The 21st Century and Creativity

One of the thought experiments I have done often over the years is to imagine what the world will be like at specific points in the future: 10 years from now, 50 years, 100, 1000, and so on. What inspires me to think along these lines is the knowledge of how much life changed in the western world from 1900 to 2000. At the beginning of the century, when the horse (and buggy) served as the mode of transportation for a majority of people, I seriously doubt that much thought was given to space travel. Also, only the keenest of imaginations might have considered the possibility of air travel, the ability to send images over invisible airwaves into a box later to be called a TV, or the development of a global network we would call the Internet.

But as we know, civilization marches forward at a seemingly exponential rate. Why does it grow so quickly? How do we (as the human race) continue to raise our level of knowledge to greater and greater capacities? Is that capacity infinite?

It is my belief that the advances of the 21st century will dwarf those of the previous one hundred years. The primary reasons are globalization and the Internet, which will lead to one overall factor: the rise in human creativity.

Whatever one thinks about globalization on a moral level, an inescapable outcome is that more and more people on Earth are getting the sorts of high level education that only elites (particularly western European or North American elites) used to receive. As Thomas Friedman makes clear with his "flat world" analogy, the percentage of people earning graduate degrees is skyrocketing in the world's two most populous nations, China and India. Factor in places like Japan, South Korea, Russia, and hopefully someday Latin America, and the overall percentage of the human population with significant knowledge will reach unprecedented levels.

As Friedman points out, the rise of engineers in cheap-labour places like India and China has resulted in an outsourcing of certain types of jobs to those countries. What is left for many in North America and western Europe is whatever they create for themselves -- which is to say that so much intellectual talent in the first world is now devoted to creative processes. People are developing new types of work or designing new methods for building and distributing their products and services. The less interesting work is being handled (so far, happily) by the newly educated in Asia; the West's best hope is to work on new ideas that advance our civilization.

(If the previous paragraph isn't clear, take just one of the examples in Friedman's book The World is Flat. In America, when you take your income taxes to an accountant, there's a very good chance that they are actually being calculated by a person in Mumbai who has been educated in whichever specific state's tax codes you happen to belong to. Meanwhile, the American accountant you are paying to handle your taxes will be engaged in international negotiations to expand his/her business, or finding loopholes to serve you better, etc. All of this is done in lightning fast time because of the Internet, which of course enables nearly real-time business operation on a global scale.)

But what happens after a few decades when all of these highly educated people around the world begin to get bored with the "easy" work? It's simple. They will also turn to the creative side of the ledger. The engineering talent that is coming in the next two-three generations, from all over the world, will devise new systems, machines, computers, and probably other things we haven't thought of yet. Combined with the continued accumulation of information on the Internet thanks to Google, Wikipedia, or some other as-yet invented global repository, one can see that the digital world consciousness will begin to take us places we've never dreamed about. About the only thing that can stop this march is some kind of catastrophe (man-made or natural) that would cut a significant swath of the population from this equation.

So what will the world look like?

In 10-20 years, the World Wide Web will be much more advanced than now, allowing for easier-to-access information (much easier than now), and the ability to communicate with others as if they were in the same room as you (better video conferencing, for example). There will be virtually no barrier to information accumulation or sharing. In education, advances in brain theory and learning style theory (already well developed) will cause an increase in knowledge in the general population. This will push the next wave of human consciousness.

In 50 years, our modes of transportation will be different, but recognizable. I think hydrogen-powered vehicles will become common. Our environment will be better off for our efforts, and maybe we will have turned the tide back on global warming to some extent.

In 100 years, I'm not sure how recognizable our world will be. Perhaps we will all live in eco-sustainable housing. So many jobs will have been invented that we can't predict what our economy will look like. Wars will have taken place, certain cultures will rise and fall. Maybe robots will have become standard members of the family. Our knowledge of science will take great leaps forward to make such achievements possible. Organized religion will be on its deathbed. That's my personal hope, anyway.

And in 1000 years? Your guess is as good as mine.