Prospect
Downhill all the way: futurology from PWC
With the Copenhagen conference looming, one question looks more urgent than ever: how can people in wealthy countries be made to understand the consequences of their lifestyles? Happily for eco-warriors, a solution has arrived from the most unlikely of sources: PricewaterhouseCoopers. The firm’s latest report on “the future of work” contains a hard-hitting piece of futurology. It’s 2020 when the real trouble starts: the year when “global warming changes the climate of Europe; as the snow on the Alps melts, skiers head to the US.” If that vision of escalating winter sports airfares doesn’t get the PWC partners swapping their Porsches for bicycles, nothing will.
This piece was first published in Prospect magazine on 21st November 2009.
Tom Chatfield
Discuss this article on First Drafts, Prospect ’s blog
Mogwai is cutting down the time he spends playing World of Warcraft. Twenty hours a week or less now, compared to a peak of over 70. It’s not that he has lost interest—just that he’s no longer working his way up the greasy pole. He’s got to the top. He heads his own guild, has 20,000 gold pieces in the bank and wields the Twin Blades of Azzinoth; weapons so powerful and difficult to acquire that other players often (virtually) follow Mogwai around just to look at them. In his own words, he’s “e-famous.” He was recently offered $8,000 for his Warcraft account, a sum he only briefly considered accepting. Given that he has clocked up over 4,500 hours of play, the prospective buyers were hardly making it worth his while. Plus, more sentimentally, he feels his character is not his alone to sell: “The strange thing about this character is that he doesn’t just belong to me. Every item he has he got through the hard work of 20 or more other people. Selling him would be a slap in their faces.” As in many modern online games, co-operation is the only way to progress, with the most challenging encounters manageable only with the collaboration of other experienced players. Hence the need for leaders, guilds—in-game collectives, sometimes containing hundreds of players—and online friendships measured in years. “When I started, I didn’t care about the other people. Now they are the only reason I continue.”
When Mogwai isn’t online, he’s called Adam Brouwer, and works as a civil servant for the British government modelling crisis scenarios of hypothetical veterinary disease outbreaks. I point out to him a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, billed under the line “The best sign that someone’s qualified to run an internet startup may not be an MBA degree, but level 70 guild leader status.” Is there anything to this? “Absolutely,” he says, “but if you tried to argue that within the traditional business market you would get laughed out of the interview.” How, then, does he explain his willingness to invest so much in something that has little value for his career? He disputes this claim. “In Warcraft I’ve developed confidence; a lack of fear about entering difficult situations; I’ve enhanced my presentation skills and debating. Then there are more subtle things: judging people’s intentions from conversations, learning to tell people what they want to hear. I am certainly more manipulative, more Machiavellian. I love being in charge of a group of people, leading them to succeed in a task.”
Read more »
Michio Kaku
When I was a child, I was mesmerised by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books, which depicted the rise and fall of a galactic empire. They were set far in the future, when humanity has forgotten the planet it came from. Reading the novels, I wondered what technology might be like millennia from now. When people say something is “impossible,” what they usually mean is that it is impossible with the technology of today or of the near future.
Now that I am a professor of theoretical physics, I realise that many “impossibilities” may actually become possible in the future; there is no law of physics preventing most of them from becoming a reality. All but a handful are just very difficult engineering problems. So I decided to rank these “impossibilities” into three categories:
Class I impossibilities do not violate any known law of physics, and may be possible within a few decades to a century. These include invisibility, teleportation, ray guns, anti-matter engines, telepathy, force fields, psychokinesis and star ships.
Read more »
Tom Nuttall
The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
(Allen Lane, £20)
The Political Punter: How to make money betting on politics, by Mike Smithson
(Harriman House, £12.99)
The black swan was the example used by John Stuart Mill to illustrate the problem of induction in the philosophy of science, which states that no amount of empirical evidence for a proposition can ever prove conclusively that it is true.
For hundreds of years, zoologists assumed that all swans were white, because they had never seen any evidence to the contrary. But then with the discovery of Australia came the sighting of a black swan. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book of the same name, has a more specific definition—for him, a “black swan” is an event that meets three conditions: a) it was unpredictable b) it had a big impact and c) after the event, we tried to explain it and make it appear more predictable than it actually was. The rise of Google is one example; 9/11 is another.
Taleb believes the modern world increasingly resembles a fantasy realm he calls “Extremistan,” where inequality, unexpectedness and improbability rule, and where black swans happen. Extremistan is home to “winner-takes-all” activities—from publishing and academic citations to modern warfare and income. But most statisticians and economists believe that the world is more like “Mediocristan”—an orderly and predictable place where most events follow a bell curve-like distribution on a graph. Taleb’s mission is to demonstrate that many of the models we use to understand the world are based on the mistaken assumption that we live in Mediocristan rather than Extremistan. Corporations produce grand strategies for future growth, forgetting that their most profitable activity arose from a chance phone call made a year earlier. Financial analysts build sophisticated models of risk to reassure clients that their investments will be safe; within six months a global financial crisis wipes the firm out.
Read more »
Charles Grant
Given how much respect most Europeans feel for the EU today in March 2027, one can easily forget that when it celebrated its 50th birthday, in 2007, it was widely mistrusted. When given the chance to vote on the EU in referendums, people usually gave it the thumbs down. The EU passed through its darkest moments at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.
Britain and France caused many of the problems. The British, under successive governments led by Gordon Brown and David Cameron, blocked significant changes to the EU treaties, even where there was a clear need for institutional reform. Britain thus marginalised itself from mainstream European debates, but the others moved on, setting up avant-garde groups without the British. France also proved destructive, blocking freer trade, deregulation, enlargement and farm policy reform.
But around 2010, the EU’s fortunes started to revive, for four reasons. The first of these was economic. The root of the earlier malaise had been the high unemployment and slow growth in many countries that made people fearful of change—whether market liberalisation, more open trade, EU enlargement or new treaties. But the Italian crisis of 2009 proved a turning point. After the collapse of the centre-left government led to political chaos, financial markets started to fear that Italy was incapable of structural economic reform. With its exports decreasingly competitive, Italy’s current account deficit and foreign debt soared. Foreign investors insisted on a hefty premium before lending to Italy. Leaders on the nationalist right and the hard left called for the country to quit the euro, devalue and repudiate foreign debt. With that outcome looking likely, financial markets started to view Greece, Spain and Portugal—which had also lost much competitiveness—as potential quitters of the euro.
Read more »
Victor Keegan
I am sitting on my patio without a care in the world, contemplating the water as it falls softly down the rocks before splashing into a swirling pool beneath, watched over by gently swaying palm trees. It is an idyllic scene, and it is a shame that not everyone can enjoy it.
Well, actually, they can. This is not the real world, but a three-dimensional simulation created by millions of “residents” in Second Life, the phenomenon that may be taking the internet in a whole new direction. Some say it will be a nine-month wonder, others that it will gradually take over much of the time we spend watching television and eventually become a major economy in its own right, generating jobs and income for millions.
How does it work?
Second Life (SL) is not a game: it is what it says it is on the label—a second life, running parallel to, and overlapping with, your “first” life. To envisage it, imagine you are watching a film on television—only instead of actors walking around, there is a three-dimensional representation of you (an “avatar,” who may or may not bear a physical resemblance to you), whose movements you control using your computer keyboard. As you walk—or fly—around, you can go shopping, listen to music, attend political meetings, take university classes, start a business or visit a strip joint. You can start building houses or objects on your own, by manipulating basic building blocks (cubes, spheres and so on) in various ways. Most importantly, you can talk, hang out, flirt or fight with your fellow inhabitants. (In some respects, SL resembles a more interactive version of The Sims, the bestselling computer game in history.)
Read more »
prospect
Disappointed by our contributors’ responses? Write in with your own answer to the question—the best will be published on our website
The answers are spread across four pages. Use the links below to navigate.
This is Page 1 (A-D)
Read more »
prospect
Disappointed by our contributors’ responses? Write in with your own answer to the question—the best will be published on our website
100 Prospect contributors answered our invitation to respond to the question above.
The answers are spread across four pages. Use the links below to navigate.
Read more »
prospect
Disappointed by our contributors’ responses? Write in with your own answer to the question—the best will be published on our website.
100 Prospect contributors answered our invitation to respond to the question above.
The answers are spread across four pages. Use the links below to navigate.
Read more »
Post a comment »
