The Future (66 page)

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Authors: Al Gore

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ARTICLES

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Bartlett, Bruce. “ ‘Starve the Beast’: Origins and Development of a Budgetary Metaphor.”
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Bergsten, C. Fred. “Two’s Company.”
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, September/October 2009.

Bisson, Peter, Elizabeth Stephenson, and S. Patrick Viguerie. “The Global Grid.”
McKinsey Quarterly
, July 26, 2011.

Blaser, Martin. “Antibiotic Overuse: Stop the Killing of Beneficial Bacteria.”
Nature
, August 25, 2011.

Bohannon, John. “Searching for the Google Effect on People’s Memory.”
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, July 15, 2011.

Bostrom, Nick. “A History of Transhumanist Thought.”
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Bowden, Mark. “The Measured Man.”
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Bowley, Graham. “The New Speed of Money, Reshaping Markets.”
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, January 2, 2011.

Bradford, James. “The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say).”
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Carmody, Tim. “Google Co-founder: China, Apple, Facebook Threaten the ‘Open Web.’ ”
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.

Caryl, Christian. “Predators and Robots at War.”
New York Review of Books
, August 30, 2011.

Cookson, Clive. “Synthetic Life.”
Financial Times
, July 27, 2012.

Council on Foreign Relations. “The New North American Energy Paradigm: Reshaping the Future.” June 27, 2012.

Cudahy, Brian J. “The Containership Revolution: Malcolm McLean’s 1956 Innovation Goes Global.”
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Diamond, Jared. “What Makes Countries Rich or Poor?”
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Diamond, Larry. “A Fourth Wave or False Start?”
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———. “Hello America.” August 16, 2010.

———. “How Luther Went Viral.” December 17, 2011.

———. “No Easy Fix.” February 24, 2011.

———. “The Printed World.” February 10, 2011.

———. “The Third Industrial Revolution.” April 21, 2012.

———. “Unbottled Gini.” January 20, 2011.

Etling, Bruce, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey. “Political Change in the Digital Age: The Fragility and Promise of Online Organizing.”
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Evans, Dave. “The Internet of Things.” Cisco Blog, July 15, 2011.

Farrell, Henry, and Cosma Shalizi. “Cognitive Democracy.”
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, May 23, 2012.

Feldstein, Martin. “China’s Biggest Problems Are Political, Not Economic.”
Wall Street Journal
, August 2, 2012.

Fernandez-Cornejo, J., and M. Caswell. “The First Decade of Genetically Engineered Crops in the United States.” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, 2006.

Financial Times
. “Job-Devouring Technology Confronts US Workers.” December 15, 2011.

Fineberg, Harvey. “Are We Ready for Neo-Evolution?” TED Talks, 2011.

Fishman, Ted. “As Populations Age, a Chance for Younger Nations.”
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, October 17, 2010.

Fortey, Richard A. “Charles Lyell and Deep Time.”
Geoscientist
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Freeman, David. “The Perfected Self.”
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.

Gillis, Justin. “Are We Nearing a Planetary Boundary.”
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, June 6, 2012.

———. “A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself.”
New York Times
, June 6, 2011.

Gladwell, Malcolm. “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.”
New Yorker
, October 4, 2010.

———. “The Tweaker.”
New Yorker
, November 14, 2011.

Grantham, Jeremy. “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever.”
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, April 2011.

Gross, Michael Joseph. “Enter the Cyber-Dragon.”
Vanity Fair
, September 2011.

———. “World War 3.0.”
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, May 2012.

Haidt, Jonathan. “Born This Way? Nature, Nurture, Narratives, and the Making of Our Political Personalities.”
Reason
, May 2012.

Hansen, James, et al. “Perception of Climate Change.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
, August 2012.

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Hillis, Danny. “Understanding Cancer Through Proteomics.” TEDMED 2010, October 2010.

Huntington, Samuel P. “The U.S.—Decline or Renewal?”
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Ikenson, Daniel J. “Made on Earth: How Global Economic Integration Renders Trade Policy Obsolete.” Cato Trade Policy Analysis No. 42, December 2, 2009.

International Monetary Fund. World Economic Outlook. September 2011.

Joffe, Josef. “Declinism’s Fifth Wave.”
American Interest
, January/February 2012.

Johnson, Toni. “Food Price Volatility and Insecurity.” Council on Foreign Relations, August 9, 2011.

Kagan, Robert. “Not Fade Away.”
New Republic
, January 11, 2012.

Kaufman, Edward E., Jr., and Carl M. Levin. “Preventing the Next Flash Crash.”
New York Times
, May 6, 2011.

Keim, Brandon. “Nanosecond Trading Could Make Markets Go Haywire.”
Wired
, February 16, 2012.

Kennedy, Pagan. “The Cyborg in Us All.”
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, September 18, 2011.

Kleiner, Keith. “Designer Babies—Like It or Not, Here They Come.” Singularity Hub, February 25, 2009.

Kristof, Nicolas D. “America’s ‘Primal Scream.’ ”
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, October 15, 2011.

Krugman, Paul. “We Are the 99.9%.”
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, November 24, 2011.

Kuznetsov, V. G. “Importance of Charles Lyell’s Works for the Formation of Scientific Geological Ideology.”
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46, no. 2 (2011): 186–97.

Lavelle, Marianne. “The Climate Change Lobby Explosion.” Center for Public Integrity, February 24, 2009.

Levinson, Marc. “Container Shipping and the Economy.”
Transportation Research News
, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, no. 246 (September / October 2006).

Lewis, Mark. “The History of the Future.”
Forbes
, October 15, 2007.

MacKenzie, Donald. “How to Make Money in Microseconds.”
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, May 19, 2011.

MacKinnon, Rebecca. “Internet Freedom Starts at Home.”
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, April 3, 2012.

Macklem, Peter T. “Emergent Phenomena and the Secrets of Life.”
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Madrigal, Alexis. “I’m Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web.”
Atlantic
, February 29, 2012.

Markoff, John. “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software.”
New York Times
, March 5, 2011.

———. “Cost of Gene Sequencing Falls, Raising Hopes for Medical Advances.”
New York Times
, March 8, 2012.

———. “Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic.”
New York Times
, October 10, 2010.

McKibben, Bill. “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.”
Rolling Stone
, July 2012.

Milojević, Ivana. “A Selective History of Futures Thinking.” Ph.D. diss., University of Queensland, 2002.

Mooney, Chris. “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science.”
Mother Jones
, June 2011.

Moore, Stephen, and Julian L. Simon. “The Greatest Century That Ever Was: 25 Miraculous Trends of the Past 100 Years.” Cato Policy Analysis No. 364, December 15, 1999.

New York Times
. “Dow Falls 1,000, Then Rebounds, Shaking Market.” May 7, 2010.

Nisbet, Robert. “The Idea of Progress.”
Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought
2, no. 1 (1979).

Noah, Timothy. “Introducing the Great Divergence.”
Slate
, September 3, 2010.

———. “Think Cranks.”
New Republic
, March 30, 2012.

Nye, Joseph S. “Cyber War and Peace.” Project Syndicate, April 10, 2012.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. “Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising.” December 2011.

Peters, Glen, et al. “Rapid Growth in CO
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Purdum, Todd. “One Nation, Under Arms.”
Vanity Fair
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Rosen, Jeffrey. “POTUS v. SCOTUS.”
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Salvaris, Mike. “The Idea of Progress in History: Future Directions in Measuring Australia’s Progress.” Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2010.

Sargent, John F., Jr. “Nanotechnology: A Policy Primer.” Congressional Research Service, April 13, 2012.

Speth, James Gustave. “America the Possible: A Manifesto, Part I.”
Orion
, March/April 2012.

Steiner, Christopher. “Wall Street’s Speed War.”
Forbes
, September 27, 2010.

Steinhart, Eric. “Teilhard de Chardin and Transhumanism.”
Journal of Evolution and Technology
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Stern, Nicholas. “The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review.”
Population and Development Review
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Stiglitz, Joseph E. “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.”
Vanity Fair
, May 2011.

Trenberth, Kevin. “Changes in Precipitation with Climate Change.”
Climate Research
47 (2010).

Trivett, Vincent. “25 US Mega Corporations: Where They Rank If They Were Countries.”
Business Insider
, June 27, 2011.

Vance, Ashlee. “3-D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution.”
New York Times
, September 14, 2010.

Walt, Steven M. “The End of the American Era.”
National Interest
, October 25, 2011.

Wilford, John Noble. “Who Began Writing? Many Theories, Few Answers.”
New York Times
, April 6, 1999.

Wilson, Daniel H. “Bionic Brains and Beyond.”
Wall Street Journal
, June 1, 2012.

Wilson, E. O. “Why Humans, Like Ants, Need a Tribe.”
Daily Beast
, April 1, 2012.

Worstall, Tim. “Six Waltons Have More Wealth than the Bottom 30% of Americans.”
Forbes
, December 14, 2011.

Zhang, David, and Harry Lee. “The Causality Analysis of Climate Change and Large-Scale Human Crisis.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
108 (March 2011): 17296–301.

Zimmer, Carl. “Tending the Body’s Microbial Garden.”
New York Times
, June 18, 2012.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

    
1
most important issues they expected to emerge
Peter Lindström,
The Future Agenda as Seen by the Committees and Subcommittees of the United States House of Representatives: A Workbook for Participatory Democracy
(Washington, DC: Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future and the Congressional Institute for the Future, 1982).

    
2
born in Russia a few months before the 1917 Revolution
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1977: Ilya Prigogine, “Autobiography,”
http://​www.​nobelprize.​org/​nobel_​prizes/​chemistry/​laureates/​1977/​prigogine-​autobio.​html#
.

    
3
educated in Belgium
Ibid.

    
4
responsible for irreversibility in nature
Peter T. Macklem, “Emergent Phenomena and the Secrets of Life,”
Journal of Applied Physiology
104 (2008): 1844–46; Ray Kurzweil,
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
(New York: Penguin, 1999).

    
5
donut with clearly defined boundaries
Macklem, “Emergent Phenomena and the Secrets of Life.”

    
6
at a higher level of complexity
Ibid.

    
7
stabilized underground for millions of years
Farrington Daniels, “A Limitless Resource: Solar Energy,”
New York Times
, March 18, 1956.

    
8
“which made so manifest the ‘arrow of time’ ”
Prigogine, “Autobiography.”

    
9
“they are understood in different ways in different societies”
Ivana Milojević, “A Selective History of Futures Thinking,” from “Futures of Education: Feminist and Post-Western Critiques and Visions” (Ph.D. diss., University of Queensland, 2002).

  
10
trying to divine the future with the help of oracles or mediums
Ibid.

  
11
animals sacrificed to the gods
Ibid.

  
12
by studying the movements of fish
Ibid.

  
13
marks on the Earth
Ibid.

  
14
each molecule of the gaseous cylinders onto which
Tracy V. Wilson, “How Holograms Work,” HowStuffWorks,
http://​science.​howstuffworks.​com/​hologram.​htm
.

  
15
astrologers of ancient Babylon used a double clock
Fred Polak,
The Image of the Future
(Amsterdam: Elsevier Scientific, 1973), p. 5.

  
16
will still linger there—still trapping heat
Daniel Schrag, personal interview.

  
17
“need to enlarge knowledge, through the development of sciences and arts”
Mike Salvaris, “The Idea of Progress in History: Future Directions in Measuring Australia’s Progress,” Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2010.

  
18
“earthly to heavenly things, and from the visible to the invisible”
Robert Nisbet, “The Idea of Progress,”
Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought
2, no. 1 (1979).

  
19
China as a guide for those who wish to progress
Peter Hubral, “The Tao: Modern Pathway to Ancient Wisdom,”
Philosopher
98, no. 1 (2010),
http://​www.​the-​philosopher.​co.​uk/​taowisdom.​htm
; Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn al-Husayn al-Mas’udi, “How Do We Come Upon New Ideas?,”
First Break
29 (March 2011).

  
20
“true scientific progress and hence actual achievement”
Salvaris, “The Idea of Progress in History.”

  
21
contributed to a fascination with the physical as well as the philosophical legacies
Polak,
The Image of the Future
, pp. 82–95.

  
22
In the seventeenth century, the father of microbiology
Jonathan Janson, “Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723),” Essential Vermeer,
http://​www.​essential​vermeer.​com/​dutch-​painters/​dutch_​art/​leeuwenhoek.​html
.

  
23
been invented in Holland less than a century earlier
Nobel Media, “Microscopes: Time Line,”
http://​www.​nobelprize.​org/​educational/​physics/​microscopes/​timeline/​index.​html
.

  
24
through them discovered cells and bacteria
Ibid.

  
25
camera obscura, made possible by the new understanding of optics
In addition to their friendship and possible artistic collaboration, Van Leeuwenhoek was also the executor of Vermeer’s will. Jonathan Janson, “Vermeer and the Camera Obscura,” Essential Vermeer,
http://​www.​essential​vermeer.​com/​camera_​obscura/​co_one.​html
; Philip Steadman, “Vermeer and the Camera Obscura,” BBC History, February 17, 2011,
http://​www.​bbc.​co.​uk/​history/​british/​empire_​seapower/​vermeer_​camera_​01.​shtml
.

  
26
“the steady step of amelioration, and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth”
Thomas Jefferson, “To William Ludlow,” September 6, 1824,
The Portable Thomas Jefferson
(New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 583.

  
27
but Lyell amply proved that the Earth was not thousands
Richard A. Fortey, “Charles Lyell and Deep Time,”
Geoscientist
21, no. 9 (October 2011); V. G. Kuznetsov, “Importance of Charles Lyell’s Works for the Formation of Scientific Geological Ideology,”
Lithology and Mineral Resources
46, no. 2 (2011): 186–97; Mark Lewis, “The History of the Future,”
Forbes
, October 15, 2007.

  
28
4.5 billion, we now know
“History of Life on Earth,” BBC Nature,
http://​www.​bbc.​co.​uk/​nature/​history_​of_​the_​earth
.

  
29
Darwin took Lyell’s books with him during his voyage on the
Beagle
Fortey, “Charles Lyell and Deep Time”; Kuznetsov, “Importance of Charles Lyell’s Works for the Formation of Scientific Geological Ideology.”

  
30
Aristotle wrote that the end of a thing defines its essential nature
Aristotle,
Eudemian Ethics
, Book 2, Section 1219a.

  
31
More than a decade before writing
Faust
Scott Horton, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,”
Harper’s
, December 2007; Cyrus Hamlin, “Faust in Performance: Peter Stein’s Production of Goethe’s Faust, Parts 1 & 2,”
Theatre
32 (2002).

  
32
emergent wisdom and creativity that is on a completely different plane
Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi, “Cognitive Democracy,”
Three-Toed Sloth
, May 23, 2012,
http://​masi.​cscs.​lsa.​umich.​edu/​~crshalizi/​weblog/​917.​html
.

  
33
Alfred North Whitehead called the obsession with measurements “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”
Polak,
The Image of the Future
, p. 196.

  
34
4.5 billion years ago would be at the far left end
“History of Life on Earth,” BBC Nature.

  
35
emergence of life 3.8 billion years ago
Ibid.

  
36
multicellular life 2.8 billion years ago
Ibid.

  
37
land 475 million years ago
Ibid.

  
38
first vertebrates more than 400 million years ago
Ibid.

  
39
primates 65 million years ago
Blythe A. Williams, Richard F. Kay, and E. Christopher Kirk, “New Perspectives on Anthropoid Origins,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
, March 8, 2010.

  
40
would appear 7.5 billion years from now
David Appell, “The Sun Will Eventually Engulf Earth—Maybe,”
Scientific American
, September 8, 2008.

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