Listen to the interview with Joel Garreau.

We live in one of the most tumultuous and exciting times in human history. With our cultural, political, economic, and spiritual systems colliding, breaking down, and transforming in the mixing bowl of the twenty-first century, it is very difficult to predict what the world or our lives might look like even a few years from now. For our June–August 2009 issue of EnlightenNext magazine, we decided to peer into the crystal ball and find out what the future—unpredictable as it may be—might have in store for us.

In the following interview, associate editor Joel Pitney speaks with Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau, author of the bestselling book Radical Evolution, about some of the new technologies that he says could not only help us tackle some of our most difficult challenges but may also dramatically alter what it means to be human. Drawing on a wealth of research into emerging trends across several industries, Garreau envisions a future where memory pills greatly enhance our learning capacities, nanotechnology makes solar our most efficient source of energy, and bioengineered bacteria cleanse the atmosphere of excess CO2. But Garreau is not a naïve techno-optimist. He is a careful student of history who understands the dynamic interplay between crisis and adaptive response that has characterized the evolution of human society from the beginning. Sticking only to the facts, he provides a fascinating vision of what our world might look like in the not-too-distant future.

EnlightenNext: What do you think is the most significant event or shift that’s going to happen in the next three years?

Joel Garreau: Well, the first thing I need to make clear is that I don’t make predictions. I don’t have a crystal ball and I don’t know anybody who does. So, I am very dubious about anybody who makes predictions. What I do look at are scenarios, which are rigorous, logical possibilities regarding the future.

One credible scenario is that our economic bad times will eventually end. I’m not predicting when that will be, but when it happens, I think that there is likely be an explosive release in demand for innovative technologies that were developed during the bad times. For example, look at what happened in the late forties and early fifties. There was an explosive demand for televisions, automobiles, and mass-produced suburban housing. All of those technologies were developed in the thirties and the forties. They were not brand new, but there was just no money. So when people finally did have two nickels to rub together, there were all of these wonderful things, these miracles that they could afford, and it changed America. Another example is the explosion of sex, drugs, and rock and roll in the sixties. That was also a result of pent-up demand for new technologies. Sex was about birth control, drugs were about synthetic psychedelics, and rock and roll was all about the transistor. We just could not have had a generation like we saw in the sixties prior to that, because we didn’t have the technology.

All of these technologies were developed during the bad times and then they suddenly experienced an explosion in demand when the bad times ended. So, my question now is, what technologies do we have in the pipeline today that are likely to have major impact on culture, values, and society in the future? What might we see an explosive demand in when this economic slump is finally over?

EN: Do you have any examples?

JG: There are many. One example is the work of Craig Venter, who is one of the guys credited with sequencing the human genome. He’s now working in the area of synthetic biology to literally bioengineer custom-order life forms. He said that by the end of this year, he’s going to have a creature that will eat carbon dioxide and poop gasoline.

EN: Wow!

JG: Yeah. And this is all near-term stuff. I’m not talking science fiction here! Another new innovation is what they’re calling nanosolar. Basically, nanotech is being used to develop flexible plastic sheets covered in extremely small circuits that generate electricity. These sheets can be used by anybody. They can be put on your car or on the roof of your house. What this means is that now everyone who consumes electricity can also be a producer. This will presumably hit the electrical grid with a bigger bang than the internet did when it hit the telephone industry.

EN: That’s incredible.

JG: Yes. And these technologies could have a big impact on society. Take for example the application of information technology to the field of medicine. One innovation coming online very soon is what is called a microfluidic array, or a “lab on a chip.” These are computer chips that have embedded within them examples of proteins or RNA or DNA that are commonly produced by the body when it is contaminated with various diseases. When you put some of your body fluids, like blood or spit, into this array, it searches for examples of whatever it’s looking for and makes an on-the-spot diagnosis. What this means practically is that in the fairly near future we’ll be able to produce home cancer tests that will be as cheap and accurate as home pregnancy tests.

The significance of this is that our entire health industry right now is based on the notion that we wait to act until we see symptoms. By that time, of course, disease is so far along that it requires heroic measures to try to deal with it. If we could get early warnings—extremely early warnings—for any sort of disease, like the ones generated by these microfluidic arrays, it will fundamentally change the model. All of a sudden we can imagine a circumstance in which the price of healthcare drops dramatically, just like the way the price of information technology has been dropping dramatically for the last forty years. The big question then is, if we can intercept disease vectors before they get symptomatic, what do we need hospitals for? Is there even a place in the future for hospitals, which treat mostly people who are already in the late stages of illness?

EN: In your book you speak a lot about the accelerating rate of change, suggesting that technology is evolving exponentially, not linearly. For example, the same amount of technological development that occurred over the past fifty years will take only twenty-five years in the future. What kind of impact do you think this rapid change will have on society?

JG: What you’re talking about is Moore’s Law, which is the core faith of the entire global information technology industry. The way it is frequently stated is that the amount of computer firepower that you can buy for a dollar will double every eighteen months for as far as the eye can see. So what that means is that if you go out and buy a two-thousand-dollar computer today, in ten years that same amount of firepower will be available for thirty-one dollars and twenty five cents . . . and you’ll be able to get it free with a subscription to Newsweek.

So the impact on society, I think, is enormous. For example, a single Apple iPhone today has more computer firepower than did the entire North American Air Defense Command back in 1965 when Gordon Moore first prophesied that these doublings would continue.

EN: So that means a thirteen-year-old girl on her iPhone at the mall has more power than—

JG: ­—the entire North American Defense Command in 1965. And we’ve had thirty-two doublings since 1959, when the first computer chip was developed. We’ve never seen anything like that before in human history. If you add it up, that’s an increase of over one billion times, all within the lifetime of many of your readers! The only change that comes remotely close to that was the railroad in the 1800s. The number of railroad miles doubled fourteen and a half times from the 1840s to the 1910s and that changed everything. It changed cities; it changed families; it changed businesses; it changed this country. And yet that was only fourteen and a half doublings. In the past fifty years, we’ve had thirty-two, and there’s every reason to think that they’re going to continue along at a steady clip.

Now, nobody really cares how fast a computer works in the abstract. The significance of this, however, is that faster chips will open up vistas that we’ve never had available to us before. For example, sequencing the human genome was seen as an impossible task when it was first proposed in 1985. People thought it would take decades and cost trillions of dollars. Well of course, it succeeded by the year 2000 for a tiny fraction of the estimated price. What people hadn’t thought about was that the power of computers was going to be accelerated on a curve, on an exponential curve, and it was going to get cheaper and cheaper. We see the same thing with robotics and with nanotechnology—things that were just out of the question ten or twenty years ago are now routine.