developments entirely: AIDS; the fall of the Soviet Empire; Sept. 11, 2001. He expects that these will not be the last surprises. "Here's a wild card for you," he says. "When networks reach a critical mass, might there be enough communication around the world that the world suddenly wakes up? Just like the atom doesn't know it is part of a cell, will we know when the world becomes one brain?"

I ask him what he thinks of the Trans-humanists and their plans to never die.

"We'll become prisoners of our own immortality," Bishop says. "We won't go outside, we won't get on a plane. Why ruin a 110-year-old life?"

We round up the usual suspects: The Singularity, human cloning, nano-robots, computer chips implanted in our brains. He warns me against putting too much faith in the keynote speakers he labels "pop futurists."

"My definition of a pop futurist," Bishop says, "is anyone who makes more money than I do."