I n grammar school, my teacher asked us to draw pictures showing how the year 2000 would look. Like a lot of my classmates, I drew a picture of levitating cars similar to Luke Skywalkers, jet propulsion backpacks, and robotic pets. In the era of Star Wars mania, Jetsons cartoons, and the original Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica series, we were certain the future would bring us the space age accoutrements we saw onscreen, and more.
Of course I was wrong. However, some amazing things have happened between now and then, things that even a room full of unbridled third-grade imaginations could not have conceived of: the end of the Cold War, the invention of the artificial heart, the Internet, 9/11, and Californias Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Even as adults, we find it impossible to draw an accurate picture of the future. Like the year 2000, a lot of what we think we see going forward will turn out to have been just a mirage. And a lot of things we cant imagine now will be as mind-blowing and life altering as the Internet has been in the last twenty years. After all, no one can truly predict the future. Too many things can happen in the world that alter how we think, feel, and behave. Too many mistakes provide unexpected enlightenment, accidental breakthroughs, and serendipitous discoveries.
But despite all of this, we desperately want to try to know what the future will bring. We seek out psychics, prophets, and great intellects to try to tell us what the future might hold. When its good news, we embrace it. When its less appealing, we ignore it. And while Ive built a career in research trying to decipher behavior, Ive always shunned the term trend forecaster . Frankly, it sounds too much like weather forecaster, and I hope to have a better success rate than that profession does. Nonetheless, there are similarities. Like a weather forecaster I am simply looking at patterns out there and trying my best to judge which way the tides will go, how moods will swing, and where storms will erupt. Human behavior, like the weather, is uncertain. All we can do is give our best guesses, our best thoughts, our aspirations, and our hopes.
What makes the future so compelling is that there seem to be limitless possibilities. We somehow imagine that in the future our greatest hopes will be realized and our worst fears somehow eradicated. The future is something that feels far away and fantastical. We anticipate it endlessly, yet somehow it feels sudden when it arrives. It feels like an airplane journey in which you fall asleep in one location and wake up in another, a place almost entirely different and, presumably, better.
In fact, the future isnt any of these things at all. It is a series of small steps that lead to bigger change. Its all of our fantasies slowly realized or rethought. Its like a child growing up. To a parent who is with them every day, the child seems the same. To a relative who comes only once a year, the child is a whole new creature. While a child might seem a different persondyeing her hair and getting four piercings at the age of sixteenif you trace back, chances are you can see the need for self-expression or rebellion throughout the childs life. The change didnt happen in a day; it happened progressively over years.
Often when the future becomes the present, were disappointed. We wonder why we dont have flying cars or cures for every cancer or robots that cater to our every whim. We forget that we have sent a robot to Mars, with miraculous vaccines, wiped out dozens of diseases that might have killed our children, and invented an Internet that has the capacity to connect anyone to anything at any time.
Bill Gates once said that people overestimate the change that can happen in five years and underestimate the change that can happen in ten. Change does not happen overnight, or over a week or month. It takes years. It takes shifts in people, places, technologies, and cultures. But it can and often does happen faster than we think. We are the architects of the future. We create it every day, in big and small ways, in moments and through decades.
We cant change everything in the present; we cant find all of the cures or will the endings to every war, genocide, or environmental disaster. What we can do is listen to those who know their field and have real expertise, those who live in their particular world day in and day out, those who adapt, create, rethink, and reshape their universe throughout their careers. There are those who do it based on research and others who do it based on instinct. But they each effect change and alter the way we experience some part of the world.
Virtually every expert we spoke to in creating this book insisted that they could not predict the future. And we had to reassure them that was not what we were seeking. We simply wanted to know what they expected, what they hoped for, what they feared. We hoped that, in collecting their thoughts, others might be enlightened, educated, and inspired. Change might begin to happen from the thoughts that erupted and the picture they presented. Ripples of information might coalesce into new perspectives, and patterns might be Rorschached from the aggregate of their visions.
Of course selecting the topics was daunting. After all, in predicting the future one has to decide what will and wont be important in the years to come. And yes, weve left out many important topics some would like us to include and covered others some might have left out. There were times when experts were loath to talk about the future of their field because the outlook was so grim, and they didnt want their visions to become self-fulfilling. Many experts were too focused on the chaos of the present to feel confident that they had accurate expectations. We tried to limit our focus to domestic concerns because we felt an international outlook would be impossible to capture in one book. But in our interviews, we found that many of our experts were unable to so limit their thoughts; their specialties were inextricably intertwined with thinkers and professionals internationally, as were their livesand our futures.
We felt some topics, such as religion, were worthy of a book in themselves and thus no expert could offer a comprehensive vision. Instead, we chose to focus on the fastest growing and most politically charged religionIslamand interviewed the scholar and author Reza Aslan. Aslans thoughts about Islam are among the most important in the book. An awareness of the truth of Islam, the importance of education about Islam, and an understanding that the terrorist agenda has no true connection to Islam are particularly timely and important to inspire understanding as a first step toward peace in this time of war.
Despite our decision not to tackle religion exhaustively, the relationship between politics and religion in America seemed to echo through many of our interviews. Whether we were talking about the future of censorship with Joan Bertin, the future of medicine with former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona, or the future of law with Alan Dershowitz, religious beliefs seemed more consequential than we expected of a country founded on the idea of separation of church and state.
