Bumps in the Road

When I was a teen, I had the usual dreams of teens about possible future occupations ranging from President to great cosmologist to historian to robber baron.  None of them included computer technology, the field in which I spent much of my life afterwards.  It had not been invented yet.  I tell my grandkids to look at fields like nanotechnology, or information ethics (I’ll wax loquacious on that some time), but I know that they, too, may find themselves in occupations not yet invented.  I try to get that across to teens and their parents I talk to, but I know it takes a lot of a lifetime to realize how drastically the world can change in a relatively short time.  That’s why I’m skeptical when anyone (myself included) starts cautioning about future “bumps in the road”, but a look ahead from time to time may still at least get us braced for the unexpected, which will always occur.

Bump One: a recent cautionary article in the Washington Post warns that European Banks, which provide much of the capital for emerging nation development programs, are severely undercapitalized and are close to retrenchments which could bring progress in nations around the world to a screeching halt.  That in turn could generate major civil unrest in countries around the world (think of the situations in Greece and the Middle East where governments are buying time to deal with the dissatisfactions of a savagely unhappy population.)  A restructuring of the global financial system is needed.  Can it be done?

Bump Two: China is facing both rapidly rising inflation and a housing bubble in an export-driven economy.  Americans tend to invest in stocks and bonds for retirement; in traditional Chinese investing, multiple houses are purchased instead, leading to an enormous pace of building that is providing far more housing than there are purchasers.  The high pace of inflation concurrently is driving up Chinese wages to a point close to where China will soon lose the competitive advantages of low wages which drive the exports on which the Chinese economy depends. A sharp decline in the Chinese export market could thus set off a chain reaction in their housing market that could wreck their economy for decades, and that in turn could have major impacts both on global politics and the world economy.  The solution of course is a major switch by China to domestic consumption, but can they do that in time?

Bump Three: the U.S. is achieving maturity in the development and use of robotic, on-demand manufacturing, just when curing the recession requires major increases in job creation.  Major manufacturers are beginning to gear up to achieve the promises of on-demand creation of products to any customer’s specification at low work-hour costs.  New jobs will be created by robotics, but they will be either the high tech sort required to support a vastly changed economy, or jobs in sectors of the economy that may not even exist yet.  Large numbers of semi-skilled workers face a lifetime of unemployment.  A vast retooling education load is about to be placed on an American educational system not yet equipped or funded to handle it. The political process, mired in 19^th century outlooks and procedures, is at an impasse that makes it virtually impossible to achieve the rapid changes that will be needed.  How rapidly can we change the ways we do business?

Bump Four:  Climate change is accelerating more each time a new report is issued, yet we remain incapable of either stopping it or living with it.  From drowning coastal cities to hurricane devastation year round everywhere to even, if there’s merit in tipping-point theory, the possibility of a rapidly approaching mini ice age, the potential hazards are everywhere while we sit on our hands.  How to get the coping process unstuck and in gear is possibly the major challenge of our age.

What all these “bumps”, and other as yet unrecognized ones, share is that they generate the need for all different kinds of people from differing political persuasions, interests, occupations, value systems and places to work together for their solution.  Evolutionary biologists claim that the major reason for humanity’s evolution into a globally dominant species is our ability to communicate with each other and to cooperate altruistically.  It’s time for us to prove it.