Author: Juan Enriquez

Publisher: Three Rivers Press; Reprint edition

Pub. in: October, 2005

ISBN: 1400047749

Pages: 272

Measurements: 9.1 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches

Origin of product: USA

Order code: BA00027

Other information:  

Amazon.com's Best of 2001

The presentation is unique, the content loops around on itself, and the wide range of font styles and sizes occasionally distract, but there is probably no better way to look at the future than Enriquez's unapologetic, head-on style. The future is not making any excuses for itself: it is roaring into town and anyone (be it individual, group, company, or nation) who fails to accept that fact is going to find themselves marginalized, irrelevant, and poor. Enriquez narrows the future down to two fundamental principles: information systems and genomics. Whoever masters these two concepts will be able to handle the future just fine; whoever ignores these will be left behind, without pity.

A concept that has already been hinted at in Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and in Matathia & Salzman's Next is the notion of the "Hockey Stick Chart." To simplify this principle: in trending almost any human scientific endeavor, be it achievements in velocity, communications, memory storage, processing power, or genetics, the trends tend to creep up slowly the first few thousand years, start to climb in the last hundred, then shoot up dramatically in the last ten, in many cases increasing geometrically every 18 months or so. The resulting graphic resembles a hockey stick in that it crawls along at a reasonably predictable angle (the handle) and then takes a near-vertical leap, in some cases straight up off the page (the blade).

Enriquez explores what he calls the "390 to 1" gap between rich countries and poor countries. Part of this ratio stems from some countries' refusal to accept the world as having shifted to a knowledge-based economy -what one does with information and how it is distributed. Countries that doggedly persist on sticking with the industrial manufacturing model may well be producing goods at record levels but are nonetheless poorer than they were ten years ago. Enriquez points to Finland, Taiwan, and Singapore as particularly savvy examples of national economies that are actively embracing the so-called "Information Age" and stand to become extremely prosperous in the next decade; he conversely points to repressive governments like Burma (where state permission is required to own or access an Internet-connected computer) as a superlative example of poverty and near-irrelevance to the world. The future can indeed be pretty intimidating to the keepers of the status quo...

Enriquez speculates as to whether future generations might be taught the extreme historical importance of the date February 12, 2001. This is the date that the Celera corporation (with the use of what was at the time the single most powerful computer on earth -since supplanted) not only announced that it had completed mapping the entire human genome, but also posted the entirety of its findings on the Internet. From that date, anyone on the planet with a computer and a web connection could view a comprehensive map of the human genome and make use of it for themselves. (The American government agency known as the National Institute of Health [NIH] tried to insist that it had done likewise, and, worried about the competition, made a pre-emptive announcement that it had in fact mapped the human genome as early as August 2000. This wasn't even close to true, but one can hardly blame government -as a rule it can't tolerate the idea that privately-funded corporations can do things faster and more efficiently. What was really at stake was the notion of control -the Federal government would have retained control over the results and would pick and choose which findings would be made known and to whom. To this day the official government stance is that it was in fact a "tie" between NIH and Celera. And the Feds aren't the sole offenders -there were a lot of organizations racing to beat Celera to this particular finish line; at least one company tried to file suit in the International Criminal Court to block Celera from publishing its findings.)

Think on that: a map of the human genome, freely available to any and all who wish to make use of it. From February 12, 2001 onward, it was now theoretically possible to engineer (or reverse-engineer) human life -to perform selective enhancements or selective deletions of specific characteristics. Medicine could conceivably shift from the current "one size fits all" preventative approach to more of a custom-tailored individual regimen--medicines uniquely targeted to act upon a specific individual. The sheer scope of this single breakthrough has yet to be measured, but one early indicator might lie in the number of genetic patents currently being applied for. In 1998 it was a total of 300, in 1999 it was 340, in 2000 it was 381. In 2001 it jumped to 8,070 - another hockey stick for the record-keepers.

All of this reinforces Enriquez's central point: those who understand and make use of the twin languages of binary and genomics are equipped to handle the future. Those that are not (be they governments or corporations), will fade into irrelevance. As a species we are very much on a new kind of threshold, one whose consequences have not yet been adequately thought through. Some reactionary elements (like the current administration) are calling for selective moratoriums on this kind of research, some elements are even calling for it to be halted outright. There is, however, no going back -the twin discoveries of genomics and instantaneous global communication have guaranteed that this is one genie that will never be stuffed back into its bottle. "Let politicians and religious leaders rant and rave all they want," opines Enriquez. "But it's coming, and those who would call for a return to some past standard are going to find themselves trampled." Perhaps, he adds, one day they'll leave behind some impressive-looking ruins for the archeologists to pore over.

Enriquez then takes the reader further into these new discoveries and starts postulating nanotechnology (molecular computers) and the whole notion of organically-designed computers (the rationale being that, since binary code technology was necessary for the human race to decisively chart their own genetic code, that there must logically be a binary code equivalent to the language of genomics -and if that is the case, the genes should certainly be able to write and design their own programs. Imagine computers able to grow their own connections, developing antibodies to fix their own routing and processing errors). Long the provenance of science-fiction writers, the line between organic and artificial intelligence has never been more blurred than today. Enriquez states quite definitively that there will be a day when that line is obliterated completely.

Enriquez makes no apologies for the odd font sizes or scattered appearance of the text (although he does make a concession to tradition in his endnotes); one gets the sense that he is continually trying to assert his "this is the way it's going to be, get used to it" argument even in the way he arranges the paragraphs across the page (even, on one occasion, in the shape of a hockey stick). (From quoting Peter Vinton JR., USA)

Target readers: General readers

Better with Business @ The Speed of Thought: Succeeding in Digital Economy :

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