Requiem for the Age of Oil

There are a couple of things that have already started happening and changing all over the Muslim world that I think will continue to accelerate in the near future. One is what I call a requiem for the age of oil. Oil is dying, and the Obama administration is focusing on the development of new energy technologies. This will no doubt push oil-rich countries to look for other ways to enrich themselves. I’m seeing this trend in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and even Iraq. They’re starting to focus on developing people. The prince in Qatar, for example, has invited the best universities in the world to set up shop in that country. He’s offering grants to major Nobel Science Prize winners to come and work on research and innovation. This is a great shift, and the faster the United States develops new energy technology, the more we’ll allow these countries to emerge.

This is particularly important for Generation Y, which is the untapped gold, the unused resource in Middle Eastern and Muslim countries. In the Arab world, sixty percent of the population is under the age of twenty-five. They’re educated, intelligent, and innovative. These are the kids of Facebook, MySpace, and Google. But there are no jobs, no opportunities. They are globally connected, but they are in a place where there is no release for their energy. I know these kids. I work with them all over the Muslim world. Just as a quick example, a group of students at An-Najah University in the West Bank created a solar car from scratch, and both Palestinian and Israeli newspapers wrote about it. They were so proud of them. So these kids are ready to compete with the best and the brightest in the world.

Elza Maalouf is a native of Lebanon and the CEO of the Center for Human Emergence–Middle East.

The Rise of Conscious Capitalism

It’s already happened. We’ve had a total economic meltdown because we’ve taken unconscious capitalism—the worship of profits while ignoring the long-term costs of earning them—to its logical conclusion. Now if you look at the Fortune 500, at least fifty percent of the companies to one degree or another practice conscious capitalism, which responsibly embraces all of its stakeholders—investors, customers, communities, employees, and the environment. But our friends on Wall Street, especially in the financial institutions that brought the economy down, continue to cling to the traditional, outdated brand of capitalism that is unconscious of its own ramifications.

I think that in the next three years we are going to see a gradual sorting out of what happened and hopefully an acknowledgment that the cause of the collapse was the fact that we forsook any sort of long-term commitment in the pursuit of short-term profits. I’m not a socialist by any means. Conscious capitalism wants to make profits too. But conscious capitalists—including companies like Google, Apple, and Medtronic—embrace a more long-range commitment to success rather than the quarter-to-quarter mentality of Wall Street.

This new model of capitalism has been brewing for at least two decades, but within the next three years, I think we’re going to see a broader recognition that this holistic approach to business is what creates the most sustainable profits. Will everybody be convinced? No. But a critical mass of investors, consumers, and visionary companies will be. We may even see a new index, a new standard, a new kind of Dow or S&P that represents this values-driven commitment to long-term thinking. I think it’s going to transform our whole philosophy of business.

Patricia Aburdene is a business journalist, social forecaster, and author of Megatrends 2000 and Megatrends 2010: The Rise of Conscious Capitalism

The Nanotech Revolution

I think that the biggest shift will result from radical advances in information technology, particularly in the realms of energy and medicine. For example, we’re now using nanotechnology to build more efficient solar panels. Nanotech is basically information technology applied to matter and energy at the level of molecules in order to create new materials and devices. In a recent study that Google founder Larry Page and I did for the National Academy of Engineering, we found that in order to meet our global energy demand, we only have to capture one part in ten thousand of the 1017 watts that fall on the earth every day. Thanks to nanotech, solar panels are dropping dramatically in cost per watt. In fact, we’re doubling the amount of solar energy we produce every two years, which means we’re only eight doublings away from meeting all of our energy needs. Within three years, this exponential growth will make solar energy less expensive than fossil fuels in many parts of the world, and we will begin to be able to count on solar as our main source of energy in the future.

Medicine is now also being driven by information technologies. Drug development used to be called drug discovery—accidentally finding things through hit-or-miss. Now we can design drugs on computers and test them using biological simulators. Another example of this is gene therapy. Now that we’ve mapped the human genome, we have the means of changing our genes, not just in babies but in mature individuals. We’ll literally be able to turn off the genes that cause disease. In the next few years, the power of these technologies will multiply by a factor of ten, expanding the capacity of modern medicine exponentially.

Ray Kurzweil is an author, inventor, futurist, and the producer of the upcoming film The Singularity Is Near.