Predicting a Massive Wave of Social Obsolescence and Innovation

If I were to tell you that within 50 years, your car, your stereo, and your computer will all be obsolete, you would likely yawn. You expect such technology to radically change. Your reaction to my next prediction might be less obvious. Within 50 years, your schools, your corporation, and your government will all be obsolete. The social technology will radically change.

I can safely predict a few things. One is that the rate of technological change will continue to accelerate. A big factor in the rate of innovation is information. Access to, and quantity of, information are both growing rapidly. The result? Accelerating levels of innovation that change technology.

The impact of technology is never benign. Life expectancy will go up, which seems wonderful. But if this happens while birth rates are dropping, the ratio of working population to retired population is likely to drop precipitously. Technology is disruptive.

Technology changes impact social institutions. The Gutenberg Press made it possible for households to afford a copy of the Bible. (During medieval times, one man sold his house to buy a Bible.) This is fascinating technology but its real impact was social – one could argue that the distribution of Bibles triggered the distribution of power and helped to fuel the Protestant Revolution. This is a clear case of technological innovation triggering social innovation. It is by no means the only such case.

Technological inventions will radically change in the next fifty years. The change of social inventions will be even more remarkable. Corporations, government, and schools will perhaps be changed the most.
Will the corporation as it is now is managed be able to keep pace with technology and market changes? Is the way that employees are now managed likely to increase productivity enough to offset the precipitous drop in the ratio of working population to retired population?

Will the nation-state as it is now governed be able to achieve important like sustaining peace and reducing green house gases? It is hard to imagine that as more countries compete economically with India and China that they’ll make more progress in reducing greenhouse gases. It is hard to imagine that as more countries gain the technology of nuclear weaponry that they will all use it as a war prophylactic rather than an actual weapon.

Do we think that our current education system - geared as it is towards realizing the potential of maybe 5% of the population - is going to survive in a world where careers are being redefined as quickly as products are today?

The rate of technological change will continue, but it will seem almost incidental to a larger work. By 2050, the world's social institutions will have been radically reconfigured and with it the very way we think about society and self. We will look back on the half century leading up to this time as a period of the most significant disruption of social systems ever seen.

We’re going to see a transformation of our very notions of institution, organization, and roles. It will seem as though the time leading up to the 21st century was an ice age, a time when social roles and institutions were basically frozen. And by 2050, what was once frozen will be in flow.