R.Morley Inc.'s The Technology Machine

1. Technology will drive not only manufacturing, but also social structures and communications. Expect that technology linkages will replace geography and family and language affinities that now form "natural" boundaries and communication patterns.

2. Mass production will give way to fully distributed manufacturing and point-of-scale manufacturing (See fig. 2.2). Mass production and its complex hierarchy of management structures enjoyed a 15-year run. Watch for industries that uncover the key to localized sourcing, design, and finally, production and reconsumption of recyclable materials, by the consumer and his family, himself. Manufacturing will become replication at the point of consumption (and design). What counts are design, time to market, and diversification of type. Product industries to watch for this kind of process innovation include clothing, recreational equipment, communications gear.

3. The 22 winners in fifteen years will be small unknowns, unheard of or unrecognized now. They will come from explosive growth businesses including hospitality resorts, health care management, specialized transport, salesperson optimization, food, small armaments, and security. These "new" industries' experience will parallel the lengthening of lifetimes and the expansion of personal wealth, and they will thrive on compact data structures. Instantly available "Personal Health" and "Safety" profiles, even diet preferences, will fuel these "mini-industries." Allowable performance envelopes on systems, much as airplanes have envelopes of performance, will be clear.

4. The 220 losers are big, insular companies in the United States and Germany. Obviously arthritic companies--GM and Xerox, for example--whose age spots are showing through their well-structured financials, are predictable casualties. Less obvious victims include companies such as Microsoft, StorageTek, and Seagate, whose clear technology limitations are becoming inflexible.

5. "Marginal operators"--uncompetitive producers populated by fewer high-skilled workers--desperately substitute volume for intelligence: Concentration on staying alive in their own geographic areas, their approach to design, marketing, production, and logistics resembles the strategy of cast-iron stove producers in the mid-1800s.

6. "Mini industries," short-term, rapid growth and death, single-hit technology winners will replace mammoth industry sectors. Market segmentation will continue its downward-distributed trend. The former "computer industry" illustrates: computers have been niched into retail, research, industrial, and academic application that differentiate their boxes. Watch for personal transportation industries, personal health, and personal security and entertainment ideas to "customize," dominate, replicate, and die, all in less than six-month spans.

7. Remanufacturing. Cameras, motors, transmissions, paper, some consumer goods, will fuel a growth of the remanufacturing and retrofit industry. Sharp and fast technology adapters in the "reman" business, such as Williams Technologies of Summerville, South Carolina, whose entire strategic base is automotive reman, will prosper.

8. Japan will be a financial, not a manufacturing center. Pushing, tracking, investing, growing, and harvesting money will be more suitable to Japan`s lifestyle and cultural affinities. Software gurus who can solve money pipeline systems challenges will train in the United States and work in Japan. Expect to see a brain drain as more degreed computer scientists and engineers depart for Japan to develop advanced systems controlling the money pipelines in a country where computers have only slowly penetrated manufacturing and consumer markets.

9. Nuclear power will enjoy a renaissance.

10. Intellectual property law will boom and dominate Internet exchange and all other information media, because ideas will be your currency, time your only copyright!

11. Intellectual capital. The most important commodity will be people--not numbers of people, but types of people. Technical power will rule in manufacturing, in the medical community, in entertainment, and communications. Ph.D engineers and brilliant software and design gurus will take positions of management and corporate direction. Salaries of engineers go through the roof, and Dilbert awakens!

12. Commodity swings will drive system swings. When Honda pioneered the aluminum engine, resource limitations--the weight of steel and steel transport issues--dictated the new material's use in engine design. The first Honda aluminum engines, however, failed; repeated attempts to perfect the casting methods eventually yielded a series of blockbuster breakthroughs that led competitors to change their own technology within five years to aluminum casting. And in fact, in 1998 the Oldsmobile Aurora engine, all aluminum sump, block, and head, became the Indy racing engine of choice.

13. He who lives by the gas gauge always runs with an empty tank.
No successful company will be only "profit driven." The bottom line--profit, enjoyment, fun, societal benefit--is only the indicator of the successful creation of money, but money can only be created from raw technology and the ability to deploy it. The alchemy that creates killer apps from thousands of "good ideas" is the key element for growth in the next two decades. Being profit-driven only, however, won`t drive innovation and growth, because being profit-driven only, however, won't drive innovation and growth, because being profit-driven means trying to drag the gas gauge from empty to full, hoping for the best. The alternative is to refuel, because when you have fuel, it does not matter what the gas gauge says.

14. We will see the return of lifetime employment--for some.

15. Raytheon. No engineers will want to work for the Raytheons, big dead institutions.

16. The U.S. Postal Service will abandon its marble, bank-like monuments and roam the back roads and Main Streets. Post offices will sell stamps, cartoons, video tapes, CDs, and any remaining paper-bound communications. Electronic postal "clerks" will e-mail and service all plastic cards and currency exchanges.

17. Companies will get bigger and smaller. Factories will follow the life cycle of agriculture in the United States, which changed from small and medium-sized family farms to a mix of agri-giants and a very few small niche farms. In manufacturing, survivors will be very large, nondistributed enterprises and small boutique firms. "The guy in the middle," firms of about $10 million to $1 billion, will not be able to compete. Megacompanies will dominate some industries--the return of monoliths. In full-blown competitive markets, size reinforced with cash and innovation brains will battle extended enterprises formed from small, fast companies.

18. Crab skin and bone growth. New lightweight materials, like crab skin and bone growth, like the composites that revolutionized aircraft, skis, and tennis equipment, will change the way we design skeletal structures--aircraft, buildings, autos, trains. The material will be grown the way bone grows, to selectively put strength where the stress appears. Crab skin has two surfaces and layers. Both are smooth and sharp, and sandwiched in between are strong fibrous elements resealing a poorly installed fiberglass installation. Material can be eroded where no strength exists, or added where there is stress, just as in bones. A photolith on a stress basis will be a big material in 2020.

19. "Ink-jet" steel. Deposition (like the ink-jet printer) of molten steel and other metals will allow us to manufacture steel parts in three dimensions. In effect, using the splatter from a welding process and molten steel addition allows a buildup of steel product--like the three-dimensional-printer--to make hard nonprototype steel-centered material. Applications include gears and complex parts.

20. Leather. Leather's live characteristics will make it perfect for high-end aesthetics; with a high-price leather will fill its own niche.

21. "Invisible manufacturing." No consumer will be aware of manufacturing; consumers will take technology, embedded and stand-alone, for granted. (A hamburger is really a bite out of a cow.) Manufactured products are really a bite out of innovative replication; coupling the two images makes the concept much harder to accept. Uncoupled manufacturing and food make it more palatable for the environmentalists, capital investment, and consumer demand.

22. Wanted: aerospace engineers (and repair men.) Thousands of communications satellites, carrying millions of payloads, will require feeding, maintenance, manufacturing, and service onboard. Satellite manufacturing, ground support, antennas, and communications and control will be big business.

23. Time travel. Experience the Renaissance or the Civil War through time travel--accurate simulation modules--like Sim City, that transport users into alternative lives--the ghetto, college, even manufacturing.

24. Satellite manufacturing carried out onboard thousands of small satellites costing $10 million each. Onboard space manufacturing, using solar power and high-bandwidth communications, will extend the boundaries of perviously earthbound production.

25. No hands! Manufacturing sector shrinkage will follow agritech and electronics industries to eliminate hands-on labor cost. Computers and intelligent systems and few humans will manage manufacturing. Twenty percent of the cost of new facilities will be computers; most manufacturing labor costs will be for technical support--engineering, simulators, idea acquisition, just like the way movies and software were produced in the nineties. Less than 5 percent of the labor base will be working at hands-on innovative replication.

26. Outsourced design, manufacturing, portfolio advanced planning and scheduling, even marketing will be conducted on the Web and son of Web.
Stand-alone manufacturing automation technologies, like the PLC, robotics, and CNC (computer numerically controlled machines), will be compressed into embedded controls with variable software driven by JAVA-like real-time engines. The integrating software is the next generation Web with enterprise links to give the customer what he truly wants--market share, competitive advantage, and profit.

27. Big cost and speed opportunity areas lie in logistics and design to solve customer hyperneeds.

28. Expect the end of the commuter traffic jam, because people will live where they work, and work where they live--in factory villages, much as they did at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Business travel will be limited to replication site selection, or key-code controlled insertion of protected designs (burn-in) at the point of manufacture.

29. Manufacturing productivity standards will increase to the point where customers will contract for standard production costs. Productivity measures will follow industry standards; costs above labor and materials will cover the service differentiators.

30. Help wanted. . . technology personnel shortage. Higher demand for technology professionals results in shortages, especially high-tech males. Shortages drive more women into technology positions and all technology workers "stretch" retirement.

31. Television will be dead. Downloads and uploads through Internet communications boxes will produce customized entertainment/communications.

32. Personal tech. Everyone from the age of six months on will wear a "Batman utility belt," chips for power, memory, lifetime medical and education records, and enterprise documentation.

33. Computers will be ten thousand times more powerful.

34. Software will be dead--embedded intelligence rules!

35. The United States will not go metric.

36. Screwdrivers will still have funny heads.

37. Nuts and bolts will be replaced with glue and plastic and one-piece molded structures; manufacturing processes will focus more on injection molding versus component and assembly structures and their complex parts management systems.

38. Laser welders--buzz boxes--and cutters will be home tools, not just heavy industry tools.

39. Smart everything! Smart furniture, smart tires, air filters, sunglasses, watch straps, faucets, speeding tickets, bank deposits, dictation, easy-fly choppers, gas turbine lawnmowers, no toasters for nano toast, coffee cups.

40. Organizational structures will continue to undergo massive redesign. Task dictates organizational design.

41. Unions and guilds erode to the point of invisibility.

42. The return of integrity. Integrity and value systems will determine enterprise and individual success. Ethics count, and everyone knows.

43. Quality time. Longer, tiresome work hours, "doing Dilbert time," ill led to frustration and demands for more quality time. Quality time will remain, however, undefined.

44. Welfare. Plastic welfare transactions will buy cars, homes and food.

45. "If you cannot change the world, change yourself!" Drugs for every possible human condition and situation, from birth through reproduction and death, like plastic surgery, will be widely used among the poorer classes and the super rich. Drugs--mood changers, personality enhancers, elevators, levelers, violence inhibitors, uppers, downers, energizers, sex aids, death aids, aggression inhibitors--will replace cultural boundaries, church, and families.

46. Biotech. Headless bodies make great spare parts banks. On the day of your birth and your registration, your DNA scraping will be cataloged for the Spare Parts Band where cloned organs and tissues can be reserved just for you. What genetic manipulation and bioengineering cannot do, spare parts will. DNA cataloged to you identity registration number will prevent anyone getting "lost" or duplicated.

47. Virtual citizenship. Passports will be issued for your enterprise or satellite citizenship. Your legal addresses will enable you to enjoy all the satellite communications privileges of that star--banking, stock trading, messaging, info retrieval, contracting for protection, entertainment.

48. Extralegal banking. Satellite banks, above and beyond global regulation, like Swiss and Cayman Island institutions; pirate satellites will appear to take them out, either physically or with viruses.

49. 3-D faxes.

50. At-home ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits)--burn-it-yourself chips.

51. Enterprisewide laws will govern health issues. Per penalty of employment card withdrawal, you will eat broccoli twice per week, you will exercise for twenty minutes, you will take your daily mood leveler.

52. Africa--more wars and more famine.

53. "Irradiated fresh to you!" When you eat that sprig of broccoli, it will have been genetically engineered to grow hydroponically, irradiated fresh to you. New varieties of fruits and vegetables will appear whose names will be selected for the human appeal; they will actually have been created to contain maximum vitamins with maximum resistance to bruising and spoilage. "Old" varieties of apples, Macintosh, Northern Spy, and so forth, will satisfy high-price, high-"niche" specialty markets.

54. Disposable toothpaste/toothbrush.

55. Better bug zappers.

56. Ultrasonic torque wrenches.

57. Nano dung beetles, intelligent garbage collectors, will patrol your lawns and homes, looking for foreign objects in the landscape of uniformity.

58. Home Is Where the Intellectual and Entropic Closed System Is. Home septic and water recycling. Home septic tanks will process wastewater for reuse; the closed system technology will be provided by aerospace.

59. Wal-Mart wins. Volume product design, assembly, and sales centers win over high-cost specialty stores.

60. Local energy solutions--portable power generators in the form of fuel cells, batteries, mobile, back-pack cells, heart implants, lamps, and miniature gas turbines.

61. What am I bid? Everything--books, music, jobs, custom clothing, medical services--will be sold o the Web, a la Amazon. What am I bid? Jobs, stocks, airplane tickets, books, wives, kids, drugs, and gurus will be negotiated, paid for, and delivered, via the internet.

62. Microchips. Each person in the United States now owns, whether he knows it or not, on average six microchips. In 2020, that number will rise to then thousand micros per person, embedded in every salt shaker, every credit card, light bulb, each key on the keyboard, shampoo bottle, paperback book cover, and air filter.

63. Education. K-12 education systems will continue in turmoil; watch for megacorporations, tired of governmental social engineering experiments that fail to educate workers, to assume comprehensive, effective education programs, birth to death, that parallel the worker's employment cycle. Kids will work, dusts will work, and seniors will work. Lectures and classroom experiences will resemble a rock concert more than a static pedagogical format (one teacher, thirty students, wood seats, and white boards). Universities will form and re-form around new issues, just as the Santa Fe Institute morphs to absorb new technologies.

64. The Americas will form new economic entities--New England and the Maritimes, Texas and Northern Mexico, Florida and Puerto Rico.

65. Killer computer applications, son of Netscape, son of JAVA, or Firefly or Push, will mutate into new wild beings that would be as impossible for us to manage now as nuclear energy was fifty years ago.

66. Bandwidth compression techniques will reduce the need for other communications vehicles, but bandwidth demand will continue to explode.

67. Adaptive sensors will replace periodic diagnosis or maintenance. As water technology and miniaturization improves, opportunities to create very small sensors will change medicine, retailing, manufacturing, and many scheduling functions. Diabetics will use a supermarket-type scanner, for example, to check blood sugar levels. Detecting bearing life, maintenance requirements for other metal parts, process quality, paint and other coating chemistries, and the monitoring of retail sales or product movement will all be handled by intelligent sensors.

68. Weather forecasting will be easier and more accurate over a longer range, supported by emergent systems and data-rich modeling. El Nino's cascading pattern of Pacific storms, followed by southern tornadoes and East Coast hurricanes, for example, will be accurately predicted and simulated as to strength and behavior. "Instant gratification is much too slow!"

69. New forms of computers will proliferate, including quantum mechanical computers, biological computers, and optical computers. The new classes of computers will be embedded and wirelessly connected; they will discern sets or behavior patterns, filter for desired requirements, and make decisions and predictions. Supported by ultra-high-bandwidth wireless links, small intelligence units linked to each other for very fast communications will form and re-form new systems as needed. Their connectivity design and control algorithms will be internally self-building, not even touched by wetware (wrinkled humanoids.)

70. Voice recognition systems will dominate computing, banking, security. Although the cost of development of today's primitive voice recognition systems was billions and early systems took years to develop, next-generation sensory recognizers, with minimal programming. Recognition systems illustrate: How does your dog recognize you on Friday as your car pulls into the drive, even if it is a rental car? He runs on a series of filters and signals-- sounds, smells, patterns-- the same way your personal security system of the year MMXX will, an electronic Willie the Rottweiler.

71. Computers will model human social organization and behavior--for example, traffic flows and crowd control.

72. Complex adaptive systems and intelligent agents--not humans--will run railroads, airports, banking, and other data-rich and extremely dynamic operations.
Intelligent systems are simple extensions of previously separate and apparently complex systems. Readers will recognize the movement toward delivering intelligence in smaller packages in the examples of our automotive high-end offerings--"computers on wheels," statistics on the growth of miniaturization and sensors, constant feedback in-process devices versus walls papered with control charts, and other manufacturing examples.

73. In ten years, expect no waits for very custom vehicles, clothing, and orthopedic appliances. In fifteen years, expect to buy some items for life, and others for life stage recycling. Understand that low-margin, break-even manufacturing will continue to exist, but growth will come from differentiation and smart systems.

74. Information technology will force and enable change; although users will specify needs, information, technology will deliver those needs.

75. Technology that starts its commercial life as entertainment will move fastest.

76. Big Brother Won`t Be Watching You. Privacy and security systems, especially in the areas of individual financial and medical controls, will be available--at a price--to most users, replacing the pervasive encroachments of credit agencies, the phone companies, and various for-profit Internet providers.

77. Hacking is cool. Computer hackers proliferate; inevitably, a few episodes of computer terrorism--blackmail and theft--will shut down utility systems. Brain criminals will hack court records, leaving everyone on the payroll squeaky-clean; a mysterious virus will erase speeding ticket records. Smart enterprises, however, will hack out software for autos, airplanes, homes, phones, and graphics.

78. Global citizens will be two hours to anywhere.

79. Class stress and walled cities. Where economic gaps between neighbors form sharp boundaries, the inequalities produce tension, class stress, and outbursts of violence or border wars, followed by archaic governmental attempts at social engineering. Citizens with the means will form complete walled cites, corporate city-states; citizens without the means will find themselves on their own, looking for alliances and "pseudo cities"--clubs, uniforms, entertainment styles. Precursors of these technologically enabled enclaves are medieval fortress cities (Paris, Siena, Firenze, Heidelburg) and other places where people were offered physical protection by structures and geology (the Great Wall of China, the English Channel, the Atlantic Ocean). Disney`s Celebration City, certain California hill towns, and the White House are precursors of the 2020 enclaves.
Social classes will solidify to include blocks of rigid, regimented lower middle classes inhabiting nongrowth corporations. "Lucky middle-class" professionals will inhabit the upper end of Islands of Excellence, dominated by technical and professional workers. The vast "lower-class" members will be shuffled to fill up isolated, controllable geographical areas--"islands." There will be little movement among class groups; however, shifts in global economies may occasionally increase the ranks of the "lucky middle-class,"just as continued outbursts of localized guerrilla activities and boundary wars will create new pockets of immigrants confined to lower-class enclaves.

80. Purchases--personal vehicles and personal medical design tracking--will be made for life.

81. Healthy nations and other economic entities will witness the reappearance of "the common weal" concept. Decisions made for the greater good, the maintenance of infrastructures, the health of workers, and the perpetuation of Island ideals will be the norm. Look for Island Constitutions of genetic engineering that guarantee physical and intellectual uniformity.

82. Spiritual leaders will appear in each new entity, not all of whom will preach a beneficent approach to human growth. Watch for gurus who gather legitimate financial and technology power, combined with general support, and a return to the blending of "church and state." Watch for others who combine corporate with personal power to amass technology resources and first-strike capability in the market.

83. We see the return of uniforms and other institutional differentiators--team hats, flags, songs, salutes, even secret code rings and chip implants, "Business casual," a temporary foray into personal expression, will have been long-ago rejected as disrespectful and disorganized.

84. The Big Three will be augmented by transportation companies that localize production and design of special-use vehicles and service true off-road vehicles and small construction and road-building equipment.

85. The U.S. interstate highway system will segment into high-speed "transportation corridors" to service Next Generation Vehicles (Blackbird). Removing small vehicles from pipelines will improve safety statistics and reduce individual traffic fatalities.

86. Air transport systems will restructure--earthbound--for short hops using smaller, faster jets, "on-call" rides (air taxis, passenger-friendly services). The airline industry that in the nineties experienced shakeups and consolidations, price wars and service lapses, will, like manufacturing, abandon the economies-of-sale model and move to ten- to thirty-passenger jet service. (Honda Motors has prototyped a light but very fast and fuel efficient midrange passenger jet, targeted for possible production by the year 2002.) Effectively, the air transport system sets out to offer jumps between the Islands of Excellence. Inhabitants and workers of noncompetitive, marginal operators will travel less for business as their companies attempt to maintain survival positions locally.

87. Genocide will fade, replaced by "blitzkrieg" hit-and-run economic competition at the upper rungs and control mechanisms at the lower-middle-class and lowest levels to lock in individual behavior. An Aldous Huxley "Brave New World" approach to managing the captive lowest classes will use genetic engineering, drugs, selective education, and entertainment as mind and behavior control.

88. Governmental power will be replaced by Big Corporate Power. Expect to see Summit Alliances of IBM, Microsoft, and Global Bank Enterprises used to fund capital growth and development, to feed and maintain Islands of Excellence, and to set demographic/economic strategies. What the Marshall Plan, the International Monetary Fund, the Rockefellers, and John J. McCloy performed for the Cold War era will be covered by Bill Gateses. With the decline of governmental clout, new agencies will broker economic power through corporations and assist in positioning certain enterprises for market dominance. Where the United States previously funded national labs, and later regional manufacturing centers, governments will take a more supportive role by facilitating communications, data gathering, and labor rules to foster corporate growth.

89. In the medical world, nanobots will facilitate disease diagnosis, health maintenance monitoring, and body repair. Clones and artificial tissue and organs will provide spare parts banks.

90. Stock exchanges--like AMEX, NASDAQ, NYSE, and Tokyo--will cease to exist, replaced by rich databases and global exchange. Corporate info structures will prepare and distribute their own financial and tax records, leading to a need for more intergiant corporate regulatory discipline and experts or astronomers to cull out the blue chips.

91. Rags to riches. Hand-made, as opposed to machine mass-produced, items will enjoy resurgence as wealthy citizens of the Islands seek to enjoy aesthetically pleasing environments of coordinated art and clothing. No metallic spandex uniforms and Star Trek unisex suits; welcome the return of Edwardian opulence at the upper levels, offset by Dickensian conditions on the lowest rungs.

92. Productivity enhancements and new organization structures will reduce the number of engineers required to design products and support processes by 75 percent.

93. Research and Development metrics run the Technology Machine: New Products Contribution to Weekly Revenues; "Cited" Patents per Associate; percent R&D/Revenue; New Product Turnover; Technology Value Ratios.

94. Smart appliances will prepare smart food. Eighty percent or more of our meals will be eaten "out" or packaged as complete, microwaveable meals.

95. The movable office (and kitchen, and bedroom, and media room). In the eighties the number of people working at home jumped 56 percent. Previously unpublished data from the 1990 Census showed 3.4 million people working at home, or 3 percent of all U.S. workers, up from 2 million in 1980, a figure that had been declining since it was measured in 1960.

96. Homes, like businesses, will be modular and agile. Furniture, as well as walls, connectivities, and utilities, will be reconfigurable and movable, just as Dilbert offices can be restructured with partitions and plants.

97. Decide Early and Big. DNA and aptitude testing will vector kids' future professions and interests, starting at age three. Because the marketplace will be a maze of niches, aiming children for the right niche and holding to that model of the future will be very important to them and their Island.

98. Object Oriented Connectivity Platforms. Manufacturing, like homes and offices, will be set up as a matrix of connectivity, rather than physical platforms focused on a specific operation. Platforms, therefore, become points of connectivity, plug and play communications nodes.

99. The gambler will continue to play the game, even when the result is disastrous, because it's the game he loves.
We will explain everything, but know nothing. As societies age, they experience analysis paralysis and science illiteracy; they become preoccupied with standards (ISO 9000, and so forth) and analysis--spreadsheets, DNA code, management options, business strategies, and manufacturing variables and scenarios. Our ability to generate planeloads of data with blinding detail and no organizing structures is crowding our ability to handle true science and real engineering with cause and effect action. Using horoscopes to make executive decisions (a la the Reagan administration) is an affront to technocrats, but it is probably just as valid problematically as any other decision method. In 2020 more analysis will be done on hearsay and anecdotal evidence than rigorous basic analysis. Expect companies to do more and more analysis. Consultants will make more and more money, and the results will be less and less meaningful.

100. The Technocrat King. Engineers think the electric car and the Y2K problem are either 1) detrimental to the organization (electric car), or 2) terminally boring, dull, noncontributory, a nonproblem (Y2K). By the year 2020, the technologist will push back and take charge of which technology tasks must be done, and where, rather than knee-jerk revenue response.

101. More failures breed more investments. Big, quick money demanded by venture capital will require one-year results, which takes more investment and more risk, the gamblers ruin.

102. Before the collapse, weeds will grow. Finding ten thousand people on the Web to agree with a radical position, geographically unbounded, will enable growth of thousands of splinter groups--religions, cults, militias, education clubs. Gradually, the groups become less extreme as they move closer to the center of the road.

103. Self. Making our own lamps, our own news, our own analysis, therapies, appliance repair, personal computing, even kids self-educating themselves. The word "personal" will take on more applications--personal families, personal food designed to maximize custom diet needs, personal clothing (clothing sized to individual bodies and fabricated to personal climate and skin needs), personal (customer-designed) cars. Personal products require agile and flexible manufacturing, geared to thousands of personal niches.

104. Earthmovers that move themselves. The wheel barrow, as well as the backhoe and the bulldozer, will be superseded by smart, electric drive equipment.

105. Power. Utilities in the midst of deregulation, and the beginning of capital redeployment will very slowly inch toward complete deregulation over a variety of media, including more natural gas turbine generators. All home energy generation will be on a distributed, localized basis.

106. Speak English! (not Dutch, Serbian, Turkish, Greek, Romanian). The extinction rate of languages accelerates, leaving English in control because it is incrementally compiled; English glyphs are acoustic glyphs, not visual glyphs that are inherently limited.

107. Brave New World. Drugs, not horses, stereos, cars, football, skateboards, or even computers, will run the mood of the average worker. Behavioral modification through drugs for health, stress, weigh control, pain, and general happiness will deliver docile workers and well-trained, highly educated, multiple-tasking professionals. The science of management--how and what drugs to deliver to which workers--will become the science of pharmacopoeias.

108. Virtual gardening, and virtual plants, like Virtual Pets, with all the feeding, watering, and hoeing, will take place on the screen.

109. Circuses. Baseball fades, as soccer, professional wrestling, Baywatch and other mass entertainment vehicles proliferate. Without translation, even soundless, the visual images offer escape either to California beaches or to violent competition. Mass entertainment will therefore be largely cross-cultural, and will influence derivative products.

110. Fat is in, thin is out. Goodbye Spice Girls and Kate Moss, hello sumo wrestlers and fat, announcing the emergence of a well-fed global middle class.

111. "Would you like your burger rare, medium or boiled lobster?" Cloned species of popular-flavored animals will mix it up on menus--beef and lamb DNA will be architectured to please regional palates; any food can by "cooked" t o resemble any other food. Nutrition and aesthetics combine to create a new food industry.

112. "Will the Real Mr. X please stand up?" With a combination of personality alteration and physical remodeling, along with the personal creation of false identity cards, accountants, resumes, birth and death, driving, insurance, and school records, managers and leaders will need security aids to determine, if they can, who is being hired, whom they are selling to, and whether the customer on the Internet is real.

113. Throw-away kids. Kids/pets will be "thrownaway" to private schools and other specialized institutions as they outlive their bearability or become too expensive to control and maintain.

114. Slap and fix. Most engineers have been trained in the deductive, Newtonian approach to problem-solving--look at a problem and work it through a flowchart for quick turnaround, we will do a slap and fix for a survivable and near-optimum solution. Books will be done this way--type it now, fix it later, versus pencils and whiteout and months of thinking and planning. In manufacturing, a very robust slap-and-fix approach will rule; no one will read the manuals, and installation and repair will be simple slap and fix.

115. Hyperspace databases. Databases and computer search engines will be multidimensional, versus a flat or one-dimensional structure, enabling simultaneous quick search and analysis. Manufacturing software will therefore deal with mathematics and new numbers because the higher the dimensional representation of equations, databases, or knowledge, the simple and easier it is for a computer to understand. Flat or one- or two-dimensional databases are less efficient than four or eight dimensions. Databases and hyperspace must be capable of division to be effective, so new manufacturing software will deal more with mathematics theory and actual application to generate very fast responses of infinite databases. Mathematics will be used less by humans, and will become a hobby--like crossword puzzles.

116. Pheromone and aromatherapy. Marketing and product enhancement through the other senses will be a science; precision in delivering odor, sight, and texture will be included in all consumer product design specs.

117. Hyperperformance. Performance improvements that continue to advance--automatic transmissions, turning radii, G's of acceleration--will be extended to housing and manufacturing processes. Doors that automatically close, and processes that run correctly even if we cannot read instructions or understand the language, will "protect" us from harming ourselves or the equipment, as well as delivering superior equipment runs.

118. Predictive behavioral modeling. Prediction of events, rather than prevention and repair, will influence equipment design. Funding for predictions of social problems--domestic violence and drunk driving--will, after some resistance, soar. Media hype--another Chicken Little phenomenon--will be replaced around the year 2002 by tremendous activity, agitation, and reaction to social modeling and solving social problems with the scientific method.

119. Noise suppression. Highway noise, traffic noise, and airport noise will be monitored, regulated, and suppressed at all levels.

120. Driverless cars.

121. Another materials revolution ("Plastics!"). Watch for self-cleaning windows and equipment; packaging--bottles, cans, and cartons--that dissolves back to the soil; fabrics in smart clothing that perform hair removal and hygiene, electric warming, color changing, and body sculpting.

122. More paper, the only medium that has withstood the test of time.

123. Mile-high skyscrapers.

124. Antimedicine. Although there will still be no "cure" for the common cold, measles and other infectious diseases will proliferate because discrete factions in some societies will refuse to be immunized.

125. The cure for AIDS will have long been engineered, but HIV will have been discovered to be not the root cause of the disease.

126. Leaders will continue to demonstrate the DNA imperative of clan leadership through spectacular sexual performance.

127. Fastest-growing professions will be computer science, networks, and health care and maintenance. Futurist George Gilder predicts that network technology is advancing ten times as fast as central processors. We think the number is much higher than that as storage is redefined.