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Our Emerging Future

Impressions from: Jeremy Rifkin, Elisabet Sahtouris, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Ray Kurzweil

Faster Forward by Melissa Hoffman

Most of us already know that the world is changing fast—we can feel it in our bones and we can smell it in the air, even though we may not always be able to put our finger on just what it is that’s happening. We may notice that the weather is more capricious, or we may shake off a bit of irritation when we find out, for example, that the new computer we purchased just a few months ago has already been superseded by a better-faster-smaller-cheaper-hipper-looking model. What would happen if we sat down to look at what all these small signs of change, taken together and viewed over a longer span of time, might actually be pointing to? It’s not necessarily a comfortable or easy exercise to undertake, as we discovered. Because, as those who spend a lot of time thinking about things like change and time will tell you, the kind of change we’re in the midst of right now is, by its very nature, different from what we’ve known before. How? According to the scientists and futurists featured here, all of these apparently isolated changes are part of a larger wave of systemic change that is now occurring with a magnitude and complexity greater than anything the human race has yet experienced. And that rate, some say, is accelerating exponentially—a concept that alone is overwhelming to comprehend. Indeed, the more we learned about change and the future, the more we found ourselves asking the question: Can our existing spiritual and ethical structures—both traditional and contemporary—equip us to handle the enormity, the speed, the complexity, and the overwhelming nature of the changes we’re undergoing? Changes that may shortly take us, as you will see in the interviews that follow, far beyond our current capacities of imagination.

As a first step toward finding the answers to these questions, we spoke with a number of scientists, evolutionary thinkers, and futurists, who each view the world of change from a slightly different perspective. From biologist Elisabet Sahtouris’s microscopic empires of warring bacteria to inventor Ray Kurzweil’s intravenous brain-enhancing nanobots; from futurist Jeremy Rifkin’s deathblow to the oil age to Barbara Marx Hubbard’s birth of a new consciousness, each contributor opens a unique window into the many dimensions of our changing life conditions. Whether the subject of discussion is as large as our universe or as small as a nanotube, whether it’s as tangible as petroleum or as ephemeral as consciousness—one thing you can count on is that it’s ALL changing. And just how much and how fast is something that all of us, like it or not, are about to find out.

Jeremy Rifkin is author of sixteen books on the impact of technological changes on the economy, the workforce, and society. He is an advisor to heads of state and government officials worldwide and speaks frequently before business, labor, and civic forums. Currently a fellow at the Wharton School of Business and the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, he spoke with What Is Enlightenment? from his office in Washington, DC.

The End of an Era with Jeremy Rifkin

WIE: The human species is experiencing unprecedented change at almost every level of its existence—technological, ecological, social, and political—and this is all happening on a global scale. From your perspective as a futurist and corporate consultant, can you describe what kinds of changes you’re seeing now and expect to see in the future?

JEREMY RIFKIN: During the twenty-first century, we are going to see the end of mass wage labor on this planet. Sophisticated new technologies—software technologies, computer technologies, robotic technologies, intelligent technologies—are already beginning to replace entire job categories. Within less than a decade, we’re going to produce goods and services we can’t even imagine yet, and many new professional skills will emerge, but these will not be mass labor jobs. We will see smaller and smaller elite workforces working side by side with increasingly intelligent technology. By the mid-decades of the twenty-first century, we’re going to be able to produce goods and services for the whole world with a fraction of the workforce we have now.

The key question this raises is, what will happen to millions of human beings when we no longer need them to produce basic goods and services? We’re already seeing that there is nowhere in the world where we are not facing long-term structural unemployment. So how do we redefine what a human being is in the twenty-first century? Whether consciously or unconsciously, we have become so accustomed to defining humans in terms of their productivity at the workplace that we scratch our head when we try to think: Is there something else human beings on earth can do? If you think about it, you start to see how narrowly constructed our consciousness is about ourselves.

The Age of Biology

Physics and chemistry dominated the first two industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and we’re now moving into the age of biology, which will be the foundation and the basic framework for the third industrial revolution of the twenty-first century. The age of biology, which is already under way, is going to raise unprecedented issues because we now have the ability to manipulate life at its component level: genes, proteins, cell lines, organs, tissues—even whole organisms. In addition to provoking serious public debate, the age of biology is going to raise the issue of how we define all of creation in a world where we can begin to reassemble it, manipulate it, redefine it, and organize it as a utility.

We’ll have to decide: Do we take a hard path or a soft path? Which means deciding: Will we use the new science to create a second genesis, to redefine and reconfigure millions of years of evolution, including our own, and, in a sense, play God? Or, will we use the new science to better understand the relationship between genes and environment, so that we can more fully—and more humbly, if you will—integrate ourselves into the first evolution on this planet? The soft path asks how we can better integrate our science and technology into working with, as opposed to against, millions of years of evolution and the ecosystems that support it. It represents a more elegant, more intellectually sophisticated, and much more scientifically advanced approach because it requires a deep understanding of framework, of context, of all the relationships and choreography that exist in nature. So, the age of biology is going to be critical for humanity. It’s going to force us to define, and even possibly redefine, what a human being is. We’ll have to carefully discern what our relationship is to our fellow species. What are our obligations to the planet, and how do we judge the intrinsic value, as opposed to the utility value, of life?

The New Hydrogen Regime

“What’s amazing about hydrogen is that when you use it to produce power, heat, and light, the only byproduct is pure water. You can drink it! Hydrogen produces no carbon dioxide at all. So if we were to move to this
“forever fuel,” it would potentially address all the major oil-related crises we now face: we could radically reduce global warming, the Middle East would become increasingly less important in the geopolitics of the world, and we could narrow the divide between the haves and have-nots—because once it’s harnessed, hydrogen’s available everywhere on the planet.”

Energy Is Power

Right now, we have three great crises facing the human family, and they’re all connected to oil. The first is global warming, the second is the increasing debt in the third world, and the third is the potential for more wars in the Middle East.

Global warming is probably the most impressive challenge faced by humanity. It represents the dark side of the Industrial Age; it’s the bill for two hundred years of burning fossil fuels. I think that if you were to measure human accomplishment on this planet in terms of sheer impact, you would have to say that global warming is the greatest single accomplishment of the human race, although it’s a negative one. Why? Because global warming has affected the entire biochemistry of the earth in less than one century. That’s very impressive—negative but impressive! Even if the temperature change will be in the lower range predicted by the studies (the higher range is a ten degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature; the lower range is three or four degrees), we’re still in trouble. These changes will force, in less than a century, a shift in climate that is equal to the change from the last ice age to today—and that took fifteen thousand years. Remember, half the planet was under ice fifteen thousand years ago. So we’re talking about changes of that magnitude in less than a century, and our ecosystems and human systems cannot accommodate that without some serious losses.

If you look at the situation in terms of economics, there are also indirect financial costs associated with global warming, which we tend not to factor in. When I consult with leaders in the reinsurance industry, they don’t know how to deal with it. The big question that comes up is: How do you insure against agricultural depletion, coastal flooding, wildfires, droughts, and severe weather patterns? The magnitude of these issues and the amounts of money involved become just enormous. Some companies have already begun to analyze the costs of all these problems, and it’s so much money that the total will eventually start to approach the actual value of our gross domestic product. (Gross Domestic Product is the total market value of all the goods and services produced within the borders of a nation during a specific period.)

Third World Debt

The second crisis we’re facing is third world debt. It’s easy for people in the West to forget that there’s a great divide between the haves and have-nots—and it’s getting worse and worse. Never before in history have so few enjoyed access to so much of the world’s resources and so many been denied. We don’t know of any proportional example in history—from the Paleolithic era to early modernity—where we’ve seen a divide of this magnitude in our human race. It’s truly unparalleled. Some of us are aware of this tremendous divide, but most of us don’t connect it with oil. When OPEC imposed the oil embargo back in the seventies, the price of oil shot up from $3 to $12 a barrel. And since then it’s never gone down. So, for thirty years, third world countries have been desperately borrowing money from the IMF, the World Bank, and other lending institutions to try to pay for oil they can’t afford in order to modernize their economies. So now, 83 cents out of every dollar borrowed in the third world is being used to pay off bad debts—and they’re not even getting the oil. These countries are now spending more money to pay back past loans than they are spending on basic human services. So eighty-nine countries out there are worse off than they were ten years ago. Keep in mind that as the price of oil continues to go up and as we reach global peak, the third world is going to be caught in a downward cycle of ever-deepening poverty and despair.

The Middle East

The third crisis we’re facing is connected to the increasingly volatile situation in the Middle East. If you take a step back, you can see that the modern age has been driven by the use of fossil fuels. Look at how we’ve been living for the past one hundred years and you’ll understand how critical oil and fossil fuels are to our very existence. Our foods are grown in petrochemical fertilizer, our clothes are made out of chemical synthetics, our plastics, our building materials, our heat, our light, our pharmaceuticals all come from oil. But we’re just beginning to see that we will have used up half of the world’s supply of cheap crude oil (this is called “global peak”) sometime between 2010 and 2035—and whichever date you believe, it’s still an incredibly short time from now. That’s the critical point though; that’s when the era is over. Because from that time forward, prices will never go down.

When we do reach peak, two-thirds of the remaining reserves of cheap oil will happen to be in the Middle East, which is the most troubled and politically volatile area of the world. If we think the Middle East is a trouble spot today, imagine what it will be like seven or fifteen years from now when that’s where all the remaining oil is. And not only that, but other nations, like China and India, are expected to need as much oil as the U.S. and the European nations within ten years from now; so everyone’s going to be fighting for that oil. It’s a dangerous, dangerous geo-political game being played out.

So if you add it all up—global warming, an increasing divide between the haves and the have-nots, more third world debt, and growing geopolitical and military pressures in the Middle East, compounded with the fact that global production of oil is likely to peak sometime within the next ten to thirty-five years—it means we’re at the end of an era. As we move toward this very dangerous endgame for the current energy regime, a new hydrogen energy regime is on the horizon. The key question is: How do we get from here to there in a way that will allow us to cross the divide and not collapse civilization? 

Elisabet Sahtouris, PhD, is an evolution biologist, futurist, author, and consultant on Living Systems Design. Dr. Sahtouris speaks and consults internationally, showing the relevance of biological systems to organizational design in businesses, government, and global trade. Her books include EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution, A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us, and Biology Revisioned, coauthored with Willis Harman.

The Wisdom of Living Systems with Elisabet Sahtouris

“The Globalization of humanity is a natural, biological, evolutionary process. Yet we face an enormous crisis because the most central and important aspect of globalization—its economy—is currently being organized in a manner that so gravely violates the fundamental principles by which healthy living systems are organized that it threatens the demise of our whole civilization.”