The Next 20 Years conference New York, July 1999 Since the one thing we know is that we cannot predict the future, the most interesting thing about the next 20 years is how we will resolve some of the contradictions that technological process hath wrought in our culture, and how they will play out in the international arena. E-commerce and the Internet are driving a lot of these changes, obviously, but not all of them. Scientific progress, which has also been accellerated by technology, is creating changes that are easily as radical but not as fascinating to most people as the Internet IPO stuff is today. So the place I want to start from is an observation, which is that overall, as a culture -- and increasingly, as a global culture -- we humans tend to pay attention to things that can be monetized. Journalism already stung 1. Medical science For example, advances in medical and longevity science will define the next 20 years of technological progress. Tons of money will be spent on biotechnology, the Human Genome Project is already starting to yield really exciting discoveries, and so on. But here's the contradiction that we will need to resolve. Huge aging population. Will only rich people get to live longer? If ability to pay is not the determining factor, how will we decide who gets to partake in the new medical treatments? And just as troubling, what will be the point of living longer if old people continue to be as dishonored and disrespected as they are in today's youth culture? The second set of contradictions has to do with the enormous amount of money that's gone into the development of the Internet as a medium for commerce, but as the trends we're seeing today play out, things get interesting. We know the Internet hammers margins -- on goods, particularly, but also for services. We also know that being an entrepreneur on the net is a very different proposition than being a software entrepreneur, for example, 10 years ago. 10 years ago, you had no exit strategy, you were going to build a long-lasting business. Now net entrepreneurs are building companies to be acquired or to go public, to be acquired later. And the Internet in the United States is thriving as a largely unregulated medium -- no taxes, no requirements to carry traffic like the telephone companies had, no reliability or security requirements, and few global regulations except for copyright. So it seems likely in the next 20 years that some big action will happen in a few areas. One, there will almost certainly be some kind of global trade laws that will be a bit less wild-west than the situation is today. Two, the margin crunch and the exit strategy trend is likely to mean that our perception of the Internet as a place for opportunity is likely to be more like Blade Runner than It's a Beautiful Life. 3. With this in mind, I suspect that over the next 20 years, people are going to start to reach their level of tolerance in a number of areas. The great discrepancies in the distribution of wealth will become a problem in health care and education. One, we are going to have to fix this, or in 20 years we will be in our dotage we will be living in "A Clockwork Orange." Population growth, which is now starting to really show up in places like Tucson, where you can actually watch the desert getting covered with houses, in addition to the global warming it's creating, is likely to spur growth in areas like ecotechnology and recycling and green building. In fact, the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling has started a green design movement he calls Viridian. He says no one will do anything about the environment until we make it pretty -- and he's only partly tongue in cheek. 4. I hate to leave the most depressing for last, but it is pretty clear to me that the most alarming trend over the next 20 years is how hell-bent the government is on watching our every movement on the global network. John Markoff broke a story in yesterday's Times about a surveillance system that the FBI is trying to put in place, and today I saw in a newsgroup that Janet Reno is trying to encourage other countries not to distribute encryption software that protects people's data and privacy. This gets really scary when you think about the trend toward sensor technology and little devices in your car and in your pocket and probably embedded in your thigh that can tell satellites where you are. So I predict that this will happen and there's nothing we will be able to do about it. And I predict that cranky hackers will have a field day bringing down the net at every opportunity. I also predict there is a big business opportunity, black-market of course, in helping people get off the grid and live without having their movements tracked. Shorter term, no privacy for us means no privacy for them, either -- consumers become more powerful forces in getting ubsiness and governments, hopefully, to disclose more about what they are doing to and with us.