Future Gazing
Imagine: All the glittering technology that surrounds us in these opening years of the 21st Century will, in a decade or two, be as old-fashioned to our kids as black and white television, typewriters and 1970s style Chevvys are to us.
Predictions are usually wrong. Their fatal flaw is that they are created in the present, which is a paradigm that is by definition, too primitive and ill-informed to fully comprehend the possibilities. (Think of a scientist in 1900 trying to comprehend commercial air travel, mass produced automobiles and the implications of that fellow Alexander Graham Bell’s newfangled invention, the telephone!)
Developments at extreme edges of science can be extrapolated, though, to give at least indications of what the next decade or two might hold. Here are a few things that could emerge in the next ten years, that would fundamentally impact the way that lawyers and many other professionals operate, if they did:
DIRECT DATA TRANSFER BETWEEN BRAIN AND MACHINE
Brain implants to directly transmit information between non-living computers and living human brains (raising the possibility of forced behaviour modification and other personally invasive practices.)
IMMENSE LONGEVITY
People that can afford the necessary enhancement medication routinely living to perhaps up to 150 years or more and remaining intellectually and physically capable of continuing to practice for several decades longer than today.
PRIVATE SECTOR SPACE EXPLORATION
Private sector space ventures that first rival and then surpass NASA, in industries such as tourism, mining and a host of other industries that will benefit from the intellectual property (IP) that is spawned by “off-earth” innovation.
CYBORGS
Development of cyborgs (part robot, part human) with skills and strength that far surpass humans, for specific tasks. Certainly, cyborgs might create the opportunity for ‘zero defect’ in a range of professional services, in that the 'human factor,’ quite literally, would be absent.
WEB 10.0
The internet morphing into a hypercollaborative, super-fast, self-organizing system spanning the globe and beyond, using intelligence far beyond the primitive logic characterizing the current world wide web. It may well develop its own “smart” thinking capabilities in which case we will have to rethink the notion of intelligence as being the product solely of human brains. This could have serious knock-on impacts for the notion of intellectual property ownership.
GLOBAL WARMING
Global warming will probably have raised sea levels by several feet, a decade from now, causing massive refugee problems in countries like Bangladesh and several maritime island nations. Wealthy parts of the world will be investing heavily in protecting assets that have become vulnerable to storm surges. South Africa and Australia’s wine industries may already have collapsed but Canada’s will be booming. What is the likelihood of entities that are harmed by the rising sea levels and climate shifts, seeking reparation from those that benefited from fossil fuels?
MEDIA CONVERGENCE
Media convergence (voice as in telephone plus picture as in video or TV plus knowledge as in data resources) is already far advanced and is likely to have transformed the way information is shared. Telephones, TVs and computers as stand-alone technologies will in all likelihood have completely disappeared.
PERSONAL PRIVACY CONCERNS
These could become a major issue as security cameras proliferate; media becomes two way interactive; RFID (radio frequency ID) or similar chips begin to be used to track people as well as goods and more and more personal data (right down to personal genomic DNA records) for personally invasive profiling and tracking. Opportunities for identity theft, online fraud and cyberterrorism will be greater and far more sophisticated than we can begin to imagine in our primitive circa-2007 paradigm.
CLEAN ENERGY
Technologies independent of fossil fuels will have begun to fundamentally replace those use them, a decade from now. Fuel demands will increase exponentially over the next decade or two as emerging economies begin to develop their industrial infrastructure. The key uncertainty is when scientists will discover the secret that makes hydrogen into a viable widespread option for propulsion and energy production. Cracking that will be as fundamental a scientific advance as the internal combustion engine was, more than a century ago.
GLOBAL MARKETS
Within a decade, a child in a rural village in Mozambique may well find herself with the same opportunity to be educated, as a child in Boston. More emerging economies will fully join the global market not only as consumers, but also as producers. The competition for talent will expand to a global level as skilled and competent professionals from previously excluded economies enter the global job market. Work will migrate to the people that can best do it, rather than vice versa. The firms that are most successful in the future will be those that are best at harnessing intellectual talent resources on a global level, rather than simply in one’s own backyard.
WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN?
Thinking about these trends is an essential part of long-range planning, which in turn is an essential component of strategy. At the most fundamental level, it gives the firm’s leadership a catalyst to think about how resilient their strategy is, to the range of possible foreseeable futures that might unfold. (I like to call this ‘dynamic resilience.’)
At a second level, it gives insight into new and emerging areas of service or practice that firms might be able to provide to clients, based on how these emerging futures might impact upon those clients. In some cases, this may point to fundamentally new areas of practice that may be required. Today, for instance, in the practice of law, these may be biotech issues around stem cell research. Tomorrow, it is not inconceivable that they might include issues of ethics surrounding cyborgs, or concepts of ownership of intellectual property that is not the product of an identifiable human mind, but the collective intelligence of a future world wide web that is owned by nobody.
At yet a third level, it suggests quite profound changes that may unfold in the nature of professions. Even in the world's economies and the philosophies that underpin them, too.
Not everything is about uncovering the future, though. Often, exercises like this bring things to the surface that a firm can do now that not only prepare it better for the future, but also exploit opportunities in the immediate present that would otherwise have remained undetected.
Hello Rob,
Read your Future Gazing "hot off the press" and it struck many chords, given my time in private legal practice in the UK and Europe, and also since. My random thoughts are too many to try and articulate now, but I just wanted to offer you and your readers a few reflections from this side of the pond, and also in the spirit of starting to make comments on others' hard work now that I have got my own Blog, Tim Travers Legal Reflections (http://blog.traversassociates.com), recently up and running.
1. Coincidentally today, my subscription to FT.com included in my daily Media and Internet email distribution a topical article called 'Novel ideas in the case for legal change' (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/d2d9ebc6-b586-11db-a5a5-0000779e2340,_i_nbePage=cbad994c-3017-11da-ba9f-00000e2511c8.html), in which the US's very own Ernie The Attorney is quoted. The FT says that it is going to be expanding its Innovative Lawyers report, which it did last year. Watch this space.
2. How do busy lawyers find the time to think ahead even one year, let alone ten or more as you have? I have often wondered how many law firms have an active 'R&D' unit, which constantly thinks how things might be done differently in the future. Is such a concept indeed even compatible with the traditional style of law practice, regardless of size of firm, or only the preserve of a special few? You may have a view or even the odd case study to share.
3. Generational differences, plus the rising economic power of many countries (India, which has been all over the UK legal press in recent months, China, and also the expansion in number of European countries (with the migration within Europe of raw and cheaper intellectual human capital) all spring readily to mind), suggests firms need an active 'cell' of partners and employees within their firms charged with the task of radical and innovative thinking. Such a cell would span the spectrum of ages, but be small and agile enough, and of sufficiently creative tendencies, to spark the creation of new knowledge and new paths of doing business, and to have sufficient influence with the management of the day to experiment within broad parameters of scope and authority.
4. In concluding, I pose this question. Are HR departments (at the behest of the senior and managing partners) actively seeking to identify the set of human characteristics and skills that might be combined together to create such a unit, which might, just might, really deliver in spades for the firm? I am guessing the annual partners' weekend is neither the time nor the place to carry out such important work, though it would be the place to hear from the cell itself.
Tim Travers
Thanks, Tim,
This does all sound a bit far fetched, of course. One needs to remember Bill Gates' recent comment that people tend to completely overestimate what can be achieved in two years, and underestimate what can be achieved in ten, though. How much of what we see today, is far beyond what we might have even guessed back in 1997?