It’s a funny thing about the future. As much as we’d like to think otherwise, changing the future is hard, and changing the past is even harder.

Yet we can predict it, and as time moves forward and the future gets closer, our predictions and visions of the future become framed by reality, and we become more realistic about the impact we’ve had.

That’s why I’ve always been mesmerized by past predictions, including ones that don’t even come close. Hindsight is 20-20, but future predictions are always challenging.

Predicting the Distant Future

In 1930, F.E. Smith, a British politician and contemporary of Winston Churchill, was bold enough to publicly describe his vision of the world and mankind 100 years into the future. In some ways his thoughts about 2030 appear to be on the right track – for example, regarding the prevalence of synthetic meat. In others he was farther off, saying, for example, that future wars would be fought primarily by unmanned tanks and that life expectancy would be increased to an average of 150 years.

Hmmm, 2030 is still not here so maybe he was closer to reality than we originally thought.

This points out the challenges futurists face as well as our dueling approach to futurism. Is the future an extrapolation of current trends, as evidenced by Smith’s miscalculations, or will our future be fortunate enough to benefit from technology breakthroughs and entirely new paradigms? In other words, are we just going to get better at the things we already do, or are we going to produce entirely new and better things?

“Improving” our Future

Our future will be a reflection of both:

• The continuation of current trends
• A number of sea changes that will fundamentally change our world and our lives

Personally, I tend to focus on the latter, where we step out of our comfort zones to imagine dramatic breakthroughs that are, by their nature, far more difficult to predict.

However, we can’t bank on breakthroughs to magically solve our problems. We simply can’t dream our challenges away.

Yes, we all want to make a difference but with a wide mixture of talents, desires, and motivations that we bring to the table, we find ourselves needing a way to set priorities and focus our energies.

That’s precisely the reason the Millennium Project was formed.

Futurism’s Role in Problem-Solving

The Millennium Project was cofounded by Jerome Glenn and Elizabeth Florescu in 1996 by tapping into the minds of experts from around the world. By last count, the number of experts involved has increased to over 4,000. Their goal was to put us on the path towards a better future.

Through a series of ongoing surveys and discussions, the group settled on 15 global challenges that were clearly evident but not being properly addressed.

1. World population is growing; food, water, education, housing, and medical care must grow rapidly to keep up.
2. Fresh water is becoming scarce in localized areas of the world.
3. The gap in living standards between the rich and poor promises to become more extreme and divisive.
4. The threat of new and re-emerging diseases and immune micro organisms is growing.
5. Capacity to decide is diminishing (as issues become more global and
   complex under conditions of increasing uncertainty and risk).
6. Terrorism is increasingly destructive, proliferating, and difficult to prevent.
7. Population growth and economic growth are interacting adversely with
   environmental quality and natural resources.
8. The status of women is changing.
9. Religious, ethnic, and racial conflicts are increasingly severe.
10. Information technology offers both promise and peril.
11. Organized crime groups are becoming sophisticated global enterprises.
12. Economic growth is bringing both promising and threatening consequences.
13. Nuclear power plants around the world are aging.
14. The HIV epidemic will continue to spread.
15. Work, unemployment, leisure, and underemployment are changing.

Understanding the World in 1996

What was it like living in 1996, and why did these issues rise to top of mind for these critical thinkers?

To begin with, the Internet was just getting started, with only 100,000 crude websites in existence compared to well over a billion today. Here’s a few other notable things that happened that year:

• 45 million people are actively using the Internet, 30 million of which live in North America.
• World population reaches 4.4 billion and is growing rapidly.
• EBay became one of the early dot com success stories, as it launches its online auction and shopping website.
• An outbreak of “mad cow” had the world on edge.
• The Summer Olympics took place in Atlanta, Georgia.
• Fox News Channel makes its debut.
• Bill Clinton defeated Bob Dole to win reelection as US President.
• Pokemon makes its first appearance and becomes an instant hit.
• Amazon launched two years earlier in 1994.
• Mark Zuckerberg was 8 years old.
• Google wouldn’t be launched until 1998.
• Apple announced that it would be acquiring NeXT, and that Steve Jobs would be returning to the company.

As we begin to get a sense of life in 1996, we can begin to understand why these became the top issues of the day.

We can also understand why a list like this needs constant updating.

The 15 Global Challenges of 2020

Over the past 25 years, we’ve grown far more sophisticated in our thinking. The growing presence of the Internet has increased our awareness of the world around us, and the Millennium Project’s list of today’s 15 Global Challenges has morphed into the following questions.

1. How can sustainable development be achieved for all while addressing global climate change?
2. How can everyone have sufficient clean water without conflict?
3. How can population growth and resources be brought into balance?
4. How can genuine democracy emerge from authoritarian regimes?
5. How can decision-making be enhanced by integrating improved global foresight during unprecedented accelerating change?
6. How can the global convergence of information and communications technologies work for everyone?
7. How can ethical market economies be encouraged to help reduce the gap between rich and poor?
8. How can the threat of new and reemerging diseases and immune micro-organisms be reduced?
9. How can education make humanity more intelligent, knowledgeable, and wise enough to address its global challenges?
10. How can shared values and new security strategies reduce ethnic conflicts, terrorism, and the use of weapons of mass destruction?
11. How can the changing status of women help improve the human condition?
12. How can transnational organized crime networks be stopped from becoming more powerful and sophisticated global enterprises?
13. How can growing energy demands be met safely and efficiently?
14. How can scientific and technological breakthroughs be accelerated to improve the human condition?
15. How can ethical considerations become more routinely incorporated into global decisions?

Keep in mind, each of the Global Challenges are transnational in nature and will require a trans institutional solution. Because of this, they cannot be addressed by a single government, or a single institution acting on its own.

Each of the Global Challenges will require a group effort, formed around collaborative actions between governments, international organizations, corporations, universities, NGOs, and creative individuals.

Setting Priorities

We all want a “better future” than the one we’re currently living through. So how do we get there?

Every time the Millennium Project Team publishes their “State of the Future” report, it serves as an overview of our present global situation and helps establish priorities.

It gives us something to focus our attention on. It gives us a reason to form relationships, join forces and combine efforts because these are massive huge problems requiring massive huge solutions.

For this reason, we need to roll up our sleeves and do the hard work needed to change the trajectory of these important worldwide challenges.

\When we think about the years ahead, there’s the future and then there’s the future future. Let’s talk about the immediate future first.

Recalibration is the Word

2021 will be a year of recalibration. As we’re gradually able to put the worst elements of 2020 behind us, it’s going to become clearer to all of us how far we’ve strayed from our habits, dependencies, and routines of the past, and not just in our daily tasks but in our entire way of thinking.

In just one year, our idea of “normal” has been run through a wood chipper and is unrecognizable in so many areas: our health, our government, our professional lives, our activities, our families, and our priorities.

As we move past the 2020 crisis mentality, 2021 will be a year of adjusting the dials, flipping the switches, and recalibrating our lives. But it’s not something we can simply press a button and regain our sense of normalcy. The first order of business will be to break our reactive habits that have built up over the past 10 months.

Covid is forcing us to change; so drifting back into our previous, comfortable state of normal will not be possible. We’ll often refer back to the “good old days” of 2019, 2015, or whatever year in the past we felt was most ideal, but that past was never as good as we recall, and we also have the opportunity to redirect ourselves, along with the rest of humanity, towards a far better future.

Choosing a Future Direction

In many areas, though, 2021 will be an opportunity to “futurize” our way towards new and improved ways of doing business, because we are wiser and better for having endured the shared crises of this past year. COVID and other events made 2020 a clear demarcation point. We were laid bare and personally vulnerable. In that state, it somehow feels okay to question our assumptions, experiment, try new things, and raise the bar on everything we think is ordinary.

The Future Future

Even our definition of the “future” will change in 2021. As our year progressed, fewer and fewer people were able to look past the immediate post-COVID future. “I can’t wait till we’re back to normal,” was a phrase I heard again and again. But as time in 2021 marches on, even those of us working as professional futurists will be working to recalibrate our collective perspectives on longer-term thinking. The rate of change, the speed with which we measure the number of moving parts currently in motion, has shifted into another gear. In these situations, changes that were already underway have been turbocharged due to 2020 events. In other cases, entirely new forms of change had their genesis in the chaos of 2020. Let’s look at some examples.

Recalibrations set to accelerate in 2021

One of the most obvious recalibrations to date has been the office workplace. Work-from-home was not unheard of before 2020, but it was a relatively big deal for a company to give certain teams the opportunity to work from home 1-2 days a week. Now companies like MasterCard, Intuit, Shopify, Siemens, and others seem committed to a predominantly work-from-home arrangement for a majority of their people. This recalibration will continue long into the future.

Along with this, our priorities change. Stemming from the work-from-home transition, we’re seeing a shift in personal priorities. Lives won’t be organized around work – it will be quite the opposite with work taking a second seat to personal commitments and pleasure. As this happens, people begin to realize they are more than just the sum total of their job, position, and title. Over time, this will lead to a deeper sense of purpose in other areas.

From a management standpoint, companies are now focused on outcomes. By focusing on outcomes, employers help people make time count, instead of simply counting time. That type of trust and empowerment actually makes staffers far more productive.

Also on the workplace front, we’ll see less corporate travel. We’ve learned we can be efficient and effective with virtual meetings. Even if employees go back to the office, they’ll continue to connect with out-of-town clients and customers virtually rather than face-to-face.

However, conferences and off-site retreats, for the most part, will resume and take place in person because none of us ever got used to day-long virtual sessions or online happy hours this year. The overall decline in business travel will be a long-term recalibration, much to the chagrin of the airline and hospitality industries.

Last, consider the recent, rapid decline of the oil and gas industry due to dramatic worldwide declines in demand. Yes, we were already moving steadily toward battery-powered cars and alternative energy sources, but this trend has significantly accelerated due to the cascading events of 2020. As a result, the worldwide economic collapse triggered global oil and gas industry retrenchments. As an industry, it clearly sees the handwriting on the wall with the end date of its energy reign looming in the distance. This recalibration will continue over the coming years.

Finally, we’ll put a greater emphasis on health and wellness, both from a personal and employer perspective. Flu and cold season will now be flu, cold, and COVID season as new variants of these viruses appear and reappear every year. Masks will become a fashion industry standard, and far more common during the Fall and Winter months. Family leave policies will be more liberal and generous, especially if companies want to keep mothers in their workforce. This will be a long-term recalibration.

Let’s Get on With It

So yes, let’s all get on with life as soon as we can in 2021, not fixated on going back to the way we were, but looking to the future with a clean slate and a desire to be and do things better. And those of us working as futurists can once again refocus on the future future and emerging technology trends like AI, robots, and flying drones!

Here’s to a successful and healthy year ahead!

How do we build a more valuable human?

That’s essentially what education is all about. Each of us has only one body and one mind, and whatever we do to increase our skills and capabilities will make each of us more valuable on the world stage.

So how do we calculate the value of someone’s life?

For some of us this is a very disconcerting question because it attempts to put a monetary value on a person, something we prefer to value in far different ways.

But that is exactly what governments and businesses find themselves doing on a daily basis. Every time an insurance company calculates their premiums, militaries plan their budget, or juries calculate an award in a product liability case, the value of human life is a central part of their decisions.

In fact, we make value judgments about people all the time. On a subconscious level we are placing an emotional value on every personal decision, object, place, or thing. The little voice in our head is constantly saying things like:

• This style of clothing will make me look more important, and therefore more valuable
• If I take this training, my boss will find me to be more useful and my salary will go up
• When the mayor died, his estate was worth millions. He must have been a very important person
• As a single mother raising 7 children, she left a tremendous legacy

Much like adding an adjustment for inflation, cost of living increase, or adding a premium for brand name anything, we are constantly readjusting the value filters in our minds.

To some, the difference in value between a homeless person in Africa and the CEO of a major corporation may be well over $1 billion. To others, these are people that should be considered equal in value.

Seven global shifts are currently underway causing the underlying value of human life to move up the exponential growth curve, and along with it, a massive reassessment of corporate decision-making is about to begin.

Past Human Life Calculations

To set the stage, in 1977 there was a televised debate about the value of human life between the late Nobel Economist Milton Friedman and an aspiring young filmmaker Michael Moore.

At the time, Ford motor company was dealing with a series of well publicized car accidents where a ford Pinto was hit from behind, causing the gas tank to explode, resulting in the death of the people inside the car.

In this exchange Moore objects to a decision that was made by Ford Motor Company in the 1970s, based on a typical cost-benefits analysis, to not spend an additional $13 per car to change the design of the Ford Pinto gas tank in a way that would reduce the likelihood of gas-tank explosions.

Friedman contended that Moore’s complaint merely was over the low value of $200,000 per life lost, not over the principle that the value of human life has a finite upper limit. Moore seemed to agree with that principle, but he objected to the idea that some executive at Ford could casually decide the fate of Pinto buyers, and that the value of avoiding a horrible death or injury from a burning Pinto was as low as the company had assumed in its formal risk analysis.

Moore assumed that most Pinto owners would have gladly paid the extra $13 to fix the gas-tank problem. But business decisions like this are far more complicated than that with literally thousands of tradeoff decisions like this being made on the design of every vehicle, where 100% safety can never be guaranteed, and cost savings is always a significant factor.

However, a cost-benefits analysis like this would have looked dramatically different if the value of a human life were to shift from $200,000 to as high as $2 billion sometime in the future.

If you’re wondering how much your life is worth today, you’re not alone. We now have the ability to quantify the value of human life with far greater accuracy.

For this reason I’d like to draw your attention to seven factors that will drive “value-of-life” calculations like this through the roof in the future. Let’s start with declining birth rates.

Seven Global Shifts

1. Declining Birth Rates

In his August 12th appearance at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in
Shanghai, Elon Musk emphatically stated, “I think the biggest problem the world will face over the next 20 years is population collapse!” And he emphasized the word “collapse!”

At today’s birth rates, over 20 countries will lose half their population by 2100. This includes Korea, Italy, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Thailand, and several more. China’s population will fall from 1.4 billion people today to 730 million in 80 years.

As birth rates decline, each child becomes more precious, and the value of each life rises.

It is the children and grandchildren of today’s young people that will determine the fate of our world, and those kids are being born primarily in Africa and parts of Asia. Pay close attention to these six countries: Nigeria, Congo, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Angola, and Pakistan. The future of our planet is happening inside these countries.

While fertility rates around the world are plummeting, over half of all the new babies born in the world are being born in these countries.

According to Pew Research, these six countries are projected to account for over half of the world’s population growth through the end of this century.

At the same time, very little money is being invested in educating this future half of the planet. According to the UN, roughly 69 million new teachers are needed.

In Africa, where they have the fastest growing school-age population, over 20% of all children do not attend any school whatsoever.

It’s important to understand that as humans we have a mandate to pass our learning from one generation to the next. But very little of this learning is currently reaching remote regions of the world.

For this reason we are on the verge of an education explosion unlike anything we’ve ever imagined!

2. Improving Global Connectedness

Much of our value to society is being formed around relationships.

The only way the human race will survive is by people forming relationships and having children. Yet there are powerfully few schools that do a good job preparing students even though there have been countless books written on this topic.

In the 1990s, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar claimed that the number of people you can manage strong relationships with was around 150. This became known as the Dunbar Number. However, social media has changed his entire theory.

Social media relationships, something that never even existed 20 years ago, now consumes the vast majority of our relationship-building time. And our expectations surrounding a “good” relationship has vastly changed over the past two decades.

Our ability to connect digitally has done more than just change how we find the perfect romance, it’s changed how we network, form business deals, and sell a product. Keep in mind, it wasn’t all that long ago when most relationships began with a smile and a handshake, rather than a click or a swipe.

With each new connection, the value of our influence along with our value as an individual grows along a similar exponential growth curve.

3. Improving Our Base of Skills

A skilled laborer is more valuable than an unskilled one, and a multi-skilled individual is even more treasured.

Over time, our ability to accurately assess macro and micro skills will add to the growing body of evidence that the value of human life is indeed snowballing.

Counter to fatalist thinking that automation will cause large numbers of people to be unemployed, automation is simply readjusting our capabilities. By 2030, with the help of automation, the average person will be able to accomplish exponentially more in their lifetime than their counterpart today.

4. Increasing Life Expectancy

Life expectancy is currently increasing by two years every decade, and there are few signs that it’s slowing down. Average life spans around the world are now double what they were 200 years ago.

Many times in the past, experts have predicted the increase in life expectancy would slow down and may even reverse, but they have repeatedly been proven wrong.

So will aging increase …forever? Is there a limit to how long we can survive into old age?

With improved diets, lifestyles, and healthcare advances particularly in such areas of gene therapy, stem cells, CRISPR, and radical life extension research, having people reach the age of 250 with an active lifestyle becomes increasingly probable.

Most experts have concluded that there really are no hard ceilings that will prevent us from living indefinitely.

In Great Britain, as an example, the Office for National Statistics predicted in 2010 that nearly one-in-five people will live to see their 100th birthday.

As the producing/consuming years of human life grows, so does its overall value.

5. Increased Options for Creating Wealth

Building wealth is becoming increasingly easy to understand. With literally millions of books, apps, and tools designed to help guide our thinking, it no longer requires luck, genius, or special connections.

The growing number of tools at our disposal, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrency, and advisor networks are making this information available to literally everyone on the planet.

In addition to physical wealth, we have created numerous ways to accrue less tangible forms of wealth such as property rights, digital assets, and intellectual property.

So far, we are only scratching the surface of what’s possible. In the future we will uncover exponentially greater options.

6. Decreasing Poverty Rates

At the same time that global wealth is increasing, extreme poverty is dropping.

The World Bank has established a set of goals including the goal to end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity. Extreme poverty has been steadily declining.

While extreme poverty is expected to rise in 2020 for the first time in over 20 years as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the overarching trend will be to compensate for this momentary blip, and continue to decline.

We still have a long way to go to create what many believe to be an equitable distribution of wealth around the world, but it’s moving in the right direction.

Along with decreasing poverty comes increasing purchase power among even the poorest of the poor.

7. Accelerating Sense of Preciousness in Children

Most families today are fine with only one or two children. Dropping from families with 6-10 kids just 50 years ago to less than two today, the amount of time and attention dedicated to each child increases.

From an investment standpoint, parents today are willing to pull out all the stops. They view everything from better daycare, to better clothes, athletic programs, travel, and technology as worthy investments in their children’s future.

Final Thoughts

These seven major trend lines, combined with dozens more, will be causing us to continually rethink how we value human life.

As the value of people climbs into the stratosphere, it will have huge implications on everything from product liability cases, to life insurance, to the way we value ourselves.

If our personal life-value grows to $2 billion, will we rethink our decision to buy a $200 couch, sleep on a $50 bed, or buy $19 shoes?

Will a better bed cause us to be better rested, extra alert, and more valuable in the future?

People in the future will view themselves as being in a constant state of improvement.
This means that over the coming decades we will become exponentially more fixable – trainable, repairable, improvable, and even re-inventable.

It will no longer be about who we are today, but who we have the potential to become in the future.

Given the source of COVID-19 and recent similar viral outbreaks, there’s no reason to think that another one won’t happen again – and sooner rather than later.

Are we willing to do and spend what’s necessary to prevent another pandemic? From the data I’ve seen, it seems like the cost of critical preventive activities is far less than the costs we’ve already incurred, and will continue to incur, since COVID-19 has reached pandemic status.

Viruses vs. Pandemics

It’s important to differentiate between preventing viruses and preventing pandemics. Webster defines a pandemic as an “outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area and affects an exceptionally high proportion of the population.”

So, when the first cases of this latest virus were reported in China was it a pandemic? No, this was simply another new virus that had made its way from wild mammals to the human race.

In the following weeks, though, the COVID-19 virus wasn’t contained. And as it spread to other cities, regions, and continents, with a rising number of fatalities, COVID-19 crossed that admittedly fuzzy threshold to the point where it could legitimately be considered a “pandemic.”

Preventing/Minimizing viruses

There are hundreds of species of bats and they continue to carry a wide variety of constantly evolving coronavirus variants. Some of the viruses prove to be relatively harmless when passed to humans. Others are incredibly contagious and deadly.

Nipah, HIV/AIDS, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, and now SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) … it’s very likely that each of these was caused initially by animal-to-human contact. Unusually it stems from bats but sometimes other animals, such as pigs or camels serve as a middle mammal in the exchange.

To minimize the emergence of another new and deadly virus that can lead to pandemics, we, and this is a global “we” – including governments at the highest and lowest levels, can create systems to minimize the instances of these exchanges by:

• Eliminating the wildlife markets that exist in some countries and cultures
• Not only reducing deforestation, but increasing forestation to restore buffer zones between the habitats of wild animals and domestic livestock

Think what you will about the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and other regional or global collectives of national, sovereign governments, but these kinds of collectives are exactly what’s required to coordinate any kind of global efforts to accomplish this. There can be no weak links among nations because viruses cross borders with ease.

Manage the Meat?

But beyond minimizing the emergence of new viruses at their source, what about protecting our food supply? We should at least consider these steps as well:

• Prohibit the sale of raw meat that hasn’t been irradiated, cleansed with UV lighting, or undergone similar measures.
• Transition to lab grown meat, also called “clean meats” or “cultured meats“.
• Continue to develop and promote plant-based meat substitutes
• Stop eating meat altogether

These all make sense in theory, and they may be beneficial in their own right. But the fact is that pandemic viruses have never started with hundreds of people eating virus-laden meat. Pandemics all begin with one person.

Once that animal to human threshold is crossed in one person (Patient Zero), no amount of meat irradiation or vegetarianism will stop the virus. From that point on, it’s passed through normal, person-to-person interaction – sharing space, breathing air, or coming into contact with bodily fluid, as in the case of Ebola and HIV/AIDS.

So, we need to go back to that fundamental point: minimizing new viruses means reducing the likelihood of these initial interactions and infections ever taking place. That said, I don’t think it’s possible to prevent another viral outbreak, but we certainly can prevent another pandemic.

Pandemic-Proofing

Okay, so maybe we’ll always have some periodic emergence of localized, horrible viruses. How do we keep them from spreading? How do we “pandemic-proof” the world?

We’ve learned a lot in the last six months, lessons we seem to learn about every century or so, about how to slow a virus and contain its spread. Medical science has a lot to say about how to prevent a virus from becoming a pandemic. Trace the contacts of infected people. Quarantine suspected or actual cases. Dutifully wash hands and surfaces. Wear masks. Limit public gatherings. Socially distance.

We’ve also been reminded that healthcare workers need to have quick access to certain equipment and supplies, especially personal protection equipment (PPE), ventilators, and other medical necessities.

Additionally, in a recent article, William A. Haseltine, formerly of the Harvard Medical School and School of Public Health, points out that antiviral drugs (as opposed to vaccines) can control a coronavirus by binding and blocking the enzymes that most of them need in order to grow. Those enzymes are similar across all coronaviruses. He suggests that it’s not only advisable but very possible to stockpile combinations of these drugs under the BioShield program adopted after 9/11 that’s intended to prevent “new and emerging biological threats.”

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Yes, all of this costs money – from reversing deforestation, to educating people about consumption of exotic animals, to stockpiling drugs, to maintaining a significant cache of healthcare worker PPE and citizen masks. There’s no definitive figure that captures all of these, but let’s at least start with:

Conservation International’s estimate that we need to make an investment of between $22.3 billion and $30.1 billion per year (globally) to address deforestation and to minimize the spread of viruses from wild mammals to humans. They compare that figure to the $10-20 trillion that COVID-19 has cost the global economy in 2020 alone.

Researchers at Princeton University offer an even more compelling case for these expenditures. They estimate that the global price tag to regulate the wildlife trade, maintain adequate disease surveillance, and reduce deforestation in critical areas (all at a total cost of $260 billion over 10 years) is a little more than two percent of the estimated global economic cost of COVID-19 over time.

These are very rough estimates of course but if we compare a few billion to the trillions we’re currently spending, plus the magnitude of benefits to humanity makes these programs seem like a pretty solid investment!

Our goal needs to be to not only pandemic-proof our world, but to pandemic-proof our future!

A couple weeks ago I was asked to speak at the 8th annual Turkish Postal Symposium in Antalya, Turkey on the future of the postal industry. This was a fascinating gathering of thought leaders to discuss next generation postal service.

I focused my talk around a central question – “How long will it be before we can mail a package and have it travel to a city on the other side of the world without ever being touched by human hands?”

As we move further down the path of automation, this is a reasonable question to be asking. Once we set a package into motion, it will essentially guide itself to its final destination by way of a completely automated global distribution network.

Many pieces of this distribution network are already in place, but as we dig deeper and try to understand what it will take to achieve this level of automation, we begin to uncover not only the technical elements that still need to be developed, but also the system layers to assure global standards and compatibility.

Since packages come in a variety of shapes and sizes, it’s reasonable to assume limits on both the size and the weight, both on the high end as well as the low end. As an example, a package the size of a grain of salt or as light as a helium balloon will need to be repackaged. Mailing larger items like skis, golf clubs, or bicycles may require a different kind of delivery service.

In addition to size and weight issues will be a series of other legal requirements for shipping restrictive items like alcohol, pharmaceuticals, live animals, biohazard materials, or products with special handling requirements like fragile glass, frozen food, or pressure sensitive instruments.

Establishing limits, rules, and standards will be a critical piece to this future mega-system.

Package labeling will need to be consistent everywhere. Adding a series of sensors to the labeling tags will enable users to keep track of the location as well as the condition of the contents in real time.

Adding to Our Global Infrastructure

If we think of this level of automation extended into a worldwide distribution system like other pieces of global infrastructure, we begin to get a sense as to how it will begin to fit into the lives of everyone on earth. For example, when we make a phone call anywhere in the world, our telecom networks connect instantly.

Many fully-mechanized distribution centers already exist in Europe, Asia, and North America, but this level of automation will require all countries in the world to eventually participate and create similar systems.

Mailing a Package in 2030

If we can imagine a day in the life of a common postal package in 2030 we will begin to better understand how a system like this will work.

Packages are first placed inside a designated “parcel pickup/delivery” space and a signal will be activated to begin the delivery process. Since this will be a 24-hour service, driverless drones will be dispatched instantly to make the pickup.

The sender will determine the item’s urgency and this will factor into a number of decision points along the way.

As the ground or air-based drone arrives, a robotic arm will extend out and retrieve the package. Depending on the time-sensitivity of the package, the drone may continue to make additional pickups and deliveries until it reaches capacity.

With packages in tow, the next stop will be a regional distribution center where parcels are sorted and sent on to their next stop, which may be another distribution center or a long-haul transit system like boats, planes, trains, or trucks.

Again, the time-sensitivity of the package will determine the likely form of transportation, and robotic systems will both load and unload these vehicles.

Once the parcel arrives at the final distribution center, it will be staged for delivery either with ground-based or aerial delivery drones.

In the future, there will be two kinds of addresses for delivery services – one for a typical home or office and a second one for wherever the intended recipient is at any given moment.

In the case of individual recipients, a series of automated messages will be sent to alert them that a package will be arriving shortly, and they can arrange to meet the delivery drone when it arrives.

With normal package delivery to a building, messages will also be sent when the package is delivered. Each building will have its own designated delivery area and robotic arms will be used to carefully place the parcel in the targeted zone.

There is no miracle science needed to complete this kind of infrastructure, just plenty of engineering work, and the political will and foresight to make it all happen.

The Missing Pieces

Naturally there are many missing pieces to the fully automated mega-system that will eventually be created.

1.) High Tech Mailboxes, Pickup & Delivery Pads – There is a huge opportunity awaiting for the first person who creates a universally accepted machine-dockable mailbox, as well as standardized, weather-protected pickup and deliver pads for homes and offices.

2.) Standardized High Tech Mailing Labels – Labels like this will monitor both the package’s location and the condition of its content.

3.) Automated Loading and Unloading Systems – Since several modes of transport will be involved, special attention will need to be paid to the handoff from one to the next, such as from a truck to a train or ship.

4.) Robotic Customs Agents – There will always be a need to inspect and monitor package content to prevent the distributing of illegal items.

5.) System Durability – Early systems will have countless points of failure, but over time, durable system will reduce breakdowns to less than one in a million deliveries.

6.) Trained Human Operators – As a system designed “by humans for humans,” there will still need to be a number of skilled human operators working in the background.

The list above is intended to highlight a few opportunities, but admittedly glosses over many of the details and intricacies involved in developing a complex global system like this.

The Argument for Going Global 

When systems are left incomplete, it requires more labor, more equipment, creating more pollution, segregation, isolation, and cultural barriers, not less.

The problem is that very few people are viewing our fragmented delivery networks as part of a larger global system. Over the coming years, global systems, involving representatives from countries all over the world will spring to life, helping to bridge the cultural barriers currently preventing mega projects like this from moving forward.

It boils down to the question of whether we are better off being a more cohesive, blended global society, or less of one.

Final Thoughts

Our need for mega projects like this is best explain in a previous column of mine titled the “Laws of Exponential Capabilities.”

Emerging technology and automation will make these types of mega projects affordable and technically doable, and increasing levels of connectedness are driving our need for efficient travel and shipping around the world.

As technological unemployment grows, countries will be looking for mega projects to both employ and reemploy our young people both now and for generations to come.