A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (16 page)

Emission of carbon gas and other polluting gases will not be easily reduced. The countries of the North will find it hard to modify their way of living, while those of the South will long reject all kinds of restrictions, arguing that they would merely be safeguarding the wealth and comfort of the North. Brazil will continue to burn the Amazonian forest for so long as the industrialized countries do not substantially reduce their own carbon gas emissions. The only international agreement on this issue, signed at Kyoto in 1999, will have practically no effect on these developments. Change will not be felt until the day the countries of the North perceive
the extreme seriousness of the consequences, and when those of the South understand that investment from the North will be substantially reduced if they do not make the effort to reduce their energy consumption. This will begin, as we shall see in the following chapter, with a very decisive action by the market, under pressure from the insurance companies and from public opinion.

Drought will have another consequence — making drinking water ever scarcer. Here the facts are overwhelming: half of the world’s rivers are already at risk of becoming seriously contaminated by industrial, agricultural, and urban pollution. The human race has already consumed 80 percent of its natural freshwater resources. There remain only eight thousand cubic meters of drinkable water per person per year, against nine thousand in 1990 and fifteen thousand in 1900. More than 2.5 billion people have difficulty gaining access to drinking water, and 3.5 billion to safe water. More than 200 million people annually contract cholera after drinking contaminated water. Polluted water kills twenty-two thousand people a day. It brings in its wake hundreds of diseases. Already very disquieting, this situation can only grow worse: by 2025, half the world’s population will suffer a lack of drinking water, particularly in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Between now and 2040, the amount of drinking water available per inhabitant will again sink by a half, falling to four thousand cubic meters per day. The case of Gaza is a good example: its well water has been so heavily exploited that the phreatic layer has been covered by the sea — itself polluted by the wastewaters released into it — because 40 percent of the inhabitants possess no flush or sewerage
system. Any long-term solution, in Gaza as elsewhere, must begin with a better urban maintenance program, desalinization of seawater, and better management of the available drinking water. In fact, there would be freshwater in amounts sufficient for twenty billion people if we could better handle the quantities absorbed by agriculture and industry, double the seventy billion dollars annually expended on production, distribution, and management of freshwater, begin a large-scale program for desalinizing seawater — three times more available than freshwater — and impose a massive price rise for consumers or taxpayers.

Finally, animal and vegetable diversity seems to be dwindling as a result of the combined forces working to harm it. About sixteen thousand species disappear every year, out of the 1.74 million species already recorded and the fourteen million believed to exist. One-quarter of all mammal species are threatened with extinction; a tenth of the coral reefs (without which no life on land would have been possible) are already condemned beyond repair; another third are menaced with extinction between now and 2035. The manta ray, for example, is on the road to extinction, like four of the seven marine turtle species; the world population of hippopotamuses has shrunk by half in the course of the past five years; 80 percent of certain shark species have disappeared in the last ten years; cod might vanish entirely before the end of the century; bluefin tuna is becoming rare. In all, the number of animal species could fall by 90 percent, as it has done twice in the history of the globe (first 250 million years ago, then sixty million, when the dinosaurs vanished and mammals emerged). The disappearance of
half of all living species before the end of the twenty-first century is not to be discounted. And it is by no means certain that the human species will survive.

As in the past, new technologies could emerge to overcome each of these forms of scarcity. Among other things, they should help to reduce energy consumption, to find better ways of ridding ourselves of wastes, and to rethink cities and transportation.

Two technological advances have so far guaranteed the expansion of the new form, one of them permitting continuous increase in the storage capacity of information through microprocessors, and the other the storage of energy by batteries. By 2030, these two advances will have reached their limits. Moore’s law (doubling microprocessor capacities every eighteen months) will have reached the end of the road, and around the same time the absolute limit of storage capacity for lithium batteries will be attained.

In other fields, linear innovations also seem to be slowing down. The automobile industry is stagnating, as is the home equipment industry. The cell phone and the Internet have made scarcely any progress for fifteen years; genetics is marking time; new drugs have not made their appearance; agriculture has made very little progress; new forms of energy have still to appear. Elsewhere, much false progress is heralded; personal computers are unnecessarily powerful, and cars too complex. In 2006 a laptop was ten times more powerful and ten
times more expensive than those that could satisfy consumer needs today.

To meet our needs in energy, water, food, and clothing products, means of transport and communication, and to eliminate the wastes of a rapidly growing population, we must therefore solve scientific problems today beyond resolution by perfecting industrially effective logistical systems that are financially practicable and socially acceptable.

First of all, major progress should be made in the miniaturization of a great many processes, no longer by packing more and more energy into ever-shrinking spaces but by utilizing the infinitely small, living or not, as a machine. In particular, we must succeed in modifying sowing seasons to make agriculture less thirsty for water, fertilizers, and energy, and organize the storage of gaseous hydrogen in order to manufacture — in economically reasonable conditions — hydrogen under high pressure, and then hybrid motors continually producing hydrogen under high pressure via electrolysis. This is the goal of future technologies, both biotechnologies and nanotechnologies. But their validity, their practicability, their safety, and their political and social acceptability will not really be achieved until 2025 at the earliest.

What is more, to comply with the injunctions of the financial markets, the research laboratories of private enterprises will circulate their results more rarely and will take fewer and fewer risks. More generally, industrial businesses will be increasingly reluctant to take risks and invest in industry, preferring the benefits of financial speculation to those — more hazardous — of technique.

And finally, one scarcity seems very difficult to overcome: time.

Production of commercial articles will take less and less time; and we shall also spend less and less of it cooking, cleaning house, eating. But products placed on the market will themselves be devourers of time. What will first of all increase is time spent on transportation, implicit in the growth rate of the cities. It will become a kind of stolen time, where people will go on eating and working. Moreover, more and more time will be spent in the course of transportation on communicating, gathering information, watching films, playing cards, watching shows. It will likewise be possible, while working, to listen to music or a taped book or to watch a live show. Music will increasingly become the great comforter in the face of sorrow, periods of mourning, solitude, and loss of hope.
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Despite this reduced time, many will realize that they will never have the time to read everything, hear everything, see everything, visit everything, or learn everything. Since available knowledge already doubles every seven years, and by 2030 will double every seventy-two days, the time needed to keep oneself informed, to learn, to become and remain employable will increase accordingly. It will be the same for the time
needed to take care of one’s health and to entertain oneself. Whereas the time needed for sleeping or making love will remain unchanged.

To skirt this obstacle, which eats into consumption, the mercantile order first encourages storage of time-devouring objects — books, disks, films — in material fashion, then (today) in virtual form: unlimited stacks, illusory, no longer possessing any relation to the possibility of being used. As though this stacking served to give everyone the illusion that he will not die before reading all these books, hearing all these melodies, and living all this stored time. In vain. Besides, future works of art will center more and more around this now obsessive theme of time.

By now it will have become clear that time is in fact the only true scarcity: no one can manufacture it; no one can sell the time available to him; no one knows how to accumulate it.

There will of course be attempts to produce a little time by prolonging the human life span. The target will be an average 120 years, for a work week of twenty-five hours.

To go ahead a little further, it will be necessary to overthrow barriers (by definition immovable) by reducing the time spent fulfilling functions inherent in every life: being born, sleeping, learning, taking care of one’s health, loving, deciding. For example, we must be able to bring a child to birth in less than nine months, teach him to walk in less than a year, and speak a language in less than three thousand hours.

Some will then find that freedom itself — human-ity’s major target since the beginnings of the mercantile
order — is in fact only the illusory manifestation of a caprice within time’s prison.

Now the great crisis of this form is at hand. In fact, it is already well under way.This first financial crisis of the age of globalization can largely be explained by the inability of American society to provide decent salaries to its middle class; this is what forced them to go into debt to purchase their homes, which caused an artificial increase in the value of capital and the economy. The financial institutions and the "initiated" who lead them had set aside the principal wealth generated therein for themselves without running the least bit of risk, thanks to securitization (collateralized debt obligation) and insurance (credit default swap). This led to an increase in debt which soon enough became intolerable and created panic, bankruptcy, and a lack of trust. The situation at hand could very well lead to a global depression or, on the contrary, constitute the beginnings of tremendous harmonized growth. But growth assumes the systematic reduction of debts and not, as has been seen in the past, its transfer solely to taxpayers. This requires above all the re-enabling on a worldwide scale of the power of the markets by that of democracy. And first the re-empowerment of the financial markets by that of law; the empowerment of the initiated by that of the citizens.

From now until 2030, the ninth form, like all of its predecessors, will deal with the worldwide problems outlined above, as well as the challenges specific to any
core, which will become increasingly expensive. But they will lead inevitably to the decline of the ninth form.

First of all, the economic crisis that surfaced in 2007 with the subprime and so-called toxic mortgages will result in the virtual liquidation of investment banks worldwide, to the disappearance of many hedge funds, and a widening problem for credit card companies. All of this will result in a massive rethinking, starting in 2009, of governments’ role in finance and banking, of a substantial increase in taxes both corporate and personal, and the implementation of some sort of close international regulation of global financial systems, with Wall Street no longer the principal player. At the same time, while other currencies will challenge the dollar as the world’s major reserve, the American currency will continue to dominate for decades to come.

Several other results will come of this phenomenon. The income of Americans, which has stagnated if not actually declined in recent years, will erode further, mainly because of two factors: first, the increasing competition of foreign workers, and second, the outsourcing of jobs. What is more, the combination of all the above, plus the realization of how great the difference is between the earning power of the average American and that of the wealthy — the top 1 percent — will raise the disturbing question: is the American dream still attainable?

The disaster in 2005 of Hurricane Katrina, and the revelation in the following years of the fragility of the country’s public service — 30 percent of American bridges, it was found, are in need of serious repair — raised the question of whether the country is any longer capable of coping with its own internal problems.

Furthermore, over the past two or three decades, an ever greater portion of Americans’ incomes will of necessity have to go toward paying for energy, water, education, security, retirement, and protection of the environment.

All this said, of the deep recession that I predicted would surface near the end of the first decade of the present century, the American economy, which has always been resilient, will rebound, led by the realms of insurance, health, technology, energy, and infrastructure. Since we have predicted that over the next several decades the cities of the world will double and triple in size, more and more of Americans’ money will have to be spent on urban schools, hospitals, road repair — in fact all kinds of local needs the federal government cannot, or will not, pay for. As early as 2011, the United States will be a much changed society, a technological state democratic and international, but still the leader of the world. Where does this leave the ninth core twenty years from now?

My prediction is that at least until 2030 it will succeed in keeping its agriculture going, protecting its cutting-edge industries, perfecting new technologies, increasing the productivity of its services, modernizing its weapons systems, defending its commercial zones, guaranteeing its access to raw materials, and maintaining its strategic influence. Thus, California will remain the core, and the United States will keep its technological lead through massive public investments aimed at its strategic businesses, particularly in the military field, financed by a budget whose now yawning deficit will remain covered by international borrowing. Washington
will remain on good terms with Europe and with the Eleven, so that these groupings will go on underwriting its borrowings and sharing the costs of its defense. In particular, the United States will do nothing to demand a massive reevaluation of the currency of these countries (and most especially the Chinese currency), which would nevertheless greatly facilitate the maintenance of jobs on American soil. Some of the Eleven and the Europeans will accept this alliance, which will allow them to maintain their growth without having to devote excessive sums to their own defense.