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Once a quarter, we go through the abstracts and we prepare for our clients six new
issues analyses, or what we call working papers. These papers cover emerging social,
political, economic and technological issues.
From Our Files
contains synopses of past working papers as a way to highlight how we have picked up on
important issues and trends and helped our clients understand what they mean to them.
The content of this section will change on approximately a semi-annual basis.
From Mankind to Mindkind: The Future of Resource Allocation
(June 2005)
Othersourcing
(September 2005)
The Expanding Mortality Horizon
(June 2005)
e-Me for Eternity
(March 2006)
Time/Space
(September 2006)
Redefining the Middle Class
(June 2006)
[updated January 2007]
From Mankind to Mindkind: The Future of Resource Allocation (June 2005)
Consciousness and its altered states, religion and spirituality are being increasingly researched. The brain and how it works, thought access and patterns, and how the brain governs behavior and beliefs all fall into this area of study. Growing understanding of the mind is blurring the lines between man and animal. We have nearly created a mouse with a brain almost entirely of human cells and have begun to acknowledge the intelligence of plants as well as the idea of human-plant chimeras. What will the Patent Office consider too human to patent? Robots will soon be employed and engaged in sports, war, medicine, business, entertainment, leisure, home care, as pets, etc. Artificial minds will replace human parents by monitoring children in cars and serving as babysitters. Nanobots will be intelligent, and robots will be able to self-replicate. The fact that intelligence may no longer exist exclusively in the human realm presents fascinating prospects for resource allocation.
Malls and retailers offer a “shopping experience” as opposed to merely buying things. Churches, museums, and universities are branching out into the commercial space as business moves into the cultural space. Distinctions between the cultural and the commercial will disappear, which will lead to greater demand for art, and all the resources that go into it will be in greater demand. Marketing messages will begin to target pets directly, meaning more resources will be allocated to find products and services they need and ways to reach them. There is also a growing trend of virtual pets. Material resources that go into real-world entertainment will be overshadowed by virtual endeavors. There will also be a shift from understanding the competitiveness of the male mind to that of the female. Kids today are psychologically fragile and are taking longer to grow up and gain steady employment, get married, and have kids. Their minds will require pharmaceuticals, counseling, special education and entertainment, etc. Organizational resources will start to hire minds rather than people. Focus will shift from managing people to managing projects. Products and services will shift to address the needs and behaviors of the mind.
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Othersourcing (September 2005)
Othersourcing is the increasing ability to have work done not merely off-site and by other entities (as with outsourcing and offshoring), but by non-humans. As work has grown to be more impersonal and service-based, it has become depersonalized and the workers seen as abstract. Higher work has made a massive shift to machines and software. Othersourcing is seen in business, the government, the military, and non-profits. College libraries are moving more information to the digital realm. A robotic grocery cart aids the visually impaired. Japanese scientists are creating robots with human-like appearances. Virtualization software can help a company outsource. Ray Kurzweil predicts that a workable artificial brain will exist by 2020. The Department of Defense is working on robot armies. Sony’s robot dog Aibo can teach itself tricks. CISCO is using software to replace staff in HR, finance, and customer service. Businesses will move to lower cost areas to reduce labor costs, like call centers off-shoring through home based agents. Humans may have to have computers implanted, as Bill Gates suggests, to hold their jobs.
People will have to focus on creating jobs and businesses based on perceptiveness and initiative, and unions may have to focus on creating jobs over protecting them. We will likely see a renewed Luddite movement involving educated and skilled people. Employers will be under pressure to help those who lose jobs. Retaining programs will likely be seen as good community relations. Employers will have to have othersourcing strategies to deal with negative consequences from employees. Businesses should form cooperative skill banks to provide redundant skills work to companies that need them. People will need to focus more on entrepreneurialism for their own self-interest.
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The Expanding Mortality Horizon (June 2005)
Global life expectancy rose from 51 to 69 in the second half of the twentieth century. According to the UN, another ten years will be added to that by 2050. The maximum probable age of death will rise to 85-90 by 2100 and one in nine Baby Boomers in the US will live to be 100. With the exception of Russia, the mortality horizon in the industrialized world will extend from age 50 to 100. Health care costs will rise, as the aging population desires to live long lives in comfort, style, and with a sense of well-being. Government spending in health care may double to $3.6 trillion by 2014 (20% of the economy) because of Medicare and Medicaid. GM supports 2.5 retirees for every worker. Metabonics brings together genomics and proteomics to incorporate the aging persona as a unified system, meaning we may find ways to prolong life based on our metabolic type. Genetic testing may someday be as commonplace as blood testing. We are learning more about the efficacy of vitamins in the elderly, the impact of obesity on mortality, activities promoting strong bones in women, marijuana’s potential to halt artherosclerosis, and the possibility of suspended animation. Alzheimer’s threatens to kill 16 million by 2050 if it is not cured.
Spiritual journeys and altered states of consciousness will be in increasing demand, benefiting spas, gadget makers, churches, publishers, adult education centers, etc. With the expanding mortality horizon, the majority of people will have some form of midlife crisis, leading them to live a minimum of two lives. Those who start a second life will often mimic their 20s and do things such as buy houses and start families. The American Law Institute and the Law Commission of Canada believe that “close personal relationships” should become the basic organizing principle of family law. Divorce will become even more a necessary option, and mental stress will increase. HR executives need to reacclimatize themselves to the idea of entry level jobs as people in their 50s will begin looking for news careers. Older adults will need resources that will serve as more than stopgap measures before death. This will increase intergenerational conflict in places like China where one child will have to support 2 parents and 4 grandparents. In the US, our model predicts a gap of $123 trillion between what retirees would require to maintain 90% of their standard of living and what they’d actually get between now and 2050. When other industrialized nations are included, the gap is $347 trillion. An increasing problem will arise for those with money to last a 25-year mortality horizon, yet children and society will not wish to provide resources to support them for another 25 years. Many robots will fill caregiving and maintenance needs, but they will not make the difficult decisions as life goes on and death and disability loom.
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e-Me for Eternity (March 2006)
As technology continues to permeate every facet of our lives, the less benign aspects of its integration are becoming more pronounced. We enter appointments into our computers, dial calls on our cell phones, purchase products with our credit cards, send e-mails and text messages or electronically do any of dozens of seemingly trivial tasks routinely performed throughout the course of our daily lives. In doing all this, we are continually adding chapters to our electronic auto-biography, or what is sometimes referred to as our data shadow. It describes the concept that bringing together different records could completely track an individual’s life. The term has taken on a heightened significance in today’s era of electronic dependence.
Just as the prevalence of security cameras, phone and credit card records settles in, the public will be forced to deal with a far greater level of personal data capture. Indeed, a whole new language is springing up to convey our surveillance society. Anticipatory surveillance is anticipating actions or needs based on our previous behavior. Preemptive surveillance is the preventive action spurred by behavior patterns. Nannycam is the consumer technology originally designed to observe and record the babysitter. Sousveillance is a reversal of observation, wherein others watch out for those who are doing the surveillance. Biometrics is using biological features for identification. All of these have the ability to capture information that will reside inside data systems for indefinite periods of time.
There is also a threat from hackers, co-workers or even family members. Programs that facilitate data theft are readily available on the Internet for download, and their ease of use and affordability makes them ominous. One more culprit in the data collection and storage world is the public itself. The emergence of Blogs, personal digital cameras and videos, streaming internet videos and online communities have given rise to perhaps the most powerful personal data providers possible.
People will have to accommodate themselves to the idea that their lives will be highly documented and that records provided both willingly and unwillingly are part of an e-me for eternity. Youthful indiscretions will follow individuals far into their lives as public records are digitized and made more accessible. Assumptions made about someone’s activities today will be codified as never before, and will remain on record for all time to come. Organizations and governments that deal with all this information will have to take even more steps than those they are currently taking to ensure that the trust relationship they develop with their constituents is not compromised.
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Time/Space (September 2006)
In the emerging virtual economy, the five major growth industries will be cyberspace, inner space, outer space, microspace and time/space. The dimension of space will govern much of the innovation and application of products and services of the future, and the coupling of time and space will define one of the most important areas of that growth. Time/space might be defined as all those endeavors that seek to compress, alter, amplify or eradicate real time in real or virtual space. That space might be the human body, the community, any place we might visit or work from, a warehouse – just about any physical or imagined place. We are learning more about how to manipulate time, and how to apply that to all manner of existence, enterprise or activity.
The increasing focus on time as a value-added proposition will have numerous significant effects on society. For one thing, the shift of focus away from tangibles to time will be environmentally beneficial. For another, it will greatly change the nature of expectations. Speed and multi-tasking will become of paramount importance, and that will alter the human resource talent that many organizations need in order to survive and thrive. Having adequate information for decision-making will be weighted with a time factor; it will not be the amount of information but the efficiencies of time, as well. Growing impatience with wasted or prolonged time will also reshape many products and services.
Warehousing, inventory, shipping and point-of-purchase offerings will all be challenged to examine time as an increasingly important variable in productivity and profitability equations. These will be dramatically affected by innovative concepts that will continually arise in order to leverage time. It is currently difficult for us to conceive of time as malleable, rather than linear and constant. But as the 21st century progresses, we will be faced with alterations in this dimension that challenge our body rhythms, our business practices, our psyches and our personal behavior and expectations. Time, like energy, is becoming a precious resource.
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Redefining the Middle Class (June 2006)
Building a large and sustainable global middle class is the key to both domestic and international political stability and to world economic growth in the decades ahead. The modern American middle class was given its first big boost by unionization and was further built by postwar public policy and a set of economic circumstances that favored U.S. labor and products. Recently, the computer age, foreign competition, the escalating costs of housing, healthcare, and education, and the weakness of labor unions placed the middle class in a more vulnerable position. The development of a middle class elsewhere in the world has been based on different factors. In the 21st century, emerging middle classes are, and will be, based on attracting jobs from elsewhere via efficiencies and cost-cutting. While the middle class will continue to be marked by homeownership, education and consumerism, jobs that were once considered middle class are shifting.
Higher education is now becoming mandatory to compete in the global marketplace and this is coupled with a growing trend towards global education. The global middle class that is emerging is almost entirely attainable to college graduates only. The lack of affordable housing options is another way in which the middle class has been redefined. There has also been a “feminization” and diversification of the middle class. Moreover, the “middle classes” of many countries are growing rapidly and are now moving about globally. This shift has been marked by mass consumerism and technological advancements. Cities are now functioning as global centers in new ways – they are serving as important locations for specialized service firms. What emerges, as a result, is a global economy whose growth is centered on “global cities” and, therefore, state-induced benefits to grow the middle class, like guaranteed health coverage and low-cost housing, are diminishing.
Many companies have realized that what used to be seen as unprofitable markets could indeed be very profitable if approached properly. As the aggregates of these markets generate substantial gains, our perceptions of those who comprise them will change. They will increasingly be seen as important consumers, thus helping to broaden and redefine what we call the middle class. As more middle class jobs are adversely affected by shifts to lower-wage areas, companies will need to review all their market preconceptions in order to maintain and/or recreate middle class markets. Currently, and in the years to come, the development of the global middle class will be defined by services that can be delivered electronically over long distances and those that cannot.
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© 2001 - 2002 Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.
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