The Futurist

When Worlds (and Centuries) Collide :

An article from Winds of Change :

A cartoon from Cox and Forkum :

 

Is this fair criticism, or unfair stereotyping?  How offended should Muslims be about the above cartoon?  If they are offended, what constitutes an appropriate protest?  Are people afraid to say what they really think, which is even more revealing?

India's Economy grew at 7.5% last year

India's economy is now the second-fastest growing of any large country in the world, albeit still much slower than the 9.9% that China recorded in 2005.  What is interesting is how quickly the mainstream media went from having a blind spot on India to speaking of it in the same sentence as China.

As recently as 1998, most of the mainstream press was spoke of China as an emerging superpower, while India was still spoken of merely in the context of its nuclear tests, rivalty with Pakistan and its poverty.  Most articles spoke of India and Pakistan under a suggestion that they were equals. 

Now, almost all articles about China being a rising economic superpower also include India.  India has, in just eight short years, changed its entire 'brand' from being one of austere poverty and an intractable, stalemated dispute with Pakistan, to being one of the two rising superpowers in this world, a place with an endless supply of knowledge workers promises to reshape the global economy. 

That there are even articles like this, which compare India and China to see which has more promise, is telling.  Such comparisons were nearly unheard of in the late 1990s. 

What has enabled a country as large as India to revamp its entire 'brand', its perception in the eyes of the world, so completely, in such a short time?

I attribute this to four factors :

1) The rise of Internet usage and bandwidth speeds, permitting more business collaboration between India and the United States.

2) The War on Terror, where a stable, thriving democracy, containing 150 million Muslims, is seen as a model and positive influence on nascent democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq, thus receiving indirect moral support from the US, UK, and Japan.

3) The Indian community in the US reaching critical mass.  Their numbers have more than doubled from 1990 to 2000, and continue to grow.  They are also the highest-income ethnic group in the US, and are developing many business ventures between the US and India. 

4) The gradual, ongoing replacement of older generation Indians with a new generation that is globally aware, tech-savvy, better educated, less xenophobic, and has higher self-esteem.  Older generation Indians kept India under socialist stagnation for decades, and kept Indian society at a lower level of Maslow's hierarchy for far too long.  They were, frankly, an embarassment in many aspects of human existence, and their passing on can only lead to massive progress. 

Prediction : India becomes the foremost economic and political 'fad' of 2006, with at least five cover stories on India in major magazines, in 2006.

Alito would tilt the SCOTUS to the Right, Rightfully

Some perspective is in order on the nomination of Samuel Alito to the US Supreme Court.

From 1994 to 2005, the nine justices comprised of three conservatives, two moderates, and four leftists.  Seven were appointed by Republican Presidents, and two were appointed by a Democrat, Bill Clinton.  Both of those two, Breyer and Ginsberg, are leftists.

So seven Republican Presidents appointed three conservatives, two moderates, and two leftists, while a Democrat reliably appointed two leftists, not even any moderates.

Which party appears to place more importance on ideology on a nominee, rather than sheer judicial qualifications?

Now that Alito, a conservative, is replacing Sandra Day O'Conner, a moderate, the balance of the Supreme Court is like this : four conservatives, one moderate, four leftists. 

This is hardly an overwhelming bias to the Right.  It is merely a removal of the tilt to the Left that has existed for so many years.  Given that conservatives outnumber liberals in the United States population, this is still not a reflection of the general population. 

Prediction : The American public will continue to demand a rightward shift in the Supreme Court, expecting one of the four leftist Justices to be replaced with a conservative, when the time arises.  The actions of Congress will reflect this, no matter how much pressure far-left groups exert. 

Update : Dick Morris on Why the Left can't sink Alito.

Economic Growth is Exponential and Accelerating - Part I

(Please see Version 2.0 of this article here).

It never ceases to amaze me how so few people truly understand that the world is progressing at an exponential and accelerating rate.  This is the most critical and fundamental aspect of making any attempt to understand and predict the future.  Without a deep appreciation for this, no predictions of the intermediate and distant future are credible.

Read Ray Kurzweil's essay on this topic for an introduction.

One dimension of accelerating, exponential progress can be seen in the economy.  Today, the US economy grows at a median rate of 3.5% per year, and the world economy at around 4.5% per year.  This is a growth rate that we have come to take for granted and expect.

But such annual growth rates were unheard of in the 19th century, or the 18th century (when the world economy grew less than 1% per year).  Things changed very little over the span of 10 or 20 years.  People expected their children to have the same living standards, and be surrounded by the same technology, as they were. 

Let's look at a graph of per-capita GGP (Gross Global Product), when viewed from the year 2000, looking backwards. 

                                                   

                                            Historical World Per Capita GGP

The accelerating rate of economic growth is apparent from the chart.  Thousands of years of human civilization before the 20th century produced modest wealth compared to what was produced in th emuch shorter interval of the 20th century.  Even with the 20th century, growth was more in the latter half than in the first 50 years. 

Now, in 2006, 4% a year is assumed, and taken for granted.  In fact, 3 billion people in the world are living in economies growing at greater than 6% a year (China, India, Russia, Vietnam, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, and others).   

This would have been considered amazing, at any other time in history.  But is this just an aberration, or has the trendline itself shifted into higher gear, and can we expect this to continue, or even accelerate, in the future?  Continue on to Part II for the answer..

The Technological Progression of Video Games

As several streams of technological progress, such as semiconductors, storage, and Internet bandwidth continue to grow exponentially, doubling every 12 to 24 months, one subset of this exponential progress that offers a compelling visual narrative is the evolution of video games.

Video games evolve in graphical sophistication as a direct consequence of Moore's Law.  A doubling in the number of graphical polygons per square inch every 18 months would translate to an improvement of 100X after 10 years, 10,000X after 20 years, and 1,000,000X after 30 years, both in resolution and in number of possible colors.

Sometimes, pictures are worth thousands of words :

1976 :

1986 :

1996 :

2006 :

Now, extrapolating this trajectory of exponential progress, what will games bring us in 2010?  or 2016?

I actually predict that video games will become so realistic and immersive that they will displace other forms of entertainment, such as television.  Details on this to follow.

The future will be fun...

Related : The Next Big Thing in Entertainment

Why do the biggest technological changes take almost everyone by surprise?

The Internet was born as early as 1969, but no later than 1983, depending on what you consider to be the event most analogous to a 'birth'.  However, only a tiny fraction of the world's people were aware of the Internet even in the early 1990s.  Then, by 1994-95, the graphical browser from Netscape seemingly emerged from nowhere, opening up a wonderland that appeared to have the sum total of human knowledge instantly available to anyone with a computer. 

This 'World Wide Web' was predicted by almost no one in the late 1980s and was absent from the vast majority of science fiction work depicting the late 1990s onwards, just five years before it happened (with the notable exception of Ray Kurzweil in his book "The Age of Intelligent Machines").  So many supposed 'great thinkers' missed it.  How?

Because, while they could easily extrapolate exponential trends such as Moore's Law and the dropping cost of telephone calls/data transfer, almost no one thought about the bigger vision - combining the two. 

1)  By the late 1980s, personal computers were starting to make their way to the mass market.  That most of the population might have bought their first PC by 1995 was an easy prediction.

2)  Long-distance telephone rates were dropping through the full 20-year period from 1970 to 1990.  That this would continue until costs would be virtually zero was an easy prediction. Plus, people already had modems and where exchanging data between computers in the 1980s.  

But combining the two, for the grand vision of hundreds of millions of PCs collectively accessing and contributing to the growing World Wide Web of information, was the missing layer of analysis that almost every great thinker missed.

Notice how the number of internet hosts was already growing exponentially in the early 1990s, but the apparent 'knee of the curve' occurred after 1996.

So, the next question becomes : How do we make additional predictions by noticing multiple, steady exponential trends, and knowing which ones will combine into something explosive, at what time?

That is, of course, the $64 trillion question.  I will venture a few, however, in the coming weeks.  Stay tuned..........

Related : Mili, Micro, Nano, Pico

Related : The Next Big Thing in Entertainment

Ridiculous Socialist Propaganda - "Women are hurt more by globalization"

I am by no means a staunch right-winger, but sometimes a headline comes along that is so incredibly dishonest and biased in its propaganda that it warrants special ridicule, and hence this exercise to dismantle it. 

Yahoo! News, which goes so far to put socialist and anti-US spin on the headlines of news articles it collects that it makes CNN and USATODAY seem quite moderate, put out a headline titled "Women are hardest hit by globalization".

This is very unprofessional and dishonest, yet typical journalism by the person at Yahoo who writes these headlines.  Notice how multiple leftist shibboleths are sneakily pre-assumed to be truths :

1) That globalization is harmful and exploitative is a well-established fact.

2) That in most developing countries, even though women don't have nearly the power parity with men that they do in the US or Europe, it still is wrong for us to place any blame on these cultures for this outcome.  It is, again, the fault of the US in general and large American corporations in particular (even if those corporations have many female executives). 

3) That there is no possibility that the lower income of women could be due to them staying at home to raise a family (a practice still common in the developing world). 

4) That the people in these countries who work at the multinational corporation (often having competed with hundreds of other applicants for the job), have somehow been forced to do so involuntarily. 

I won't even get into how countries that globalize more efficiently have higher human development.  That is a topic for another day. 

The later part of the article does present an opposing point of view, where blaming outside forces for the problems women face within a poor country is not fair, but this rebuttal is placed at the very end of the article.  And right after that, an anti-US quote from.... Fidel Castro!

The article could just as easily have this rebuttal placed at the top, and be spun with a pro-capitalism title of "Socialists and Multiculturalists try to misplace blame for gender inequality on developed nations".  The same content, just a different take on it.

But it isn't.  That, my friends, is leftist spin...

US GDP Grew at 1.1% in Q405

The US economy posted a growth rate of 1.1% in the final quarter of 2005, substantially below expectations of 3.0%.  While this is the lowest growth rate in the last 12 quarters, it is still above the levels where fears of a recession become legitimate.  The economic disruptions caused by Hurricane Katrina and high oil prices shaved off the majority of fourth-quarter growth, and the first quarter of 2006 may very well be higher than average in order to revert back to the economy's mean trendline. 

Here is a chart of the quarterly GDP growth rates for the US economy for the last 10 years, with the red quarter being the most recent one.  The current interruption does seem out of place within the solid growth trend we were on up till this point.

   

Prediction : The US economy will grow at greater than 3% in 2006, even as oil remains above $50/barrel.  We will have adapted to the new reality, and will be permanently able to withstand oil prices as high as $70/barrel without a problem. 

Alito receives a majority of votes in the Senate

Judge Samuel Alito appears headed for a seat on the Supreme Court without any last-minute surprises.  Of the 86 Senators that have voted so far, 55 have voted in favor and 31 against. 

Of the few Democrats that have voted in favor of Alito, notable among them is Robert Byrd, the seniormost Democrat of them all.  Byrd summarized the inappropriate politicizing of judicial nominees as follows :

I regret that we have come to a place in our history when both political parties, both political parties exhibit such a take-no prisoners attitude. All sides seek to use the debate over a Supreme Court nominee to air their particular wish list for or against abortion, euthanasia, executive authority, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, corporate greed, and dozens of other subjects.

All of these issues should be debated but the battle line should not be drawn on the Judiciary. It should be debated by the peoples' representatives right here in the legislative branch. However, too many Americans apparently believe that if they cannot get Congress to address an issue then they must take it to the Court. As the saying goes: "if you can't change the law, change the judge."

This kind of thinking represents a gross misinterpretation of the separation of powers. It is the role of the Congress, the role of the legislative branch to make and change the laws. Supreme Court justices exist to interpret laws and be sure that they square with the Constitution and with law.

Byrd's rejection of the stance taken by other Democratic Senators makes a filibuster all but impossible.

Another dimension of the nomination of Alito (age 55) and John Roberts before him (age 50) is reality of a seat on the Supreme Court being a lifetime appointment.  As life expectancies are rising and medical knowledge is doubling every 8 years, it is incorrect to assume that Roberts and Alito will only serve until age 75 or 80, like their predecessors did.  It is quite possible that both of these men could live until age 100, and, should they choose to continue serving until death, could remain on the bench for another 45 to 50 years. 

The news for the left is even worse than they may have thought.

Prediction : The US Supreme Court will never go further to the left over the next 50 years, than it was from 1994-2005.

Scientific Breakthrough will help Speed up Flu Drug Development

As important as terrorism is, Al-Qaeda has still managed to kill no more than 10,000 people worldwide in the past five years.  An outbreak of bird flu, however, could kill tens of millions.  The Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 killed 50 million people, or nearly 3% of the world's population at the time.  If a pandemic of similar severity were to engulf the world today, it would spread much more quickly in this age of international air travel, and could wipe out most of the population of developing countries in the world, as well as cause an economic calamity more severe than the Great Depression. 

However, scientists have now discovered how the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus replicates inside cells.  While the virus will continue to mutate and attempt to outpace our efforts to develop effective drugs quickly, what is noteworthy is how far our technology has advanced.  As recently as 1995, it would have taken several years to map the genome of a flu virus and dig out this information.  Now, the same can be achieved in a matter of months, due to computers being 100 times more powerful than they were in 1996, and the productivity of this exponential improvement in computational power now diffusing pervasively throughout our scientific research infrastructure.

In the future, new pathogens will be decoded in even shorter times, hopefully at a rate faster than they can mutate. 

China's Economy grew 9.9% in 2005

China was once again the fastest-growing large country in the world, with 9.9% growth in 2005 on top of 10.1% growth in 2004.

This incredible surge, which began in 1979 or 1991, depending on how you look at it, has lifted over 400 million Chinese out of poverty, helped China rise greatly in almost all meaures of human development, and kept the world economy growing at a higher rate than that of the United States.  At the current rate, China will become a developed country (a country with a Human Development Index score greater than 0.800) by 2010, putting China roughly at the level of human development the United States had in 1960. 

However, I also submit that China will have to evolve into a genuine democracy to advance their society beyond that level in the decade following 2010.  I submit that to truly become a wealthy nation, China will have to foster innovation, creativity, and self-determination at the grassroots level, and cannot achieve this as long as the Chinese Communist Party controls Chinese society this tightly. 

China thus cannot become a superpower without evolving into a Democracy, contrary to what the fashionably anti-American crowd would have the world believe. 

A bit of perspective is in order. 

Consider that America is still condemned heavily for slavery that ended in the 1860s (sometimes even from countries that had slavery until well past that period), yet China is criticized relatively less than that for their invasion of Tibet during the 1950s and their Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, just 17 years ago. 

Consider that when there is a tsunami in the Indian Ocean or an earthquake in Pakistan, America is criticized for not providing enough aid soon enough.  Few voices are even asking the supposedly emerging superpower on the same continent for aid.

America is criticized for not proving enough humanitarian aid to Africa, despite the billions already provided.  How often do you hear anyone suggest that China should also donate aid to Africa?

As the world's lone superpower, America carries a heavy burden.  Being held to a standard that no other country is held to, and being criticized for solving only a few, rather than all of the problems in the world, is something Americans have grown accustomed to.  Those who are so quick to conclude that China will achieve parity with or even surpass America have to consider just how many burdens China has to be prepared to carry before it can occupy the same echelon.

Prediction : China evolves (perhaps with several painful incidents) to a democratic model by 2015, or its growth rate slows down dramatically after 2015, to a rate not much faster than that of the US.  The two are mutually exclusive, so one of the two must occur. 

UN Human Development Index

The UN publishes an annual report on human development each year, which produces a composite score for almost all nations in the world, based on indicators like per capita income, life expectancy, literacy, higher education, diffusion of technology, patents generated, etc. 

The world map below displays the approximate development level of the world's nations, with the greener nations being more developed, and the redder nations being less developed (source : Wikipedia). 

Wealth and poverty can be measured in both relative and absolute terms.  In absolute terms, the progress in human development that has been made since 1975 is stunning.  See the table of Human Development Index progress here. 

In 1975, only about 20 nations had acheived a score of 0.800 or greater (the level that corresponds to being a 'developed' country).  By 2003, approximately 57 countries have achieved 'developed' status.

This can be linked entirely to the diffusion of technology, spread of globalization, and the emergence of the United States as the dominant economic model in the world, creating win-win trade arrangements with many other countries.