Leadership, Not Technology, Shapes The Future
Why Leaders will Play the Decisive Role in Shaping 2020
Leadership shapes cultures, which shape human choices, which more than technology or events, shape the future.
Whether the next decade is a glorious new chapter in the human saga, or a disaster will depend largely on the quality of leadership people are offered – globally, nationally and locally.
It has been said that there have been four great ages in the long arc of human history.
Early in the human story, the hunter-gatherer age saw us reliant on nature to provide our needs. The agricultural age saw the advent of basic technologies, through which we learned to control nature. This enabled the development of civilisations in the upper Nile region, and around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
The industrial age brought the mechanization of industry and agriculture. Much has been written on the industrial revolution and the many technological, as well as social and cultural changes it brought.
In the past decade, we have entered potentially the most exciting – and risky – period in our history, the IT-Bio-Nano era, of which today’s digital revolution is just a foretaste. In this epoch, we will increasingly automate and robotize industry, agricultural processes and even human biology.
The IT-Bio-Nano age presents societies with huge challenges and wonderful opportunities. For communities, the next decade will be a time of increasingly rapid change in which a plethora of new options in medicine, genetics, bio-technology, education, communication and more will stretch our ability to make informed choices.
The next decade will present the biggest opportunities for innovation in human history. Rapidly expanding technologies are already transforming, for example, the realm of medicine.
Medical advances over the past ten years have led us to the point where we currently add 0.2 years to life expectancy every year. By 2025, medical researchers expect to be able to add one year to life expectancy every year.
When the first human genome was mapped a decade ago, the cost was a staggering three billion dollars. Today, mapping your individual genome costs around $5000. By 2020, it will likely set you back just five dollars – and you will likely be able to do it yourself, with a kit you purchase in the supermarket.
This, of course, opens up all kinds of possibilities for receiving pre-emptive treatments for inherited diseases, and for genetic enhancements to aid memory and other faculties.
At present, the most obvious area of rapid technological change is that of communications and media technologies. The advent of the digital media age has brought with it not just new gadgets and means of sharing information; it has brought an entirely new way of thinking.
Digital-think knows that large data does not require large space. My entire health records can now be stored on a miniscule RFID tag, a device smaller than a grain of sand.
Power and influence are no longer based on what you know, but how well you can innovate with what you know. The key to leadership is not the information you have at hand, but your ability to analyze it quickly and accurately – and cheaply.
The head of the British Computer Society has predicted that by 2015 technologists will be able to store the digital equivalent of an entire lifetime of human memories on a device no larger than a sugar cube.
This ‘life-logging’ is already a reality in some of the major techno-research units of the US and Europe. The technology is still emerging, but the exponential growth in the power of chips are making the prediction look more realistic every week.
If Moore’s law holds true and the computing power of the now ubiquitous silicon chip continues to double every 18 months to two years, by 2025 chips will be ten thousand times more powerful than they are today. (Some technologists now believe Moore’s law is changing, as computer power doubles every eleven months.)
This is without the burgeoning developments in nanotechnology, which allows us to build machines from the atomic level up. Or bio-mechanical science, which lets us to replace metallic-based chips with those built from organic materials like those found in our brains.
The IBM Blue Brain Project in Switzerland is working to replicate the full functions of the human brain in silicon. It expects to have developed a human-level machine intelligence by 2020.
In futurism, we speak about ‘singularity’, the point at which machines reach such a level of sophistication that we, their makers, can no longer either predict of understand their full capabilities. Some expect that point to be reach in or near 2030; for many people in society generally, the moment has already arrived!
We’ve seen amazing progress in computing in the last three decades, yet many technologists estimate that we’ll eventually see computer power increase by a factor 108 or 1012 on what it is today. If we throw in the emerging science of quantum computing, some say we could see computing power grow by a factor of 1044 within just 20 years.
We’ve just begun to compute.
Meanwhile, we’re entering the age of the Cloud. This is the third phase of the Internet revolution and IT and allows a global layer of communications and information built on top of the existing, often overloaded, web.
Why spend valuable personal or company resources on costly software and bulky machines on which to store it? Why not let someone else’s machine carry the load?
Within the next decade, most software and data-storage will move into the Cloud. Venture capitalists are already advising start-ups not to waste time and money with business plans that feature in-house servers and IT staff. Why not let your software and data run on mega-PCs owned by Google and IBM? Their engineers get paid more than yours ever will; and they’re paid to deliver a largely trouble-free service.
Forbes magazine has declared this to be ‘the cheap revolution’, as it will lead to a 90 percent drop in the cost of the internet for consumers, organizations and governments.
The Cloud will also provide the platform for the ‘Internet of Things’. Shortly, we will be surrounded by billions of sensor-driven tools which are all connected to the Cloud.
Everything from your garden sprinkler system, to the lights in your bedroom and even your clothes will be hooked up to net via micro-sensors.
Already, entire agricultural systems are hooked up to internet, allowing automatic control of heat, humidity, fertilizer levels and so on.
Many foresee the evolution of a global sensor grid, or ‘global mind’, where everything is networked.
We’ve entered the brave new world of the ‘Exaflood’. This is a word communications technologists have developed to describe the rapidly increasing torrent of data transmitted over net.
It has been estimated that, in 2006, the world community generated something near 161 Exabytes of information via the net. An Exabyte is equivalent to one million times one million times one million bytes, or keystrokes.
By the end of 2010, that number will have blown out to 988 Exabytes – an eight-fold increase in just 4 years. This rate of expansion is set to explode as we enter the Cloud.
Meanwhile, another, much quieter revolution is taking place in the world of virtual reality (VR) and robotics. Today we have tele-marketing – in 2009, 212 million Americans did all or part of their shopping online. We also have tele-politics and tele-economics.
The future, though, is tele-everything.
Already a British company has pioneered a fully haptic virtual reality technology, which calls into play all five of the human senses to create an environment where you can physically inhabit a room with another person who is not in reality present.
This will lead to VR Vacations (‘Beam me up Scott’) and VR Travel. Truly virtual business meetings, featuring the full characteristics of touch, sight, sound and touch are just five to seven years away. (No more worrying about airline strikes.)
Virtual education is well on the way, tailor-made for a digital and digitized generation of students who see screens as authority windows. Already in the UK, 85.5 percent of children kids aged between seven and sixteen own a mobile phone, while only 72 percent own a book. In the near future, avatars & robots will enhance and augment – not necessarily replace – the role of the human educator.
The US is already working in virtual Einstein and virtual George Washington. Using the writings and public statements of these men, VR and robotics engineers are able to intuite how they might respond to various questions and situations.
Students will soon go to school to learn from Einstein. (How will we parents handle the homework then?!)
Education will see a new revolution as a more ‘discovery’ mode of learning comes to the fore. Learning will become, as will film and other forms of entertainment media, an online-game-like experience. Digital whiteboards will allow teachers to scribble one moment, then switch seamlessly to DVD/Web video or game mode the next.
In Japan, one thousand nursing homes have purchased Paro robots, which are designed to help ease loneliness and to assist people who suffer with dementia. In a recent survey, most clients said they preferred the machine nurses to the human variety.
Of course, the next leap forward in VR is the silicon brain implant, which will allow machines to communicate directly with us without having to fool our senses. Already, the Neurosky company offers game technology featuring a headset through which on screen devices are controlled using nothing more than brain waves – all for around $200.
All of this technology, of course, raises some important questions. For one, will we increasingly favour cyber over real? Will we find it easier to develop friendship remotely, via Facebook, than face-to-face over the garden fence? What will this mean to our ability to read facial expressions, to emote and empathise up-close-and-personal?
As we invite technologies increasingly into our bodies, will we lost the line between what is essentially human and what is machine? Will that even matter? (I for one believe it will.)
As we engineer aspects of the human genetic makeup, will we reach a time when modified human DNA sequences are patented and sold to the highest bidder? What will we do with the resulting class of ‘have-nots’, who lack the genetic advantages of their betters?
As we increasingly toy with the mean, the gadgets and tools we devise, will we lose sight of the ends? Or will we, in the words of the French philosopher Jacques Ellul, inhabit a world where we build ‘faster and faster machines to take us nowhere.’?
These are all vital questions, and the natural corollary of our love affair not just with technology, but with speed of change.
Within a decade, every government body and more than a few major companies will have, near the top of their structures, a team of ethicists and philosophers, who will frantically attempt to navigate the morality of our use of technologies.
As a social commentator, my special interest in the future is not so much on the pure technology, but on how it will impact on the human condition and social relationships.
What impact will our growing reliance on hi-tech mean in terms of social cohesion?
Already, nations like the UK and Germany as seeing the emergence of a new form of post-industrial urban isolation. In fulfilment of Toffler’s 1970’s prediction, a great many quite well educated people are already feeling alone in the bustling crow.
Our future is daunting, but it’s also exciting, because it is not fundamentally shaped by technologies or events – not even wildcard events. The future is shaped by human reactions, human choices. What people need most in looking at future is not knowledge but hope.
In face of rapid change, it is usually the currency of human confidence that is most devalued.
This is why the leadership question is so vital to our understanding of and approach to the future!
In an age of exponential change on multiple fronts, new demands will be placed upon leaders of all stripes. They will sometimes feel that they inhabit the eye of an increasing disorientating storm. Yet, they will find exhilarating, fresh opportunities to shape cultures that allow a proactive response.
In business, professional associations, not-for-profits, community organizations and civic authorities, leadership will require new social sensitivities, more interactive management systems and a sharper ability to add innovation to information.
Leaders are essentially cultural architects. Cultures define what is normal, acceptable and viable in terms of values and behaviour within a group. Those values shape both emotion and choice.
Recent social research projects have shown again how much human choice is impacted by group cultures.
In one test of the power of acculturation, repeated across many cultures, ten people are given a maths quiz. It has emerged time and again that if, say, eight of them get the final answer wrong, the two who had it right are likely to want to change their answers to match the majority. There are multitudes of other tests which show conclusively how great is the human desire for social acceptance and how often this is demonstrated through conformist behaviour.
Leaders guide the formation of cultures, which empower people to make innovative choices, which, in turn, shape the future.
Leaders also add value to change, transforming it into something that adds tangible benefit for the individual, family or community. And leaders provide these fixed compass markers amidst the tsunami of new developments, possibilities and options.
In the face of exponential change, technologically and socially, people will increasingly seek out and take their cues from leadership reference points.
Whatever their particular enterprise, every leader can proactively shape the future by providing a culture of confidence; a culture in which people feel inspired to innovate, even under great pressure, or in the face of great uncertainty.
As the first true futurist, Alvin Toffler, noted: ‘Our moral responsibility is not to stop future, but to shape it… to channel our destiny in humane directions and to ease the trauma of transition.’
That, in a nutshell, is what leadership is and will increasingly be about.
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