The Future of Everything

THE FUTURE OF
EVERYTHING
50 Experts Explain Where Were Heading
And How Well Get There
The Future of Everything
The Future of Everything

50 Experts Explain Where Were Heading
and How Well Get There
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal

New York
Copyright 2014 Dow Jones & Co, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Contents
Introduction
Agriculture
How Drones and Big Data Will Reduce Our
Agricultural Thirst
By Clare Hasler-Lewis
Art
Art Will Be Like Music Is TodayEverywhere
11
By Carter Cleveland
Women Artists Are Poised to Take Off
17
Agnes Gund
Banks
Big Banks Will Get Bigger
James P. Gorman
19
Beauty
Beauty in the Future Will Mean Looking
Different
23
Tyra Banks
Biology
How Brains Will Learn to Understand
Themselves
28
Bert Vogelstein
Cars
We Must Rethink How We Make Vehiclesand
How We Use Them
30
Bill Ford
Cities
Cities Will Increasingly Be the Place Where
Problems Get Solved
35
Kasim Reed
Cleaning
Robots Will Take Over Household Chores
39
James Dyson
Clothing
Technology Will Revolutionize How Clothes
Are Made
Joseph Altuzarra
41
Coffee
Caf and Coffee Will Be Inseparable
43
James Freeman
Communications
Wireless Communications Will Cleave Us From
the Legacies of Old Networks
45
Tom Wheeler
Corporations
Global Companies Will Look More and More
Alike
49
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Death
Longer Lifespans Will Change Lifeand Death
55
Shelly Kagan
Drugs
More Drugs Will Really WorkBut Theyll Cost
More
61
Mark B. McClellan
Education
An End for Grade Levels in Schools
Margaret Spellings
63
Email
Email Will Get a Lot More Useful
68
V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai
Energy
Energy Will Look Much as It Does Nowor
Perhaps Not
70
Daniel Yergin
Entrepreneurship
It Will Be Easier to Start Your Own
Businessand Succeed With It
76
Angela Benton
Fashion
Quality Could Overtake Fast Fashion
81
Michael Kors
Fashion Models
'Virtual Selves' Will Stand in for Top Models
83
Ivan Bart
Food
Food Will be More Sustainable and Locally
Sourced
Alice Waters
85
Hiring
Great Employees Will Be Much Easier to Find
90
Laszlo Bock
Homes
Tomorrows House Will be Smallerbut Wont
Feel Like It
92
Sarah Susanka
A Shift to Nomadic Living
97
Tony Fadell
Internet Access
We Will Battle to Connect Everyone to the
Internet
99
Mark Zuckerberg
Investing
Investors Will Turn Their Backs on Active
Management
105
John C. Bogle
Job Creation
The Problem Will Not Be Producing EnoughIt
Will Be Providing Enough Work
Lawrence H. Summers
111
Leisure
The Human Element Will Remain the Basis of
Leisure
116
Robert A. Iger
Love
The Future of Love Will Play Out by Prehistoric
Rules
121
Helen Fisher
Managers
Bosses Will Care About Output, Not Input
127
Matt Mullenweg
Medicine
Cheaper DNA Sequencing Will Make
Personalized Care Routine
129
Francis S. Collins
Wearable Sensors Will Transform Medical Care
134
Eric J. Topol
Military Conflict
Asia Will Be the Site of Increased Military
Jostling
Adm. Dennis Blair
137
Money
As Cash Goes Away, the Financial System Will
Expand
139
Ajay Banga
Movies
The Movie Theater Experience Will be Bigger
and More Beautiful
145
Christopher Nolan
Music
The Record Album Will Endure
150
Taylor Swift
National Security
Military Leaders Will Have More Information,
Less Time to Decide
156
Gen. Martin Dempsey
Oceans
Oceans Will Need Replenishing to Sustain Our
Well-Being
158
Enric Sala
Offices
Offices Will Follow Us Everywhere
Nikil Saval
160
Parenting
You Will Raise a Constantly Monitored Child
162
Lenore Skenazy
Physics
Physicists Will Work to Unify Two Great
Frontiers of Science
164
Martin Rees
Politics
The Hues of Red and Blue States Will Change
166
David Plouffe
Privacy
Only the Rich Will Have Privacy
172
Richard Clarke
Retirement
The Retirement Community Will Be Retired
177
Linda P. Fried
Robotics
Robots Will Fuse the Physical and Digital Worlds
Into One
Illah R. Nourbakhsh
182
Space
Get Ready for Bioengineering, Teleportation and
a New Home on Mars
188
G. Scott Hubbard
Sports
Technology Will Transform How We Playand
WatchSports
193
Billy Beane
Television
Well Say a Farewell to Linear Television
198
Roy Price
More Great TV Will Be Discovered and

Appreciated
199
Josh Sapan
About This Book
201
Introduction
On July 8, 1889, The Wall Street Journal first appeared as a fourpage afternoon newspaper. It was the creation of three financial journalistsCharles Dow, Edward Jones and Charles Bergstresserwho
saw a growing need for objective business and markets news in a
nation undergoing rapid industrialization, fueled by increasingly liquid financial markets.
At the time, much of the business news available was decidedly
unreliable; the lines between gossip, fact and opinion were barely discernible. In their debut issue, the editors wrote that The Journal
will aim steadily at being a paper of news, and not a paper of opinions.
It will give a good deal of news not found in other publications, and it
will present in the market article, its news, its tables and its advertisements, a faithful picture of the rapidly evolving panorama of the Street.
Today, the Journal is the United States top daily newspaper by paid
circulation, with over 2.2 million subscribers. We reach millions on
mobile phones, desktops and tablets, around the clock and across the
globe, every day. We still cover in depth markets, economics and
business, but in the past few years especially our range has expanded
to include politics and world affairs, sports, fashion, leisure and the
arts. We publish 12 global versions in nine languages, and have
reporters in more than 75 countries.
2 Introduction
After 125 years, our commitment to providing the most complete

daily report of objective news of true value and the best analysis
in journalism remains as strong as ever. This e-book embodies that
commitment.
To commemorate our anniversary, we asked a wide range of
thinkers and doers with unique, first-hand perspective, to help us
think about tomorrows worldthat is, The Future of Everything.
The response was overwhelming. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
shared his vision of what he called the greatest technological revolution yet, as billions of people around the globe connect to the Internet for the first time. Billy Beane, the general manager of baseballs
Oakland As, explained how data and analytics are utterly transforming the world of sport. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers
framed the economic challenge of the future: jobs. Harvard professor
Rosabeth Moss Kanter told us how globalization is forcing companies to rethink their standards.
And pop singer Taylor Swift explained how the digital world
allows stars like her to develop closer relationships with fans than ever
before, even while it challenges artists to stay fresh and engaged. The
only real risk, she wrote, is being too afraid to take a risk at all.
Looking ahead, helping our readers navigate the future remains
core to our mission at The Wall Street Journal. As the world enters a
new age of digitization and globalization, as technology offers us new
challenges and amazing opportunities, as millions of people around
the world join the middle class and new businesses with new challenges come into being, the Journal will be there, as it has been for
125 years, to report and illuminate our times.
What also remains constant, even in changing times, is our gratitude to our readers. We couldnt do it without you. In our fastchanging and complicated world, The Wall Street Journal stands as
committed as ever to being your essential guide, engaging, inform-
Introduction 3
ing and delighting you along the way. I hope you enjoy this special
e-book, and that you will continue to let us be your trusted companion into the future.
Gerard Baker
Editor in Chief, The Wall Street Journal
Agriculture
How Drones and Big Data Will Reduce Our

Agricultural Thirst
BY CLARE HASLER-LEWIS
What will the future of agriculture and food production look like?
Most of us are aware of some sobering statistics: With the planets
population expected to approach 10 billion by 2050, and incomes rising, demand for food is likely to double. Demand for water, meanwhile, is projected to grow roughly 55%, according to the 2014 U.N.
World Water Development Report, while more than 40% of the
worlds population will be living in areas of severe water stress.
Those are daunting challenges, to be sure.
But from where Im sitting, I also see a steady stream of new farming technologies, practices and ideas that are increasing our ability
to use limited resources efficiently particularly water. And that
promises a future agriculture that can feed the world, sustainably, for
generations to come.
Capturing, recycling and reusing water will become the rule rather
than the exception in food production and processing. Processing the
food we eat every day makes up 50% of our total water footprint. It
is not difficult to imagine most consumer products of the future bearing a Water Footprint rating.
A glimpse of that water-efficient future is already visible at the
University of California, Davis, where my colleagues recently opened
The Future of Everything 7
the worlds only LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental

Design) Platinum-certified winery, brewery and food-processing
facility. Wineries typically draw lots of water from public systems to
clean their equipment. Ours gets all of the water it needs and more
by capturing and filtering rainwater. In addition, some 90% of the
water and chemicals from each cleaning cycle will be recovered for
future use, helping reduce water-consumption to less than one-fifth
of the average for a winery its size, drastically reducing the chemical
footprint as well.
In the same vein, new technology will materially change many
existing agricultural practices. Im not talking about inventing or
improving some farming tool the traditional way new technology
has changed agriculture in the past. Rather, agriculture will change
thanks to the application of big data.
Already we have prescriptive farming, in which data collected
using tractors and GPS helps farmers decide which seeds to plant
in each patch of land and how to cultivate them. Soon, well have
networks of sensors that detect moisture in the ground or on plants
themselves and transmit their data to drones, which are poised to
become farmings new intelligence-gathering tool of choice.
8 The Wall Street Journal
Within the next decade, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle

Systems International predicts, 80% of commercial drones will be
used for agricultural purposes. Unmanned aircraft with sensors,
infrared cameras and the ability to transmit data in real time not only
will help farms use less water, but also will be able to delineate the
impact of pests and provide clues to their refuges.
Big data and its applications for water management will be
deployed not just by farms and agribusiness but also by public authorities that play a role in agriculture. Networks with sensors for moisture detection will direct the timing, location and duration of irrigation that will be a key part of conservation and governance by water
authorities.
Agricultures thirst for water will drive new policies as well as practices. Politicians, farmers and economists will wrestle with how water
should be used, metered and taxed. One possibility is to control access
through use of water credits awarded on the basis of conservation
metrics. A cap-and-trade market could then be established, similar to
the pollution credits markets already in effect in Europe and in the
Northeast. Public policies and the market will reward efficient use of
water and cooperative water use.
Better water management, though essential, wont accomplish
another crucial goal: getting fresh produce to urban markets more
efficiently or sustainably. Such efficiency will be even more critical
as our global population becomes more urbanized. The solution will
be self-sustaining urban food production, where crops will be grown
year-round in vertical farms, reducing the need for the carbonemitting transport of fruits and vegetables over long distances and
vastly reducing water use. By using recycled water, vertical farms are
capable of using 98% less water per item of produce than traditional
farming. I can envision a future where every community purchases
its produce from its own vertical farm taking locally grown to a
whole new level.
The future of agriculture and at its heart, more efficient water
use will have an enormous impact on our economy, our politics
and our way of life. In the broadest sense, how well we manage to
produce more with less will determine whether we live in a sustainable world.
Ms. Hasler-Lewis is the executive director of the Robert

Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science at the
University of California, Davis.
Art
Art Will Be Like Music Is

TodayEverywhere
BY CARTER CLEVELAND
Before talking about the future of art, Id like to draw your attention
to the past, to another form of human expression: music.
Pre-20th century, the music world in the West resembled the art
world today. If you listened to professional music, were informed
about the genre and attended performances, you were part of an elite
class.
Today, its hard to imagine a world where listening to music has
anything to do with class. Not everyone can afford front-row seats
to a Justin Timberlake concert, but everyone knows his music. You
can ask anyone on the street about their favorite band and watch their
eyes light up. In contrast, try asking someone on the street about
their favorite artist and rarely will you find a similarly enthusiastic
response. (If this thought experiment doesnt make sense, you probably live in New York or Londontwo cities that together account
for over 60% of the global art market.)
So why has music succeeded in transcending class hierarchies while
art has not? Pessimists would say that fundamentally there is a finite
universe of people interested in art, or that you must experience art
in person to acquire a passion for it. But these same arguments were
made about music and attending live performances over 100 years
ago.
No, a love for art is not genetically predestined. Like music, passion
for art is nourished from a young age via exposure and education. But
while the record player and the radio drove musics exposure beyond
class boundaries, those technologies were incompatible with art.
The good news is that the Internet provides a medium for both
music and art to reach anyone with an Internet connectionand
therefore holds the promise of a future where art is as ubiquitous a
part of culture as music is today.
Given that, here are six predictions about the future of art:
1. The art of tomorrow will be the technology of today. Going
back to charcoal on a cave wall, artistic mediums always began
as functional technologies. Consider the daguerreotype, once
an affordable alternative to commission paintings, now a fineart medium beloved by Chuck Close. As we become
increasingly comfortable with new technologies, they will
transition to future modes of self-expression. Contemporary
examples include Jon Rafmans Google Street View art, Dwyer
Kilcollins sculptures made using 3-D printers, and Katsu
creating abstract paintings with spray-paint-carrying drones.
And just imagine the kind of artistic experiences made possible
by new virtual-reality technologies.
2. An upper-middle-brow of art will emerge. Literary critic
William Deresiewicz used the phrase upper middle brow to
describe cultural content that has widespread appeal and stands
on its own critical merit. Television has seen the emerging
dominance of upper-middle-brow shows like House of
Cards. In film, Pixar has managed to engage high-, middleand even lowbrow audiences simultaneously. And Shakespeare
accomplished the same in theater. Today art is rarely

appreciated for appealing outside of a small world of
tastemakersalthough examples like Banksy and Christian
Marclay (particularly his film The Clock) come to mind. But
in the future, a larger and more diverse audience of art lovers
will celebrate artists that achieve trans-brow appeal.
3. The art market will expand massively. The global art market is
about $66 billion annually, but for every one household that
collects art there are 37 with the same average income who
dont. If art becomes a ubiquitous part of culture, collecting
could become normal behavior for households with disposable
income, just like buying luxury fashion and jewelry. At Artsy
we are seeing this phenomenon firsthand among new collectors
in Silicon Valley, a market we have early visibility into given
our tech-startup roots.
4. There will be many more galleries. Some 71% of collectors and
88% of dealers regularly buy and sell art via digital image (sight
unseen), and on Artsy we see an average distance between
buyer and seller of over 2,000 miles. Additionally, as of 2012,
art fairs now account for 36% of all dealer sales. Art fairs and
online platforms give galleries global reach without the costs of
multiple physical locations. This ability to reduce costs will see a
corresponding increase in galleries able to serve the rapidly
growing art market.
5. New artists will be discovered faster, and location wont matter
(as much). SoundCloud Chief Executive (and Artsy investor)
Alex Ljung recently pointed me to the phenomenon of Lorde, a
17-year-old from New Zealand, who hit No. 1 on Billboards
Hot 100 less than a year after releasing her first extended play
(EP) on SoundCloud. Online music platforms are making these
kinds of discoveries increasingly frequent; and online art
platforms will similarly unearth more talented artists regardless

of location or how connected they are into the art worlds
existing power structures.
6. Education today will ensure the longevity of art in the future.
For the majority of the 20th century, contemporary classical
music flourished. Then, an elitist outlook that saw no value in
educating new audiences began to dominate the genre. While
rooted in the values of artistic integrity, this elitist stance was
falsely premised on the idea that connoisseurs are born, not
made.
Ultimately, ignoring future audiences proved lethal for contemporary classical music, which has now become largely an academic pursuit with the biggest names barely able to fill the orchestra sections of
concert halls.
Why wont the fate of contemporary classical music befall contemporary art? Because unlike the contemporary music establishment, the art world is educating new audiences via the Internet.
Museums, foundations and galleries increasingly publish artworks
online andcriticallysupply contextual material for self-education
(the same reason Artsy created the Art Genome Project, which provides art-historical context and allows users to discover related artists).
As with music, a passion for art is made, not born. By educating
young audiences today, we are avoiding contemporary classical
musics fate and ensuring that future generations have the opportunity to become art lovers, collectors, patrons and connoisseurs.
Mr. Cleveland is founder and chief executive officer of

Artsy, an online resource for art education and collecting.
Women Artists Are Poised to Take Off
AGNES GUND
I think that women artists are on the upswing, and the market will
start to correct as more collectors, in it for the game, will drive the
prices of women artists up as will buyers recognizing the talent that
has been there all along. As a result, women artists will be doing
larger artworks, with Damien Hirst- or Jeff Koons-style studios, and
they will also become a greater presence in architecture.
There will be mechanized ways to change galleries and exhibitions, allowing for more elastic shows with an ability to place more
art on view in ways that are not possible now. The Google project
will continue to expand beyond its 32,000 images from 46 museums
and will globalize the art market and increase accessibility and exposure for all institutions. This digitization will build the audience for
images and ideas about art that will dramatically extend what catalogs
and books do today. Art will increasingly reach more people in more
places.
Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art
Banks
Big Banks Will Get Bigger
JAMES P. GORMAN
The threshold question: Will banks continue to exist? The answer is

yes, because society will still need the two essential functions they
provide: mobilization of capital from providers to users, and facilitation of payments for goods and services.
But technology, globalization and demographics will change the
shape of banking as dramatically in the next 100 years as they have in
the last.
In particular, technology will continue to breed competition and
disintermediation. Traditional consumer banking will come under
extreme pressure as its central deposit-taking and lending functions
are challenged by online savings vehicles, crowdfunding and loan
syndicating by such nontraditional competitors as insurance companies, pension and hedge funds.
Universal adoption of mobile devices puts a bank branch in everyones pocket and renders bricks and mortar obsolete. Of the 97,000
bank branches that exist across the U.S. today, all but about 10,000
will disappear. Those remaining will become social gathering places
where people go to be educated about finance, engage in discussion
groups about savings and investment and, at the high end, get exclusive exposure to luxury goods and services.
BIG AND BIGGER

At the same time, ample opportunities will continue to exist for big
global banks in providing large-scale finance for corporations, institutions and governments. Inexorable consolidation will make the big
banks even bigger. Economies of scale and the boundary-less nature
of electronic technology will doom most small institutions, though
some may survive under protectionist regulation or niche strategies.
Regulation will become ever more globally harmonized. A century
ago, the Federal Reserve had just been created, and U.S. banking regulation was largely state-level. Increases in global trade flows have
fueled a harmonization process that began in 1944 at Bretton Woods
and continued through the Basel Accords of today. Nationalism in
financial regulation will not go away entirely, but the reality of economic interconnectedness will tip the scales in favor of a global regulatory architecture.
In the capital markets, state ownership will decrease as developing
nations become developed and privatize productive enterprises, and
as industrial sectors continue their cycles of creative destruction. This
bodes well for continuing vital, if volatile, global equity markets.
Asset management will become the single-largest segment of
financial services, as users of capital become providers of capital in
newly developed economies and an aging global demographic creates an inevitable shift from consumers to savers. A burgeoning global
middle class will create an enormous pool of savings in search of
investment, for which they will seek professional advice and execution.
While this new investor class will expect adequate financial returns,
they increasingly will demand, too, that their capital generates a positive social return. Many also will value human relationships with
financial advisers, even if they conduct their meetings across continents or oceans via digital video-conferencing.
Underfunded defined-benefit and government pension plans will
finally have to be dealt with, and reforms will push more people into
private investment programs, further propelling asset management.
Too much money chases too few returns, potentially setting the stage
for the next 100-year global financial crisis.
PROMISE AND THREATS
Technology, of course, holds both promise and threats. Big-data
applications dramatically enhance institutions ability to reduce loan
losses and identify financial fraud through margin calls and detection
of suspicious fund flows in real time. As powerful as these tools are,
determined cybercriminals will find ways to steal so much they will
force nations to establish deposit-insurance-like entities extending
beyond traditional banks to cover theft.
Cash as a physical entity will virtually cease to exist, with coins and
checkbooks consigned to museums. As people conduct their financial
transactions on hand-held devices made secure by advanced biometrics, even tipping will be done electronically.
Paper currency does not disappear entirely, however. Youll still
need it to buy a beer at a certain dusty bar in the Australian outback,
where the proprietor sticks stubbornly to a cash-only policy, because
you never know, mate!
Mr. Gorman is chairman and chief executive of Morgan

Stanley.
Beauty
Beauty in the Future Will Mean Looking

Different
TYRA BANKS
As I look into the future, I see radical changes in both how people
attain beauty, and how the world perceives beauty. In general, I
believe, traditional beauty will be less valuableand more uniqueness
will be heralded.
But let me be more specific with 10 predictions:
1. Plastic surgery will be as easy and quick as going to the
drugstore for Tylenol. Emphasis will be on how unique and
interesting one can look, as opposed to a cookie-cutter look.
People will be vying for that cutting-edge, distinct look in the
way that today celebs reach for baby names that defy
convention.
2. There will be no hair extensions. If one wants longer locks, a
hair-growing serum is applied to the scalp, and the length and
thickness of the hair will increase in 24 hours. The popular hair
texture of choice will be curly.
3. Global warming will threaten our crops so natural food will be
scarce. Hourglass, curvy bodies will be the aspirational beauty
standard, representing that those women have access to
bounties of fulfilling yet healthy food, which means they are

affluent.
4. The features of ones baby will be as selectable as menu items at
a fast-food drive-through window. Blue and green eyes will
become so common that dark brown will become the rare and
newly desired eye color.
5. Skin color and features will mesh into a similar shade for the
majority of people. Typical features and coloring will lean
toward a Rihanna or Beyonc or me kind of look. People with
alabaster or ebony skin will be rare and heralded for that
uniqueness.
6. Because beauty will be so readily accessible and skin color and

features will be similar, prejudices based on physical features
will be nearly eradicated. Prejudice will be socioeconomically
based.
7. Advertising for the beauty industry will have shifted. Since
beauty will be easily attainable, models will be as relevant as a
horse and buggy. Robot/avatar models with features that look
totally different from the golden-skinned everyday people will
represent and sell products world-wide.
8. Everyone will have at least one personal robot/assistant/
companion. If a person allows that robot/assistant to suggest
products paid for by sponsors, that persons robot will be free of
charge. In fact, that person will actually be paid to use the robot
by a pool of advertisers. The robot will have super artificial
intelligence and will be able to sense if its owner is having a
low-self-esteem day and will then strategically give boosts of
confidence to its owner. Wow, Eloisa! Your eyes look
especially lovely today.
9. For those who choose not to go for plastic surgery, beauty
ingestibles (active waters, etc.) will give instant, yet temporary
results: contoured cheekbones, rosy cheeks, arched eyebrows.
However, one must use them repeatedly to maintain results.
10. Womens empowerment will be an irrelevant concept because
the balance of power between the sexes will have shifted
dramatically. Women, in control of when they can have
children (up to age 120!), and having more degrees and
education than men, will be in charge. Men will be responsible
for 70% of cosmetics sales and plastic-surgery procedures
world-wide. Why? Men will be vying for womens attention,
obsessed with being attractive to females and snagging well-off
ladies who can take care of them.
Ms. Banks is a model and creator and executive producer

of Americas Next Top Model.
Biology
How Brains Will Learn to Understand

Themselves
BERT VOGELSTEIN
The brain is the final frontier in biology. We have little understanding of how my brain is now formulating this paragraph, as just one
example. The structure and function of human brains are wondrous,
far superior to those of the computers they have so far created. For
brains to understand themselves, the efforts of brains trained not only
in biology, but also in physics, chemistry, mathematics, psychology
and philosophy will be required. The understanding that will result
from these efforts will mitigate the enormous societal problems now
posed by diseased or malevolent brains, and will eventually allow us
to communicate with each other without any physical activity or
instrumentation.
Bert Vogelstein, co-director of the Ludwig Center at Johns Hopkins
Kimmel Cancer Center; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Cars
We Must Rethink How We Make

Vehiclesand How We Use Them
BILL FORD
During the past decade, the automotive industry emerged from one
of the most challenging periods we have ever encountered, and has
now entered one of the most exciting and promising times in our history. Yet, even more important is our focus on the future, which will
be defined by an important trend: the automobile as part of a larger
ecosystem.
This requires a change in our view of the car as an individual object
to seeing it as part of our broader transportation network. It also
requires a fundamental change in how we think about transportation. Customers today have extremely diverse priorities, and we must
embrace these differences as we design and sell automobiles.
The facts that underpin this trend are compelling. With a growing
global population and greater prosperity, the number of vehicles on
the road could exceed two billion by midcentury. Combine this with
a continuing population shift toward cities, with a projected 54%
of the global population in cities by 2050, and it becomes clear that
our current transportation model is not sustainable. Our infrastructure cannot support such a large volume of vehicles without creating massive congestion that would have serious consequences for our
environment, health, economic progress and quality of life.
CHALLENGEAND OPPORTUNITY
The good news is that this scenario is not inevitable, and some experts
say this challenge represents a $130 billion business opportunity for
the automotive market. Some solutions already are under way to
develop more space-efficient vehicles with clean engines that run on
gas or alternative energy sources. Yet other answers will require a
fundamental rethinking of what the business of being an auto manufacturer looks like. No matter how clean and efficient vehicles are,
we simply cannot depend on selling more of them as they function
today. Cars will need to be smarter and more integrated into the
overall transportation system.
Forward-looking companies will redefine themselves and move
from being just car and truck manufacturers to become personalmobility companies. We will be thinking more intelligently about
how the vehicles we build interact with one another and with a citys
infrastructure, which includes trains, pedestrian walkways, buses,
bikes and everything else that helps us move through urban centers.
Rapidly changing preferences among car owners, including an
ever-increasing emphasis on connectivity, will redefine the types of
vehicles we bring to market, the features we focus on and how vehicles are marketed and used.
NEW OWNERSHIP MODELS
The rise of companies such as Lyft, Uber and Zipcar underlines individual ownership as not always being the most cost-effective way to
obtain access to a vehicle, especially for urban customers. Individual
ownership also may not be the primary model of vehicle ownership
in the future. Just how this affects the current sales model is yet to be
seen.
Cars of the future will be mobile communications platforms that
talk to each other and the world around them to make driving safer
and more efficient. They will be integrated into the transportation
ecosystem in ways that optimize the entire system, with software
that allows owners to increasingly customize features and functions.
We already are in the early stages of this transformation, with wireless communication, infotainment systems and limited functions for
automated driving and parking.
Continuing to meet consumer demand for greater efficiency also
will require more than just changes to engines and energy sources.
New materials and manufacturing processes will reshape auto manufacturers and the suppliers we have worked with for decades.
Aluminum and high-strength steel will evolve as the materials that
serve as the backbone of the industry. Carbon fiber will move from
the realm of race cars and million-dollar exotics into small cars and
crossovers. This will require rethinking the life-cycle supply chain.
REDEFINING DRIVING
We also will need to rethink what defines the act of driving.
Autonomous driving, or cars that navigate themselves, will be possible, and in certain situations, common practice. We already are seeing some of this make its way into vehicles to provide safer and easier
driving. As these technologies develop, we expect they significantly
will extend the useful driving life of individuals and offer new opportunities for the physically challenged. Some entrepreneurs are even
pushing current boundaries further by exploring the feasibility of flying cars. While these would require significant regulatory development to become a viable option, they do provide a glimpse of what
our future of mobility may look like.
All of this serves as the backdrop to how we think about Ford
Motor Co. today. Henry Ford redefined mobility for average people,
and we have the opportunity to do the same now. The next 20 years
will see a radical transformation of our industry, and will present
many new ways of ensuring that my great-grandfathers dream of
opening the highways for all mankind will remain alive and well in
the 21st century and beyond.
Mr. Ford is executive chairman of Ford Motor Co.
Cities
Cities Will Increasingly Be the Place Where

Problems Get Solved
KASIM REED
I often say that cities are where hope meets the street, and that will be
increasingly true between now and 2050.
Cities, in short, are ascendant. National governmentsin the U.S.
and overseasare all but broken and hold little promise for mending
themselves in the future. As such, people and businesses will turn to
cities for leadership, bold thinking, effective services and, yes, hope.
What will these cities look like and how will they work? Public
safety is the most fundamental responsibility of city government;
thus, cities in the future will have a focused, well-managed approach
to lowering crime rates.
Atlanta, for instance, is already using PredPol, predictive technology that helps forecast criminal activity. The result: crime rates that,
in many instances, are falling below the 40-year lows we have already
seen. In the future, police will perfect the use of predictive analytics
to thwart crimes before they occur. We will also see expanded use of
video technology, giving public-safety officials a view of every street
corner, 24 hours a day.
BALANCING PRIORITIES
In the end, our efforts to reduce crime will depend on how much pri-
vacy we are willing to sacrifice. Accordingly, we will need thoughtful public discussions about how to balance privacy with the desire
for safety.
As cities attract more of our most talented young people, new
relationships, ideas and jobs will emerge from new innovation hubs.
We will see a greater focus on personal mobilityinvolving walking,
biking, light rail, autonomous vehicle and car-sharing programsalong with healthier lifestyles and improved mortality rates
among our residents.
Air and water will be cleaner, and energy use will be cut by 20%
to 40% in our leading cities because of these changes.
High-speed rail will allow over six million residents in the Atlanta
region to travel to the coast of Savannah in less than an hour. In those
rare instances when we must travel by car, we will climb into an electric, self-driven vehicleone that will travel along a networked traffic
system. In all, our roads will be safer and less congested.
TOUCH OF A BUTTON
In 2050, I also believe that our lives will be more efficient. Gains
in technology will make interactions with government and business
more convenient.
Residents will be able to access services from municipalities at the
touch of a button, or even the wave of a hand through the air.
From the convenience of a laptop or smartphone, I believe that residents will be able to receive a visual route of where they want to
gowhether driving, biking or walkingto any destination in a city
and how long it will take them to get there.
The cities of the future will continue to be engines of economic
prosperity. It will be cities that will offer transformational solutions
to the global problems of crime, inadequate education and income
inequality. If we are able to unleash the full potential of cities around

the world, we will see a 50% increase in the annual U.S. GDP growth
rate, from the sluggish 2% today to the 3%-plus we need in the
future.
This city-fueled growth will help make the world a stronger,
healthier and more prosperous place than it is today.
Mr. Reed is the mayor of Atlanta.
Cleaning
Robots Will Take Over Household Chores
JAMES DYSON
The smart home is getting smarter by the day, soon prophesying

and providing our every want and need. Cleaning will be no exception. But before the robot revolution arrives, we are already eliminating cleaning dread. The kinds of small, highly efficient motors our
engineers are developing give versatile cordless vacuums the power
of their tethered counterparts, making a quick clean achievable, no
matter the moment. And those robots? Eventually theyll take on all
the household chores, predicting our undetected needs and adapting
to the environment around them. Theyll clean up autonomously,
invisibly, completely hygienically and far more effectively than oldfashioned elbow grease.
James Dyson, inventor and founder of Dyson Ltd.
Clothing
Technology Will Revolutionize How Clothes

Are Made
JOSEPH ALTUZARRA
Beautiful, meaningful clothing will be favored over disposable product. There will be a desire on the part of customers to know where
clothing comes from, and how it is made, especially as they become
more aware of their carbon footprint.
Finally, it is impossible to think that technology will not somehow
play a role in shaping fashion.
We are already seeing how technological innovations (from
breathable synthetics to ultrasonic welding machines) can revolutionize the way clothes are made, and I am certain that the next 100 years
will usher in a wave of technological advancements that will have a
huge impact on how people dress.
Joseph Altuzarra, fashion designer
Coffee
Caf and Coffee Will Be Inseparable
JAMES FREEMAN
What will coffee be like in 2139? Its tempting to predict a Binacalike caffe latte spray, or genetically engineered mosquitos that inject
an essence of the finest Ethiopian Yirgacheffe instead of malaria, but
humans, for good or ill, remain humans. We need to hear the coffee
grinder buzzing and have the anticipation focus our attention on the
impending pleasure so we can experience it more keenly. The surrender to craft and professionalism, the inspiring overheard remark,
the providential chance encounterhallmarks of the cafe experiencewill remain as important to us as they were 125 years ago.
Weve been drinking coffee together since the 1530swhen cafes
serving coffee from the mountains of Yemen spread across Cairo.
Well want that conviviality even more in the future, I happily suspect.
James Freeman, founder of Blue Bottle Coffee
Communications
Wireless Communications Will Cleave Us

From the Legacies of Old Networks
TOM WHEELER
Nothing is more seminal to our existence than how we connect.

Today we are on the cusp of what could become the greatest
network-driven change in history.
Networks have always created places. Chicago became the nations
second city because the converging rail lines centralized economic
activity. New York remains the nations media center because it was
from there that the early telegraph lines emanated.
In the new networked world, however, the power of connections
is no longer centralizing. Whereas railroad, telegraph and telephone
networks had to converge at a hub to exchange activity, a distributed
digital network allows activity at the edges of the network without a
hub.
SHAPING THE FUTURE
That push began with the mating of the microprocessor and the airwaves. It is the offspring of that union that holds the promise of
surpassing the railroad and telegraph and shaping the future of communications.
Moores Lawhow the power of microchips doubles about every
two yearshas made todays smartphone as powerful as the super-
computers of just a few years back. Lost in our complacency about

such advances is how the exponential functioning of Moores Law
continues to churn forward. In only 20 years, smartphone chips will
be more than 1,000 times as powerful as today!
Now, consider how connecting the power of these computers
without wires transforms the ways we live and work. That there are
nearly as many mobile phones as people on the planet has transformed the lives of billions. In the not-too-distant future, wireless
communications will connect not just everyone, but everything.
When 50 billion inanimate devices are talking to each other (Ciscos
forecast for 2020), information will flow like the breeze among sensors and databases. In the process it will create new information to
populate new devices and databases.
NEW DISRUPTERS
Yes, unanticipated effects await us. Who would have imagined that
the railroads would change Americans diets, as the refrigerated delivery of food by rail substantially reduced prices and put meat on urban
tables? A century later, who could have foreseen how mobile computing would disrupt the hotel or taxi industries as companies like
Airbnb and Uber are doing? Just as local carting companies and merchants fought to keep railroads out of their towns in the 19th century,
we see the hotel and taxi industries leaning on local and state governments to limit competition from digital upstarts.
Its not technology that will define our futureits us. The new
technology will cleave us from the comfortable legacies established
by the old networks. The new era of distributed activity encourages
innovation without permission.
As such, our challenge will echo that of earlier eras confronted by
new networks. We know from that history how the rewards go to
those who push past network legacies and press forward to harness
that which the new networks make possible.
Mr. Wheeler is chairman of the Federal Communications

Commission.
Corporations
Global Companies Will Look More and

More Alike
ROSABETH MOSS KANTER
Be prepared for a future in which the concept of a corporationhow

its structured, how its governedwill vary widely. But the conduct
of corporations will converge on a few universal standards and
norms.
Consider this example. For a recent Harvard program about business leadership in China, I convened a panel of chief executives from
four very different companies: China Mobile, a state-owned enterprise and the largest mobile-telephone operator in the world; Esquel
Group, a family apparel company that had left China for Hong Kong,
then returned; IBM Greater China, the multinational IBM business
unit on the ground in China; and a software startup that at the time
was operating in Shanghai, incorporated in Delaware, had investors
in Asia and the U.S., and used a bank in Silicon Valley.
The types of ownership and governance of the companies ranged
over a wide spectrum. But as the panel discussion progressed, it
became clear that each business was strikingly similar in its imperatives and aspirations. Each CEO talked about competing for talent
from a new generation whose members value meaningful work in
addition to a good salary, creating a culture for constant innovation,
striving for more open communication, considering longer time

horizons and serving local communities.
NEXT YEARS MODELS
The fact that this conversation took place in China is itself a harbinger of the future. Nearly 100 Chinese companies are now among
the worlds 500 largest, ranked by revenue, closing in on the number
of U.S.-based giants. Emerging-country powerhouses have been
acquiring Western icons (Indias Mittal has bought Frances Arcelor,
Tata Motors bought Jaguar and Land Rover, and Brazils AmBev
acquired Anheuser-Busch and Belgiums InBev). This promises further proliferation of corporate forms, especially when U.S. concepts
are no longer held up as the dominant models.
New forms of ownership and governance will include Asian-style
state-owned or government-linked enterprises, such as Singapores
Temasek; German-style dual supervisory and management boards;
customer or employee-owned financial, retail and producer cooperatives, such as Frances Crdit Agricole or Canadas Desjardins; B
corporations established for profits plus social benefit; alliances and
consortia such as Visa and MasterCard; charities that run businesses,
like Germanys Robert Bosch Foundation; family-owned, privateequity-held or venture-capital-funded enterprises; and the X Factor
of partnerships still to be invented.
Yet, corporations of all types will have some things in common
wherever they originate or operate. They will be globally connected,
technologically enabled, humanly diverse and socially accountable.
They will have to be. Customers, the media and the public will
increasingly demand it.
QUIET REVOLUTION
While inevitable battles will rage, for example, over which government sets food-safety standards, or agrees to a global environmentalprotection treaty, many large companies will engineer a quiet convergence of standards that will gradually affect every business.
Cemex, for example, the global cement company with headquarters
in Mexico, decided after its first entry into Spain to be one Cemex
and to operate by a single set of standards everywhere, enabling dramatic growth through acquisitions in the U.S., Egypt, Europe and
Australia. When Shinhan Financial Group in South Korea sought
listing on the New York Stock Exchange soon after a merger, it
was seeking legitimacy, not just capital, by showing compliance with
Sarbanes-Oxley, which it considered the worlds highest standard.
Internet governance will be globalized, as will continuing efforts at
interoperability among mobile-telecom operators.
Convergence will increase because companies compare themselves
with one another across wide territories, and so will their
smartphone-using, Web-empowered customers. Being determinedly
local will be a choice, not an unconscious default position. A neighborhood grocer serving local produce must compete with nearby
international chain supermarkets offering goods flown in from the
opposite ends of the Earth. At the same time, large corporations
must watch disruptive startups and small businesses with innovative
products; Coca-Cola bought Honest Tea, making the upstart beverage brewer its entree into healthy-bottled-drinks markets of the
future. As technology evolves and cloud computing hovers everywhere, small businesses will have access to the same inputs as large
ones.
If companies didnt begin with a culture of purpose and principles,
an internationally, ethnically diverse membership will demand it, as
universal values and ethical codes facilitate communication, coordination and cooperation. More companies will be shape-shifting
bundles of activities, designed for flexibility rather than stability and
predictability.
To deal with a rapidly changing environment and the fluid boundaries of business units that come and go, more work will be done
by crosscutting project teams, and there will be more bottom-up
self-organizinga matrix on steroids. Companies will embrace the
always-on, always-accessible, democratizing communication of
social media, or fall behind.
They will be less headquarters-centric, because all wisdom no
longer emanates from Armonk, Cincinnati, Bangalore or Beijing.
Like Google and Facebook, their power will come not from their
number of employees but from the size of their partnership network.
A small core with a wide set of loosely affiliated partners is itself a new
organizational form.
DARK SIDE
There is a dark side. Being globally integrated can slide into being
globally manipulative. Corporate greed wont disappear by itself.
Large companies can play one country off against another, looking
for tax shelters or tax breaks, ready to move and leave scorched earth
behind. But the spotlight of transparency will shine, like it or not.
Media activism is likely to grow along with triple bottom lines.
In addition to financial statements, requirements for environmental
and social reporting are emerging in the European Union, Brazil and
Australia, among other places.
Thus, corporations of the future will have to forge a new social
contract with society. Their conduct will matter more than their legal
form. Stakeholders, including financial shareholders, are watching.
To gain trust and legitimacy, companies must be responsible citizens

wherever they operate. That includes more than employee volunteerism in community-service projects; it means paying their taxes
and paying their way, including the price of externalities such as
carbon emissions.
And they must figure out, maybe before nations do, how to find
universal values that help them work cooperatively across borders.
After all, world peace and prosperity is also good for business.
Dr. Kanter holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle professorship at

Harvard Business School, and is the author of
SuperCorp and Confidence. Twitter:
@RosabethKanter.
Death
Longer Lifespans Will Change Lifeand

Death
SHELLY KAGAN
Death isnt going to be overcome anytime soon. So the most fundamental fact about the human conditionwe live, and then we dieis
going to stay the same. Accordingly, the most common basic attitudes toward death (fear of death, and a wish for immortality) are
likely to remain in place as well.
But though death will remain undefeated, it may yet be delayed.
It is possible that in the not-too-distant future, medical science will
have progressed sufficiently that we may be able to significantly
expand the normal human life span, adding perhaps 40, 60 or even 80
healthy years to the current upper limits.
Such a change would be unprecedented in human history.
Although average human life expectancy has increased over the centuries, this is entirely due to reduction in premature deaths (primarily
from disease). The Bibles idea of a long lifeabout 80 yearsis still
more or less on target, more than 2,000 years later. So if we do find
ourselves facing the real possibility of living healthy lives for 120, 140
or 160 years, this will be a change unlike any we have faced before.
Delaying death in this way will require radical changes in society.
Consider the fact that, for most of us, parenting and raising children
occupies an absolutely central part of our adult lives. That would have
to change. An additional 80 healthy years might mean that women

would be fertile for twice or three times as long as they are now. But
if that meant having two or three times as many children, the resulting population explosion would be utterly unmanageable.
On the other hand, if typical families still had only two or so children each, the raising of those children would occupy a much smaller
portion of ones adulthood than it does now (16%, perhaps, compared
with almost 40% now). Would family life become a much less significant part of our lives? Or would the roles of grandparent, greatgrandparent and great-great-grandparent (and so on) take on new
and unfamiliar significance? We dont know.
EXTRA RETIREMENT?
Similar questions arise when we think about the impact of longer life
on ones career. Where exactly would the extra years go? Would
they be added to the years one spends in retirement? But many people
dont save enough for retirement as it is! How could we possibly
manage to earn enough in our working years to pay for an additional
80 years of retirement?
So will the extra years be spent working? But many people are
already sufficiently unhappy with their jobs to be counting the time
until they can retire. How will they put up with needing to work for
an additional 80 years? And even those of us who currently love our
jobs might well grow bored if we had to work at them for over a
century!
Perhaps people will change careers. Maybe after a half-century at
one type of career, people will routinely switch tracks and have a
completely different second (or third) career. That might well solve
the problem of boredom. But who wants to start over again at the
bottom of the corporate laddernot to mention making an entrylevel salaryat the age of 70 or 80?
In posing these questions, I dont at all mean to suggest that they
cannot be answered. Humans are remarkably adaptable, and I have
no doubt that various sorts of social arrangements would eventually
emerge. Perhaps it shouldnt surprise us that we cannot readily predict exactly what those new arrangements will look like. But at the
very least we must avoid the naive assumption that we can just take
an extra 80 years and simply drop them into the sorts of lives we
currently have, while everything else stays the same.
Being a philosopher, I cannot resist speculating a bit further. Even
with tremendous advances in biology and medicine, presumably
human bodies will eventually wear out. So lets imagine that in the
future, suitable replacement organsand perhaps even entire bodiescan be synthetically grown at will. That will allow us to delay
death even further.
But what about the brain? I imagine that even the healthiest brain
will eventually break down. Mustnt that signal the end?
HOPES AND FEARS

Not necessarily. Suppose that we can also grow replacement brains!
Imagine that as your old brain nears the end of its ability to function
properly, scientists upload your entire set of memories, beliefs, goals
and desires onto a computer, and all of that content is then downloaded onto the replacement brain, which is then neatly slipped into
your skull. When you wake up from your brain transplant, you will
have all the same thoughts and hopes and fears as you had just before
the operation. Wont that mean that death has been put off even
longer?
Thats actually a surprisingly difficult question to answer. There is
a lively debate among contemporary philosophers about the underlying metaphysical requirements for personal identitywhat it takes
for a given person to continue to exist from moment to moment.
On some views, the person who wakes up from the operation will
indeed be you, the very same person who went into the hospital. But
on other views, the person who wakes up will be just a copy of you,
someone who mistakenly believes he is you, but who isnt really you
at all. Tragically enough, the real you will have died on the operating
table.
Suppose we take the more optimistic view, and decide that the person who wakes up really would be you. Wont that mean, then, that
death has been more than delayed, that it has actually been defeated?
Given the possibility of transplant after transplant, wont the age-old
dream of immortality finally be ours?
No, not even there. For some day the sun will burn out, and all life
on Earth will end, even ours.
Death can be delayed. But it cannot be denied.
Shelly Kagan is the Clark professor of philosophy at Yale

University and author of the 2012 book Death.
Drugs
More Drugs Will Really WorkBut Theyll

Cost More
MARK B. MCCLELLAN
We are going to get better at developing very effective, targeted

treatments. Were seeing the front wave of that now with some
genomically based therapies for cancer and other illnesses. We are
going to find ways to bring down the time and costs of developing
these treatments, with better science and a better regulatory process.
What thats going to mean is more therapies that really do work but
also have a high price, because there is a lot more confidence theyre
going to have an impact for the patients who use them. If we can
not only speed development but use it to foster competition among
treatments, and if we can make progress on cheaper and better ways
to deliver health care, Im fairly optimistic about the outlook for drug
innovation over the next decade or so.
Mark B. McClellan, director of the health care innovation and value
initiative at the Brookings Institution and former head of the Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
Education
An End for Grade Levels in Schools
MARGARET SPELLINGS
When I look ahead to the schools of 20 years from now, what I see
are institutions that not only will be more diverse, but will in every
way look and function differently from the schoolhouses of today.
The classrooms of the present will go the way of the banks of old.
Just as new technologies allowed us to access banks through ATMs
instead of going to the teller in the lobby, education will be revolutionized through ever-expanding technologies and the rapid flow of
information.
Those two forces will change the trappings of the system we know
now, resulting in a consumer-driven education.
Parents, for one, will have access to the flow of data, allowing them
to help their children find the education that best fits them. Buyers,
meaning the parents and students, will be in control of the education, selecting from an la carte menu of options. Gone will be the
fixed-price menu, where a student attends a school based upon geography and is offered few alternatives. Students and their parents can
take their state and federal dollars and find an education that best suits
them.
For many Americans, this revolution will mean home schooling.
For others, it will mean accessing coursework online at any time. For
all students, this will mean more individualized learning.
DATA-DRIVEN EDUCATION
Like parents, teachers also will have real-time data. They will use it to
create the best strategies for educating a child. They will build a plan
that is customized to a students needs. If a student, for instance, does
not grasp English, the plan will concentrate on acquiring that necessity as fast as possible. If a child trails in reading, the strategy will lead
to quick interventions. If a child is outpacing her peers in math, the
plan will enrich her learning so she can move even further ahead.
The individualized approach to education will serve children in
another important way. Instead of moving as part of a group from
grade to grade, a child can move ahead when ready.
The concept of grade level especially will change in high school.
Students will not think of themselves as freshmen, sophomores,
juniors or seniors. They will be grouped by their level of learning,
regardless of age.
Of course, they still must master the basics of reading, writing,
math and science to graduate. But perhaps a 15-year-old is learning
with 17-year-olds on math, while working with 16-year-olds on
reading. The data will guide where each child best fits. Each students
competencies will be a guiding force in the coming world of education.
At the lower levels, we will see a different universe, too. Threeand-four-year-olds will not be sitting on the sidelines. Elementary
schools will include them as part of a new zero-to-15 approach. We
will not think about individual grades so much as we think about
ensuring students start early and stay on the path to proficiency. That
way, they will retain the boost that early education provides.
TEACHERS SHIFTING ROLE
Teachers in this new process will remain as valuable as they are today.
But they will be less like employees of a traditional school and more
like independent agents who contract to get a job done with students.
Those teachers who excel at customizing an education will do best,
showing they can reach their students with innovative strategies and
modern technologies. They will get their students on the path to
graduation and beyond.
Teachers who excel also will be deployed to the most difficult
schools and classrooms. They will receive more pay for taking on
harder assignments. And their days, like those of principals, will
increasingly focus on their customers, the students.
Those students who do go on to pursue postsecondary education,
which will likely be most of them if they are to succeed in the workplace, also will enter a new world. They will think less of a piece
of paper that signifies completion and more about the skills that an
employer will require of them.
In fact, employers will increasingly credential students. Many
companies will test prospective employees to see if they have the requisite knowledge and attributes. Badging students particularly will
prevail in the worlds of science, technology, engineering and math.
Employers will determine whether a young person is ready, not just
the university.
From early ages through college, data and information will guide
students and parents through this new world. They will look for the
best education options like travelers today look for a Trip Advisor rating. The only reason we will not reach this better place is if the status quo prevails. But the market-oriented forces that have changed so
much of our worldcompetition, customization, technology, modern management and customer focusare too powerful for even an
entrenched educational establishment to resist.
These principles also will change our education systems. In turn,
those systems will well serve Americas diverse student body, preparing each student for a world that will require them to think creatively, reason through problems and respond to fast-changing circumstances.
Ms. Spellings, president of the George W. Bush

Presidential Center in Dallas, was secretary of education
from 2005 to 2009.
Email
Email Will Get a Lot More Useful
V.A. SHIVA AYYADURAI
When I tell people I invented email, the first thing they say is, I
want to kill you. Email is here to stayits time we got better at using
it. Email originated from the interoffice paper mail system (Inbox,
Outbox, etc.) used in every office across the world. In the good old
days, the secretary did all the hard work and the boss did two things:
dictating and editing. But email has made secretaries of us all; we
spend up to 38% of our day managing email. The future email systems will have integrated artificial intelligence that will know you as
well as the secretary of 1978 once did, and you will be able to dictate
to it. It will automatically sort your inbox, file and archive, prioritize, and even come up with reasonable responses, which you simply
review, edit and send. So you can go back to the future: Be the boss,
and your mail system will be the secretary.
V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, faculty lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Energy
Energy Will Look Much as It Does Nowor

Perhaps Not
DANIEL YERGIN
The world will soon run out of its most important energy resource
because supplies are becoming exhausted. To stave off disaster,
there must be a quick shift to wind power.
No, the warning is not from 2014. Rather, its from 1881, eight
years before the first pages of The Wall Street Journal rolled off the
press. And the speaker was no less than Lord Kelvin, one of the great
scientists of the 19th century.
Thats a good reminder of how the actual energy future can confound the best predictions from the platform of the energy present. And the reminders keep coming. Just six years ago, the U.S.
was gearing up to spend $100 billion a year importing liquefied natural gas, or LNG, because of the increasingly high cost and apparent scarcity of domestic gas. Now the country is less than two years
away from becoming an exporter of LNG, while European industry
is migrating to the U.S. to take advantage of inexpensive natural gas.
By 2021, the U.S. will be one of the top three LNG exporters in the
world.
Two lessons: Energy surprises occur and recur. And markets
matter. So, with those caveats in mind, what might the energy world
look like 20 years from now? The most likely answer, from todays
perspective, is biggerbut not too different. The reasons are two.
SLOW SHIFTS
First, in the energy business, given the scale of existing infrastructure
and the length of investment lead times, 20 years isnt very long.
Second, virtually all growth in demand over the next 20 years will
be in the emerging-markets countries, which will largely tilt toward
conventional energy. Consider that two decades from now, the newcar market in China will likely be 41 million vehicles a year, compared with 17 million in the U.S.
To be more specific: About two decades from nowin what we
call our Global Redesign scenariothe world will be using between
35% and 40% more energy. That is the result of global economic
growth and rising incomes in the developing world.
Today, oil, natural gas and coal provide 82% of world energy.
Twenty years from now, their share will be only slightly lower: 75%
to 80%. There will, however, be a big shift in the mix among those
conventional fuels. While coal use will decline in the U.S., it will
increase in countries such as China and India, which will use coal as
an inexpensive fuel for generating electricity. Natural gas will gain
market share around the world.
In the 1950s, oil toppled King Coal to seize the No. 1 position. But
by the 2030s, the reign of oil will be over. It will be running a neckand-neck race with coal and natural gas. By the end of the 2030s, it
is likely that natural gas will pull ahead to become the worlds No. 1
fuel.
Emerging-markets countries are moving ahead with new nuclear
power plants. But in Germany the fleet will be shut down by early in
the next decade; only some of Japans nuclear power plants will come
back into operation, and part of the U.S. nuclear fleet will be looking
at early retirement. So nuclear will likely hold constant at around 6%
of total energyunless new designs, such as small modular reactors,
begin to enter the market.
MARCH OF EVENTS
What could change this picture?
Technology is an obvious answer. Wind is moving from the
alternative category to the conventional. Further progress on
costs could accelerate its adoption. Solar costs have come down dramatically in the past few years. Further declines would move solar
more rapidly into the marketplace. Breakthroughs on electricity stor-
age would give a further boost to wind and solar by overcoming their
present dependence on blowing wind and shining sun.
What about the electric car? China has set a goal of having a million electric cars on the road by 2020a target on which its way
behind. At this point, the U.S. is ahead of China. But, even if the cost
challenges are met and the electric car takes off in big volumes, the
auto fleet is so large that the effect on fuel consumption would not be
really felt until the 2030s.
But policies, and their interaction with events, matter a lot. What
kind of incentives and subsidies are required to cause a transition
away from conventional fuels? Until recently, Germany saw itself as
the worlds model for the rapid introduction of renewables. But now
it is becoming something of an anti-model, as the costs of the subsidies threaten a loss of global competitiveness, risking, in the words of
Germanys economics minister, a dramatic deindustrialization.
But a new global push to accelerate renewables could be ignited by
a combination of events: several years of extreme weather, which
powers a much stronger consensus about the imminent risks of climate change; and a severe security crisis that disrupts the flow of oil.
In such circumstances, governments, pushed by alarmed publics,
would rush new policies into place.
VULNERABLE SUBSIDIES
Of course, events could work in the other way, too. During the
global recession, European governments peeled back generous subsidies for renewables. Another steep economic downturn would have
a similar effect, meaning a big setback for the renewables industry.
What happens after the 2030s? Recent years have seen a great
bubbling in scientific research and technological innovation around
energy. The general lesson is that energy innovation takes a long

time to reach the marketplace.
In this wave of innovation, there will be many disappointments.
But some parts of these efforts are likely to make their impact felt
sometime in the 2030s. They may be small in number but could be
oversize in terms of effect. And that is when the energy mix could
start to look quite different.
Mr. Yergin is vice chairman of IHS, a research and

information company. His most recent book is The
Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the
Modern World. He received the Pulitzer Prize for The
Prize.
Entrepreneurship
It Will Be Easier to Start Your Own

Businessand Succeed With It
ANGELA BENTON
Today when we think about entrepreneurship, we tend to think

about the big winsthe large rounds of financing, the huge IPOs.
Facebook and other recent phenoms have become our go-to success
stories.
But will this be the same in the future? I wouldnt bet on it.
With the increase in the number of startups over the past five years,
weve entered the age of democratized entrepreneurship. Just about
anyone can afford to launch a business these days, as well as being
able to get access to the information they need to see some success
at it. Many of these new entrants today are mobile-app businesses. In
the future, it will be so much more than that.
In reality, most small businesses today arent the sexy tech startups
we read about. They are the mom-and-pop stores in our local communities. In the future all of these businesses will be technologyenabled, executing on their business model in some way, shape or
form (sales, distribution, etc.) that leverages technology. The brickand-mortar small businesses we grew up with will become businesses
built on exponential technology platforms, not dissimilar to how
entrepreneurs are leveraging social platforms (Twitter, Facebook,
etc.) to build businesses today.
Here are a few of the key exponential technologies that will transform the entrepreneurship landscape.
DRONE TECHNOLOGIES
Though most commonly associated with the military, drone technology will eventually become an open platform that will enable quicker
delivery of goods around the world. This will become a viable delivery option for small businesses to fulfill orders, whether you are a
mom-and-pop or a billion-dollar retailer. This will not only change
how businesses compete with one another (anyone who is a maker/
creator with something to sell can set up shop with near-instant
delivery), but it also will open up a slew of opportunities for entrepreneurs to build complex drone networks for fulfillment.
INTERNET OF THINGS
Its no surprise how connected we can expect to be in the future. In
the so-called Internet of Things, in which everyone and everything
will carry an identifying tag for the Web, nearly every facet of our
life will be recorded, tracked, or monitored in some way through
sensors. Therein lies the opportunity for budding entrepreneurs of
the future to access an individuals data and get a 360-degree view
of that person. If you think the recommendation engines of today
are good, wait until you see what the future holds. Every business
and startup will compete to get to a customer at the perfect moment
and with the perfect product that is so uniquely them. When that
gets old, entrepreneurs will be forced to do what they are known for:
think creatively to package solutions that arrive right when someone
needs them. Got a flat tire on the way home from work? Not an issue.
The sensor in your car will have the tow truck on the way along with
a cab to make sure youre home in time for your Chinese-food deliv-
ery (delivered by drone no doubt) brought to you by [Your Name

Here] Inc.
3-D PRINTING
Ever had an idea for ___? We all have moments of inspiration.
Though sites such as Quirky exist today to help inventors and entrepreneurs develop physical products, imagine what it will be like
when one can have an idea, create a mold, and simply print it. Right
in your own living room. This kind of accessibility in the future will
spur not just new widgets to sell but whole new economies based
on sharing, bartering and maybe even developing new printed currencies. Will the next Warren Buffett please stand up?
The future holds exciting and interesting opportunities for entrepreneurs, especially when you take into account these exponential
technologies and how much growth will occur in those areas. Above
and beyond that, entrepreneurship will be a lifestyle and commonplace. Everyone will sell something. It will allow individuals the freedom of building a business where they work one day a week from
their home in Lost Springs, Wyo., selling a product that is 3-D
printed or building the largest drone delivery network weve ever
imagined.
See you in the future.
Ms. Benton is founder and chief executive of NewME

Accelerator, a platform that accelerates startups led by
minority entrepreneurs.
Fashion
Quality Could Overtake Fast Fashion
MICHAEL KORS
I love fashion because its plugged into the zeitgeist, so its always
changing. Thirty years ago, I could never have predicted Id be where
I am today, so I know I dont know whats going to happen in the
next five years or the next 20 years. I have my predictionsIm sure
technology will continue to have an impact on fashion, particularly
the way people shop. I think quality will be increasingly importantwere moving away from a time of fast fashion. But really, the
only constant in fashion is that you must keep moving forward, otherwise youll be left behind.
Michael Kors, fashion designer and founder of Michael Kors Holdings Ltd.
Fashion Models
'Virtual Selves' Will Stand in for Top

Models
IVAN BART
The modeling industrys most invaluable advancement 125 years

from now will be to finally solve for, If only there were more hours
in a day. Enter Virtual Selves: a platform allowing top models to
make multiple appearances simultaneously. Virtual Selves will generate additional revenue for the most in-demand models, allowing
their likenesses to walk multiple shows or sit for multiple shoots, perhaps on multiple continents. It will also help overscheduled editors
and industry executives prevent extreme fatigue and avoid seemingly
inevitable fashion-month traffic jams.
Ivan Bart, senior vice president and managing director of IMG Models
Food
Food Will be More Sustainable and Locally

Sourced
ALICE WATERS
Over the past half-century, the fast-food industry, aided by government subsidies, has come to dominate the food marketplace. That
development has given us an obesity epidemic and, with the growth
of so-called factory farms, has degraded the environment.
More recently, in a reaction against fast food and Big Ag, the
sustainable-food movement, with a focus on local food networks and
healthy eating, has gained a foothold in restaurants and farms across
the country. What began as an underground movement has now
gone mainstream.
Looking forward, I believe that ever-growing numbers of Americansled by passionate chefs, farmers and activistswill choose the
latter of these two paths: a sustainable food future. Let me describe
how I believe, ideally, that future will look.
FARMERS MARKETS
The number of farmers markets and young people taking up farming
will multiply geometrically. As such, we will see at least one farmers
market in every town in the country and, in turn, the revitalization
of many areas.
At the same time, small mom-and-pop restaurants will enjoy a
resurgence. These ownerswith little enthusiasm for franchiseswill

be interested primarily in quality of life and in building a community
around their businesses. These restaurants will build relationships
directly with farms and will want to increase the quality and variety
of their produce. As a result, I expect to see a greater variety of fruits
and vegetables becoming available in the market.
Growing demand will push farmers to be innovative, as will climate change. That will mean more greenhouses in the colder parts
of the country, growing food in urban areas and choosing crops that
can withstand extreme weather.
This movement poses a threat to fast-food businesses and industrial
food companies, both of which I predict will continue to shape-shift
and co-opt their values for profit. As long as their products continue
to be supported by government subsidies, they will be successful. The
reality is that the sustainable-food movements reach will grow only
to a point and ultimately will be limited to those with access, means
and educationunless legislators dramatically change food and agriculture policy.
I think that those in government will come back to their senses in
the coming years and begin to subsidize farms instead of factories. As
access to real food becomes increasingly divided between the haves
and the have-nots, food security will become even more of a socialjustice issue.
BACK TO SCHOOL
I am confident that we will see a growing consensus about the most
effective way to transform food in America: building a real, sustainable and free school-lunch program. Decision makers will agree that
the most sensible place to reach every child and to have the most lasting impact is with a program of edible education. Having worked
in that field for more than 20 years via the Edible Schoolyard Project, I know whats possible: Providing children with delicious meals
made from organic ingredients transforms their attitudes about, and
behavior toward, food for life.
Beyond the individual nutrition outcome of each child, an institutional food program with principled buying criteria (food that
is locally sourced and organic) becomes a subsidy system for real
fooda subsidy system that sees schools become the engine for sustainability.
I know that those on both sides of the political aisle finally realize
that in food we find the root problem of many of our nations ills. I
am not sure yet that they realize that food has the solution.
Ms. Waters is a chef, author and founder of Chez Panisse

restaurant and the Edible Schoolyard Project.
Hiring
Great Employees Will Be Much Easier to

Find
LASZLO BOCK
If things work out, rsums will become less important. Who you
know, the color of your skin or your orientation will become less
important as organizations become adept at sifting job applicants
with a sense of what they can accomplish.
Right now, we have an information asymmetry problem: As a
candidate, its hard to accurately demonstrate what youre good at,
and employers dont do a good job of conveying what they need.
Technology will resolve this as more information becomes available,
and companies will be able to hire people based on what they can
actually contribute.
Technology will also enable employers to find the most talented
people in the worlds seven billion. Every company thats growing
will want high-quality people, but if you just look at traditional qualifications, well run out of people to hire. Clever organizations will
cast a much wider net for the most in-demand skills. Its going to be
easier, eventually, to find the brilliant top 5% of the world than taking 50th-percentile performers and turning them into top-five-percentile performers.
Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google Inc.
Homes
Tomorrows House Will be Smallerbut

Wont Feel Like It
SARAH SUSANKA
When we imagine the house of the future, most of us tend to think

that as technology changes, the look of the house will change with it.
But we are creatures of habit, and we tend to hang onto the things
that make us feel at home.
So the house of the future will not look very different from todays
homes. However, I believe that much of what that house contains,
and what it allows us to do, will be quite different.
My predictions fall into three categories.
DESIGN
The house will be smaller in square footage, but it will feel bigger
because it is well designed. Think Apple, Tesla, Dyson. When something is carefully thought through, you can get less to do more. It
will have sizzle and elegance, rather than volume and acreage.
Bigger, that is, doesnt necessarily mean better. When you use your
available budget to build the rooms you actually use, you end up with
a house that fits, and with very little unused or rarely used space.
The house of the future will have a more informal character. No
need for the formal rooms designed for a type of guest that is in short
supply today, and almost nonexistent in our future world. Listen to
the millennials. They arent interested in wasted space, or in impressing the neighbors. They want comfort and conviviality with a generous dose of practicality. This generation will constitute a substantial
percentage of our future homes inhabitants. They know what they
want, and a McMansion in suburbia is decidedly not it.
What we currently call aging in place and universal design,
concepts of architecture that cater to all ages and abilities, will
become standard practice in all our structures, as well as in the designs
of our communities. The house of the future will be designed not
only for the owners personal needs today, but also for the long haul.
Coming generations will care deeply about appropriate use of
resourcesreally an issue of good designand will go to great
lengths to ensure that their houses and communities are in sync with
this larger vision of long-term health and welfare. So we can expect
houses that are less expensive and easier to maintain, though Im
afraid no maintenance is still not in the cards.
TECHNOLOGY
The spaghetti bundles of wires running through most new homes
today will be a thing of the distant past. Everything will be wireless,
and all devices, appliances and control systems will talk to each other
with ease, which will thankfully make upgrades far less difficult.
Lighting will be perhaps the most remarkable change. Theres an
LED revolution just beginning today that 30 years from now will
completely shift how we experience the different rooms and places
within our homes.
In our future world, whole surfaces will be the light source. Youll
be changing the color and light intensity of the walls and ceilings,
and maybe even the floors of your home, adjusting them to different
presets, in much the same way that high-end lighting systems work
today. But unlike some of our present-day control systems, these will
not require a Ph.D. to operate.
Were hearing a lot of late about smart homes, but like the Internet in 1995, it hasnt quite caught on yet. Watch out, though. This is
one of the big shifts headed our way.
Everything in the home will be connected to the smart-home
automation system, to such a degree in fact that the homes of today
will be the equivalent of a typewriter, and the house of the future a
state-of-the-art computer.
Currently we think of the house as a place for living to take place
in. Our future house will be a place for accessing the world around
us. It will be serving a dramatically different set of functions for us, in

addition to the everyday living we do in them now.
Im seeing in-home offices in which one wall is entirely video
screen, projecting the world of fellow workers into your office, so
you have the experience of working with them, but from the comfort of your own home.
Similarly, windows can serve multiple functions. Some have builtin photovoltaics (at least on the south side of the house and roof).
They can be see-through when the weathers great, or become a
projectional surface, allowing you to select from myriad real-time
locations. Where would you like to be todaySydney Harbour, the
Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal?
In fact, this may even become our entertainment, too. Imagine the
adrenaline rush of your home perched atop Niagara Falls. Who needs
TV when you can experience that?
CONSTRUCTION
Well select houses we want to build in a different way. Well use
3-D immersion technology to try on different floor plans, so that we
can feel the place before we buy it, much as happens when a forsale property holds an open-house today, but without all the fellow
gawkers getting in your way.
Well build in a different way, too. Right now, our most expensive
purchase is built with the most antiquated process. Imagine if every
time you wanted to buy a new car, all the parts were delivered to
your driveway, and put together by a local automobile assembler over
the ensuing months, weather allowing. Thats whats happening currently with our houses. As weve done for centuries, we bring all the
materials required to assemble the structure to the site, and build it
stick by stick in situ. Its a slow and challenging process, dependent

upon Mother Nature and the exigencies of the market.
The house of the future, by contrast, will be built with precision
in a factory setting, just like our cars are today, and brought to the
site in large panels that can be assembled and completed in less than a
week.
In the end, what most of us long for is a place that really feels
like home, a place that is beautiful and feeds the soul. Using design
and technological features already within our grasp, the home of the
future has the potential to more closely resemble a cottage in the
south of France than a house in suburbia. And that cottage will be
your personal portal to everywhere.
Ms. Susanka is an architect, blogger and author of the

Not So Big series of books, including The Not So Big
House. She lives in North Carolina.
A Shift to Nomadic Living
TONY FADELL
As communications becomes ubiquitous between people and products, our relationship with the home will change. The comforts of
home will no longer be tied to specific physical structures, giving
way to nomadic living. Home will be wherever we choose to rest our
heads. Homes will also become more consciousof both their surroundings and occupant needsand begin taking care of their occupants instead of the other way around. The impact? Everything from
automatic energy savings to seniors being able to live in their homes
longer. Finally, homes will produce and store energy (solar, wind and
batteries) to enable low-cost green energy and allow for local sharing
of a precious resource.
Tony Fadell, founder of Nest Labs
Internet Access
We Will Battle to Connect Everyone to the

Internet
MARK ZUCKERBERG
There have been moments in history where the invention of new

technology has completely rewired the way our society lives and
works. The printing press, radio, television, mobile phones and the
Internet are among these. In the coming decades, we will see the
greatest revolution yet, as billions of people connect to the Internet
for the first time.
Today, only a little more than one-third of the world is connectedabout 2.7 billion people. Its easy to take the Internet for
granted and assume most people will soon have the access and opportunity we have, but that just isnt the case. Connecting everyone is
one of the fundamental challenges of our generation.
When people have access, they not only connect with their friends,
families and communities, they also gain the opportunity to participate in the global economy. Research by McKinsey & Co. in 2011
shows that the Internet already accounts for a larger share of economic activity in many developed countries than agriculture and
energy, and over the previous five years created 21% of GDP growth.
Access to online tools lets people use information to do their jobs better and in turn create even more jobs, business and opportunities. The
Internet is the foundation of this economy.
CONNECTING THE WORLD

Connecting everyone in the world does more than share these benefits with billions of more people. Bringing the other two-thirds of
the world online will enable them to invent and create new things
that benefit us, too. If we can connect everyone, all of our lives will
improve dramatically.
But this isnt going to happen by itself.
Not only do the vast majority of people have no access to the Internet, but even more surprisingly, Internet adoption is growing by less
than 9% each year. Thats very slow considering how early we are in
its development and that this rate is only slowing further.
A common belief is that as more people buy smartphones, they will
have data access. But that isnt a given. In most countries, the cost of
a data plan is much more expensive than the price of the smartphone
itself. For example, an iPhone with a two-year data plan in the U.S.
costs about $2,000, where $500 to $600 is for the phone and about
$1,500 is for the data.
In turn, the vast majority of data costs go directly toward covering the tens of billions of dollars spent each year building global
infrastructure to deliver the Internet. Unless this becomes more efficient, we cannot sustainably serve everyone at prices they can afford.
And unless we change this, we will soon live in a world where the
majority of people with smartphones use them offline and still dont
have access to the Internet.
There is a lot of research into how to deliver the Internet in completely new ways. Some of this work involves satellites, planes, lasers
and beaming Internet from the sky. This research will eventually be
necessary to connect everyone since some people live in remote areas
where there is just no infrastructure to connect them. But this isnt
the problem most people have.
In fact, almost 90% of the worlds population already lives within

range of an existing cellular network. For everyone in those areas, we
dont need to build completely new kinds of infrastructure to help
them connect. We just need to show why its valuable and make it
affordable.
The challenge for our industry will be to develop models for Inter-
net access that make data more affordable while enabling mobile
operators to continue growing and investing in a sustainable way.
Efforts like Internet.orga global partnership founded by Facebook and other technology leadersare already under way to solve
this by working with operators to provide free basic Internet services
to people world-wide. Our society has already decided that certain
basic services over the phone should be free. Anyone can call 911 to
get medical attention or report a crime even if you havent paid for a
phone plan. In the future, everyone should have access to basic Internet services as well, even if they havent paid for a data plan. And just
as basic phone services encouraged more people to get phones, basic
Internet services will encourage many more people to get a data plan.
If these efforts work, we can expect to connect billions of people
within the next decadeand this will transform their lives and communities.
HUMAN PROGRESS
A recent study by Deloitte found that expanding Internet access
in developing countries would create 140 million jobs and lift 160
million people out of poverty, and that this newfound opportunity
would even meaningfully reduce child-mortality rates. Across subSaharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, the Internet will
help drive human progress.
Perhaps the most important change might be a new global sense
of community. Today we can only hear the voices and witness the
imaginations of one-third of the worlds people. We are all being
robbed of the creativity and potential of the two-thirds of the world
not yet online. Tomorrow, if we succeed, the Internet will truly represent everyone.
Nothing about this future is guaranteed. The coming years will be
a battle to expand and defend the free and open Internet. Our success will determine how far this vision of a connected world can go.
Connecting the world is within our reach, and if we work together,
we can make this happen.
Mr. Zuckerberg is chief executive of Facebook.
Investing
Investors Will Turn Their Backs on Active

Management
JOHN C. BOGLE
One major principle has shaped my 63- year career in investments:

When there is a gap between perception and reality, it is only a
matter of time until reality takes over. In considering the future of
investing over the coming decades, thats a good place to begin. So
whats ahead?
1. A MUCH SMALLER FINANCIAL SYSTEM.
Investors will increasingly see the light and choose low-cost, lowturnover, middle-of-the-road strategies, buying and holding their
investment portfolios for the long term. The reality is that hyperactive trading strategies offer incomprehensible complexity that ultimately destroys value. As investors continue to favor value-creating
simplicity, and realize that their positive perception of finance conflicts with that reality, they will demand a smaller and less-costly
financial system.
Today, our nations financial system is generally perceived as a
smoothly functioning national asset. But the reality is that its cost has
soared from a low of 4% of gross domestic product in 1950 to an estimated 10% of GDP in 2013$1.6 trillion.
The wealth generated for the systems insiderssenior financial
executives, mutual-fund managers, hedge-fund operators, entrepreneurs and financial buccaneershas grown to epic levels.
Simply put, I predict that the wealth arrogated to itself by our
bloated financial system will be rejected by the largest set of participants in financeour investors.
2. A MARKED DECLINE IN SPECULATION.
As investors come to recognize the long-term financial penalty of
excessive trading activity, they will begin to demand their fair share
of the value created by our publicly traded corporations. The perception held by too many investors that they can beat the market will
give way to the reality that, on balance, trading grotesque trillions of
dollars with one anotherlast year alone, a record $56 trillionis to
no avail.
In fact, Americas corporations are the true value creators. Wall
Street firms, with their excessive intermediation costs, are value
destroyers. Investors are simply the residual beneficiaries. Thats the
ultimate reality. The perception that short-term speculation can add
value will fade, if only slowly.
3. A GROWING DISTRUST OF ACTIVE MANAGERS.
Looking ahead, the trend of investors moving away from actively
managed mutual funds and toward passive index funds will
strengthen. Index funds now account for 34% of U.S. equity mutualfund assets. Since 2007, investors have added $930 billion to their
investments in passively operated U.S. equity index funds, and they
have withdrawn $240 billion from their holdings in actively managed
equity funds. Thats a swing of more than $1.17 trillion in investor
preferences. In the years ahead, that trend will accelerate.
The secret of the traditional index fund is a combination of low
cost, broad diversification and a long-term horizon. Investors can

enjoy the magic of compounding long-term returns, while avoiding the severe penalty inflicted by compounding costs. Broad-market
index funds can cost as little as 0.05% a year, compared with the 1%
to 2% annual drag from the costs of active management.
As investors increasingly see the benefits of the index fund, their
perception that active fund managers as a group are able to add value
will fade. In the coming era, active managers will have to make hard
choices about their fees, their strategies, their portfolio turnover, their
tax inefficiency, and their susceptibility to large capital inflowsand
outflowsdepending on their returns.
4. THE RISE OF CORPORATE GOVERNANCE.

Over the coming decades, institutional money managers will become
far more active in engaging the managements of the corporations
whose shares are held in their portfolios. The perception is that the
giant money managers that dominate todays intermediation society
represent a powerful force in corporate governance. The reality is
that their latent power remains unexercised. For example, asset managers regularly endorse managements nominees for directors and shy
away from supporting proxy proposals by minority shareholders.
Both our corporate and financial manager/agents have too often
placed their own interests before the interests of their shareowner/
principals. We now operate in an unprecedented double agency
society,
tacit
agentscorporate
conspiracy
between
managers,
and
these
institutional
two
asset
sets
of
man-
agersleaving our system of capitalism largely bereft of the checks

and balances demanded by elementary principles of sound governance.
The 300 largest institutional money managerslargely mutual
funds and pension fundsnow own some 65% of all U.S. stocks
by market capitalization. (The largest 10 managers alone own 32%.)
They therefore hold absolute power over our nations corporations,
a share that is likely to increase over time. That largely unexercised
power will be exercised in the coming era, aided by a federal standard
of fiduciary duty for these trustees of Other Peoples Money. As we
become a Fiduciary Society, our corporate and financial system will
finally place first the interests of investors.
In 1949, writing in The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham
said that, in theory, stockholders as a class are king. Acting as a
majority they can hire and fire managements and bend them completely to their will. The behavior of stockholders has long suggested
that such power is largely theoretical. But I predict that it mustand

willbecome a reality in the years ahead, as institutional investors are
forced to recognize not only their rights, but their responsibilities of
corporate ownership and control.
The four changes that Ive outlined here are coming. The financial
system will shrink in relative importance; much of todays shortterm speculation will gradually be displaced by long-term investment; index funds will rise and active management will fall; and
public opinion and public policy will together demand that the managers of Other Peoples Money act as good corporate citizens.
These challenges to the status quo will be fought aggressively by
entrenched special interests of the financial sector. But when investors
demand change, money managers will, in their own self-interest,
accede to their wishes. After all, as Adam Smith wrote in 1776, the
interest of the consumer must be the ultimate end and object of all
industry and commerce. In the world of investing, Adam Smiths
maxim will finally become reality.
Mr. Bogle is the founder and former chairman and chief

executive officer of Vanguard Group.
Job Creation
The Problem Will Not Be Producing

EnoughIt Will Be Providing Enough
Work
LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS
The great economic problem for millennia has been scarcity. People
want much more than can be produced. The challenge has been to
produce as much as possible and to ensure that everybody gets their
fair share.
In important respects, the problem has changed. There are many
more Americans who are obese than who are undernourished, for
example. But that is only a harbinger of things to come. The economic challenge of the future will not be producing enough. It will
be providing enough good jobs.
What has happened in agriculture over the past century is remarkable. The share of American workers employed in agriculture has
declined from over a third a century ago to between 1% and 2%
today. Why? Because agricultural productivity has risen spectacularly, with mechanization reducing the demand for agricultural
workers even as food is more abundant than ever.
All of this has had far-reaching implications. Tens of millions of
people have moved from rural to urban areas to take jobs in manufacturing and services. Supporting those left behind has led the federal government to spend well over $100 billion in the past decade.
Though global issues surely remain, the problems in American agriculture today no longer involve ensuring that food is available, but
ensuring livelihoods for those who once worked in agriculture.
SOFTWARE IS EATING THE WORLD
What has happened in agriculture is happening to much of the rest
of the economy. In Marc Andreessens phrase, Software is eating the
world. Already the number of Americans doing production work in
manufacturing and the number on disability are comparable. There
are good reasons to expect an uptick in the next few years in manufacturing employment. But the long-term trend is inexorable and
nearly universal. As in agriculture, technology is allowing the production of far more output with far fewer people. No country can
aspire to more of an increase in competitiveness than China, yet even
it has suffered a decline in manufacturing employment over the past
two decades. And the robotics and 3-D printing revolutions are still
in their second innings.
What about services? A generation from now, taxis will not have
drivers; checkout from any kind of retail establishment will be automatic; call centers will have been automated with voice-recognition
technology; routine news stories will be written by bots; counseling
will be delivered by expert systems; financial analysis will be done
by software; single teachers will reach hundreds of thousands of students, and software will provide them with homework assignments
customized to their strengths and weaknesses; and on and on.
Those losing jobs due to increased productivity will be freed up
to do things in other sectors. But there are many reasons to think
the software revolution will be even more profound than the agricultural revolution. This time around, change will come faster and
affect a much larger share of the economy. Workers leaving agri-
culture could move into a wide range of jobs in manufacturing or

services. Today, however, there are more sectors losing jobs than creating jobs. And the general-purpose aspect of software technology
means that even the industries and jobs that it creates are not forever.
Not so long ago it was explained that the VCR might be bad for the
movie-theater industry but Blockbuster was a major job creator.
TROUBLING TRENDS IN LABOR MARKET
Job availability is already a chronic problem in the U.S. Consider
what has happened to 25- to 54-year-old men, a group that is
instructive to consider because there is a strong prevailing expectation of universal work. Some 50 years ago, 1 in 20 men between
those ages was out of work. Since that time the workforce has gotten
substantially healthier and better educated. Indeed, the improvements
in education have been far greater than anything we can expect to
take place over the next two generations. Yet it is a reasonable estimate that 1 in 6 men between 25 and 54 will not be working if and
when the economy returns to normal cyclical conditions.
If current trends continue, it could well be that a generation from
now a quarter of middle-aged men will be out of work at any given
moment. In such a world, more than half of men would have an outof-work spell of more than a year at some point during their prime
years. We do not yet fully know what the capacity to come back to
work after such an experience will be, but the experience of men out
of work for a long time because of the Great Recession is surely troubling.
So the challenge for economic policy will increasingly be generating enough work for all who need work for income, purchasing
power and dignity. What will this require? The role of government
was transformed to meet the needs of an industrial age by Gladstone,
Bismarck and the two Roosevelts. We will need their equivalent if

we are to meet the needs of the information age.
Mr. Summers is the Charles W. Eliot professor at

Harvard University and a former U.S. Treasury secretary.
Leisure
The Human Element Will Remain the Basis

of Leisure
ROBERT A. IGER
In 1956, the year after Disneyland opened, Walt Disney was asked
to imagine what entertainment would be like a half-century into the
future.
As one of the worlds great innovators, Walt had just introduced
people to a new form of leisure entertainmentthe theme park. But
when it came to predicting the future, Walt said that was beyond his
powers, given the rapid pace of change in the entertainment industry.
One thing was certain, Walt said: The centuries-old human need
for great storytelling would endure for generations to come,
enhanced by new technologies that would bring these tales to life in
extraordinary ways.
Walt was better at predicting the future than he realized. Six
decades later, technology is lifting the limits of creativity and transforming the possibilities for entertainment and leisure. Todays digital
era has unleashed unprecedented innovation, giving rise to an array
of new entertainment options competing for our time and attention.
As Walt also predicted, peoples need to be entertained with storytelling has endured: We gravitate to the universal stories that bind
ustales of adventure, heroism and love, tales that provide comfort
and escape. Great storytelling still remains the bedrock of great entertainment.
In the years ahead, this fusion of technology and creativity will
allow us to deliver experiences once unimaginable. What will that
future look like? Like Walt, Im hesitant to make predictions. But a
few things seem certain to me.
CUSTOMIZED EXPERIENCES
To start, the 20th-century concept of one size fits all no longer
applies, as innovators around the world create tools that allow us to
customize entertainment and leisure experiences to fit our own tastes
and schedules and share them instantly with friends, family and an
ever-growing digitally connected global community. In short, we
are creating what I like to call technology-enabled leisure.
Mobile storytelling, and mobile entertainment, will dominate our
lives, and offer rich, compelling experiences well beyond what is
available today. Where someone is will no longer be a barrier to
being entertained; the geography of leisure will be limitless.
One of the most exciting developments I see on the horizon is
technology that will immerse us into entertaining worlds, or project those worlds and experiences into our lives. In essence, entertainment will be immeasurably enhanced with both virtual-reality experiences and augmented-reality experiences. Bringing us into created
worlds and bringing created worlds into our world will fundamentally explode the boundaries of storytelling, unburdening the storyteller in ways we cant yet imagine.
The challenges? Technology can be an invasive force, competing
for our attention and eroding the time we have for ourselves and our
families. Few of us would give up the tech tools that keep us productive and informed; even fewer can remember the last time we
completely unplugged on vacation. The more ubiquitous technology becomes in our lives, the more diligent we must be to ensure it
doesnt overwhelm or diminish our leisure time.
SHEDDING THE COCOON
Ultimately, technology is about connecting, not cocooning; its a
tool that should empower us to reach more people and bind us closer
together, rather than encourage us to disengage from one another.
Even as we use technology to create more individualized experiences, social interaction is still a basic need, a fundamental part of our
humanity.
Thats why we value entertainment events that create treasured
memories, strengthen personal connections and deliver shared experiences, whether at the movies, in a theme park, or at a sports stadium.
This is entertainment that cannot be time-shifted or duplicated; you
have to be there, immersed in the moment.
An experience is enhanced when shared with others, becoming
something to be savored and remembered long after its over. These
social events enrich our lives, and our need for them will never
change.
The human love of storytelling, whether individualized or shared,
will also be a constant. Although I cant predict the precise future
of entertainment, I share Walt Disneys optimism and his belief that
whatever lies ahead, it will be defined by great storytelling. Just like
it always has been.
Mr. Iger is chairman and chief executive officer of Walt

Disney Co.
Love
The Future of Love Will Play Out by

Prehistoric Rules
HELEN FISHER
Through the looking glass of pre-history, Ill venture a few hypotheses about the future of women, men and love.
First, some 84% of American men and women are projected to
marry by the time they reach age 40. This will persist. The reason is
simple: To bond is human. This drive most likely evolved more than
four million years ago, and email and computers wont stamp it out.
Second, as women continue to pile into the paid labor force, the
double-income family will become the norm. But this isnt new
either. For millions of years, women in hunting-gathering societies
commuted to work to gather fruits and vegetables, returning to camp
with much of the evening meal.
Third, we will see more divorce. Today, almost 50% of American
men and women are projected to divorce. However, in huntinggathering societies, men and women regularly have two or three
marriages. Across prehistory, serial pairing was probably the
normas it is becoming once again.
In fact, I believe we are shedding some 10,000 years of agrarian
traditions and returning to our prehistoric roots. Our farming forebears were obliged to marry someone with the right kin, social and
religious connections. Arranged marriages were the norm. And the
credo was honor thy husband til death do us part. Today, instead,
most men and women in postindustrial societies marry (and divorce)
for love. Men and women consistently rank love, or mutual attraction, as the first criterion for choosing a spouseas they most likely
did a million years ago.
INTERNET DATING
Many believe that Internet dating is irrevocably changing relationships. I dont agree. Today, 33% of singles met their latest first date
through the Internet; 37% of relationships start online, as do 20%
of marriages. But Internet dating services arent dating services; they
are introducing services. During your first coffee or cocktail with
a potential partner, your ancient brain springs into action and you
court by its prehistoric rules. Whether we meet online or off doesnt
change our basic courtship tactics.
I do an annual study, Singles in America, with the Internet dating
site Match.com. We dont poll the Match membership; instead, each
survey is a representative sample of Americans. The responses of these
20,000-plus men and women have given me more hints about the
future. Foremost, racism and religious prejudice are decreasing in
the U.S.: 74% of singles would make a long-term commitment to
someone of a different ethnic background, and 70% would commit
to someone of a different faith. Most singles also approve of samesex marriage, as well as having children while unmarried. But singles
dont approve of commuter marriages, sexually open relationships, or
partners sleeping in separate homes. Singles have come to regard a
deep, transparent and romantic connection to a committed partner as
the core of social life.
We are becoming cautious, however. In the U.S., 67% of cohabiting couples are scared of divorce. So singles are ushering into vogue
an extended precommitment stage of courtship. With hooking up,

friends with benefits and living together, they are getting to know a
partner long before they tie the knot. Where marriage used to be the
beginning of a partnership, its becoming the finale. More will opt
for alternatives to legal matrimony, too, such as civil partnerships in
England; civil unions in the U.S.; de facto mateships in Australia; and
the PACS (pacte civil de solidarit) in France.
GETTING IT RIGHT
We will probably see more happy partnerships, however, because
everywhere that both spouses bring home money, bad marriages can
end and better ones can begin. In fact, in 2012, I surveyed 1,095 married Americans with Match.com: 81% said they would remarry the
person to whom they were currently wed. With the decline of infant
mortality and myriad medical breakthroughs, many will also enjoy a
long, healthy middle agemore time to find and keep true love.
Im an optimist. I believe we will come to embrace the growing
data that women are just as sexual as men; that men are just as romantic as women; that gays and lesbians are just as eager to attach; that
older folks are just as randy and romantic as the young.
More than 4.4 million years ago, our ancestors adopted a dual
human reproductive strategy: serial pair-bonding and clandestine
adultery. So the single greatest 21st century issue in relationships is
likely to be how each of us handles these conflicting appetites. Yet
around the world, people still pine for love, live for love, kill for love
and die for love.
These neural pathways live deep in the human brain. They will not
changeeven a million years from now. Any prediction of the future
should take into account this unquenchable, adaptable and primordial
human drive to love.
Dr. Fisher is a senior research fellow at the Kinsey

Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction,
and chief scientific adviser to Match.com.
Managers
Bosses Will Care About Output, Not Input
MATT MULLENWEG
The factory model of work is dead, but its vestiges still haunt
modern-day information workers from the giant companies all the
way down to startups and bosses who blindly follow models of how
things have been done before rather than reimagining how we work.
It should not matter what hours you work or where youre [working] from. What matters is how you communicate and what you get
done. Its a waste of the natural resources of time and energy to commute; when we break the shackles of what looks like work versus
what actually drives value, 90% of the cost and space of an office and
management will disappear. We will manage by trust and measuring
output, rather than the easier task of tallying input.
Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, maker of WordPress blogging
software
Medicine
Cheaper DNA Sequencing Will Make

Personalized Care Routine
FRANCIS S. COLLINS
In 1889, when The Wall Street Journal was founded, medicine was
quite primitive. An American born in that era could expect to live
into his or her mid-40s on average, compared with nearly 80 today.
There were no X-rays, aspirin, blood transfusions, insulin, oxygen
equipment, antibiotics, childhood vaccines, heart surgeries, organ
transplants, cholesterol-lowering drugs or many other medical breakthroughs we now take for granted. In fact, for most serious illnesses,
it wasnt until the 1940s that the medical care offered in a hospital bed
provided a better chance of survival than staying home.
Given how swiftly the field of medicine is moving, it is impossible
to predict where we might stand in 25 years, let alone 125 years.
However, one thing is certain: From my vantage point at the helm
of the worlds leading supporter of biomedical research, I see a broad
horizon filled with exciting opportunitiesmany with the potential
to transform medicine.
At the forefront of these revolutionary possibilities is personalized
medicine, which is the idea of precisely tailoring each persons medical care to his or her own unique genetic makeup. In fact, if all goes
as we envision, todays mostly one-size-fits-all approach to med-
ical care will seem as outdated to future generations as bloodletting

leeches and patent-medicine potions are to us.
Once the stuff of science fiction, the individualized approach to
medicine is rapidly approaching reality now that the cost of sequencing a persons DNA instruction book, or genome, has fallen to
$1,000an astounding figure when one considers it cost about $400
million to produce the first sequence of the human genome a little
more than a decade ago.
Over the course of the next few decades, the availability of cheap,
efficient DNA sequencing technology will lead to a medical landscape in which each babys genome is sequenced, and that information is used to shape a lifetime of personalized strategies for disease
prevention, detection and treatment. Combined with the use of
mobile health technology to assist in real-time monitoring of such
things as diet, exercise, blood pressure, heart rate and blood
chemistries, the vision of the quantified self will be a reality for
many of us.
TARGETING MICROBIOMES
In this new world of medicine, DNA sequencers also will likely be
used to identify and analyze the trillions of microbes that live in and
on each of our bodiesour microbiomes. Researchers already have
uncovered some tantalizing clues about how microbiomes may affect
individuals susceptibility to obesity, cardiovascular disease and other
conditions, and are now hard at work formulating ideas about how
to adjust microbiomes, potentially using individually designed probiotics, to improve health.
Likewise, technology holds the key to a futuristic approach to
cancer treatment: determining the complete genome sequence of
each patients tumor, so that an ideal choice of targeted therapies
can be administered. On top of that, many cancer therapies will

include engineering the patients own immune system to fight the
diseasebuilding a high-tech phalanx of cellular ninja warriors to
take out the tumor.
The coming decades also will see major advances in unraveling the
mysteries of what some have called biomedicines final frontier: the

human brain.
Much of this progress will be fueled by the new U.S. Brain
Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or
Brain, Initiative, which will enable the creation of new tools to examine the activity of billions of nerve cells, networks and pathways in
real time. The knowledge generated by this effort will serve as a
launchpad for revolutionary approaches to help people affected by, or
at risk for, Alzheimers disease, autism, depression, epilepsy, Parkinsons disease, schizophrenia, stroke, traumatic brain injury and many
other neurological disorders.
Applications of stem cells will continue to expand in revolutionary
ways. One exciting possibility is what I like to call You on a Chip.
In this scenario, we would take a few of your blood or skin cells,
use induced pluripotent stem-cell technology to turn them into lung,
liver, heart and a wide variety of other cells, and then grow this tissue
on small biochips. Such chips could be used to check whether a drug
might cause harmful side effects in your lungs, your liver and so
onindividualizing the entire process of developing drugs and testing their safety.
Other exciting applications of stem cells include the possibility of
generating almost any kind of tissue perfectly matched to the individual, allowing replacement of failing organs without the risk of transplant rejection.
UNIVERSAL FLU VACCINE
Infectious diseases will not vanish, but we will find new ways to
fight them off. A universal flu vaccine will be developed in the
next decade that will make the need for annual injections obsolete,
andeven more importantwill render moot the threat of a future
(currently overdue) world-wide epidemic. And the greatest epidemic

of modern times, HIV/AIDS, will ultimately be conquered. Our ability to treat this disease has advanced far beyond what anyone could
have imagined when it emerged three decades ago, with antiviral
therapies now enabling people diagnosed in their 20s to live to age
70 and beyond. But millions are still newly infected every year.
To realize the dream of an AIDS-free generation sometime in the
next few decades, we will need a combination of widespread implementation of strategies already known to be successful, plus the ultimate development of a vaccine. Some are even now projecting that
a cure can be found, so that people who are currently locked into
daily therapy for life can be returned to complete health. Imagine the
socioeconomic impact of no child anywhere being born with HIV,
of teenagers being vaccinated, and, for those individuals who do happen to become infected, the availability of a cure.
As with any forecast, my vision for the future of medicine hinges
upon a number of complex, interrelated variables. Among the most
crucial is strong, sustained support of our nations scientists, particularly those who are eager to tackle high-risk challenges with the
potential to yield high rewards for human health. Todays investment
in the biomedical research enterprise truly is an investment in tomorrows medicine.
Dr. Collins is the director of the National Institutes of

Health.
Wearable Sensors Will Transform Medical

Care
ERIC J. TOPOL
In 20 years, humans will finally attain the status of cars for their medical care. Theyll have wearable and embeddable sensors with predictive analytics, and, most importantly, autonomous driving capabilities. Most cases of cancer will be successfully treated, Alzheimers will
be substantially delayed or even pre-empted. DNA sequencing will
be performed for most individuals at birth (or as a fetus). Hospitals,
except for certain key functions like intensive-care units and operating rooms, will be completely transformed to data-surveillance centers. People will look back and laugh about the old physical office visit
and the iconic stethoscope along with the way so much of health
care was rendered in the pre-digital era.
Eric J. Topol, chief academic officer of Scripps Health and professor
of genomics at the Scripps Research Institute
Military Conflict
Asia Will Be the Site of Increased Military

Jostling
ADM. DENNIS BLAIR
As the U.S. rebalances to Asia, regional crises and more fundamental

trends will require close attention and management. There will be
continued maritime jostling as China continues to press its territorial
claims against Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam. Coast guards and
other civil organizations will dominate activities. However, anticipate shooting incidents, with casualties, between navies and air
forces. They will not escalate to wider military conflict.
Adm. Dennis Blair, former director of national intelligence and chairman of Sasakawa Peace Foundation/USA
Money
As Cash Goes Away, the Financial System

Will Expand
AJAY BANGA
When The Wall Street Journal marked its 50th anniversary, the
Worlds Fair was in New York City, the theme was The World of
Tomorrow, and President Roosevelt spoke about the need to break
down barriers between nations. Fast-forward to 1989, the Journals
centennial, and you had the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, one of the
most iconic barriers in modern history.
You might be asking yourself: What does that have to do with the
future of money?
The future of money wont be about cash or the form it takes. The
future of money and commerce will be about breaking down barriers and increasing access for more people across both geographies
and incomes. Why? Because with the right payment systems and new
innovations in place, how you pay for things drives greater equality
of opportunity in society.
The future of money will help bring about greater financial inclusion and lift up those who had been left behind. Its a future where
half the planets adult population, 2.5 billion people, is no longer
excluded from the financial mainstream and where more people will
have proof of identity and the capacity to do what we take for
grantedpay a bill, save money for a rainy day, borrow on reasonable
terms. This will happen not because they have more, but because they
have access to more.
GREATER EQUALITY
Were already seeing the use of money in the form of cash and checks
decline and the use of electronic payments increase. Keep in mind,
were at the beginning of this journey, as 85% of the worlds retail
transactions are still done in cash and check. Its a journey that will
get us to a world of greater equality and financial inclusion.
So, what does the future hold in store?
Security stands squarely at the center of any solution. There are
some hard and fast truths about people and money that will never
change. People want to know their money is safe, accessible and
secure. This doesnt change whether money is in the form of a bill, a
card or in a digital wallet.
Consumer and merchant trust in technology is a must. This already
involves such innovations as chip cards, mobile and digital wallets,
and biometrics like a fingerprint or retina scan to increase security
and reduce fraud.
That technology must also empower consumers and merchants,
transforming commerce and payments from the exchange of value
to the creation of value. This is not just about driving monetary
valueits about driving societal value as well.
And thats the larger, more meaningful opportunity in front of
usovercoming the challenge of exclusion around the world, in
developed and developing countries alike.
This change is delivered by a move from a world of cash to a world
beyond cash that extends access regardless of income, gender or location. It confirms a study by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
and McKinsey & Co. that found in countries where more than 70%
of people can pay digitally, financial inclusion is over 85%.
SEEDS OF CHANGE
The future is built on the use of the right technologies adopted and
adapted for the local marketplace, not just to manufacture bright
shiny objects. Financial inclusion is powered by a network that connects these technologies and platforms to help grow an economy
thats more equitable, sustainable and inclusive. It expands the middle
class, generates equal opportunities, increases social and economic
mobility, and narrows income inequality.
This wont happen all at once or as a quick fix. It will happen
because of the strong partnership between the public and private sector. The public sector will help with regulation and creating a good
business climate. The private sector will push execution.
We are seeing the seeds of this today. In countries like Kenya and
Egypt, mobile phones serve as invaluable financial tools connecting
people to commerce and enabling them to send and receive money.
In South Africa, millions get their social benefits through debit cards
with biometric technology built into them. The U.N. World Food
Program provides more than one million Syrian refugees in Lebanon

and Jordan with prepaid cards that are reloaded every month and
designed to help those in need buy the food they need from local
stores.
This is how we as a society will deliver on the potential of the
global economy.
MONEY AND PURPOSE
What does the future of money look like? There will be greater
opportunity because the limits of physical currency have been
removed. Advancements in technology will lead to unprecedented
potential for economic growth and productivity. We will have a
global economy thats closer to being truly global because were more
connected digitally and less dependent on cash. Consumers will have
the access and ability to buy what they want, when they want it.
Retailers and merchants will be able to personalize their goods and
services, enhance their relationships with customers, and grow their
business.
The ancient Greek playwright Sophocles wrote, The wonders of
the world are many, but none, none is more wondrous than man.
What was true then remains true today and will remain true 125 years
from now. The future of money, regardless of form, must be met
with human purposea purpose tied to greater access and fewer barriers for more people.
Ajay Banga is the chief executive of MasterCard.
Movies
The Movie Theater Experience Will be

Bigger and More Beautiful
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN
In the 90s, newly accessible video technology gave adventurous

filmmakers (such as Lars von Trier and his colleagues in the filmmaking movement Dogme 95) an unprecedented wedge for questioning
the form of motion pictures. The resulting 20-year process of radical
technical and aesthetic change has now been co-opted by the very
establishment it sought to challenge.
Hungry for savings, studios are ditching film prints (under $600
each), while already bridling at the mere $80 per screen for digital
drives. They want satellite distribution up and running within 10
years. Quentin Tarantinos recent observation that digital projection
is the death of cinema identifies this fork in the road: For a century,
movies have been defined by the physical medium (even Dogme 95
insisted on 35mm film as the presentation format).
Savings will be trivial. The real prize the corporations see is the
flexibility of a nonphysical medium.
MOVIES AS CONTENT
As streams of data, movies would be thrown in with other endeavors
under the reductive term content, jargon that pretends to elevate
the creative, but actually trivializes differences of form that have been
important to creators and audiences alike. Content can be ported

across phones, watches, gas-station pumps or any other screen, and
the idea would be that movie theaters should acknowledge their place
as just another of these platforms, albeit with bigger screens and
cupholders.
This is a future in which the theater becomes what Tarantino pinpointed as television in public. The channel-changing part is key.
The distributor or theater owner (depending on the vital question
of who controls the remote) would be able to change the content
being played, instantly. A movies Friday matinees would determine
whether it even gets an evening screening, or whether the projector
switches back to last weeks blockbuster. This process could even be
automated based on ticket sales in the interests of fairness.
Instant reactivity always favors the familiar. New approaches need
time to gather support from audiences. Smaller, more unusual films
would be shut out. Innovation would shift entirely to home-based
entertainment, with the remaining theaters serving exclusively as
gathering places for fan-based or branded-event titles.
This bleak future is the direction the industry is pointed in, but
even if it arrives it will not last. Once movies can no longer be defined
by technology, you unmask powerful fundamentalsthe timelessness, the otherworldliness, the shared experience of these narratives.
We moan about intrusive moviegoers, but most of us feel a pang of
disappointment when we find ourselves in an empty theater.
The audience experience is distinct from home entertainment, but
not so much that people seek it out for its own sake. The experience must distinguish itself in other ways. And it will. The public
will lay down their money to those studios, theaters and filmmakers
who value the theatrical experience and create a new distinction from
home entertainment that will enthralljust as movies fought back
with widescreen and multitrack sound when television first nipped at

its heels.
These developments will require innovation, experimentation and
expense, not cost-cutting exercises disguised as digital upgrades or
gimmickry aimed at justifying variable ticket pricing. The theatrical
window is to the movie business what live concerts are to the music
businessand no one goes to a concert to be played an MP3 on a bare
stage.
BACK TO THE FUTURE
The theaters of the future will be bigger and more beautiful than ever
before. They will employ expensive presentation formats that cannot be accessed or reproduced in the home (such as, ironically, film
prints). And they will still enjoy exclusivity, as studios relearn the
tremendous economic value of the staggered release of their products.
The projects that most obviously lend themselves to such distinctions are spectacles. But if history is any guide, all genres, all budgets
will follow. Because the cinema of the future will depend not just on
grander presentation, but on the emergence of filmmakers inventive
enough to command the focused attention of a crowd for hours.
These new voices will emerge just as we despair that there is nothing left to be discovered. As in the early 90s, when years of bad
multiplexing had soured the public on movies, and a young director
named Quentin Tarantino ripped through theaters with a profound

sense of cinemas past and an instinct for reclaiming cinemas rightful
place at the head of popular culture.
Never before has a system so willingly embraced the radical teardown of its own formal standards. But no standards means no rules.
Whether photochemical or video-based, a film can now look or
sound like anything.
Its unthinkable that extraordinary new work wont emerge from
such an open structure. Thats the part I cant wait for.
Mr. Nolan is the director of the Dark Knight trilogy,

Inception, and Interstellar.
Music
The Record Album Will Endure
TAYLOR SWIFT
Where will the music industry be in 20 years, 30 years, 50 years?

Before I tell you my thoughts on the matter, you should know that
youre reading the opinion of an enthusiastic optimist: one of the few
living souls in the music industry who still believes that the music
industry is not dyingits just coming alive.
There are many (many) people who predict the downfall of music
sales and the irrelevancy of the album as an economic entity. I am
not one of them. In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will
continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has
bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their
labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace.
Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid
album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently.
In recent years, youve probably read the articles about major
recording artists who have decided to practically give their music
away, for this promotion or that exclusive deal. My hope for the
future, not just in the music industry, but in every young girl I
meetis that they all realize their worth and ask for it.
Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things
are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. Its my opinion that
music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists

and their labels will someday decide what an albums price point is. I
hope they dont underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.
ARROWS THROUGH THE HEART
In mentioning album sales, Id like to point out that people are still
buying albums, but now theyre buying just a few of them. They are
buying only the ones that hit them like an arrow through the heart
or have made them feel strong or allowed them to feel like they really
arent alone in feeling so alone. It isnt as easy today as it was 20 years
ago to have a multiplatinum-selling album, and as artists, that should
challenge and motivate us.
There are always going to be those artists who break through on
an emotional level and end up in peoples lives forever. The way I see
it, fans view music the way they view their relationships. Some music
is just for fun, a passing fling (the ones they dance to at clubs and parties for a month while the song is a huge radio hit, that they will soon
forget they ever danced to). Some songs and albums represent seasons
of our lives, like relationships that we hold dear in our memories but
had their time and place in the past.
However, some artists will be like finding the one. We will
cherish every album they put out until they retire and we will play
their music for our children and grandchildren. As an artist, this is the
dream bond we hope to establish with our fans. I think the future still
holds the possibility for this kind of bond, the one my father has with
the Beach Boys and the one my mother has with Carly Simon.
I think forming a bond with fans in the future will come in the
form of constantly providing them with the element of surprise. No,
I did not say shock; I said surprise. I believe couples can stay in
love for decades if they just continue to surprise each other, so why
cant this love affair exist between an artist and their fans?
In the YouTube generation we live in, I walked out onstage every
night of my stadium tour last year knowing almost every fan had
already seen the show online. To continue to show them something
they had never seen before, I brought out dozens of special guest performers to sing their hits with me. My generation was raised being
able to flip channels if we got bored, and we read the last page of
the book when we got impatient. We want to be caught off guard,
delighted, left in awe. I hope the next generations artists will continue to think of inventive ways of keeping their audiences on their
toes, as challenging as that might be.
There are a few things I have witnessed becoming obsolete in the
past few years, the first being autographs. I havent been asked for an
autograph since the invention of the iPhone with a front-facing camera. The only memento kids these days want is a selfie. Its part of
the new currency, which seems to be how many followers you have
on Instagram.
FAN POWER
A friend of mine, who is an actress, told me that when the casting
for her recent movie came down to two actresses, the casting director
chose the actress with more Twitter followers. I see this becoming a
trend in the music industry. For me, this dates back to 2005 when I
walked into my first record-label meetings, explaining to them that
I had been communicating directly with my fans on this new site
called Myspace. In the future, artists will get record deals because they
have fansnot the other way around.
Another theme I see fading into the gray is genre distinction.
These days, nothing great you hear on the radio seems to come from
just one musical influence. The wild, unpredictable fun in making

music today is that anything goes. Pop sounds like hip hop; country
sounds like rock; rock sounds like soul; and folk sounds like countryand to me, thats incredible progress. I want to make music that
reflects all of my influences, and I think that in the coming decades
the idea of genres will become less of a career-defining path and more
of an organizational tool.
This moment in music is so exciting because the creative avenues
an artist can explore are limitless. In this moment in music, stepping
out of your comfort zone is rewarded, and sonic evolution is not only
acceptedit is celebrated. The only real risk is being too afraid to
take a risk at all.
CELEBRITY SPOTLIGHT
I predict that some things will never change. There will always be
an increasing fixation on the private lives of musicians, especially the
younger ones. Artists who were at their commercial peak in the 70s,
80s and 90s tell me, It was never this crazy for us back then! And I
suspect Ill be saying that same thing to younger artists someday (God
help them). There continues to be a bad girl vs. good girl/clean-cut
vs. sexy debate, and for as long as those labels exist, I just hope there
will be contenders on both sides. Everyone needs someone to relate
to.
And as for me? Ill just be sitting back and growing old, watching
all of this happen or not happen, all the while trying to maintain a life
rooted in this same optimism.
And Id also like a nice garden.
Ms. Swift is a singer and songwriter, and the winner of

seven Grammy Awards.
National Security
Military Leaders Will Have More

Information, Less Time to Decide
GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY
One hundred years ago, Edward Lorenz coined the phrase the butterfly effect to describe how small events can have large, widespread
consequences. Today, with hierarchical, centralized systems in
decline, we are increasingly subject to this phenomenon in national
security. Power is no longer simply the sum of capability and capacity
but now, disproportionately, includes speedspeed of action but
especially speed of decision making.
Countering the need for speed is often paralyzing volumes of
information, which often create an illusion of control and optimal
decision making. But we may not be considering the very real costs
of lengthy deliberation.
Being willing and able to make sound decisions faster means that
military leadership must become more agile and innovative. Our
future security will demand it.
Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Oceans
Oceans Will Need Replenishing to Sustain

Our Well-Being
ENRIC SALA
In the last century, overfishing, pollution and warming have

depleted the oceans natural capital that produces goods and services
essential to our well-being, such as oxygen and food. Now, ocean
acidification has emerged as another global threat. Our most urgent
task is to replenish that natural capital by ending overfishing, creating
more marine reserves, and dramatically cutting plastic and carbon
pollution. A future ocean fuller of life will support the livelihoods of
several billion people. The future of the ocean must be a healthy and
productive one.
Enric Sala, marine ecologist and National Geographic explorer-inresidence who is leading the Pristine Seas Project
Offices
Offices Will Follow Us Everywhere
NIKIL SAVAL
As offices improve their ability to follow us everywhereout of the

building envelope and into cafes, homes, bathrooms, via smartphones
and computerscities will reshape themselves to become more like
offices, with entire districts centered around co-working and other
forms of sharing workspace. Barring a political revolution, we will
see a future of tremendous ecological instability, in which the construction of tall glassy office towers should seem like an extravagance,
and in which demand rather than supply shapes the offering of space.
In those shared, dense offices that remain, we should expect many
more digital processes to have automated jobs like telemarketing and
bookkeeping; the remaining jobs will require the administration of
ever more complex computer business systems, with human beings
attached to them like fleshy limbs of a vast, impersonal machine.
Nikil Saval, an editor at n+1 and the author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace
Parenting
You Will Raise a Constantly Monitored

Child
LENORE SKENAZY
Its 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are? How about at
10 a.m.? 10:05? 10:07?
What, you havent checked? You will. Parents will soon monitor
their childrens every moment from zygote to law school. Already,
popular apps track childrens whereabouts, heart rate, blood oxygen
level. Next, ingestible sensors will monitor their food intake. (Did
Ella just eat a cookie?!?)
Eventually, anyone not paying nonstop attention to their kids
could face ostracism at Parents Night, legal action, or worse. Mere
monitoring will give way to more things like the MiniBrake, an
existing prototype that allows parents to slam on their childrens
bike brakes from 150 feet away. Goodbye, helicopter parents, hello,
CRCschild remote-controllers.
Lenore Skenazy is a public speaker and founder of the book and blog
Free-Range Kids
Physics
Physicists Will Work to Unify Two Great

Frontiers of Science
MARTIN REES
Two great 20th century breakthroughs are the bedrock of modern

technology. Weve learned about the microworld of atoms, nuclei
and the quantum. And Einsteins relativity offered deeper insights
into gravity and the cosmos. But there is crucial unfinished business:
to meld these two concepts together into a single unified theory. We
need this theory to understand the very beginning of our universe,
and what happens inside black holes. It would interlink the two great
frontiers of science: the very large and the very small. It would conclude a quest to understand space, time and matter that dates back to
ancient Greece. But it would not be the end of physics.
The challenge throughout the coming centuries will be to use
the basic laws to evolve revolutionary technologies that will transform how future generations livehere on Earth and maybe far out
in space.
Martin Rees, professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University
of Cambridge, and the U.K.s astronomer royal
Politics
The Hues of Red and Blue States Will

Change
DAVID PLOUFFE
How will politics change in the coming years? In one important way,
it wont.
The most important ingredient of electoral success in the past 125
years will remain so in the next 125: Strong candidates with a compelling message and the right timing will still matter more than anything else. But the campaigns around them will continue to change
rapidly.
Heres a look at how.
DEMOGRAPHICS
The statistics and projections of the nations growing diversity are
well known. The Electoral College implications, perhaps less so.
Most Americans can tell you which states are the key battlegrounds
of the moment. But that list isnt static.
States like Georgia, Arizona and yes, even Texas, will be purple
states very soon. Good for the Democrats. And some current battlegrounds could become solid blue, like Nevada. But a careful eye must
be kept on Pennsylvania and the upper Midwest. These solid Obama
states are getting older and experiencing slower Latino growth.
History tells us this much: The map on election night in 2032 will
not look like 2012.
TECHNOLOGY
This is like throwing a dart at the side of the barn, especially in the
long run. But we know that data and its smart use will only improve
campaigns understanding of the electorate.
Campaigns will increasingly be fought out on mobile devices as
much as television and computers. In India, Prime Minister Narendra
Modi broke new ground by using holograms throughout the country to extend his reach. These were just presentations of his speeches.
With advancements in artificial intelligence, you could soon have
holograms of presidential candidates at your door, interacting with
you and asking and answering questions.
More states will inevitably move to online voter registration and
perhaps digital voting. There will be resistance, especially by some in
the GOP, but our voting system wont remain disconnected forever
from the way we are leading the rest of our lives.
PERSONALIZATION
Connected to technological and data advances, campaigns will
increasingly be personalized to the individual. From the television to
the smartphone to the doorstep, campaigns will target you. Perhaps
eventually as you walk through a store or through a subway station.
Not you as a member of a voter cohort. But you, the individual.
Campaigns cannot have a million different messages, however;
these personalized messages still must be connected to an overall message architecture. The ability to deliver the right message to the right
voter and measure its effectiveness will continue to take more of the
guesswork out of politics.
CORRUPTION
We are entering the age of the billionaire political arms race. Like
missiles soaring over the Earth in space, these big spenders will fire
back and forth at one another, attempting to control more of our politics.
In some races, the candidates will be mere bystanders to the super

PAC main event. But this inevitably will lead to positions being
taken, votes being cast, and legislation being sponsored to please
political benefactorsor to court them.
This super PAC era is in its infancybut it could rival the Robber
Baron and Watergate years in terms of its insidious effect on government.
CHANGING ISSUES
The state of the economy and the big foreign-policy challenges of
the moment always have dominated and always will dominate political campaigns. But as we get deeper into the 21st century, new
factors will impact, if not help shape, our politics, including: more
concrete changes brought on by global warming, more sophisticated
and frequent cyberwarfare and cyberattacks, technology companies
that claim to know more about you than you do (and the attendant
privacy issues), baby boomers moving fully into retirement, increasing urbanization, and the rise and fall of competitor nations.
This is far from a complete list and surely, in some cases, will prove
to be inaccurate. All we can know for sure is that politics wont be
immune to the breathtaking changes happening in every sector of
our economy.
There are disrupters in every industry, and political campaigns will
be no different. The good ones wont just apply the best practices of
the private sector, but will also innovate and create on their own to
meet their unique needs.
Mr. Plouffe is a corporate and political strategist who

served as campaign manager and White House senior
adviser for President Barack Obama.
Privacy
Only the Rich Will Have Privacy
RICHARD CLARKE
One surprise from the widespread use of information technology has

been the enormous value created out of just data. Information about
what individuals do has created corporations worth billions of dollars.
While storage of vast amounts of data has led to hugely valuable
benefits from analysis and correlation, it also has led to a significant
erosion, if not almost complete destruction, of any meaningful concept of privacy.
Each of the hundreds of times a day information about you is
recorded and stored on a networked device, new data becomes available for somebody. Data about your health, location, political views,
buying preferences, finances, relationships and security riskiness are
available to untold interested parties. Sometimes you knowingly
authorized their acquisition of that data, often you did so obliviously,
and occasionally that information is obtained covertly.
A 9/11 LEGACY
In Europe, governments have attempted to limit access to the new
treasure troves of data. In the U.S., where the data manipulation
industry was spawned and grew into a cash cow, such efforts have
been less successful. The coincidence of September 11 with the
advent of multiple online technologies and services created a climate
in which government had unlimited funds and authorities for data

collection.
Barring some civilization-threatening disaster, the next 25 years
of cyberspace will see a growing gush of data, an increasingly rapid
spreading of interconnected devices into every aspect of our lives, in
our cars, throughout our homes, and indeed, into our bodies. Our
cars not only will call for help when needed, they will report our driving habits and violations. The smart home will have data collectors
embedded in appliances and entertainment systems. We will all wear
devices that monitor our health and bodily functions. For loyalty or
good behavior in our cars, homes and health, we will be rewarded by
corporations.
Already today, where we are, whom we are with and what we are
doing at any given moment can often be determined through a combination of data and video surveillance technology. By 2040, it could
be a given that any of our activities can be known by a variety of
governmental and corporate entities.
As a result, crimes such as speeding, car theft and robbery should
generally continue to diminish. If, however, the use of robotics and
the deterioration of the environment develop as now expected, there
could be an increase in societal dislocations and discontent from
unemployment and climate-related disasters. That very discontent
would increase the desire of government security entities to want
more data for more control.
WHO REMEMBERS PRIVACY?
Will enough people object to stop the insatiable demands of government and industry for more data? Over time there will be fewer people who recall pre-Information Age privacy, more people who will
have grown up with few expectations of privacy. While a backlash
against the erosion of privacy is possible, it is more likely that people

acting on their fear of big government and big corporate data will be
a minority.
Privacy advocacy groups will probably be overwhelmed by corporate interests, the security industrial complex, and by a public that
perceives benefits from the, frequently free, data-yielding devices and
applications.
Privacy may then be a commodity that only the wealthy can
acquire, but only briefly and in special sanctuaries while taking
expensive off-the-grid vacations in locations without surveillance

cameras or the tracking devices we call mobile phones.
Mr. Clarke is chairman and chief executive of Good

Harbor Security Risk Management LLC, a provider of
cybersecurity services. He was a senior White House
adviser for the past three presidents on matters including
cybersecurity and counterterrorism.
Retirement
The Retirement Community Will Be

Retired
LINDA P. FRIED
Over the past 100 years, we have added 30 years to the length of
our lives. But retirement, as we know it, is making poor use of this
public-health dividend. Rich or poor, older Americanscounting
down their days in enclaves of the elderlyare asked to contribute
little of enduring value.
And thats what must change. At heart, public-health scientists are
optimists. Crystal ball in hand, I see a future that retires the retirement
community and fully integrates older adults into every facet of American life. We need to invest in an America where older adults are
healthy and remain among us, living out important roles and responsibilities that leave a lasting legacy.
That future will begin with living arrangements that are energyefficient, accessible and adaptable as our health and our needs change.
Research demonstrates that we live longer, and healthier, in communities that bring us into the mixwhether in buildings designed for
several generations to cohabitate, in dwellings where we live with
spouse and friends in a group of small apartments, or in multigenerational communities or high-rises with ample space for people of all
ages to socialize, to walk, sit outside with friends and exercise.
AGE-FRIENDLY CITIES
We will make our homes in communities where we can walk to
get groceries, cleaning and haircuts. The World Health Organization
calls such places age-friendly cities. Pedestrians will enjoy safe and
accessible benches, parks and playgrounds. Public transit will be fully
accessible and have the potential to take us everywhere. Healthy
foods will be available and affordable, whether through green carts,
grocery stores or home delivery for those who are disabled. Everyone
will benefit from such communities, but none more than older people
who will be less isolated and less dependent on others.
Of course, well still seek a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Because many will want, and need, to keep working, we will not
only keep our jobs longer, well serve on intergenerational teams that
extract the strengths and capabilities of each age group. As universities have roles for emeritus professors, other institutions will ask the
most senior workers to solve complex problems that need the most
mature minds, and to mentor new generations of employees. Some
workplace policies will permit flexible hours and a gradual step-down
in the amount of time worked in a year, while other employers will
adopt flexible locations: summers in the North and winters in the
South.
As ever, older adults will want and need roles that reassure them
they are leaving the world, as well as their children and grandchildren, in good shape. With expanded social roles, they will address
multiple unmet social needs, ensuring that children succeed in school,
have the skills to get jobs and understand the critical importance of
healthy behaviors that start in childhood.
BUILDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS
Some will mentor young entrepreneurs; others will help students,
serve as first responders or counsel young people in communities

of need. These roles will be carried out through national service,
part-time employment or volunteer opportunitiesa variety of
approaches in which accumulated experience and wisdom have the

potential to secure, and transform, our future.
With the proper investments in healthy communities and healthy
populations, we can redefine retirement not as separation but as integration, a period of continuing constructive contribution with meaningful roles and responsibilities that leave the world better for next
generations.
I know of no more exciting prospect than building a new life stage
we never had before, and designing these 30 additional years of life
so they are a win-win for all.
Dr. Fried is dean and DeLamar professor at Columbia

Universitys Mailman School of Public Health.
Robotics
Robots Will Fuse the Physical and Digital

Worlds Into One
ILLAH R. NOURBAKHSH
Sunday, April 1, 2035. You are house-hunting, driving to an open house

showing to meet the owners, and now your car is speaking Esperanto, thanks to
your daughters April Fools antics. Eventually you convince the car to return
to your native tongue, and it queries whether you want your usual morning
Starbucks cappuccino delivered to your destination. You arrive, jump out, and
a Starbot punctually lands to deliver its coffee payload. Consulting the shared
family calendar, the car requests permission to leave and fetch your daughter
from soccer.
A Realtor bot trundles out to warmly greet you and connects you via telepresence to the homeowners, who are still in Florida. Together, you and the
robot-embodied owners tour the apartment. The bot offers to arrange and project your home furnishings into each room, remapping furniture locations and
adding several retro 1990s table lamps made available for single-command
purchasing. The lamps seem strangely familiar, and you realize whyyou
glanced at them in a digital storefront last week. The robo-advert must have
tracked your gaze direction and, ever since, you have seen digital versions of the
lamps cropping up everywhere. The telepresence patch that the owners are using
is probably free, sponsored by product placement. By the end of the tour, youve
decided against the apartment, but you buy the lamp, asking for in-home delivery. It will be 3D-printed on-demand, installed and turned on, waiting for
your return home.
The robots are coming. But they wont all be shiny, Apple-designed
C-3PO look-alikes with middle-aged Siri brains. I believe the robot
invasion will be a hodgepodge affair, with legs, propellers and wheels;
robots that run the gamut from embodied android forms to robotic
technologies hidden in the woodwork of our homes.
All of these diverse robots will have one thing in common, though:
They will serve to usher the online digital economy into our physical
worlda reverse plotline to the sci-fi cult classic Tron, in which
humans fall into the digital world of a computer.
Social commentators prognosticating about Googles acquisition
of robot companies note that, having conquered the digital realm,
businesses are increasingly turning their attention to the remaining
physical frontier. I see a more radical direction: Todays corporations
arent simply colonizing the physical world with robotic productsthe move toward the so-called Internet of Things. These corporate actors are going to synchronize the digital and physical worlds
into a single, fused matrix. Every physical action you take will have a
digital consequence, and every digital act will push back on the physical world.
Imagine purchasing a trinket from a local gift store in Edinburgh,
from anywhere, since every stores interior is mapped and available
for browsing, purchasing and fulfillment. Reminded by a sensor network in the yard reporting moisture levels, you will water your lawn
both manually and by voice command because you have constant
access to robotic middleware that permanently straddles the digitalphysical gap. Just as, today, your search history informs every query
result online, so by 2035 your physical history, from spoken word,
gaze and body language, will affect every marketing decision our
computer companions make.
Human behavior will be commoditized, recorded, analyzed, sold
and resold in return for simple conveniences from walkout checkout
to personalized on-the-spot delivery. When the fused world seamlessly meets your real and perceived needs, you will feel like a powerful puppet-master. Your needs will be met by robot baristas, robot
Realtors and robot sales agents. But when every marketing bot wants
your attention all the time, all with intimate details about your preferences and purchasing history, you will feel overwhelmed by the
inability to find peace. I call this form of robot overstimulation robot
smog.
ROBOT SMOG
Robot smog is ultimately about ever-increasing rates of robot labor
in society. Robots eventually pervade the world because robot labor
is a moving target: Productivity increases yearly, costs drop and
the human advantage erodes with every new robo-innovation. In
Dancing with Robots: Human Skills for Computerized Work,
authors Frank Levy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
Richard Murane of Harvard University reveal how robotics selectively erodes labor categories across the employment spectrum. Their
thesis is that all jobs requiring routine mental or physical activity are
at risk as robots become ever more capable. The potential return on
investment from robot labor is so enticing that even companies with
no prior business in robotics have opened their own robot R&D centersincluding Foxconn, Amazon and Google.
How fundamentally will expanding robot labor change the economy by 2035? In Capital in the 21st Century, economist Thomas
Piketty evaluates wealth and inequality over hundreds of years, taking
into consideration both labor income and income from capital. His
punch line is that income from capital in the U.S. has achieved levels
of inequality never before seen in available historical data, significantly outstripping the already high levels of labor income inequality
that we also face. Start with Mr. Pikettys current analysis and add a
20-year dose of accelerating robot innovation. As robotics edges out
human labor across more categories of work, it plays the unusual role
of an accelerating pump from labor to capital.
What will 20 years of labor-to-capital pumping do to society?
The year 2035 will likely witness new levels of wealth inequality as
income generation shifts from workers to robot-capital owners. An
elite capital-ownership class will stand on the far side of a robot-ownership gap that will dwarf the inequality of todays labor divide.
ROBOTS FOR CHANGE
But all isnt lost. Just as robots empower companies to achieve impossible levels of productivity, so robot technologies can empower communities to collect and use previously impossible amounts of actionable local information. At its heart, robot innovation is about disruptively inexpensive sensors, networks and data processors. These
very same tools enable communities to track air pollution, monitor
groundwater health, and explore millions of environmental and social
parameters for change.
The year 2035 will fall deeply within the zone of interactive big
data: Communities will have as much power as governments and
corporations at collecting, visualizing, interpreting and advocating
based on rich information. Democratization has been bolstered by the
age of open communication.
Prepare for a sea change when citizens not only have direct access
to public discourse through networking technologies, but also ownership over large-scale social and environmental data that, until now,
has been in the hands of the few.
Will our robot future deliver massive inequality or revolutionary
empowerment? Either way, 2035 will be a disruptive year.
Dr. Nourbakhsh is a professor of robotics and director of

the Create Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, and the
author of Robot Futures.
Space
Get Ready for Bioengineering, Teleportation

and a New Home on Mars
G. SCOTT HUBBARD
Science-fiction writers and futurists often point to a new technology

or scientific discovery as a vehicle for envisioning things to come.
My prediction is that human beings themselves will change in ways
that both enable and react to space exploration.
Some of this change will be in our attitudes. We will invest heavily
in stewardship of this planet as climate changesboth adaptation and
mitigation will be required. We will use both in situ and space-borne
assets to think globally, predict regionally and act locally. Humanity will be humbled and inspired when we find evidence of ancient
microbes on Mars, discover alien sea life under the ice of Jupiters
moon Europa and study the many pale blue dots that are Earthlike
planets around other stars.
The power of genetic engineering will allow us to understand and
manipulate the aging bio-clock and to practice individualized genetic
medicine. We will see a proliferation of prosthetics that both replace
and extend our abilities. Humanity (or our bioengineered descendants) will then be better able to endure the rigors of space travel.
OUR SECOND HOME
While there will undoubtedly continue to be government-sponsored
space exploration that is in the service of science and opening new

frontiers, entrepreneurs will provide new space-related technologies,
jobs and wealth. The reasons to make the trip to space will vary
greatly: Some of us will be tourists, some busy extracting new materials from orbiting biotech laboratories or near-Earth-object minerals; some will be preparing to develop a second home for humanity
on Mars and studying the life we will have found under the surface
of the Red Planet.
Even more fundamental changes are coming in our mental capabilities and relationship to the natural world.
Multitaskingand the search, storage and manipulation of vast
googolplex-size data cloudswill result in a mind-machine interface
that is seamless. The barriers between the virtual world and the
real world will become meaningless as we constantly move between
them. We will perfect virtual experiences, create robots that pass the
Turing test for artificial intelligence, and modify our own selves to
create an integration that makes the old debates of human versus
robotic space exploration meaningless.
Beyond even these changes, though, lie discoveries more wondrous and amazing. We will begin to detect and understand the dark
matter and dark energy that makes up the vast majority of the universe. If the physics theorists are correct, we may find many parallel
universes that will stretch our sense of the infinite beyond our grasp.
There is also the understanding and application of entanglementEinsteins despised spooky action at a distance that is nevertheless a fact of quantum mechanics. Experiments conducted since
1972 continue to demonstrate that pairs of subatomic particles and
photons created through certain processes are entangled. It is well
known that pairs created this way always have opposite characteristics, but the specific parameters for any single particle are only determined during the act of detection.
SPEEDY DATA?
The spooky feature is that when one makes the observation of one
particle and sets its parameters, even after it has traveled kilometers,
the other particle will instantly exhibit the opposite characteristics. It
is as if either information has traveled faster than the speed of light,
or there is a property of matter that transcends space-time distance as
we ordinarily observe it in our (mostly Newtonian) world.
Entangled particles, and even ensembles of particles, have now
been used by several prominent research groups to demonstrate a
form of teleportation.
By 2034 or maybe 2064, science will have come to grips with the
phenomenon of entanglement in a variety of startling ways. We may
begin to understand the relationship of mind and matter: why the act
of human observation or measurement results in a certain reality. In
the practical world of space exploration, entanglement engineering
might result in a method of sending messages and matter that evades

the speed-of-light barrier in the macro-universe.
We now have cellphones that were only fantasy in the 1968 edition
of Star Trek. Can the matter-transporter be far behind?
Prof. Hubbard, in the department of aeronautics and

astronautics at Stanford University, is former director of
NASAs Ames Research Center and the author of
Exploring Mars.
Sports
Technology Will Transform How We

Playand WatchSports
BILLY BEANE
Baseballmy passion and profession for three decadeshas been at

the forefront of the analytics revolution sweeping through sports.
And the game is just beginning.
The proverbial tip of the iceberg: Statcast, a 3-D tracking system
that provides detailed metrics on the locations and movements of the
ball, the players, and even the umpires. While the system is currently
installed in only a handful of ballparks, Major League Baseball plans
for all 30 stadiums to have it by 2015. Eventually, such systems will
proliferate not just through the ranks of all professional sports but to
youth sports, affecting everything from how games are taught to the
statistical nomenclature of sport.
These technologies, combined with new media devices that will
deliver that information, will give fans a new level of feedback about
the action on the field and create unprecedented access to players and
the game.
I also see change that goes far beyond the fan experience and
new methods of performance analysis. Technology will transform the
social fabric of sport.
Baseball, for instance, has always been a game of insiders, played
by those who could hit, run, field and throw a certain way, and man-
aged by those who played well enough to eventually earn the keys to
the front office. The old ideas of who should play in the big leagues,
and who should decide who should play, will be replaced with new
ideas.
LEVELING THE FIELD
Having advanced performance data at even the most junior levels will
make it less likely that players get filtered out based on 60-yard-dash
times or radar-gun readings, and more likely that they advance on
the merits of practiced skills. The ability to paint the corners of the
strike zone, to swing only at pitches within that zone, and to manage
the subtle footwork required of a difficult fielding play is accessible to
any player willing to commit to the 10,000 Hour Rule (the average
amount of practice Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, says is

needed to excel in selected fields). A whole new class of players whose
skill sets previously were not fully appreciated will be able to reach
the highest levels thanks to a more nuanced understanding of their
abilities.
The current modus operandi of building rosters to maximize the
sum of individual talent also will be challenged; data compiled using
new technologies will enable management to assemble players in
new ways, emphasizing their ability to complement one another.
Whereas current metrics describe players performance in isolation,
front offices will increasingly rely on statistics that measure a players
value in the context of the rest of the team, picking up externalities
such as how a players defensive abilities may compensate for the deficiencies of those playing around him.
In a new twist to the old school vs. new school debate in sports,
technology-based roster-building and algorithm-driven decisionmaking thus will be the strongest propagators of the traditional
virtues of teamwork and chemistry. (I should note here that these
opinions are my ownand not those of my club, the Oakland Athletics, or Major League Baseball.)
Technology will create an equally drastic shift in front offices.
Aspirants to the front office already are just one click away from decision makers, thanks to social media. It is not uncommon for a bloggers analysis post to show up in a general managers Twitter feeda
level of proximity and access unheard of a decade ago. Many sports
franchises are already hiring analysts based on their work in the public sphere; as social media become more targeted and efficient, the
line between the outsiders and insiders will narrow.
GAME OF DATA POINTS

Increased demand for the technical skills required to interpret the
big data produced by 3-D tracking systems also will dramatically
change the composition and demographics of front offices, which
historically have drawn on former players. Competing to hire those
best equipped to glean insights from the new data regardless of their
backgrounds will be a welcome trend in an industry that has actively
sought ways to improve its diversity.
The one constant in the future of sports will be the game that is
played between the lines; baseball, in particular, embraces historical
continuity. But what drives the gamethose who play it, how their
play is evaluated, and those who make the evaluationswill fundamentally change. As we have seen in other societal realms, technology is driving sports down the road toward increased access, diversity
and meritocracy.
In sum, sport will no longer be the exclusive domain of insiders,
and the business will be better for it.
Mr. Beane, a former professional baseball player, is

general manager of the Oakland Athletics.
Television
Well Say a Farewell to Linear Television
ROY PRICE
Even as on-demand TV viewing grows, there will always be a way

to tune into a network or channel. But in 10 or 20 years Im not convinced that the flow of content when I tune in is going to be the
same as your flow. It could be customized for you, Pandora-style.
The concept of a strictly linear broadcast, where theyre airing a rerun
of Two and a Half Men and thats your only option whether you like
it or notI suspect there will be a time when that isnt happening anymore. Also, when you think about the consumption and delivery experience, youll see interfaces that mix watching shows with chatting with
friends and social media. That would provide a clear utility to consumers,
integrating all those things into one communications experience.
As for the content, it is easy to imagine that you would see a
broader range of more specific channels. Some might have professional content while others could have user-generated content. In an
environment of more on-demand viewing, a channel wouldnt need
to have as many hours of programming. That would reduce the barriers to entry for new content providers. There will always be content brands that are strong. In a world of infinite choices, it helps to
know that if you click on Comedy Central there will be comedy and
on ESPN there will be sports.
Roy Price, director, Amazon Studios
More Great TV Will Be Discovered and

Appreciated
JOSH SAPAN
TV is increasingly the new cinema. I use the word cinema carefully

because it connotes more nuanced and better writing, casting, design
and storytelling. That is a direct function of a change in technology
that is under way that I think is only going to accelerate: Whereas
television has traditionally been viewed on a linear basismeaning
whats on Thursday at 8 p.m.increasingly its viewed at your own
choice of time and environment.
What I think people dont often pay adequate attention to is
the technology itself has created the invitation for these great openended stories to be peoples favorites, and to be more prominent in
the world. It is the technology that emancipated the great work. In
the next five or 10 years, great TV will be discovered and appreciated
more, good TV will be found to be good, mediocre TV will increasingly drown in the slushy middle, and imitative and bad TVas it
always has been, but maybe more rapidlywill be canceled. Overall,
TV will be better and smarter.
Josh Sapan, chief executive officer of AMC Networks, home of Mad
Men, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead
About This Book
The Future of Everything was published in December 2014 by The

Wall Street Journal.
These essays were originally published July 8, 2014, as part of the
Journals WSJ 125 special section, which commemorated the publications 125th anniversary. The section can be viewed online at
wsj.com/125. The essays are reproduced here as they ran, though
some headlines were edited.
The cover illustration was by Daniel Hertzberg. The art director
was Manuel Velez. The editors were Larry Rout, Glenn Ruffenach,
Matt Murray and David Marino-Nachison.
For questions about this or other e-books from The Wall Street
Journal, e-mail ebooks@wsj.com. For more news, information and
subscription information, visit wsj.com.

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THE FUTURE OF

The Future of Everything

The Future of Everything

The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal

Women Artists Are Poised to Take Off

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai

A Shift to Nomadic Living

Wearable Sensors Will Transform Medical Care

Gen. Martin Dempsey

More Great TV Will Be Discovered and

After 125 years, our commitment to providing the most complete

How Drones and Big Data Will Reduce Our

The Future of Everything 7

the worlds only LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental

8 The Wall Street Journal

Within the next decade, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle

The Future of Everything 9

Ms. Hasler-Lewis is the executive director of the Robert

Art Will Be Like Music Is

12 The Wall Street Journal

The Future of Everything 13

accomplished the same in theater. Today art is rarely

14 The Wall Street Journal

platforms will similarly unearth more talented artists regardless

The Future of Everything 15

Mr. Cleveland is founder and chief executive officer of

16 The Wall Street Journal

Women Artists Are Poised to Take Off

Big Banks Will Get Bigger

The threshold question: Will banks continue to exist? The answer is

20 The Wall Street Journal

BIG AND BIGGER

The Future of Everything 21

Mr. Gorman is chairman and chief executive of Morgan

Beauty in the Future Will Mean Looking

24 The Wall Street Journal

bounties of fulfilling yet healthy food, which means they are

The Future of Everything 25

6. Because beauty will be so readily accessible and skin color and

26 The Wall Street Journal

Ms. Banks is a model and creator and executive producer

How Brains Will Learn to Understand

We Must Rethink How We Make

The Future of Everything 31

32 The Wall Street Journal

The Future of Everything 33

Mr. Ford is executive chairman of Ford Motor Co.

Cities Will Increasingly Be the Place Where

36 The Wall Street Journal

The Future of Everything 37

inequality. If we are able to unleash the full potential of cities around

Mr. Reed is the mayor of Atlanta.

Robots Will Take Over Household Chores

The smart home is getting smarter by the day, soon prophesying

Technology Will Revolutionize How Clothes

Caf and Coffee Will Be Inseparable

Wireless Communications Will Cleave Us

Nothing is more seminal to our existence than how we connect.

46 The Wall Street Journal

computers of just a few years back. Lost in our complacency about

The Future of Everything 47

Mr. Wheeler is chairman of the Federal Communications