The Great Questions of Tomorrow (TED Books) - Hardcover

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David J. Rothkopf is CEO and Editor of the FP Group, where he oversees all editorial, publishing, event, and other operations of the company, publishers of Foreign Policy Magazine. He is also the President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf, an international advisory company specializing in global political risk, energy, resource, technology, and emerging markets issues based in Washington, DC. He is the author of numerous internationally acclaimed books, including The Great Questions of Tomorrow, Power, Inc., Superclass, and Running the World. He writes a weekly column for Foreign Policy, a regular column for CNN, and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, CNN, Newsweek, Time, and many others.

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The Great Questions of Tomorrow

1

The Day Before the Renaissance

If we sense that such changes are coming, we have an urgent responsibility to ourselves, our families, and our communities to prepare for them. How do we begin to address these massive shifts in nearly every facet of our lives? How can we begin to prepare for changes that are of a scope and substance that may be greater than any faced for twenty generations, some that may be so great that they force us to reconsider our most fundamental ideas about ourselves and our world? And how can we shift our focus away from the old, comfortable formulations about how societies are organized and operate, what they look like, who should lead them, and what course corrections are essential?

Asking the right questions is where to begin. And, if we look to the history of epochal changes, we can see common characteristics among them that can help us understand what those questions are.

In Search of Perspective

It is an irony of life that, when our senses are most attuned to the events transpiring around us, real perspective is most elusive. Later, even as memory plays its tricks on us, nature affords us the compensatory blessing of context. While we may not remember every bit and piece of what happened, we gain a clearer perspective through the passage of time.

Imagine that you lived during the fourteenth century. It would be very hard to have much long-term perspective. During the outbreaks of the plague, survival was the only priority. And of course, as bad as it was, the plague was hardly the only concern. The Little Ice Age was beginning. The Great Schism was dividing the Catholic Church. Mongol rule was ending in the Middle East. The Hundred Years’ War had begun. Dynastic upheaval in China ushered in the beginning of the Ming Dynasty. The Scots were fighting for independence (some things never change). Much as it is today, Christian Europe and the forces of Islam were in conflict, resulting in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389.

With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that every one of the shocks that rocked the era led not just to substantial progress, but to reordering of the basic way in which society was viewed. In the wake of the human losses of the Black Plague, labor became more valued, and a middle class began to emerge. Trade flows, which may well have brought the plague to Europe from Asia, also led to the exchange of new ideas and materials, to economic and intellectual growth. The nature of work and how we thought of economics began to change.

A weakened Church began to be challenged by reformers. States began to emerge in forms like those we know today. Ultimately, within a few hundred years of the change, principalities gave way to nation-states, which in turn were locked in a power struggle with the Catholic Church. The nature of governance had also been transformed.

Universities and scholarship began to take root and spread in new ways. Education for commoners, beginning with literacy, began to spread. Combining the rise of the middle class and the needs of new governments to win support from other powerful members of society, the seeds of more democratic government were planted in places like Europe, themselves predicated on a changing view of the rights of individuals and of states, the role of law, and the nature of communities.

With new technologies of navigation and new networks of roads, not only did societies interact with each other differently, thus instigating changes in cultures, but so did the nature of warfare—navies grew more important, and gunpowder and other new technologies of fighting ushered in the end of the reign of knights and local warlords. With governments and political systems changing, substantial shifts in the nature of the diplomacy required to resolve such conflicts also took place.

In other words, while the average citizen of the fourteenth century saw struggle and chaos, changes were afoot that would redefine how people thought of themselves, who they were, what a community was, and of the nature of basic rights, of governance, of work and economics, of war and peace. To understand the future and how it would be different from the past, it would therefore have been essential to consider the questions associated with such changes. To ask in the context of the changing world—and to ask again, amid what was to follow—how does all this change how I view myself, my community, my rights, my government, my job, and the way the world works around me?

During another such time of upheaval, we too would benefit from considering similar questions because, once again, the coming changes will be profound.

Of course, asking the right questions, and getting the right answers, is easier said than done. We have loads of biases. We expect the world will confirm those biases, and we mishear and misread events around us as a result. We expect the future to be like the past. (After all, we live in a world in which 85 percent of the time the weather tomorrow is the same as the weather today.) We are also harried and so busy reacting to the demands of the moment, much like the average citizen of the fourteenth century dealing with war and plagues and climatic catastrophes, that pausing to get to the root questions often seems like an impossible luxury, and one we are ill-prepared for. This last point is also important. If we don’t understand the technologies or other forces at play in changing our world—be they the burgeoning sciences of the early Renaissance or the neural networks or cyberthreats of today—then how can we possibly understand what is to come?

Furthermore, if those who are supposed to lead us don’t understand the changes, they can’t ask the right questions either. What’s more, they typically have a vested interest in resisting the questions. The status quo got them where they are, and they have a strong interest in preserving it. For example, the predisposition of our political leaders to seek to capitalize on the fears of the moment to advance their self-interested desire to cling to power regularly leads us to keep our eyes on yesterday’s headlines rather than on the horizon. Fearmongering is not only exploitative—and, by the way, plays right into the hands of some, like terrorists, who seek to promote fear—it is also a potentially fatal distraction from the bigger risks associated with potential coming changes for which we are ill-prepared.

• • •

I know some of this from personal experience. In the late 1990s, I founded a company devoted to using the power of technology to help top policy makers and business leaders get the answers they needed. My proposition was that now, thanks to the Internet, we can use sophisticated tools (this was before Google) to find any answer you need. Seemed like a gold mine. It was not. Why? Because what we discovered was that the big problem in most organizations was not finding the answers, it was getting our would-be clients to figure out the right questions. I’ve spoken to many top intelligence officials who acknowledge that they have the same problem in the US government—vast apparatuses with huge resources devoted to gathering information, but real problems when it comes to arriving at the questions that might make those people and satellites and computers useful. One current top intelligence official said to me, “Asking the right question is the biggest challenge we face. People typically let the immediate past shape their...