The world of 2088, as imagined by the minds of UW

As Columns looks back over its 90 years, we also look ahead to what the next 90 years might be like for the UW, the U.S. and the world. Using late-20th century technology—e-mail, fax and the even older technology of the telephone—we contacted about 50 faculty and alumni. Many turned us down. (“Too tough,” said one. “I draw a blank,” said another.) Others grabbed at the opportunity to speculate on the world at the end of the 21st century. “I kind of enjoyed it,” one professor told us. “At least no one is going to come up to me on the street in 90 years and say ‘You were wrong!’ ” What follows is not a comprehensive look at the year 2088, but a mosaic of projections, guesses and fables gathered by UW writers and complied by Columns Editor Tom Griffin. This on-line version contains more predictions than the print version due to limits on the number of pages we can print.

Education

Universities Still Belong to Age of Enlightenment

In 90 years, the UW freshman class will still be primarily 18 and 19 year olds. That means universities will still be dealing with people who are a critical developmental stage of life, who are open to learning, experimentation and growth; this will be reflected in the spirit of the university, regardless of any technological changes in the way we teach and learn. The way we parcel out knowledge could be quite different, but the central role of faculty as providers of information, who open doorways to students, will be much the same. Universities of the future will still carry on the traditions of the Enlightenment: that learning per se is valuable, and that it is important for the social good that it brings. The university will continue to be a place of inquiry an important force in the social and economic life of the state, as it is now.

—Dean of Undergraduate Education Fred Campbell and Associate Vice Provost Louis Fox

Please Don’t Call It High School

Restructuring of the formal educational delivery system will take place over the first quarter of the 21 century. Focused on family well-being and beginning with the pre-natal period, the first phase will provide guidance in child-rearing, nutrition, finance and the like through the nursery school years, concluding at age three or four. At this age, children will enter a phase that carries them in multi-age groups through what had been called kindergarten and the first two grades of school. Twenty children will be with the same teachers for four years—a team of interns, career teachers and specialists in the teaching of reading and mathematics, who also teach university courses in these fields to future teachers, thanks to school-university partnerships.

The next two phases—four years each—bring students to the end of their elementary and secondary school years at the age of 16. By beginning earlier, smoothing out the transitions from nursery schools to kindergarten to more formal schooling, ensuring a full and comprehensive curriculum in the major domains of knowledge, connecting to the array of information networks, and leaving teachers more time for individual tutoring, most students will graduate at 16 with an education comparable to 18-year-olds of an earlier era.

They then will go on to a four-year phase (conducted under what had once been community colleges) that combine community service, career education, training in a variety of hands-on technical skills, and approximately two years of general education. This is where schooling will end for most young people—at an average age of 20 and with a college degree.

—Education Professor Emeritus John Goodlad

Academia and Private Industry Will Become Much Closer

For one, the community will have a different perspective on us. Right now, they see us mostly as teachers, but the community will begin to see us more as an engine for technological advancement. The business world is looking at us earlier and earlier and they are increasingly willing to take risks on early research. We’re going to see a lot more researchers becoming entrepreneurs. Academia and private industry will never become the same, but we will be working much closer together.

— Director of Industry Relations John DesRosier, UW School of Medicine

Trading a Book for a Personal Display Device

The world of libraries and information 90 years hence will be more of what we have now—more libraries and more information—with highly sophisticated tools to organize and retrieve information. Libraries still will exist and will be more numerous but perhaps smaller. They will serve as community and university intellectual centers with instruction and assistance in information retrieval, advisory and reference services, and will contain collections of unique, original. physical objects—such as books and manuscripts—and digital archives to preserve and authenticate information objects. Each person will have a computerized information agent to scan the global databases for information relevant to his/her interests. Highly selected information may be downloaded directly to the brain through neurolinks. Books will have been replaced by the latest work downloaded from the network to your hand-held personal display device which will feature very high resolution display and be even more readable than a book. It will be possible to curl up with your digital book for a cozy read on a rainy day, latte in hand!

—UW Libraries Director Betty Bengtson

Environment

Volcanoes, Earthquakes Shatter the Northwest

At least two Cascade volcanoes will erupt, with at least one of them producing significant destruction in its vicinity with significant economic impact. Because of improved monitoring and understanding of volcanic processes and a pro-active emergency management community, loss of life will be minimal. On the other hand, land-use planning efforts will have mostly failed and there will be very large losses of homes and businesses due to the pressure of development to expand into dangerous areas.

During the same period, there will be three damaging earthquakes, one of which will be quite significant, causing many deaths and widespread destruction. Because earthquake prediction science will have made some progress, the later of these earthquakes will have some warning ahead of time. Earthquake prediction capabilities will still lag significantly behind the equivalent capabilities of weather prediction.

An earthquake warning system will be built and connected to critical facilities, such that as soon as an earthquake starts, warnings will be sent out allowing anywhere from a few seconds to more than a minute to prepare for the arrival of strong shaking. This system will work well in the expected earthquakes for systems which can respond quickly (power plants, high-speed trains, other mechanical systems), but there will continue to be a problem with educating the public to respond quickly and properly to such warnings because they only occur every few decades.

—Geophysics Research Professor Steve Malone

Humans: The Most Serious Threat to Life on Earth

Two trends make the future less rosy than the past: more consumption of resources and more people. … The question is whether people, societies, and government can move toward sustainability. This will require adopting two principles. The first is the “responsibility principle” which is that the rights to use environmental resources carry attendant responsibilities to use them sustainably. The second, the “precautionary principle” states that in the face of uncertainty concerning environmental resources and impacts—err on the side of caution.

Knowing the principles is the first step, but implementing them through education is what must be done. Education can modify our biological behaviors and control greed but the question is whether social evolution can move the human race to live within biological as well as social limits. For example, parenting is still the only job that does not require any qualifications or any test of ability or means. How un-thinking can we be? We need to evolve socially so that all children are wanted and all parents are adequate providers and educators. Without social evolution, disease, war, and famine will continue to control human destiny in much of the world. My hope is that social evolution may have progressed enough in the next 90 years that humans do not breed too much, use too much, degrade earth’s life support system or kill other species.

—Zoology Professor P. Dee Boersma

Not Enough Fish to Go Around

In 90 years, the non-Indian commercial salmon fisheries in Washington and Oregon will be gone. The political power of recreational fishers and the treaty rights of the Indians spell the inevitable end of the traditional commercial salmon industry. Recreational salmon fishers will be fishing almost exclusively hook-and-release—there simply won’t be enough fish to go around. The tribal fisheries will have abandoned gill netting and replaced it by much more selective fishing methods such as lift nets, fish wheels or modified purse-seining. Most of the hatcheries around the state will be abandoned, victims of their economic inefficiency, continued budget cuts, and concern about wild fish.

The commercial marine fisheries will be almost unrecognizable. In order to obtain the approval of powerful Alaskan politicians, much of the ownership of the right to catch fish will be granted to coastal communities, who will, in turn, lease their catching rights to large corporations. The owner-operator will be almost extinct as a fishing institution, replaced by vessels owned by large companies. The traditional, small-scale fishers will survive primarily in the invertebrate fisheries such as clams and abalone.

Biologically stocks will continue to rise and fall with environmental conditions, but the marine fisheries will generally be healthy, with numerous small and a few large marine reserves set aside as parks and spawning refuges. Despite considerable political effort, the habitat base for salmon will continue to decline as the growing human population competes with fish for water, stream frontage and land use. Efforts to save habitat will be reasonably successful in forest watersheds, where changes in forest practice will improve conditions for salmon, but in suburban and urban areas these attempts will be much less successful.

—Fisheries Professor Ray Hilborn

Genetic Research Results in ‘Designer’ Trees

Three dedicated categories of forest land will emerge:

1) Lands reserved primarily for the intensive production of wood products; forest farming if you will. 2) Lands that will provide both forest products and environmental and amenity benefits in some combination. 3) Lands that are reserved and managed only for their environmental and amenity benefits.

Whatever the ultimate balance in these categories of forest lands, the following will occur:

1) Fast growth, short rotation, disease- and insect-resistant forests with desired wood properties will be developed through molecular genetics research. The environmental community will have reservations and appropriate worries about these “designer” trees and forests, but the perceived benefits will be judged to outweigh the risks.

2) We will build housing of equal or greater strength than now but with less wood and wood of lower quality. For example, new products will be available that combine wood with other materials such as plastics. The recycling and reuse ethic will be commonplace with an almost instinctive acceptance.

3) Advanced technology and research will also help forest stewards manage and protect environmental and amenity values of forests in a more informed and effective way. The dynamics of all biota will be better understood including, for example, soil insects and arthropods, migratory birds, the needs of anadromous fish and threatened plants even of the most insignificant stature. All will be much easier to monitor and provide for.

—Forest Resources Dean David Thorud

Forestry: Increased Demand Met with Increased Productivity

Progress in the field of forestry over the next 90 years will be dominated by two themes; an increasing reliance on renewable resources by a growing world population and an unlimited, universal access to information. Advances in molecular biology will vastly expand our capability to “grow” fiber and forests, increasing productivity within a shrinking resource base allocated to production for human consumption. Plant life in general and the animals that depend upon them will flourish as global warming increased over the next 90 years, augmenting the man-made increases in productivity.

The simultaneous growing demand and responding productivity will allow a multitude of choices to be made by societies and communities around the world. Universal access to information and a diverse, democratic opinion-sharing capability will create access to forest management policies at global and community scales. Communities of interests and communities of place will interact to create an infinite variety of policies, reflecting diverse values regarding forest management. This may manifest itself in a variety of forms. There will be the capability to globally centralize forest policy with human use of forests controlled by a mega-policy network, literally defining the relationship between mankind and our forest environment. Alternately, decentralization of forest use decisions might allow people’s relationship with forest to be individual in nature. Perhaps a combination of the two models will evolve.

Progress in the field of forestry over the next 90 years will be more social, political and cultural than technical. Increasing human demand for renewable resources will be met by increasing productivity and availability.

—Olympic Natural Resources Center Director John M. Calhoun.

Health

Charting New Plagues Like Predicting the Weather

The emergence of new infectious agents is closely related to human activities such as travel, trade, antibiotic usage and ecological degradation. The human-related factors of emergence will increase over the next 90 years. Human population growth on the planet will exacerbate epidemic activity. The breadth of transmission will continue to increase. The food and water supply of the world will become increasingly precious.

Indeed, while more than a billion inhabitants now live without adequate clean water, and more than two billion without adequate sanitation, these numbers will increase. Food production will become more and more centralized as we struggle to feed our population, and this will make the food supply increasingly vulnerable to contamination.

On the positive side new technology now allows us to characterize infectious agents more rapidly, and to produce effective vaccines more quickly. These two capacities will become central to our ability to control human infection. In addition, our ability to accurately map the planet and its ecosystem should allow us to develop and test predictions of disease occurrence much as we now do the weather.

—Public Health and Community Medicine Professor Ann Kimball

We Will Cure Cancer, Strokes, Diabetes and Alzheimer’s Disease

The next 90 years will witness dramatic changes as medical science solves the mystery of common chronic diseases like cancer, atherosclerosis causing heart disease and stroke, diabetes, and age-related dementias like Alzheimer’s disease. Our understanding of the brain will be dramatically different in terms of detail and complexity. Persons will have the potential to live out their life span (which will exceed 90 years) and to delay onset of disability. Medical care will be more self-directed as information is more accessible, of higher quality, and user friendly.

Care will not be as invasive and minimalist techniques will overtake traditional surgery. The institutions we now associate with health care (hospitals, the doctors office) will predictably be surpassed by facilities driven by technology changes. The major threats to health will come from geopolitical, economic forces and from individual behaviors.

Ninety years ago we could not have predicted the health catastrophes of nuclear holocaust, the global AIDS epidemic, or environmental contamination. “New” diseases will emerge. We can, thus, predict that medical science will continue to be reactive to social forces and that social forces will continue to be major determinants of health and disease.”

—UW Medical Center Medical Director Eric Larson

Predictions on Weight Loss and Diet

During the next hundred years, the area of weight control will undergo several metamorphoses. Initially, drugs will become available which control appetite and help people lose weight. Other drugs will enable those who wish to eat whatever their hearts desire without the fear of gaining unwanted weight. (Of course, given the continuing rise in the world population and the increased depletion of resources, it is not clear that the food to accomplish that will be available). In the next phase, the precise genetic make-up of newly conceived fetuses will be determinable and the risks for excessive obesity (and/or leanness) and its associated health problems will also be known such that early interventions (probably dietary) will be used to achieve whatever the “ideal” body size of any particular era might be.”

—Psychology Professor Steve Woods

The Six Million Dollar Man Is a Bargain

At present, millions of medical devices are implanted in humans each year. At present, millions of medical devices are implanted in humans each year. These include pacemakers, blood vessel replacements, hip joints, eye lens implants, drainage tubes, heart valves and cochlear implants. The devices save lives and improve the quality of life. But they never work as well as the original part being replaced. Basically, the body views most of the materials we now use as “foreign objects” and simply walls them off. Thus, we get aberrant healing and poor mechanical and electrical communication between the implant and the body. The path to the future of medical implants demands that the body recognize these devices as “natural” and heal them in a facile manner.

Science fiction writers have had no problem imagining where biomaterials should go. The Tin Man of The Wizard of Oz, The Six Million Dollar Man, RoboCop and StarTrek’s Borg have all been seamless integrations between metals, plastics, electronics and living flesh. Evidence suggests this seamless integration can really be achieved.

Envision prosthetic limbs that heal into the skin for a bacterial seal, the bone for mechanical support and the nerves for control. An artificial heart that functions about as well as a healthy natural heart would—extending hundreds of thousands of lives. A robust artificial pancreas could improve the quality of life for millions, as could an electronics-electrode array artificial eye for the vision impaired. Finally, can “dip-stick” diagnostic devices be built that offer early home detection of cancers and other life-threatening conditions? The potential now exists to engineer synthetic surfaces so that they control biological reactions with precision. Thus, we can imagine creating a new generation of biomaterials that might revolutionize health care and diagnostics.

—UW Engineered Biomaterials Director Buddy D. Ratner

Bloodless, Sterile, Painless Surgery

It will be commonplace for citizens of the late 21st century to visit their physician who will send them to a room in which a whole body ultrasound scan will be made of the entire human body. This scan will the be compared to the patient’s previous scan, as well as to that of a database of healthy individuals, and a computer with pattern recognition capabilities will detect any anomalies. The computer will recognize the development, for example, of a pre-cancerous region and recommend the application of therapy.

The patient will return to the whole body scan room, where a second, more accurate scan will be made of the region of interest, and the once the pre-cancerous region is targeted, a short burst of high intensity, focused ultrasound will be used to kill that tissue. This use of therapeutic ultrasound will be administered in a minimally invasive manner, with remarkable accuracy and specificity, and will result in bloodless, sterile and painless surgery.

—Applied Physics Laboratory Physicist Larry Crum.

Look Ma, No Cavities Ever as Dentists Throw Away Their Drills

A remarkable improvement has occurred in dental health during the past several decades with dramatic increases in retention of teeth. Indeed, the majority of our grandparents had lost all of their teeth and were wearing full dentures before the age of 50. Our parents had some tooth loss, were functioning with combinations of fixed and removable restorations, and were fighting a slowly progressive battle with generalized periodontal disease. In contrast, the majority of our children are essentially caries-free and can expect to retain their dentition for a lifetime. There is every reason to expect that such advances will continue at an even greater pace during the decades of the 21st century. Most people will retain all of their teeth for a lifetime and be protected from oral disease by vaccines and by new preventive approaches derived from knowledge of the human genome. For those few teeth that are damaged or lost, unique biological materials will substitute for tooth structure without the need for drilling and entire replacements for the teeth will be grown in the jaw.

—Dentistry Dean Paul Robertson

Looking Inside the Brain

As technology revolutionized genetic research and resulted in the Human Genome Project, new technology will revolutionize neuroscience. We will be able to provide access to information on billion of neurons in the brain. We’ve seen this already with the patch-clamp, a device used to literally listen to the electrical signals of single ion channels, developed only in 1980. By the end of a generation, we’ll have reached a point we can’t even envision.

—Physiology and Biophysics Professor Bertil Hille

Killing Brain Tumors with Antibodies

I am certain that the imaging technology of today will be fused with interventional procedures, making surgery much less invasive. I predict that open craniotomy for ruptured blood vessels will be history, as better intravascular techniques develop. Already, the use of small coils introduced through the vasculature and placed into aneurysms are making a substantial contribution in this regard. Furthermore, magnetic resonance scanning will be incorporated with laser and focused ultrasound to obliterate brain tumors. Of course, I’d anticipate that immunotherapy for malignant brain tumors becomes the primary treatment modality, and only a biopsy of the tumor tissue would be needed to classify it, and raise the requisite antibodies that would be specific to it.

—Neurological Surgery Professor Sean Grady

Childhood Addictions Will Grow

Addictions among children to food, drugs and alcohol will continue to rise. Currently, our children are more obese than ever. This can be attributed to the availability of food and apathy toward physical activity. Children will spend more time interacting with computers, and less time being active. We will have a better understanding of addiction at the molecular level, but the solution will never be a quick fix.

—Pediatrics Professor Tom Pendergrass

We Must Rethink Many Conventional Beliefs

The field of bioethics, which has surged ahead during the last 30 years, as new technologies and new forms of health care have challenged the long tradition of medical ethics, faces several major issues as we enter the next millennium.

Ironically, these coming problems remind us of the problems that medicine faced some 150 years ago. A new science was revolutionizing medicine: germ theory and all that it implies about the prevention of infectious disease and the understanding of the immune system was challenging a millennium of medical science. Similarly, molecular biology, or “gene theory” is challenging the science that medicine has lived with for this last century and with the new molecular medicine brings particular ethical questions. We will know more about the health future and fate of individuals than ever before. We will know more about the health history and expectations of families. Questions of confidentiality and about advice and education will force us to rethink many conventional beliefs.

— Medical History and Ethics Chair Al Jonsen

Health Services Won’t Exist as We Know It

“Looking back to the future” is sometimes helpful. Allegedly in a meeting of the Chicago City Council at the turn of last century, there was much private excitement about investing in horses as the wave of the future, but deep public concern about how the city would ever pay the increasing bills to keep the streets clean. That was before cars, airplanes, computers, a freezer in the kitchen and a satellite dish in the backyard. Back then, health care meant nurses in people’s homes, except those who went to the hospital—as a last refuge.

Ninety years from now? We can’t possibly comprehend that world. Today’s mega-trends tell us the world as we know it won’t last that long, simply because the earth can’t support the predicted population. Even short of that dire prediction, i.e., if wars or other disasters keep the global population within sustainable limits, I do not believe any of the health sciences will exist as we now know them. Given the pressures of over-population and the possibilities of technology, I think the major focus of health care will be managing information, both on earth and in other parts of the universe. Systems will be much more controlling, and our descendants will recall with curiosity that Americans once were so devoted to privacy and individualism. They also will recall that once even smart people separated mind, body and spirit and thought of medicine as prescriptions at the pharmacy and cutting bodies open. Ghastly primitive!

—Nursing Dean Emeritus Sue Hegyvary

Rates of Discovery, Demographics Transform Medicine

Approximately 90 years ago, the Flexner Report ushered in an era of modern medical education. Since that time, changes in medicine and medical education have reflected the changing role of medicine in society and advances in biomedical science. We are currently in an era of extremely rapid change in medicine, and I expect that three factors should have a profound impact on the way medicine and medical education evolves over the next 90 years.

The Stunning Rate of Scientific Discovery. The body of medical information required by a physician for day-to-day practice is currently estimated to turn over every five years. Furthermore, this stunning turnover rate is expected to shorten further. Medical education programs must prepare tomorrow’s physicians with learning skills to engage in lifelong learning and to incorporate advances in information technology into the daily practice of medicine.
The Changing Demographics of Our Region and Country. By the mid-21st century, major demographic shifts are expected. The physician workforce must reflect the changing demographics, and all physicians should be sensitive to the cultural differences in how people approach health and health care. Academic medicine must work to ensure that medical education is fully accessible to individuals from all backgrounds.
The Requirement to Constrain Health Care Spending. The population of individuals over age 65 is expected to double by the year 2030, and the population over age 85 is the fastest growing segment. This has very serious health care cost implications for our country which is already spending more than any other in the world on health care. The improved health status of the elderly and advances in biomedical science should be helpful, but it is likely that more conservative, outcomes-based practice standards will be needed to constrain health care spending. Academic medicine should play a pivotal role in developing and disseminating these standards, and in conducting the research that will underpin the practice of medicine over the next 90 years

—Medical School Dean/VP for Medical Affairs Paul Ramsey

Drugs Continue as Cornerstone of Medical Therapy

Pharmaceuticals are the cornerstone of medical therapy and their impact increases at a remarkable rate. Thanks to the introduction of protease inhibitors and combination therapy, only two years after researchers publicly despaired of ever finding an effective treatment, infection with HIV leading to AIDS evolved from a virtual death sentence to a treatable disease.

Pharmacists are a unique source of information to other health care professionals as well as to patients. In the future, community pharmacists will maintain individual charts and keep patients informed of relevant new developments that may mitigate her or his disease and improve quality of life. … Because change is so rapid, pharmacy will probably be the first to require post-licensing certification. Provisions of services complimentary to, but not in competition with, other elements of the health care system will be a future role for all pharmacists working in the community. In a career that spans 35 years of close observation of the profession and the industry, I have never felt as enthusiastic by the future prospects of pharmacy and pharmaceuticals as I do today. The future promises much.

—Pharmacy Dean Emeritus Milo Gibaldi

Politics

Divorce American Style: U.S. Splits Up

The 21st century will witness a dissolution of the current United States into a number of new national territories, joined together in a confederation that I call the American Community. Simultaneously, there will be a strengthening of international institutions, such as the United Nations and the IMF. This does not mean that the resulting American Community will consist of entirely independent nation states. It is far more likely, and certainly advantageous, for the new states to enter into arrangements for common governance on a number of fronts. There are many possible configurations of individual states within the new American community. These could consist of relatively large territories encompassing a number of the current states (the Pacific Northwest is one possibility), existing states that wish to stand on their own (Texas, for example), states that are subdivisions of older units (Southern California), even city-states (New York City).

In a fashion, this process will be something of the reverse that has occurred with the European states that have joined together in the European Community. If anything, Americans may avoid many of the obstacles to political and economic union that exist among the EC countries. Not only is the United States relatively more homogenous culturally than the European countries, but the American Community would be developed against a background of strong central rule, thereby making loss of individual autonomy among the components easier to accomplish on a range of issues that are transnational in nature. Furthermore, there is the lengthy tradition of an American common market, which to some extent already has been extended across international lines to include Mexico and Canada under the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

As the new nations of the American Community come into existence, they likely will resist maintaining extensive defense establishments. Nations with far more modest military establishments than the present United States appear increasingly to have the advantage in world politics. One of the palpable ironies of the century is that the two countries most soundly defeated in the major wars—Germany and Japan—have emerged at the end of the period as greater economic powers than most of the victors. By relying on their former adversaries in war for protection, both have been able to concentrate their productive capacities toward economic development, with spectacular results. In the 21st century, the new American Community will seize upon the economic advantages of demilitarization.

—Law Professor Stewart Jay

Petrified by Changing Demographics?

The most significant change will be the changing demographics of American society in general and the Pacific Northwest in particular. If current trends continue, this nation will look much more differently than it does today, with higher numbers of people of color. The European stock will probably be a distinct minority. Are we going to be petrified or hysterical about this inevitability, or do what this region uniquely has the capacity to do, that is, hammer out the contours of a genuinely pluralistic society? I think the jury is still out on this.

—Public Affairs Professor Hubert Locke

Women the World Over Gain Economic Independence

In 2088, the campaign for “Women’s rights are human rights” has succeeded in making violence against women within the family illegal. Women the world over have gained enough economic independence to leave abusive relations—whether at work or at home. The “Children’s rights are human rights” campaign has succeeded in making children’s physical, emotional and cognitive development a cornerstone of all laws, policy and budgetary decisions. Every person—woman, man and child—has access to the latest communication tools: computerized phone/mail/video that fit in the palm of the hand and that give access to education, work and friends/family.

—Women Studies Professor Angela Ginorio

The U District: People Will Still Need a Place to Interact

Certainly a lot of the existing buildings will be replaced with more substantial structures. The area will have increased density. Hopefully we will have a much better rapid transit system coming through the area. I don’t think any of the same stores will be here except possibly the book store and maybe Bartell Drugs. But that is hard to tell. There will be the same types of stores probably to a certain degree but not the same stores.

Hopefully the University will be thriving, will continue to be a great university and the business community and residential community around it will continue to be a desirable place to live and work and shop and dine and go to the movies and all those sorts of things. Even with all the technological advances, people are still going to want to interact with other people and the public places will still certainly play an important part in the future.—Scott Soules, a third-generation Ave. property owner

Popular Culture

Love, Romance and the Androgynous Family

In the next 90 years, technological changes will help create the androgynous family. The Provider Role—the idea and practice that men should be the lead and primary bread winner—will have had its death rattle long before the next century is very old. Men and women will both work and take turns caretaking home and family, depending on whose job pays more or who is working. There will be no expectation of whose work will take precedence based on gender. A good deal of that work will take place at home—the image of telecommuting envisioned in the 20th century will really happen in the 21st.

Technology will add to the blurring of gender. There is a good chance that more surrogacy will occur—and not just for infertile women, but for women who are highly paid and prefer not to have repeated pregnancies. There may even be ways to have children outside of the human womb, thereby reducing women’s physical risks or greater claim to being the primary parent. Many fewer families will have children that have physical and mental disabilities since genetic testing will be much more precise and gene splicing will rectify most birth defects. Abortions will be rarer as contraception becomes automatic and foolproof. However, because genetic testing will be so exact, some parents will elect abortion if their fetus does not measure up to new societal standards of perfection.

Love and romance will still be extremely important and used as the means of justifying a relationship—and choosing to stay in a marriage—which means divorce will still be common. While we may undulate between times of high and low divorce ( based on economic trends) we should expect, especially with the extension of the average life span, that most people will have three marriages or more over their lifetime. Birth rates will be low, however, since cost of living will escalate, wealth will be divided over multiple marital break-ups, and single family housing will become harder to attain. Government will give subsidies for childbearing and childraising but only the very rich and the very poor will have more than two children in their lifetime.

—Sociology Professor Pepper Schwartz

Good-bye Football, Hello “Rollerball”?

Within the next 90 years, skyrocketing players’ salaries and a less attractive product to the media and fans may doom professional sports as we know it. The reduction or elimination of opportunities to play professional sports could also change the face of college athletics. Perhaps the NBA and the NFL will finally decided to create their own farm systems, similar to what major league baseball is currently doing. Those athletes coming out of high school who do not want to go to college can go directly to a farm system where they can be developed athletically and prepared for a professional career. Those athletes who do want to go to college for an education and also play college ball will have that option, too. With this option, you may not see the “best” players but you’ll see players who are committed to truly being “student-athletes.” I think this commitment will also improve relations between coaches and players because there will be less pressure on both parties to win at all costs.

Who knows? Professional and college sports could be raised to the level of sport not unlike the movie Rollerball, where athletes were deified and the fans’ sole interest was to see someone maimed or killed in the roller rink. There is a disturbing trend in sports, fueled by the avarice of the professional ranks and the uncontrolled zealousness and expectations of fans. Hopefully, collegiate sports can steer clear of this pathway and eternally commit to education as its focus.

—Senior Associate Athletics Director Ralph Bayard

War Between Printed Page and Electronic Media

Right now there is a war going on between the printed page and electronic media. In 90 years, I have hope that both will have survived, that people will not abdicate the book. It was easier to ignite the imagination of my students in the past; they did not depend so much on visuals. If they had a favorite song, they didn’t have a visual that automatically went along with it. Now it is virtually impossible to separate the visual from anything else. So I foresee some problems in teaching the arts, writing, creativity. The artificial eye, the artificial brain can’t replace the real thing.

I have a story that I’ve never finished. It was my “raid” into futuristic writing. In that world the book had been discontinued. Official readers dramatized the book—-they made the book come to life. They had this ability to memorize all the particular words in a book. One of them gets into trouble because she has a real book—not that books have been banned, but that paper is so scarce, resources are scare. When I started it in 1975 I thought it was futuristic. I’m not sure it’s futuristic anymore.

—Creative Writing Professor Colleen McElroy

Advertising More Personal, and More Intrusive

Traditional forms of advertising and advertising agencies will be long gone. But as long as capitalism exists, advertising will exist in some form. It will find a way. Advertising will be able to speak directly to the individual instead of the mass market. It will be much more segmented and personal, more intrusive, than talking to a whole bunch of people. You will see it coming in the next five years as the Internet becomes much more forceful. You will get a strong hint of the future in the next five years.”

—Jim Riswol, partner, creative director and copywriter, Wieden & Kennedy ad agency

Photography: You Can’t Replace a Person’s Eye

Photography is changing so rapidly it is almost hard to keep up with it now, let alone think of the next 90 years. The change from film to digital images will continue, and films, cameras and digital equipment will get even smaller, more portable and more sophisticated.

The technology is definitely driving this industry and to stay on top you have to be aware of and using the latest technology available. But it is still up to the person. You can’t replace a person’s eye, the composition of an image, or sensitivity to light. I consider myself a Neanderthal, a romantic, who loves art. But we may not be talking about film in the future. It may be all digital. In a few years, I might have the ability to be in Africa photographing an elephant or a lion and then beam that image back to my office in Seattle so a magazine could use it. I wouldn’t have to wait a month to have my film processed. And I see this coming on the consumer level as well. Films, if they exist, will be so fine grain you can do just about anything with them and still have an excellent image. Just in the past five years, for instance, the sophistication of autofocus cameras has changed the kind of work I can do. It used to be inaccurate and trying. Now I can capture images I couldn’t before because these camera systems are so fast, definitely faster than my reflexes.

As a professional I have to keep up and buy the latest gadgets because this business puts bread on my table. But keep in mind, all the technology in the world doesn’t replace a person’s eye and composition, and those are what make for unforgettable images. And that is what we are really after.

—Art Wolfe, wildlife photographer

Scandals Continue, But Reporting Won’t Be Any Easier

In 90 years, the newspaper will be delivered electronically. Even so, some antique people will cherish the feel of paper. They’ll get a hard copy from a printer that’s attached to the food-and-news delivery modem in the kitchen.

Ninety years from now, there will be no phone lines, but I hope we will still have a democracy and an aggressive media. We will peer into the government’s business using some sort of electronic gizmo that connects us directly to the people’s data.

Even so, reporting won’t be any easier. The society will be just as plagued by liars 90 years from now as it is today. Governments will restrict the flow of information, and the only thing that will open the spigot will be a series of painful scandals. Reporters will need the same detective skills that are used today. Maybe they won’t drive around in automobiles but they will hunt for sources and ask tough questions—unless we no longer have a democracy.

Future reporters will dwell on war, corruption, greed and the other foibles. I can only hope they discover better ways to reflect the lives of common people. I can only hope that they don’t forget the poor and the afflicted in their fascination with the wealthy.

— Eric Nalder, reporter, Seattle Times

Space

Tales From the Red Planet

SYRTIS MAJOR, MAY 2088—The sun hung just above the cloudless western horizon, surrounded by a bright rosy glow. Two figures trailing long shadows were trudging toward a large, boxy vehicle with six soft, oversize wheels. One of the figures stopped and stared at the rapidly sinking sun. “What a spectacular sunset,” she exclaimed. “Come on,” her companion said, “we really need to get back before it gets too dark. We still have to do a checkout of the water production unit before we shut things down for the night. Besides, summer’s over and tonight’s low will be -140 F.” The encroaching darkness began to reveal a dazzling panoply of stars overhead. One brilliant point of light above the fading glow outshone all the others. The young woman gazed at it for what seemed like an eternity to her companion. “Now what are you staring at?” he asked. “It’s so blue, so beautiful, I can never get over it,” she sighed, “someday I would really like to go there. … All right, I’m coming.”

The ride, as usual, was rough. Rocks, large and small, were strewn over the arid landscape from horizon to horizon, so their vehicle could not move very fast. After a brief silence, the young woman spoke, “Scott, I just couldn’t help gazing at Earth in the twilight sky. You know that I was born here, the first of the native Martians, and that I’ve spent all of my 15 Mars years here—that’s more than 28 Earth years! Sure, I’ve seen the holo-videos and done the virtual reality visits, but I really crave to be there in person. I want to actually feel the ocean breezes and smell the forests, I want to walk around outdoors, barefoot and without this clumsy space suit and helmet. I’ve got to go there someday. Do you think they’ll ever let me off this rusty, dried-up excuse for a planet?”

The vehicle lurched over a large boulder. “Liz, you know I was the last temp sent from Earth three Mars years ago, just before the Great Economic Collapse. I’m still here; so are many other temps. Nobody is going anywhere and you know it. Nearly a third of the people on Earth are starving; the last thing they need back there is to have to deal with us.”

“I know, I know,” Liz sighed, “at least we’re OK here, I guess. Our three bases have plenty of renewable air, food, and water, we have lots of energy thanks to the fusion breakthrough, and everyone is healthy. I suppose if things continue to go well for us here, some day our colony will transform all of Mars into a second Earth.” As she spoke they neared one of the dozens of large, metallic, igloo-shaped, interconnected structures that formed Base Syrtis 1. The vehicle deftly maneuvered itself into perfect alignment and mated its airlock to the structure’s docking port with a click and a hiss.

“Mommy, Mommy, I’m so glad you’re back!,” shrieked the little girl as she ran toward Liz and gave her a big hug. “I love you, Mommy! Can I go with you tomorrow to see your big crater, please, please?” Liz held her daughter tightly, “Oh, Jenny, I really want to show you my crater, but it’s still too dangerous for you to visit. Where’s Dad?” “Daddy’s in the virtual holo-room. He’s watching the Huskies beating Stanford in the Final Four! Wanna watch too?”

—Aeronautics and Astronautics Professor Adam Bruckner

Technology

Wired for Life: The Internet Implant

I’m aware of only one accurate prediction in the field of computing. In 1965, Gordon Moore, then of Fairchild Semiconductor and later a founder of Intel, had the audacity to suggest that the density of transistors on integrated circuits would double every 18 months. Amazingly, device physicists and process engineers have managed to make good on Moore’s prediction over the course of more than 30 years.

This exponential rate of progress – the fact that everything about computing continues to double at fixed intervals, from the amount of performance you can buy for a dollar to the value of Microsoft stock – is why we can’t predict the future of computing. There’s nothing else like this, in any other field. If transportation technology had improved at the same rate as information technology over the past 30 years, then an automobile would be the size of a toaster, cost $200, go 100,000 miles per hour, and travel 150,000 miles on a gallon of fuel. A Boeing 747, introduced 30 years ago, would cost hundreds of dollars today, rather than hundreds of millions. Ridiculous? Not in computing, where today’s $3,000 laptop personal computer is vastly more capable than the $3 million building-sized institutional computer of just a couple of decades ago. The implications of this sort of progress are impossible to predict.

Let me close with just a couple of predictions that I have borrowed from others. These are 10-year or 20-year predictions, not 90-year predictions-we will live to see them.

From Jim Gray of Microsoft Research: It will soon be possible – in terms of cost and size – to store a complete digital video record of your life. We will figure out how to digest, analyze, organize, and retrieve this information. See someone on the street but can’t remember the name? Not a problem! How will this information be presented to you? The advances in user interfaces that we have promised for years will finally be realized in the next decade – acceptable speech input and output, gesture recognition, retinal projection, convincing artificial intelligence. But consider this:

From Bran Ferren of Walt Disney Imagineering (in The New York Times Magazine): The technology needed for an early Internet-connection implant is no more than 25 years off. Imagine that you could understand any language, remember every joke, solve any equation, get the latest news, balance your checkbook, communicate with others, and have near-instant access to any book ever published, without ever having to leave the privacy of yourself. I guarantee you that many of our kids’ kids will choose a “Net job” as the preferred way of horrifying their parents.

Want to bet against these? I’ll take your money. And that’s only the next few decades.

—Computer Science and Engineering Chair Ed Lazowska

Technology Makes Money, Prisons Obsolete

If we look at the technological advances of the past 90 years, we can anticipate that those of the next 90 will be equally spellbinding. As a result of a new understandings of how our bodies work, the better nutrition and a complete mapping of the human genome, those that are born near the 22nd century can expect lifetimes of perhaps several hundred years. Preventive medicine will begin in the womb with gene therapy. We can expect organ replacement and repairing of fractured DNA to be commonplace. With our aging population we can expect greater challenges in improving the quality of life, while working on ways to save our planet from natural resource exploitation that may ultimately limits its ability to produce food.

Our greatest technological advances will be in the ability to manipulate matter at the atomic scale. We will truly become latter-day alchemists … combining the elements to build custom molecules, that will give us new materials and medicines. We will have miniature bulldozers, excavators, sewage filters and power plants. These machines will be able to reproduce themselves and infiltrate those areas of our environment and bodies where they can build and maintain the miniature vasculature of our world.

Computing will also advance to the nanoscale, with storage of information within electron orbitals and spin. Binary will be replaced by tristate and multistate machines that will have the capacity to process and store terabytes of information in microseconds. Sensors and computers will be implanted within our bodies and embedded within the very fabric of what we wear, in the walls of our home and in our places of business. We will have personal information spaces that provide access to vast storehouses of knowledge that we can access and mine instantaneously, using intelligent agents that will filter and reconstruct three dimensional representations of information. Other software and hardware robots will assist us in our work, play and home maintenance. Money will not be needed … just our physical characteristics act as a “fingerprint” to signal our identity with electronic processing of transactions that automatically adjusts our instantaneous net worth. Since we will be able to track the identity of everybody with sensors within our environment, the nature of crime will change … indeed, prisons as we know them will become obsolete as we will use new therapies to rehabilitate.

Our transportation systems will become more efficient, and less polluting. But there will be less need to move our bodies to go places, for we will have transportation systems for our senses that use virtual reality to create synthesized 3D spaces, much like the holodeck of Star Trek, where we visit with our friends and family and conduct our business and education.

Everything will be wireless. Central power generation will not be needed as we will have self-contained generators in our homes that use fusion as a means of powering our appliances. Perhaps many of our appliances may be powered by the metabolism of our own bodies.

Our power will be in our knowledge and the ability to integrate and exploit the new affordances provided to us by our technology. The human adventure will continue as we explore our remaining frontiers of the ocean, space and the domains and very limits of human thought. In 90 years we will understand more about consciousness and the way the mind works. But will we be happy?

—Human Interface Technology Lab Director Thomas Furness

Predictions—Examples of Human Hubris

We cannot project 90 years into the future; it is futile. Projections are based on merely extending observed patterns of the past into the future, on the assumption that the milieu surrounding the subject matter stays constant and continues those forces which have produced the observed pattern.

Technologies are not autonomous. They are shaped by social, economic, political and cultural phenomena. For example, if the patent laws change, the future of biotechnologies changes (Before the 5-4 Supreme Court decision allowing the patenting of an engineered microbe, virtually no one believed that living organisms were patentable; even after the decision, most commentators doubted it would be extended to mammals, which the patent office has done.)

Since these social phenomena can be quite volatile, predicting technologies is an example of human hubris. Even the National Security Agency apparently was surprised by the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Communism, etc. I have my students read an article from some 25 years ago predicting portable nuclear reactors as consumer items and other developments, made by eminent scientists and public officials; this is in the syllabus to show how absurd this approach can be. Remember how the Green Revolution was going to end world hunger?

—Technical Communication Professor Philip Bereano

The Six Million Dollar Man Is a Bargain

—UW Engineered Biomaterials Director Buddy D. Ratner

Sorry, Einstein: Biology Replaces Physics as Science’s Top Dog

As for my thoughts on the future of biochemistry in the next century, I can only state at this time that the complexity of the living process, as has been learned within the past 50 years, calls for new approaches and thinking. Physics, long the dominant determinant of thought and ideas in science, has been displaced by the biological sciences which display the extraordinary complexity that defies or belies many of the ideas promoted by physicists and chemists through which much of our ideas in the present century have been promoted.

Hence I predict new modalities of thought in which systems analysis or concepts involving organized networks of cellular processes will come to the forefront of the biological sciences. Of course, early in the next century, much of the so-called Human Genome Project will have been completed with the promised “encyclopedia of genetic information.”

However, along with that will be the evidence that knowledge of the genome and its constituent genes does not give knowledge of how the living cell or organism is constructed and the multiple types of physiological processes are regulated. Hopefully the next century will see a more appropriate and detailed construction of the probabilistic schemes or networks of the living process rather than the simplistic and absolutist ways of current thinking. Sorry I won’t be around.

—Martin Rodbell, 1994 Nobel Prize in Medicine