Future Positive

It’s 2022 – and low carbon living is as attractive as it is crucial. So what’s on offer? In an exciting new project, Forum for the Future comes up with iconic adverts – and a thoughtful rationale – for the innovative products and services we’ll all be wanting.

There’ll be lots of appealing new products and carefully worked out services by the 2020s – helping us live a better life in a low carbon economy. They’ll affect how we work, travel, shop and eat, our homes, our social lives and leisure pursuits, our holidays and our education.

There’ll be big rewards, too, for those who see them coming. And shocks for those who don’t. Forum’s starter list of nine [see right] ranges from the technologically challenging to the disarmingly simple. But then again, the simple can be pretty smart.

From here to Future Positive in 15 years? We’ll be buying into change – big time. Joy Green dives in to investigate the implications…

Between now and 2022, there’s not much time. But there’s time enough for a metamorphic shift. Just think of the mushrooming of the internet in the 15 years since 1992.

The future won’t come out of nowhere. Canny observers can already spot seeds that should have borne fruit in a Future Positive world by 2022. The characteristic products and services of that future [see right] may take an unexpected shape, but they’re rooted in the dilemmas of today – particularly the imperative of tackling climate change.

“The future is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed”

That’s partly because the high premium on low carbon will be a big factor in unlocking their success – driving the necessary investment in cutting edge technologies, and provoking an accompanying shift in behaviour, attitudes and priorities. Some things will seem radically new. Others will ‘merely’ be a matter of reconfiguring today’s niche solutions for the mainstream. As the sci-fi writer William Gibson famously observed: “The future is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

How evenly, then, might the fruits be distributed in 2022?

Well-heeled professionals will be licking their lips over their Virtual Windows, spelling the death of the commute, putting the zing into home working and adding psychedelic zip to nights out on the town (even as Kinetica harvests their excess human energy). And what could be better to top that off, than long distance travel in luxury, and exotic holidays with no time penalty for getting there? Once upon a time, people traded their time and skills to reach unaffordable distant destinations by ‘working their passage’ on board ship. Turning that equation on its head, the Airstream service is perfectly attuned to the time-poor professional keen to ‘have it all’. Cabins on its airships are so well equipped and connected up, that working en route is every bit as productive as working from home – yet so comfortable that passengers can switch at will into cosseted holiday mode.

“Cabins on the airships are so well equipped that working en route is as productive as working from home – but passengers can switch at will into cosseted holiday mode”

It starts to add up to complete freedom from place, for those lucky enough to have the right kind of job. But is this a privileged future for the few? Or could we be within reach of a world where selling your time to an impersonal corporation is a laughable anachronism, and ingenious sharing systems give nearly everyone access to abundance?

Already in 2007 there are innovative groups experimenting with trust-based peer-to-peer networks – and not just for doing geeky computer stuff. The London-based collective Espra, for example, is working on what its members call “a parallel public infrastructure” – a network that pushes online collaboration into the real, physical world. By linking up users intelligently, it aims to make it easy for near-strangers to work together, share stuff – and even, somewhat improbably, deliver parcels for each other.

Espra’s project is at an early stage, and may evolve into something else entirely by 2022. What’s interesting is its underlying principle – to do much more with much less, by sparking off connections between people. This idea is an emerging force, and it is spreading.

The Locality concept in Future Positive builds on this. It suggests that a subtle but essential shift has taken place, encouraging people to be more interested in using things than owning them. It has something in common with familiar services like Freecycle where people give away unwanted but still useful goods. But instead of selling or giving away unwanted things, the participants in Locality get more from possessions which they do use, by making them available to hire locally for a small fee. The exact sum paid is determined by the member’s profile as a good borrower. Everyone gets feedback from lenders, eBay-style – and if you generally return items on time and in good nick, you end up paying much lower rates than someone who always returns things late, dirty or dented. This is really only an extension of a familiar idea from the insurance industry, that lower-risk users pay less.

The development of wide-ranging product-service systems like Locality is a kind of holy grail for low carbon living. It would make huge efficiencies possible at a stroke. There’s a great deal riding on the promise that such services can deliver impressively enough for almost everyone to want to participate. It would, of course, force a massive re-think by equipment manufacturers and retailers, whose current profits come from high volume sales rather than high levels of usage per item.

Should we be surprised that such a powerful ‘disruptive innovation’ can be based on such a ridiculously simple idea – sharing stuff? Not if we’ve been listening to the iconoclastic physicist Freeman Dyson. As he has wryly noted, the technologies that have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. Whichever sharing model manages to finally crack the mainstream will probably seem incredibly simple – and lucrative – with hindsight.

Locality’s graded fee system is not the only way of running a sharing scheme. Instead, you could use an Espra-style trust-based system to get direct control as a lender over who can and can’t borrow, say, your precious power tools. Kids under 12? Definitely not. The young couple two doors down? No problem. But what about the students who lost three drill bits and returned the rest in a mysteriously sticky state last time? Do you laugh it off? Fine them reputation points? Or just quietly remove them from your trust map?

Either way, you can imagine a self-organising system of constantly shifting networks, where the trusted and socially well-adjusted live in a world of abundance, but the antisocial or ostracised inhabit a shrinking sphere, perhaps restricted in extreme cases to just the few basic product-services the local council can manage to provide. Do the losers under this system look like the losers in our current system? And how easy will it be to escape the ghetto of a bad reputation?

Some aspects of the Positive Future vision, of course, are just ways of unblocking current practical problems – and they’re ethical no-brainers. Shop n Drop, for instance, gets over the plague of present-day delivery services – the requirement that the recipient should be at home to take delivery. Its genius is to spot that the mundane time-eating task of the weekly shop can be automated practically out of existence when there’s a refrigerated, password-protected Shop n Drop bunker near your doorstep, where the supplier simply stashes your regular order for you. The resulting efficiencies – a surprisingly large proportion of food miles come from all those car journeys to the supermarket – painlessly shave away at the national carbon debt.

Meanwhile, Virtual Window technology lets your kids live in a world richer in experience than you ever imagined. Their virtual school trips take them convincingly into space, the rainforest and the ocean depths. They’re taught alongside classmates thousands of miles away. Even though the Virtual Window is not in itself low energy, it allows the necessary paradox of a ‘small’, intensely connected world where people can stay vitally and viscerally in touch with widely dispersed loved ones and business contacts without having to travel frequently for meetings – or mess around with avatars in Second Life.

OK, teleconferencing today can be frustrating – and even at its best it’s still underwhelming. But by 2022 we can reasonably expect to be making Skype-style video calls in full size, ultra-high-resolution glory. The Virtual Window could combine this with the kind of capabilities that Microsoft is offering with the Surface, a startlingly intuitive-looking piece of touchscreen technology. If the hype is to be believed, it’s both incredibly easy to use and extremely powerful – and presumably 15 years should be time enough to iron out any glitches….

These are plausible stepping stone to the kind of world where you can have dinner/breakfast with granny in New Zealand via your kitchen wall and then give a project presentation to colleagues in Delhi without getting up off your (well-upholstered) seat.

The flip side of living in a time that’s rapidly awakening to great crisis, is that we are entering a period of great incentive to genius. By 2022 we should be well into a creative era of what Buckminster Fuller called ‘emergence by emergency’. Ideas previously dismissed as impossibly radical will move rapidly to the mainstream and win broad acceptance. When we look back, the visions we have now may seem quite tame in comparison.

Joy Green is running the current expansion of Forum for the Future’s online activities. You can explore the full Future Positive project at www.lowcarbonliving2022.org.uk.

26 October 2007

Joy Green