LITTLE ROCK — As we approach the darkest day of the calendar year (winter solstice) or perhaps eternal darkness (apocalypse), why not tempt fate and peek into the future?
Not the future of The Jetsons or Star Trek, of conveyor belts that relieve us of walking and phasers set to stun because, um, we kind of already have that.
Let’s assume the planet will not end Friday.
What will the near future bring? Stuff already in the pipe.
Who would know such things? There is, in this country, an Association of Professional Futurists,and the goal of its 250 or so members is to advance the science and craft of forecasts and projections.
So we can ask some of them.
But first, did you know that central Arkansas is a major player in the highly futuristic-sounding medical field of nanotechnology?
Michael Douglas, director of BioVentures at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, can tell you that the future’s well on its way.
Researchers have begun testing on humans how well tiny nano materials can carry and release medicine to areas of disease in the body. These beginning stages of human testing will assure the safety of such treatments.
“The use of nano materials holds great promise for more efficient, targeted delivery of drugs,” Douglas says. “Think of them as carrying a payload; think of them as silver bullets.”
UAMS is part of a nanotechnology consortium that includes the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. UAMS also is working with the National Center for Toxicological Research in Jefferson.
“It could be another seven or eight years before we see nano materials appear in drug formulas,” says Douglas, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology. “But the quality of life for the patient would be much better, assuming the nano material is not toxic to the human body. It will give the physician new tools to address disease.”
UAMS, Douglas says, is “publishing in high-end journals with other major centers that do this kind of work; there is an appreciation for the power we have in the area of the whole nano materials initiative.”
Douglas says BioVentures is also developing tools for “personalized” medicine.
“If you have cancer, your cancer can be defined and treated in you as individual rather than someone who has this disease. Technology allows us to personalize therapeutic treatment.
“That is the future of medicine.”
FORWARD THINKING
Among the Association of Professional Futurists, “you won’t hear serious futurists talking about making ‘predictions,’” says Joyce Gioia, a member and purveyor of her weekly Herman Trend Alert newsletter, which discusses future implications of present-day breakthroughs inmedicine, architecture, sustainability - anything. “We don’t base our ideas typically on conjecture.”
We asked a few such futurists for advancements they’re already seeing in laboratories or on testing grounds that could arrive in Arkansas in the next decade or two.
Autonomous autos (Jim Lee, a blogger for The Futurist online magazine)
Google and the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have been working on a self-piloting automobile for about a decade, but this May, Nevada issued the first license for a “driverless” car. Unlike earlier plans that imagined highways installed with computer chips that vehicles would read remotely, Google’s cars are equipped with self-contained guidance systems that make use of GPS and cameras.
In 2010, The New York Times reported these Toyota Priuses - most are that model - had logged more than 1,000 miles without human assistance.
“Pretty much everyone is working on that, so I think it has a good chance of going mainstream by the mid-2020s,” says Lee.
Bionic augmentation (Mike Jackson, co-founder and chairman of the company Shaping Tomorrow, which Lee described as “the Google of future trends”)
“Where a weak signal is beginning to appear is the desire of humans to augment their physical and mental intelligence by digital and mechanical means,” Jackson says.
We saw this at the Olympics this year when South African and double-amputee Oscar Pistorius competed in the 400-meter race on his Flex-foot Cheetah carbon fiber prosthetic blades. (He made it to the semifinals, where he placed last in a field of eight.)
Baseball player Bryce Harper made news this summer when he wore red contact lenses that purport to lessen the glare of the sun and help players see the baseball more clearly.
For a long time it was the dream of surgeons and prosthetics engineers to give disabled people abilities on par with the abled. Has that vision been hijacked?
Call it an arms race.
“It will then be just a matter of time before fit humans replace perfectly normal body parts to achieve the same capabilities as disabled people,” Jackson says. “A new industry is likely to spring up in this field.”
Meat factory (Gioia)
To many, we already have meat factories. It’s called the modern beef industry. This, though, would be the true industrialization of meat - organic muscle and fat grown without the side effect of a face.
“We’re going to have hamburgers that were grown in the laboratory,” says Gioia.
Also called in vitro meat, test tube meat, cultured meat.
She referred to Josh Schonwald’s book The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches From the Future of Food (Harper Books, released in April), which looks at everything from cultured meat to plant-based meat alternatives (think Boca Burgeron steroids).
Taking ranches out of the food chain could be especially important in emerging markets such as China and India. Unlike the United States, they face immediate pressure to maximize nutrition and minimize land use. Growing fish filets in petri dishes would also benefit over fished areas of the oceans, which Gioia says face even more imminent degradation.
“Interesting enough,” she says, “Winston Churchill back in the day talked about the expectation of having in vitro meat.”
Online education (Andrew Hines, professor of future studies at the University of Houston)
University of Phoenix, Khan Academy - this is just the event horizon.
“From my perspective as an educator ... I would submit that online education is poised to make a big impact in the next decade,” Hines says.
He says online education hasn’t yet hit the “growth phase” of the innovation curve.
Distance-learning options are common at Arkansas universities. For example, the University of Arkansas Global Campus includes degree programs for which all teaching occurs online.
The University of Houston put its entire future-studies curriculum online several years ago and has integrated remote and on-campus degree candidates into the “classroom” physically and virtually.
“There are other classes where the entire experience is handled in the virtual realm. We like the hybrid approach, but I can see a role for a full spectrum ... of offerings - the all-physical, the hybrid, the all-virtual - depending.”
End of physical media (Jeremy Mancuso, University of Houston future studies graduate, Shaping Tomorrow employee)
More and more we will decamp the physical world. We have already dumped our spiral-bound address books in favor of Address Book software, our mailboxes for inboxes, our calendars for iCal. Checks will become increasingly obsolete in the face of electronic banking. Our physical currency will become more hoary in favor of card swipes, and maybe not even that - maybe smartphone waving.
Even our hard drives could soon be replaced by cloud based computing and storage.
“Physical media is going to go away,” Mancuso says.
Mancuso doesn’t even have a workplace, exactly. At Shaping Tomorrow, he works entirely “off-site.”
“I’ve seen my boss maybe five times in the six years I’ve worked there.”
Incidentally, Mancuso also uses a “co-working center,” a large space partitioned into offices and cubicles rented to folks who miss the office dynamic but who otherwise have no reason to be together.
Sounds crazy, but then, so does membership in a club of huffing, sweating people who go out of their way not to meet anyone, walking on machines that make sure they don’t get anywhere.
Style, Pages 51 on 12/16/2012