Cost Out A Better Future

Democratic candidate for U.S. President, Andrew Yang, proposes sending every person over 18 years of age a government check for $1000 each month. Why? Human beings need food, shelter, and clothing every month. Yet, automation is expected to eliminate more and more of the ways people now earn the funds needed to provide these necessities, while corporations accumulate greater wealth by replacing employees with machines.

     Already, Yang notes, big tech companies, such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google, grow rich by packaging and selling the private information millions and billions of individuals supply free of charge.

     Technological changes require changes in other sectors of human life. When work requires manipulating information on a computer, the physical strength of men is unnecessary. Childcare is still necessary, but how it is provided and by whom need not be confined to unpaid natural mothers.

     Not only childcare, but $1000-a-month paychecks also would provide compensation for those whose time creates an enjoyable community life: the shoppers and clerks who get to know each other, community leaders who organize groups and boycotts to solve problems, gardeners who share crops with neighbors and plant flowers to beautify walking paths, visitors who watch sports with the homebound, families who attend religious services together, friends and relatives who celebrate birthdays with homemade cakes, cards, and presents, and those who write "Thank you" notes.

     Those dissatisfied with $1000 a month will innovate. Designs can be sleeker. Drugs can cure more. Experts can develop more effective teaching methods. Constitutions, standards, and collective agreements can harness, not only the temporary impulses of a mob, but also the independent actions of robots and AI. Dives can go deeper. Spacecraft can go farther. Games can be more fun.

     $1000 a month is a small price to pay for a better world.

   

Get Real About Forecasting 2018's Happenings

At the start of 2018, there has been no shortage of predictions about what will happen this year. TIME magazine devoted its entire January 15 issue, guest edited by Bill Gates, to a future of positive developments.

I have seen claims that the best places to find a job are in Arizona: Chandler and Scottsdale. Brain power will be enhanced by supplements or meditation. Advertisers will be more interested in how much time we view their commercials, rather than in how many commercials we see. Companies will mine data to personalize the messages they send us. Besides those designing technological developments, more people will be involved in considering the consequences of these developments, such as automated warfare and gene editing.

All of these forecasts remind me of the professor who said the only way to make accurate predictions is to forecast often. His prediction is more accurate than ever in our fast changing world, where today's jobs can be gone tomorrow and where so-called stable governments can disappear in the next election or coup.

No doubt, a variety of resources provide frequent updates. I'm just giving an example of one: TrendWatching.com offers its Premium Service subscribers a 100-page plus "2018 Trend Report,"  but it also provides a free daily look at innovations from around the world, innovations that often are worth imitating immediately. Businesses are reminded, for example, that they have become Glass Boxes. Consumers and potential employees have multiple ways to find out about their culture, people, processes, and product ingredients, not just their stock's performances. Evolution is not finished.

A Fork in the Road to the Future

How should children be prepared to handle the next 70 or 80 years of their lives? Or 40-year-olds to handle their next 40 years?

The trendwatching.com site, that has spotters all over the world, found people have looked at current conditions:

• immigration
• refugee crisis
• job automation
• depressed wages
• uneven recovery
• generational divide
• racial divide
• fear of terrorism

and sorted themselves into two groups:

• Global citizens open to an interconnected world, where people learn to understand their changing relationships to neighborhoods, cities, and nations
• Nation nurturers who seek comfort in the familiar

Dealing with change, especially rapid change, is not easy. It is understandable that some want to wall themselves off from foreigners; to pretend technology is going to slow down and manufacturing jobs, as we have known them, are going to return; to listen only to broadcasts that agree with them; and to cling to traditional families where a man works and an uneducated woman stays at home with the children.  But you only need look at one example of the future -  shopping malls and stores empty of consumers of all kinds who have switched over to ordering their needs and wants online - to see change is impossible to escape. (Could these empty stores be converted to on-going world fairs where "shoppers" could go to experience and learn new technologies?)

Like it or not, children are going to live in a world of global citizens. Parents and teachers need to prepare to help them feel at home there. 

Globalization Deniers

Will low-skilled workers in developed countries ever again be able to enter a plant and find a high-paying union job? Even if blocking trade pacts and immigrants provides a temporary fix, reality requires preparing for a much different future. Looking at mass communication, air and space travel, and artificial intelligence, Villanova Professor Ilia Delio suggests we need political structures and public policies that support human socialization in the world's new phase of global life.

     Some jobs always will stay close to home: police officers, firefighters, even food trucks. But using cameras to improve police work in one country (by eliminating bribes and beatings, for example) is an idea that can translate to other countries the same way training practices that improve the performance of firefighters and new spices that jazz up menus can spread benefits around the world. Resisting the changes caused by globalization does no one a favor.

     The trick is to look to the future and to anticipate the needs and wants that men, women, and children everywhere still need and want to fill. I find it useful to enter two keywords: ted talks and trendwatching, into my computer from time to time to check the discoveries of those who think about the future all the time. Before mapping out paths on a college campus, for example, Tom Hulme told how it made sense to watch what paths students and professors actually took. I was reminded of the story of how the construction company hired to build a highway over a mountain in Saudi Arabia pushed a donkey over the edge of the mountain and watched the route it took picking its way down before imitating the donkey's route with a highway.

     Photos provide an excellent way for students around the world to get to know how each other live. Stephen Wilkes used the photos he took day and night at one location, not to map out a design for a road, but to make art. By combining all the photos into composites, he showed day and night life on a river in one photo and daily life at an animals' watering hole in another. Believe it or not, there are lots of people in the world who have no idea of what our home towns look like, just as I didn't know what a town in Syria looked like after it was bombed until  I saw a photo a drone took of the devastation. Students and teachers can go to ePals.com to find classrooms throughout the world that can exchange photos of their cities.

     The International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) is sponsoring a contest to select digital format photos from around the world that show scenes and individuals that demonstrate four themes:

• Youth who are active community leaders and informed citizens that provide future opportunities and positive change.
• Diverse leaders who serve others and change every level of society for the better.
• Institutions that build just, prosperous societies by engaging communities, accountability, and responsive governance.
• Quality education, independent media, and new technologies that provide information and foster civic engagement in communities.

There is a $250 prize for the winning photo in each of the four categories. The deadline for submitting photos is April 25, 2016. Additional details are at irex.org/photocontest.

     With predictions that millions of people around the world will be hungry in the future, photos of young people using new farming practices might be a winning way to show the promise of globalization.

Young Voices

For 90 years, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards have recognized the outstanding ways students in grades seven through twelve have expressed their views of the world. When my granddaughter won a gold key this year for her modern fable about the consequences of a wolf's deception, I had an opportunity to look through the book of submissions from last year's winners that she received.

     With World Creativity and Innovation Week coming up April 15-21, this might be a good time for parents and teachers to encourage children and students to think about the world and compare what they draw and say with some of the representations and comments of Scholastic Art and Writing Award winners.

     One student disputed the stereotypes of color: yellow Asians, black Africans, brown Indians, and white Americans. She saw herself in many colors.

     World hunger was a topic that came up in several essays. A girl who wrote about villages where people "are skin and bones, their ribs visible" and their eyes always sad ended by saying that she never stops praying that, like "a blade of grass," these villagers can be "new and fresh." But a young immigrant from Laos who is a waitress in a bowling alley looks at American children in wonder when they "swallow between rounds" of arcade games and "drop food on the floor."

     Boys think about war. One made a sculpture showing a young man being persuaded to enlist in the Army. Another wrote about depth charges attacking a U-boat in World War II. A poet whose entry went from boy to old man included a stanza about being "a soldier with the callused heart mindlessly...following orders and longing for a purpose."

     Religion was a subject covered in art and word. Monks and Hindu statues caught the eyes of young photographers. One student looked at Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam and decided it was possible to start a world religion by deciding whom to exclude and what beliefs were contrary to the status quo.

     There were a number of unsettling dystopian views of the future. Meat and gems could not save a boy from a rare fever, and, when everything was plastic, only an old worn blanket could hold memories.

     For information about how students can share their voices with other young people and adults next year, login to artandwriting.org later this year.