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.

Welcome to the Next Transformation

In about 1300, the West began its first great transformation. When it was complete by 1700, the church had been eclipsed as the dominant institution by the nation-state – kings had more power than popes and it was the individual who chose his or her religion. Starting with this great transformation, the West has gone through three great transformations. You are living through the very beginning of the fourth.

In succession, the past transformations have given the individual freedom of religion, the right to vote, and access to credit. In the process, the church, state, and bank have been transformed. And the West has overcome the limits of land, capital, and knowledge workers as well through a succession of economic revolutions we’ve come to know as the Commercial Revolution, Capitalism, and the Information Age.

The next great transformation, the fourth in the series, will transform the modern corporation as the past repetitions have transformed the church, state, and bank. It will result in the individual having unprecedented levels of control over how he works and on what he works. In the process, the West will overcome what has replaced land, capital, and knowledge workers as the new limit to progress, it will overcome the limit of entrepreneurship by turning a growing number of employees into entrepreneurs, changing our notion of a corporation and its employees.

Key to all of this is this notion. We are well aware that progress depends on technological inventions like the wheel, the compass, the steam engine, the car, and computer. We seem less aware of the fact that progress depends, too, on social inventions like the bank, accounting, legal contracts, schools, universities, nation-states, and the modern corporation.

The next great transformation will disrupt everything. It is hard to image a world in which a group who might have been expected to take a role as factory workers in the 19th century or as knowledge workers in the 20th century will, instead, take on the role of entrepreneurs. Imagine having even 10% of the population busily creating and recreating the organizations through which we conduct business, education, and governance.

This blog will tell the story of next great transformation, will predict the next 50 years using a pattern that began 700 years ago. Pull up a chair around my kitchen table and settle in. This is going to be a fascinating series of events to narrate.

Welcome to the next transformation.