by Hugh M. Lewis

The future rushes headlong before us like a rushing roller coaster. The wind flaps the future in our faces ever faster and faster. The pace of technological change in the world is increasing, leading to a headlong on-rush of change that inundates us and that grows more complicated with each passing year. We must ask ourselves where it will all end, and how. We must ask whether there is a climax or a zenith to the development in which world civilization is undergoing, or whether or not our sense of progress will continue without limit or end into the indefinite future.

The problem seems to be that our vision of the future as well as the sense of the future itself, is growing increasingly uncertain as it grows increasingly complex as the result of its hastening acceleration of change upon all levels of articulation. Scientific progress does not, alone, render the world safer, saner or more stable as a platform for human civilization. It seems to have been a mixed blessing indeed.

Our coordinate reference points shift continuously with our attempts to keep apace with the changes that are occurring. Technical skill jobs are rendered obsolete within shorter periods of time, leading to chronic displacement of "post-qualified" workers and a chronic shortage of newly trained specialists capable of meeting increased and increasingly diverse demands. A kind of "techno-shock" sets in with advancing middle age--closure of the old bone apparatus to the shifting demands of the ever new. In such an emerging context, it is easy to get left behind in the shuffle, to fall out of the competition to keep abreast, and increasing numbers of people are being left behind.

It is not difficult to muster statistical indicators based upon the growing increases of change in the world. Human systems continue their expansion and the elaboration of complex technologies as our applied knowledge advances and becomes increasingly hyper-compartmentalized in sub-specializations. If we compare the pace of change in the last quarter of a century to the previous century, and the course of change of the previous 125 years to the previous millennium, we can see clearly that with each decade the pace of change and the complications of progress are growing at an increasing rate. We are today far more different than our ancestors a century and a half ago, than these ancestors were to their predecessors a thousand years before. 

There is a sense too that the entire global system is self-organizing and like a runaway horse with no one in the driver's seat. It is so large, so complicated, so overpowering, that it is simply beyond the capacity of any single individual or even any single group or set of groups, to manage or control in an effective way. It may even be beyond the capacity of everyone's control, and this is a frightening thought.  It seems to have pretty much a life of its own, with its own developmental trajectory and historical momentum, taking its own course of which we are more the responding participants than the "proactive" leaders and movers and shakers. There is, in fact, little each of us can do in terms of our own personal lives to affect the larger front of change that is happening all around the world. 

And it is obvious that some people are profiting from the future, and others are being excluded systematically from it, and many even being impoverished by it. Some people are getting richer, and many more people are becoming poorer and poor by the changes of the future. The future does not seem to hold a lot of promise for genuine equality in the distribution of resources or for the greater rule of law or for democracy or human freedom. Given our track records, it doesn't seem to hold much prospect for "world peace" either, making "world peace" the pat reply of a young, naive beauty contestant more than anything else.

As we seek to envision our collective future, we of course cannot make any clear predictions. The future is an unfinished system. It is largely self-organizing, and therefore is underdetermined. Much hinges therefore on chance outcomes. A huge meteorite may materialize out of the black of the night, at a moments notice, and result in catastrophe for everyone. Though the likelihood of such chance events occurring on any given day or in any given year, are not very great, the possibility still remains. More likely though are semi-deterministic outcomes that are the unintended and therefore unforeseeable consequences of our own collective actions. As more and more modern nation states acquire the bomb, the likelihood of a nuclear exchange that escalates to global holocaust followed by nuclear winter, is increasing, while the capacity to effectively control the access and use of such weapons decreases in inverse proportion.

Nuclear holocaust is really not a scenario that keeps most of us awake at night. There are probably even more pressing concerns that we scarcely know about or pay much attention to. Top of the list seems to be the concern for rising global temperatures that are attributed to the greenhouse effect of increasing CO₂ levels in the atmosphere that are the result of widespread fossil fuel dependency. This is an issue that seems to be growing worse each passing year, and yet we are still undecided as to the eventual outcomes of this process. Rising sea levels are swamping some low-island communities in the Pacific and Indian oceans, and this trend is liable to worsen. Eventually, sea-board communities will be threatened as well. How far it will continue to rise, and whether there might be some unknown catastrophic consequence in the destabilization of the earth's atmospheric system, remains unknown as well. 

We have alternative futures to concern ourselves with, and to some unknown but significant degree, we ourselves have a measure of control in deciding the most likely outcomes of our future. We have in fact an infinite number of alternative futures to consider, without a clear sense, in all the confusion and complexity, which kinds of future are the most likely in the long run. Much about the world is within the realm of our constructive capacity to control and to change, and this capacity is increasing with our increasing technological capacity. But at the same time as we progress technologically, and as technological modernization catches up with more and more communities in the world, our social institutions and cultural orientations remain, by comparison, relatively regressive and backward, if not in many instances downright medieval. And the propensity for human violence and perversion, upon a group or an individual level, does not seem to lessen with enlightenment, but to only become worse as access to destructive technologies increases and there seems to be a widespread mass culture that centers around the celebration of such distorted behavior.

So our sense of progress in the world seems somewhat stilted and uneven, not just in the sense of the gross inequalities between the beneficiaries of progressive development and those who are consistent kept out of our future paradise, but also in terms of the kinds of institutions and things that achieve progressive development, and everything else that doesn't.  Whatever else we might be able to say about our progress, it has proven to be a mixed blessing indeed for the world as a whole.

I have hypothesized, in keeping with von Bertalanffy's general systems theory, that for the world system as a whole there is a sense of equi-finality that we are eventually approaching, a sense of an inevitable global equilibrium that we will establish for ourselves, for better or for worse, that will become pretty much what we are left with in the long run. Different nation states can start out at different points and places along the way, but the system as a whole should arrive at some global sense of order inevitable. The trouble remains that we really cannot forecast with any certainty what this equi-final global system will ultimately look like. If we look backward to counter-factual histories, we can ask ourselves what the world might be like today if Hitler and the other Axis powers had gained eventual success over Russia, Great Britain and the US in World War II. As of 1942, there was no clear sense that the war would end in the favor of the Allies. 

Part of the problem with doing this kind of forecasting is that we cannot tell what are the most important or critical factors that will in the long run most determine the outcomes for the world as a whole. It is pretty much anyone's guess whether economic factors outweigh the political actions of leaders or governments, or whether fanatical religious or other social factors may play a critical roll in the long run. This is especially the case when in fact we see so much technical and technological change occurring in the world at a quickening tempo.

There are some things that seem to weigh heavily in whatever calculus of formulations we may make. One of these things is a central baseline feature that is part of the Malthusian dilemma and what is referred to as social-environmental circumscription, especially on a global scale. The basic principle is that a society under normal and stable conditions tends to naturally increase in population growth rate until it has over-passed its carrying capacity, at which point environmental degradation sets in which tends to further limit and circumscribe resource availability, resulting in increasing death rates. Environmental degradation may often times be irreversible, resulting in permanent loss of critical habitat and associated eco-system resources that originally supported the population. We end up pretty much with an Easter Island scenario. It is possible and quite easy to imagine and even observe such a model of local areas, assuming that there is some degree of closure of the local system. But it is a different challenge to realistically observe or estimate the model on a larger regional or global scale of occurrence. The earth as a whole is a closed biospheric system, deriving its energy from the sun primarily, but otherwise containing all the essential components that drive life on earth. Within this system, any ecological subsystem must be considered as an open system that exchanges its resources and its biomass with the larger meta-biotic context of the biosphere as a whole. There are in fact very few completely closed biological ecosystems on earth that are not connected somehow with the larger biosphere or its bio-geophysical substrate.

To put this problem another way, the human species is liable in the long run to be its own worst enemy, or, more accurately, to become the mass victims of its own mass success, if we measure such success strictly on biological terms of adaptive survival and reproductive growth. Population growth rates the world over remain high in spite of widespread disease and malnutrition--in fact relatively high infant mortality rates, a principle index of the relative health of a society, almost invariably lead to increased birth rates as mother's respond by nature to their loss by new pregnancy. I would say population growth rates remain high, not in spite of disease and poverty, but because of it. They only come down as the consequence of a society achieving a relative level of affluence, on average, and the increasing sense of security that comes with such affluence. But it can be said that regardless of this case, growth rates of the human population, as a whole, remains fairly high, far above rates of replacement for death rates.

We do not really know what the carrying capacity of the earth is. Some have put the estimate at about 7.5 billion. I'm more inclined to see it in terms of about 12 billion. Of course, this is a relative thing. The world could not afford 7.5 billion Americans, though it may be able to carry 12 billion mainland Chinese. Of course, most of the 6.5 billion souls on earth want to live like Americans, or to at least be as affluent as they think most Americans are, and hence we should err in our estimates on global carrying capacity on the side of caution. 

We can off course argue the global carrying capacity question. It all depends upon our point of view. There are likely to be a great many localized "critical events" that occur as the result of overreaching local carrying capacity and overpopulation, before the global system as a whole begins feeling the weight of human population pressure in terms of systemic, wide reaching consequences.

The point is this, progressive development brings with it rising expectations of affluence and of health and material well being, if only as a consequence of a "trickle down" effect of impoverished people in the streets starring at billboards of rich people all day long. As the global population moves towards an increasingly developed system characterized by higher average levels of consumption and affluence, the stress and strain this is liable to place upon the earth's carrying capacity is bound to increase, perhaps disproportionately to the actual per capita increase in population itself. The counterargument, which is valid but to an unknown extent, is that scientific progress raises the threshold of adaptation and carrying capacity through the introduction of technological changes to the environment. We can carry more people at higher levels of affluence as we grow and develop the technical and organizational structures that support our global system. This has been the promise of science all along. But it is proving the case that we may in fact have more to fear from our technology, and its unintended consequences upon our global environment, than from the mere consequences of overpopulation and eco-systemic saturation itself.

Not all progress has been so long-sighted enough to overcome the long-term, unforeseen consequences of its own development. There are many cases in point. Nuclear power was thought to be the energy solution of the future until the lessons of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl caught up with the world. Americans typically drive bigger and faster cars, at faster, unsafe speeds, on more crowded roads, in the face of increasing gasoline prices and regardless of issues of pollution, congestion and the problems of global warming. Penicillin was thought to be the wonder drug cure-all for every infection, until its overuse resulted in the development of Penicillin resistant strains of bacteria. DDT in the 50's was believed to be the solution to the global problem of malaria, until it was found in the fat of  fish populations in increasing concentrations.

We know that the human species, as a single species, has become the most reproductively successful form of life on earth, probably in all of natural history, in spite of our rather "K-strategy" of reproduction. A large part of the earth's natural resources are going to the processes of supporting and maintaining human biomass and its increasingly materialistic styles of living. Disregard claims of ant or other insect biomass being greater--perhaps they may be taken as a whole, but I am talking about one single species, not only with an absolute biomass, but with an effective accumulative behavioral consequence upon its environment.

So, the bottom-line about our collective future seems to be this--there is some hypothetical multi-factorial carrying capacity of the earth in relation to human population growth and adaptive behavior. We do not know exactly what this carrying capacity is, but we do know that the human population is continuing to rapidly increase regardless of efforts or counter-measures to forestall human reproduction. We cannot know the full teleological consequences of the development of our technology or associated alternative systems in relation to growing human population or in relation to altering the complex thresholds for human systems equilibrium--on one hand, improvements in agricultural production, for instance, possibly by use of genetically modified seeds, may increase the threshold of global carrying capacity for human population, regionally if not overall. 

For instance, we cannot guess all the consequences of introducing genetically modified or engineered species into the natural systems in relation to the larger global environment. On the other hand, increased food production, in and of itself, may lead simply to increased human consumption of food without increasingly equitable distribution of food, with consequences of obesity and over-consumption for some populations and starvation for others. In such a case, simply increasing agricultural productivity will not necessarily produce the worldwide long-term benefits of increasing stability and security of the larger human system and reducing the effects of socio-environmental circumscription. It is possible that increased production levels, coupled with associated patterns such as reliance on petrochemical fertilizers and industrial equipment, may actually have the reverse effect of lowering the net threshold value of global carrying capacity, by encouraging disparities in levels of consumption between populations and thus leading to imbalanced patterns of consumption overall.

The same kind of case can be made for almost any critical technological invention or innovation that we introduce, especially if such innovations are introduced into the larger global human system without taking into account larger scale social and organizational reverberations that might be attendant to such introductions. It is similar to the kind of issue of introducing a new alien predator species into a local ecosystem--the species may become invasive, uncontrollable, and eventually destroying the key linkages upon which the ecosystem depended.

We are becoming increasingly aware in our modern world of the fact of the basic interdependencies that the human species shares with the natural world. We are becoming increasingly aware of the natural limitations and constraints our world places upon our technological progress. We have come to realize that the changes we enact in the world for our collective benefit must be coordinate with and non-destructive to the natural systems of the biosphere and of the bio-geophysical platform of the earth itself. These considerations set constraining variables in our new formulations for an alternative future. It is increasingly  understood and accepted, for instance, that in the structure of the long run there is no viable place for a carbon-based energy economy, and that therefore the sooner we make a conversion from over-dependency upon fossil-fuels to hydrogen and other alternative forms of fuel, the better off we will all be. It is increasingly realized that the costs, consequences and unintended risks of waging modern warfare are far greater and more prohibitive than at any time in our previous history, and that the gains from winning in war are no longer clear cut nor as obvious as we once thought they were. Even the wealthiest of nation states is finding the challenge of waging modern war to be technologically expensive, indeed, an exorbitant expense on their national budget, with the gains achieved from successful war-making becoming less and less obvious with each passing year. We may say that, globally, collectively, we are coming to better and better realize the natural limitations of our growth and our capacity for development, and we are learning that it is the epitome of wisdom to work within these limitations, rather than to continue to overstep them in whatever it is we strive to do.

It follows that we must proceed with caution in our considerations and eventual construction of alternative futures. We can no longer take for granted the availability of unlimited natural resources that are ours alone in the world to plunder and squander with no sense of tomorrow. We can no longer strive to be the ultimate consumers without seeing and seeking limits to our patterns of consumption. We can no longer merely invent and devise new systems to put in motion in the world, without taking into more complete account the possible unintended consequences of our development. We can no longer promote, free of a growing sense of global social responsibility, large families with large numbers of natural offspring. We can no longer consider war and the resort to collective violence as a feasible and efficacious alternative in the resolution of our differences or in the promotion of our interests in competition with other peoples. We have choices to make in all these respects, and the choices will be made whether we wish them to be or not.

General Systems Essays, Vol. I