2025report.com thanks sir fazle abed- sustainability's greatest hero in 60 years since my family first reported at The Economist critical impacts of asia's majority of our human race

welcome to college year 2021-22 aka 37/40 of 2025report.com major talking points & Diary of
last best chance to design world where next girl born -or child of any skin color has nature's greatest chance of a good life
.
my father norman and lifelong journalist at the economist was last journalist to interview von neumann- whose biography of industrial revolutions IR3 and IR4 he later wrote- our core belief :

we 7.5 human beings have all the tech and abundance of nature to design good life opportunities for all if we unite/collaborate in doing so

BUT unlike IR1 sharing machine energy which rolled out slowly and partially, IR2-4 completely changed human potential in under a generation; we made a mess of ir2 communications tech, and the UN was born to resolve, and by 1957's death of von neumann kennedy and others were uniting the world in hope of soon no mission impossible
round any dynamics unique to human being

.transparency questions we seek to mediate in 21-22 our 37th year of updating 2025 report's countdown to sustainability generations-
  • what is the most entrepreneurial way teachers need to explore 4 industrial revolutions if today's younger half of the world especially poorest or colored halves are to celebrate their communal contributions to sustainability?
  • can leaders of entrepreneurial revolution learn systematically from what chances have we so far missed between 2021 and 1945 and 1760 when the machine age started to be webbed around the world out of Glasgow University thanks to brothers James and Adam ie through systems connecting alumni of engineering and social-economic mapmaking
  • welcome to abedmooc.com - 30 collaboration networks -a billion village women app'd to end poverty -2021 TOP 100 ways to change education and prevent species extinction - special thanks economistdiary.com and economistUN.com
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    chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk writes from washington dc and glasgow summer 2021: dear 7.5 billion human brains and beings - valuing youth's futures was easier ack in 1984 our book 2025 report, lead editor the economist's norman macrae, and biographer of von neumann's legacy of 100 fold more tech each decade 2020 back to 1960 -...

    valuetrue.com- help profile ten wizard tricks for ESG-Environment Social Governance-positive cashflow business models interest me- they are both the only way to scale sustainability of all our children and how to extinguish our species
    the difference is to be found in a purposeful and transparent model that is multiwin including society's need that the business is preventing the greatest risks it sectors experts know most about versus a short-term model where owners are taking from every other stakeholder every quarter
    even more interesting is a partnership network of business models; unfortunately if even one core partner is not sustainable the whole network may collapse on society
    as a statistician i have spent 50 years searching for most purposelful networks in the world- i don't expect to find one more purposeful than that built over 50 years by fazle abed and a billion poorest village women - goal 5 100% livesmatter communities 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6; 4 livelihood edu for all 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 ref Safiqul Islam 3 last mile health services 3.1 3,2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 last mile nutrition 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2,6 banking for all workers 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6

    ABED & - help map who advises younger half of world to connect friends and alumni of late sir fazle abed founder of BRA-Coop = Bangladesh Rural Advancement and Cooperation with billion Asian poorest women sdgs and community building enterprises

    Scots are about 1/400 of human species, 80% living around the world. Over two thirds of the world's mothers are Asian. In 1760 we Scota started up age of humans & machines: naturally what we have discovered about chances of human sustainability have come mostly from servant leaders of billion asian village mothers and a few euro-american maths wizards, notably von neumann, einstein
    chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk writes: Dad, Norman Macrae, end poverty sub-editor of the economist during most first 45 years of the united nations died in 2010, the 250th year of humans and machines started up by Glasgow University's Watt & Smith: soon afterwards Japan's Ambassador to Dhaka arranged for a dinner party to celebrate Sir Fazle Abed as humanity's greatest entrepreneurial revolutionary - can you help us share the knowhow abed empowered a billion asian women to network? it could just save our species..EconomistDiary.com Xglasgow.com

    Monday, December 31, 1984

     definitions of industrial revolution 4 (eg various economic forms from davos to qatar to rsvp where chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk) are valuable to explore as our cultural maps of soceity5.0 where japan's has been one my father surveyed in 1962 and jfkennedy seconded

    Chris Macrae posted this

    60 years of alumni of sdgsjapan

    college year 21-22 last chances - together with adam smith scholars doing homework for ecop26.com, here is  our 5 cents worth on sorts of systems to design if today's youth are to be the first sustainability generation- 

    to be frank i am still trying to improve entrepreneurially sustainable leaps i started to glimpse pieces of from 15 visits from dc to bangladesh  to listen to sir fazle abed (and 8 womens empowerment-tech detours navigated by chinese female graduate students in oxford and new york) before abed died and after norman died - i needed such diverse views to rebalance what washingtonians were making noise about - any person would probably need an opposite diversity tour- see eg leadersquest which has organised hundreds of these for big corporations  

    IR1 the energy machines can bring

    1R2 the coms connectivity which machines mediate- as the last gen of kinds who studied maths with slide rulers and pen/paper- death of distance idea of all being www.alumnisat.com - alumni of first generation sharing life critical apps with each other seemed wonderful to swot- if you only ever chat about market purposes with one framework i recommend swot- for example orwell explored exponential threats of coms being monoplised by big brother hitler or worse, but what if coms ended cost of distance everywhere children learned and developed

    IR4 the time predictable as 2020s by alumni of neumann and moore when machine intel started governing systems previously overseen by bureaucrats- why would this happen? because machine brains can be infinitely cloned to crunch world-deep data real time- and the promise of moores law /and silicon valley compounding from 1965 was 100 times more silicon brain capacity every decade until the machne's brain capacity in a one dollar brain exceeded the human brain- however as mathematcians like turing have shown humans have the choice of what data artificial intel is assigned to

    IR3 controversially alumni of my father at the economist have argued ir3 is an era when over 90% of livelihoods change - that's what in our view natural sustainability and lives matter let alone health and afety of children everywhere would need to map round- it was this framing of ir3 which explains why our 2025 book argued that while tech applied to finance might be the first ir3 revolution, sustainability would be determined by whether education was transformed - in blending classroom, virtual and deep community apprenticeships it was not our recommendation in 1984 tht educators would wait 36 years for a virus before coming out of the classroom!

    If you branstorm/zoom ir1-4 with people you trust most- you may start exploring opportunities that excited my father most in the 1980s -decade 3 of von neumann's legace 


    Chris’ Activity


    we've entered 5 4 3 2 1 0 - last 5 years of 1984's fieldbook 2025report.com on can education be transformed to prevent extinction of our species; our 1992companion biography of john von neumann has belatedly been published in japanese as an alternative attraction to the olympics - may those who celebrate last mile health servants more than other celebrities be valued truly out of every joyous community 

    TRANSFORM EDU 2025 to 1984: and how will it need to open up community action networks in

    goal 3 health

    goal 2 human energy security ie food/water

    goal 1 finance designed to end poverty and grow middle class and evolve with natures rules not just a handful f the world's richest men or political media barons

    -probably 5 generations of my diaspora scottish family have failed to mediate the hopes of the two thirds of world youth who are asian with the 15% african 7% latin american 7% white 5% for whom ethnicity is not 2020s main issue as they live in natures harms way

    still our advice is :

    connect with any abed alumni -particuarly the 36 humnicorn networks a billion asian women empowered with his engineers guidance through the last 50 years

    younger half of workd should mak friendships everywhere community solutions are being discovered to the solutions of the biggest organisations

    for those who use linkedin -see you here june 2021 update on 60 years of japan/asia rising

    for those who want to download 1984's list of challenges to innovate

    chapter 6 fintech to end poverty

    chapter 7 AI JOBS

    chapter 8 AI education

    chapter 9 virtual productivity ai maps

    2025 report page index us 1985 printing if you need page lasered rsvp chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk

    chap 10 transforming government -AI

    CHAP 11 - AI HEALTH

    CHAP 11 bis AI health part 2

    16 ai biotech

    17 ai population

    18 ai food

    19 ai green

    20 ai green part 2

     

    21 ai drugs

    22 ai mind

    23 ai home

    24 alien judgement - are humans safe to share intel with?

    for those who see humanity has one last chance to cooperate please tell us so we can add to EconomistDiary.com


    chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk linkedin UNwomens ecop26.com glasgow and washington dc writes- if you can ,please help us lovingly update 37th year of The 2025 Report- 




    published in 1984 by the economist's norman macrae and son chris as countdown to millennials being the world's first sd generation by 2025- so far tech has changed 100 times moore with engineering we expected -4 revolutions energy, communications, smarter jobs than slide ruler and paper strategies, humansing what gov services machines operate real time - but politicians and big brothers have behaved so as to spin more hate than we expected- we the peoples- younger and older halves -  are stuck just when we needed to learn from each others community sustaining solution

    here is the summary we published in 1984 2025 report aka new vikings in swedish

     .changing employment

     the change from real world jobs to digitally empowered blended services is not an unprecedented rundown. In the 1890s, around half of the workforce in countries like the United States were in three occupations: agriculture, domestic service and jobs to do with horse transport. By the 1970s these three were down to 4 per cent of the workforce. If this had been foretold in the 1890s, there would have been a wail. It would have been said that half the population was fit only to be farmworkers, parlourmaids and sweepers-up of horse manure. Where would this half find jobs? The answer was by the 1970s the majority of them were much more fully employed ( because more married women joined the workforce) doing jobs that would have sounded double-Dutch in the 1890s: extracting oil instead of fish out of the North Sea; working as computer programmers, or as television engineers, or as package-holiday tour operators chartering jet aircraft.

    The move in jobs in the past fifty years in the rich countries has been out of manufacturing and into telecommuting.

     Changing education

     

    There has been a sea-change in the traditional ages on man. Compared with 1974 our children in 2024 generally go out to paid work (especially computer programming work) much earlier, maybe starting at nine, maybe at twelve, and we do not exploit them. But young adults of twenty-three to forty-five stay at home to play much more than in 1974; it is quite usual today for one parent (probably now generally the father, although sometimes the mother) to stay at home during the period when young children are growing up. And today adults of forty-three to ninety-three go back to school - via computerised learning - much more than they did in 1974.

    In most of the rich countries in 2024 children are not allowed to leave school until they pass their Preliminary Exam. About 5 per cent of American children passed their exam last year before their eight birthday, but the median age for passing it in 2024 is ten-and-a-half, and remedial education is generally needed if a child has not passed it by the age of fifteen.

    A child who passes his Prelim can decide whether to tale a job at once, and take up the remainder of his twelve years of free schooling later; or he can pass on to secondary schooling forthwith, and start to study for his Higher Diploma.

    The mode of learning for the under-twelves is nowadays generally computer-generated. The child sits at home or with a group of friends or (more rarely) in an actual, traditional school building. She or he will be in touch with a computer program that has discovered , during a preliminary assessment, her or his individual learning pattern. The computer will decide what next questions to ask or task to set after each response from each child.

    A school teacher assessor, who may live half a world away, will generally have been hired, via the voucher system by the family for each individual child. A good assessor will probably have vouchers to monitor the progress of twenty-five individual children, although some parents prefer to employ groups of assessors - one following the child's progress in emotional balance, one in mathematics, one in civilized living, and so on - and these groups band together in telecommuting schools.

    Many communities and districts also have on-the-spot 'uncles' and 'aunts'. They monitor childrens' educational performance by browsing through the TC and also run play groups where they meet and get to know the children personally...

    Some of the parents who have temporarily opted out of employment to be a family educator also put up material on the TC s for other parents to consult. Sometimes the advice is given for free, sometimes as a business. It is a business for Joshua Ginsberg. He puts a parents advice newsletter on the TC , usually monthly. Over 300,000 people subscribe to it, nowadays at a 25-cent fee per person, or less if you accept attached advertisements. Here's an entry from the current newsletter:..

     

    here you can download 2025 report-the whole of our 1984 book written to offer an alternative systems end game to orwell's big brother- you can also help us coblog 37th annual revisions at www.bidenuni.com- Q&A welomme chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk in wash dc  +1 240 316 8157to cop26 glasgow nov 2021

    as well as connecting the first 40 years of dad's diaries as teenager navigating allied bomber command over modernday myanmar/bangladesh to notes from keynes last class in cambridge to 40 years of scribbling leaders at the economist only 30 of 2000 of which he was permitted to sign - one anual suvey from age of 40 starting 1962 consider how japan  (his teenage combatant)can help sustain two thirds of world's peoples who are asian. in fact the 1964 olympics was a joyous time in tokyo with prince charles and japan emperor mapping back how to end all the poverty traps their nations had compoubded in the past era or mercantile empires led by 2 small islands at exreme ends of the old world's continents -what marred this celebration was jf kennedy did not live to brainstorm mon races down on earth nor the consequences of the first wordwide satellite broadcast-and equally lives matter remapping did not kickstart inside the new world across peoples of every skin type

    in my family tree 5 generations of diaspora scots -mainly medics social justice mediators, community builders and british embassy storytellers of loving different peoples- saw the world wars as mainly due to london corporate empire's mercantile age misusing james watt's and adam smiths machines stared up at glasgow u 1760- -if only lives mattered wherer humans and machines linkied in the world - goodwill could have multiplied sustaiablity across the road- give moores laws exponentials in dad's view the 2020s would be the last chance decade to humanise ai so that wherever next girl was born she and her community thrived 

    - 2025 report was revised in different ptint languages to 1993's sweden's new vikings -

     

    1984littlesister.JPG

     

    wanted round world happiness letters  rsvp chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk 

    ....example dc<>tokyo

    Dear Tsutomu and Yuko -happy new year to you and peoples in all hemispheres

    would the publisher and you be interested in making a shortlist of people to send an early review copy of Von Neumann in Japanese to?

    one difficulty is finding people who joyfully remember how exciting the 1960s seemed to be both because of Japan Rising with Deming and USA rising with Von Neumanns artificial intel and moon race

    sadly the main historian at Harvard of this promise to unite youth: Ezra Vogel died in the last 10 days; 

    my guess is that leaves one pivotal Japanese person in Boston to send a copy to as joi ito - you probably know he was headhunted to lead MIT media lab and to bridge us-japan entrepreneurs; the media lab borders at least 5 generally interesting labs in addition to specific ones such as health, agriculture, ;

     the original artificial intelligence lab formed with 3 years of Von Neumann's death,

    Tim Berner Lee's www lab, 

    Rosalind Picard's lab - how do advances in machines 5 senses also augment senses for humans with disabilities

    the new Schwarzman transformation of MIT linking in oxford and China's Tsinghua and 9 leading Japanese graduates, - if you could send a copy to Tokyo's Mayor/Governor Koike - she cares about education imagineering as much as Beijing's mayor -and both are caught up in the mess covid has made for Olympics youth - i once hoped that Naomi Osaka would win the tennis Olympics and go on to be Japans youth Sustainabiilty Development Goals ambassador but it looks like that world stage for lives matter societies has been lost

    and mobile tech end poverty labs- these dont have one simple name but having visited mit most years since 2008 i can help ask around for a full list

    none of these labs integrated edu tech the way dad and my 2025report.com first debated in 1984- frankly Nordica and Chinese diaspora eg Singapore seem to do that in ways that neither MIT AI lab nor the other twin AI lab at Stanford yet do

    the japan society in new york one block from the United Nations is a pivotal community discussion hub- except while covid reigns; they staged an event with Joi Ito 2 years ago which i attended ; i tried to ask who was their new york number 1 humaniser of technology was but didnt get an answer- indeed they were also in the process of changing the organisational team-it may be a question the publisher can ask more directly than i

    back in 2007 my next door neighbor Shimada, Takehiro worked at the japan embassy in DC; he was in charge of the annual cherry blossom festival; he connected me with the then head of JICA in ysa Yamamoto Aiichiro who shared my interest in Bangladesh as a tech lab for the poor as well as my fathers 1960/1970 surveys of japan and asia rising and humanising tech, I dont know how to contact these two people but tech for sustainability goals is something only japan can lead collaboratively in todays G7

    Although my father supported Schwab world economic forum in its early days as an apres ski dinner roundtable Schwab's weforum managers dont recall; however it would be fascinating if Tokyo;s industrial revolution 4 hub of Schwab has any connections with the history of tech- I know Schwab's AI conference organiser so i could ask her for one name at Schwab IR4 Tokyo lab but I am not sure if Japan'sG20 please for society 5.0 and Osaka data track were ever understood in the west. probably the most highly connected person of all is Koji Tomita - I dont know if there is somebody in his team at USA embassy who might have time to read von neumann
    BRIDGING 3 GENERATIONS WHO WIN OR LOSE OUR SPECIES
    A key future history question seems to me to start up around who remembers why von neumanns inspirations in usa never came humanly together with Deming's inspiration in japan; there is even the extraordinary story around 1965 when intel received its then largest silicon chip order from a Japanese calculator company and rather than become too dependent on one client invented the programmable chip -why didnt Japan and silicon valley twin in the 1970s?

    back in 1964 Prince Charles was inspired by the Tokyo Olympics, met Akio Motita of Sony, asked him to inwardly invest in wales one of the first Japanese inward investments in the west- but i dont know in both countries who connects that 57 years on

    i realise both Prince Charles and the Emperors family are huge supporters of green technology; if anyone is preparing Japanese connections with Glasgow cop 26 my friends are trying to celebrate all youth organisations without borders; we have hired the Glasgow University Union for middle Saturday nov 6 so that youth and sdg led discussions connect with what Adam Smith and James Watt started 260 years ago

    the two places to host briainstorming remembrance events of my fathers work were Glasgow University and thanks to Ambassador Sadoshima - in 2012 the Japanese Embassy in Dhaka - there my father's greatest end poverty hero chaired 2 dinner sessions:
    *the future coalition of new universities needed if there is ever to be a first sd generation
    * the future of fintech and economics for the poorest billion female Asians

    Compared with the 1960s computing/commuications NIT team needed to code the moon landing, Moores law suggest we have multiplied capacity to analyse 10 fold every 5 years -approaching a trillion times moore by 2025 - but we don't seem to have united human and machine intel by any exponentially positive multiplier- i think von neumann would be sad that worldwide collaboration round trust in tech-youth had not yet multiplied across asia , europe, usa but then i grew up optimistically with Yoko Ono and John Lennon imagineering scripts in my mind-

    the sdg generation is all to play for in the 2020s if Asians let it be 
    -as we enter 2021 it is not likely to be led by America's 5% of peoples not the EU's 5% unless something hugely different emerges at cop26

    happy 2021 chris macrae  wash dc +1 240 316 8157  Xglasgow.com

     




    On Sunday, 20 December 2020, 21:44:07 GMT-5, Tsutomu Yawata  wrote: Dear Chris


    The Japanese publisher also thank you for the updated bio.  They will include this summary in their paperback edition.   They appreciate your assistance.All the best, Tsutomu Yawata The English Agency (Japan) Ltd.

    ⌘⌘⌘


    On 2020/12/19 21:55, christopher macrae wrote:Hello Tsutomu and Yuko -may i wish you a happy/safe new year

    I drafted a biographical summary of Norman Macrae. Can you and the publisher choose if you want to use parts of it on the book cover or inside? 

    I see Japan as making unique  world leading  choices with Society5.0, Osaka track, Reiwa era...Olympics, Expo25...

    Personally I don't well understand the world of the 2020s: so please ignore this unless there are parts of it that resonate with you

    Norman Macrae; Future Historian
    1760s: When James Watt and Adam Smith started up lives of humans assisted by machines they hoped to map out worldwide improvement of the human lot. 

    By 1843, it was clear to Diaspora Scot James Wilson that empires led by Britain were spinning the opposite of a world in which all lives matter. He started up The Economist as a newsletter mediating purposeful futures of London’s Royal Society.  The Economist’s 1943 centenary autobiography written at the height of world war 2 summarises how much more trusted mediation needed doing if technology was not to destroy the human race. At that time, Norman Macrae was spending his last days as a teenager in world war 2 with allied bomber command hubbed out of modern-day Myanmar.

    1945 Surviving world war 2, Norman saw the opportunity to Unite Nations as a chance to sustain our species. From the last class at Cambridge to be instructed on Keynesian systems for ending poverty, Norman was overjoyed to be offered a job at The Economist paying 8 pounds a week. The other two most joyful events in Norman’s second twenty years of life were an interview with John Von Neumann on the legacy of his life’s work, and The Economist offering Norman one signed survey per year from 1962. Norman chose 1962’s survey to be about the rise and rise of Japan, and hopes for all of Asia’s reversal of the poverty traps that Empire had caused.

    1960s John Von Neumann’s immediate legacy after his death in 1957 comprised the moon race and two Artificial Intelligence labs- at MIT Boston facing the Atlantic Coast, at Stanford facing the Pacific Coast. 

    Norman disagreed with western economists who started hiring themselves out to big government and big corporations in the 1970s. He sought to mediate an optimistic global village viewspaper and adopted the Keynesian role of future historian. 1970s Economist surveys epitomised this:  1972 the next 40 years, 1975 Asia Pacific Century, 1976 the Entrepreneurial Revolution of value chains integrated by small-medium sized enterprises, 1977 celebration that Asian village women empowered by rural Keynesianism and China’s happy intent to seed transformational education. In 1984, his family joined Norman in editing The 2025 Report- a 4 decade exponential countdown to sustainability

    In 1989, Norman started an active retirement receiving the huge honours of Japan’s Order of Rising Sun with Gold Rays and Neck Ribbon and Britain’s CBE. His first project: this biography on John Von Neumann. Norman died in 2010 but not before discovering one more unacknowledged hero- women empowerment’s Sir Fazle Abed.

    2020s. Post-covid19, will humans open every society anew and value the futureoflife.org? Will we the peoples celebrate the third and probably ultimate chance to humanize machines by valuing all lives matter?

    Let it be: the future of the Olympics out of the Orient, the future of climate summits out of Smithian Glasgow, the future of all humans-artificial intelligence communities everywhere : the flourishing of girls, boys, and every colored skin under the sun. 


     2025 report authors' prologue 

    most popular -deadline 2000s - chapter 6 fintech for the unbanked, media true to goal of end poverty  -- results- everyone failed true media- fintech worldrecordjobs.com - see quadir family from 1995, fazle abed digital cash bangladesh www.bkash.com later with gates/ma, jack ma with jerry yang & masa son and pony ma , partially correct mpesa in afrca; idea but not yet execution of satoshi blockchain as way to comeback from subprimed world and digital central bank currency for sdg dev

    Future History

    Net Futures - The 2025 Report (title of american edition, english publisgers preferred 2024 report ie orwell +40)

    Back in 1984 , Norman and Chris Macrae wrote "The 2025 Report: a future history of the next 40 years". It was the first book to:

     .provide readers with a brainstorming journey of what people in an internetworking world might do

    • predict that a new economy would emerge with revolutionary new productivity and social benefits enjoyed by all who interacted in a net-connected world, designed for every community to thrive in diversity and goodwill multipliers of sustainability exponentials across generations

     

    Our 1984 scenario of an internetworking world

    Changing communications, and what makes people distant, bossy, etc

    Changing national politics

    Changing economics

    Changing employment

    Changing education

     

    Our 1984 scenario of an internetworking world

    The great technological event of the next 40 years will be the steady rise in importance of the Telecommunications-Computer terminal (TC for short)... Eventually books, files, television programmes, computer information and telecommunications will merge. We'll have this portable object which is a television screen with first a typewriter, later a voice activator attached. Afterwards it will be minaturised so that your personal access instrument can be carried in your buttonhole, but there will be these cheap terminals around everywhere, more widely than telephones of 1984. The terminals will be used to access databases anywhere in the globe, and will become the brainworker's mobile place of work. Brainworkers, which will increasingly mean all workers, will be able to live in Tahiti if they want to and telecommute daily to the New York or Tokyo or Hamburg office through which they work. In the satellite age costs of transmission will not depend mainly on distance. And knowledge once digitalised can be replicated for use anywhere almost instantly.

    Over the last decade, I have written many articles in The Economist and delivered lectures in nearly 30 countries across the world saying the future should be much more rosy. This book explores the lovely future people could have if only all democrats made the right decisions.

    Norman Macrae, 1984.

     

    Changing communications, and what makes people distant, bossy etc

    Telecommunications are now recognised as the third of the three great transport revolutions that have, in swift succession, transformed society in the past two hundred years. First, were the railways; second the automobile; and third, telecommunications-attached-to-the-computer, which was bound to be the most far-reaching because in telecommunications, once the infrastructure is installed, the cost of use does not depend greatly on distance. So by the early years of the twenty-first century brainworkers - which in rich countries already meant most workers - no longer need to live near their work.

    All three revolutions were opposed by the ruling establishments of their time, and therefore emerged fastest where government was weak. All three brought great new freedoms to the common man, but the railway and motor-car ages temporarily made access to capital the most important source of economic power. As most men and women did not like being bossed about by capitalists who could become more powerful because they were born stinking rich, they voted to give greater economic power to governments during the railway and motor-car ages. This was economically inefficient, and also made tyrannies more likely and more terrible. The information revolution was fortunately the exact opposite of the steam engine's industrial revolution and of Henry Ford's mass production automobile revolution in this respect. The steam engine and mass production has made start-up costs for the individual entrepreneur larger and larger, so that in both the steam and automobile ages to quote Bell Canada's Gordon Thompson in the early 1970s, there was 'no way an ordinary citizen could walk into a modern complex factory and use its facilities to construct something useful for himself'. But, as Thompson forecast, the databases of the next decades were places into which every part-time enthusiast could tele-commute. In all jobs connected with the use of information, start-up costs for the individual entrepreneur in 1984-2024 have grown smaller and smaller. It was 'never thus', said Thompson, 'with power shovels and punch presses'.

    In consequence, in the TC age, the most important economic resource is no longer ownership of or access to capital, but has become the ability to use readily available knowledge intelligently and entrepreneurially.

    Changing national politics

    For a region's people to succeed in the Telecommuting Age there are four main requirements - satisfied in places as far apart ad Guam and Queensland and Cape Province and California and Penang and Scotland. First , as the prophet John Naisbitt said in 1982, 'the languages needed for the immediate future are computer and English'. Second, the area has to be a nice one in which to live. Third, it is important that all income earners should adapt happily to a 'cafeteria of compensation' schemes. These allow the individual employee to decide what mix (s)he wants of salary, job objectives, career aims, flexitime, job sharing, long or short holidays, fringe benefits or fringe nuisances. Fourth, there needs to be a competitive and quickly changing telecommunications system. The TC age is making understanding of these requirements increasingly transparent among human beings worldwide.

    Governments at first tried to impede or regulate much of this, but an early discovery of the Telecommutung age was that we could change the way we chose our governments. Until the 1990s we had pretended to ourselves that we could alter our lifestyles by choosing on each Tuesday or Thursday every four years whether Mr Reagan or Mr Carter , Mrs Thatcher or Mr Kinnock, was putting on the tribal demonstration which at that particular moment annoyed us less. After the advent of the TC we found that the more sensible and direct way in which a free man or woman could choose government was by voting with his or her feet. The individual could go to live in any area where the government - which could from then on be a very local government - permitted the lifestyle, rules and customs which suited that human being.

     

    Changing Economics

    The introduction of the international Centrobank was the last great act of government before government grew much less important. It was not a conception of policy-making governments at all, but emerged from the first computerised town meeting of the world.

    By 2005 the gap in income and expectations between the rich and poor nations was recognised to be man's most dangerous problem. Internet linked television channels in sixty-eight countries invited their viewers to participate in a computerised conference about it, in the form of a series of weekly programmes. Recommendations tapped in by viewers were tried out on a computer model of the world economy. If recommendations were shown by the model to be likely to make the world economic situation worse, they were to be discarded. If recommendations were reported by the model to make the economic situation in poor countries better, they were retained for 'ongoing computer analysis' in the next programme.

    In 2024 it is easy to see this as a forerunner of the TC conferences which play so large a part in our lives today, both as pastime and principal innovative device in business. But the truth of this 2005 breakthrough tends to irk the highbrow. It succeeded because it was initially a rather downmarket network television programme. About 400 million people watched the first programme, and 3 million individuals or groups tapped in suggestions. Around 99 per cent of these were rejected by the computer as likely to increase the unhappiness of mankind. It became known that the rejects included suggestions submitted by the World Council of Churches and by many other pressure groups. This still left 31,000 suggestions that were accepted by the computer as worthy of ongoing analysis. As these were honed, and details were added to the most interesting, an exciting consensus began to emerge. Later programmes were watched by nearly a billion people as it became recognised that something important was being born.

    These audiences were swollen by successful telegimmicks. The presenter of the first part of the first programme was a roly-poly professor who was that year's Nobel laureate in economics, and who proved a natural television personality. He explained that economists now agreed that aid programmes could sometimes help poor countries, but sometimes most definitely made their circumstances worse. When Mexico was inflating at over 80 per cent a year in the early 1980s , the inflow to it of huge loanable funds made its inflation even faster and its crash more certain. The professor set Mexico's 1979-1981 economy on the model, pumped in the loaned funds and showed how all the indicators ( higher inflation, lower real gross domestic product and so on) then flashed red, signaling an economy getting worse, rather than green, signaling an economy getting better. ..The professor then put the model back to mirror the contemporary world of 2005, and played into it various nostrums that had been recommended by politicians of left, right and centre, but mostly left. The dials generally flashed red. Then the professor provided another set of recommendations , and asked viewers who wished to play to tap in their own guesses on the consequent movement of key economics variables in the model. Those who got their guesses right to within a set error were told they had qualified for a second round of a knock-out economic guesstimators' world championship. Knockout competitions of this sort continued for viewers throughout the series of programmes.

    In the second part of that first programme, the presenters dared to introduce two political decisions into the game. They said that government-to-government aid programmes had been particularly popular among politicians during the age of over-government, but there was growing agreement that government-to-government aid was the worst method of hand-out. The excessive role played by governments in poor countries was one of the barriers to their economic advance, and a main destroyer of their people's freedom. Could anyone have thought it would be wise to give aid to President Mbogo?

    In consequence, the most successful economic aid programmes had been those operated through the International Monetary Fund, which imposed conditions on how borrowing governments should operate. The professor showed that IMF-monitored operations in most years had brought more green flashes from the model than red. But this involved IMF officials - often from the rich countries - in telling governments of poor countries what to do; and one of the objectives of this town meeting of the world was to diminish such embarrassments.

    The first questions to be asked in the next few programmes, said the compilers, were 1) which countries should qualify for aid? ; and having decided that, 2) up to what limits and conditions? ; and 3) through what mechanisms? They promised that later programmes after the first half-dozen would examine how any scheme could be used to diminish the power of governments and increase the power of free markets and free people.

    Changing employment

    In a typical 21st C scene, obedience to consumer needs is shown by every car plant in the world because of better and more customised information available on all our TCs. Most people buying a car in 2024 will key into their special requirements into their TCs.

    The TC will reply: "You can get a customised car which meets all of your specifications by putting personalised instructions on the software of the assembly line's robots in one of these factories (choice of nine) requesting that the next car on the line be modified as you dictate. But that would cost up to $40,000 (Click to factories for quotations and credit facilities). For a fifth of that price, you can meet most of your requirements by the following standard computer programme at present scheduled for production in June at Nissan Kanpur; or July at Ford Manila (and so on). Click to factories for precise specifications and prices.

    All of this has become commonplace after 2000. How has it affected employment?

    For a new industry of 2019-2024 let us cite the intendedly short-lived example of the Clark-Schmidt Robot Gardener. Matthew Clark was a 53-year old on his third university course (he had started the other two at the ages of nineteen and thirty-seven respectively) telecommuted through the University of Southern California, although he took it while living in his native Australia , when, together with two other student's telecommuting through USC's database, he devised a system for a robot-driven lawnmower which could also scan soil and assess the possibilities for reseeding. It signaled the videos to be called up on your TC to show alternative uses for the soil in your garden. If you picked one video display that particularly suited your taste, you keyed in its number into the Robot Gardener and it signaled back, 'put such-and-such chemical into my tank and seeds 1234, 3456 (et cetera), plus software program 29387 - both orderable through your TC - into my reseeder.'

    Clark and his two colleagues put their tentative ideas for this device on the researchers' database monitored by the University of Southern California. The entry numbers to the USC database were held by people who had promised to accept the computer's judgement of the value of any ideas they might contribute to projects entered on it. In all, 1213 people - domiciled from Hanoi through Penang and Capri and Bermuda back to Queensland in Australia itself - tapped in suggestions for improvements, of which 176 were accepted nby the computer as worthwhile. The payments recommended by the computer ranged from $42 ( for a cosmetic improvement recommended by an eleven-year-old schoolboy) to one tenth of the equity (eventually worth several million dollars) for a proposal by a research team from another telecommuting university which proved important enough for Clark to feel slightly guilty about calling the Robot Gardener after himself.

    When the improvements suggested by these 176 contributors had been incorporated by Clark into the appropriate software program for making the Robot Gardener , it was advertised on USC's entrepreneur-browsing program available on any TC. Entry numbers for the lowest echelons of this can be bought for a very few dollars, but the Robot Gardener was put on a higher echelon because USC's computer had signaled this was a potential quick winner.

    One of those who had paid for an expensive entry number into browsing among good 'proffered opportunity products' (POPs) was a Dutchman called Carl Schmidt. He had become a successful 'arranging producer' in an earlier venture, and now occupied himself browsing through his TC looking for a second bonanza. He made an offer to Clark to tale an option for launch in return for a fairly complicates programme of profit sharing, which in practice (because arranging is nowadays a more skilled job than inventing) eventually gave Schmidt more money than Clark. Clark accepted this and Schmidt produced a prototype within three days by reprogramming robots in an experimental plant. A video of the prototype was put on consumers' TC channels worldwide the next week, and most of the 400 odd gardeners' TC channels round the world picked it out within days as a 'best buy'.

    Schmidt's video advertisement said 'If you key in your order now with your credit number, you can get a Robot Gardener for a bargain price (applies to the first 10,000 orders only). Tenders are also invited for part of the equity.' The advance orders and bids for equity made it possible to finance assembly of the Robot Gardener for early-bid customers within a few weeks...

    Note that there was never any intention that Robot Gardeners Inc should grow into a huge and long-lasting company. Clark and Schmidt are already researching and browsing into other possibilities, on separate courses. About fifty of those who succeeded by early participation in this venture hope to become the equivalent of Clark and Schmidt in other things.

    At no stage has this enormously successful manufacturing venture employed more than 1000 people. It is therefore true that the loss of nine-tenths of manufacturing jobs , which we saw has been highest in car-making in rich countries, has also been true there in manufacturing jobs as a whole. Where these countries had 20-40 per cent of their workforces in manufacturing in 1974, they typically have 2-4 per cent now.

    This is not an unprecedented rundown. In the 1890s around half of the workforce in countries like the United States were in three occupations: agriculture, domestic service and jobs to do with horse transport. By the 1970s these three were down to 4 per cent of the workforce. If this had been foretold in the 1890s, there would have been a wail. It would have been said that half the population was fit only to be farmworkers, parlourmaids and sweepers-up of horse manure. Where would this half find jobs? The answer was by the 1970s the majority of them were much more fully employed ( because more married women joined the workforce) doing jobs that would have sounded double-Dutch in the 1890s: extracting oil instead of fish out of the North Sea; working as computer programmers, or as television engineers, or as package-holiday tour operators chartering jet aircraft.

    The move in jobs in the past fifty years in the rich countries has been out of manufacturing and into telecommuting.

     Changing education

     

    There has been a sea-change in the traditional ages on man. Compared with 1974 our children in 2024 generally go out to paid work (especially computer programming work) much earlier, maybe starting at nine, maybe at twelve, and we do not exploit them. But young adults of twenty-three to forty-five stay at home to play much more than in 1974; it is quite usual today for one parent (probably now generally the father, although sometimes the mother) to stay at home during the period when young children are growing up. And today adults of forty-three to ninety-three go back to school - via computerised learning - much more than they did in 1974.

    In most of the rich countries in 2024 children are not allowed to leave school until they pass their Preliminary Exam. About 5 per cent of American children passed their exam last year before their eight birthday, but the median age for passing it in 2024 is ten-and-a-half, and remedial education is generally needed if a child has not passed it by the age of fifteen.

    A child who passes his Prelim can decide whether to tale a job at once, and take up the remainder of his twelve years of free schooling later; or he can pass on to secondary schooling forthwith, and start to study for his Higher Diploma.

    The mode of learning for the under-twelves is nowadays generally computer-generated. The child sits at home or with a group of friends or (more rarely) in an actual, traditional school building. She or he will be in touch with a computer program that has discovered , during a preliminary assessment, her or his individual learning pattern. The computer will decide what next questions to ask or task to set after each response from each child.

    A school teacher assessor, who may live half a world away, will generally have been hired, via the voucher system by the family for each individual child. A good assessor will probably have vouchers to monitor the progress of twenty-five individual children, although some parents prefer to employ groups of assessors - one following the child's progress in emotional balance, one in mathematics, one in civilized living, and so on - and these groups band together in telecommuting schools.

    Many communities and districts also have on-the-spot 'uncles' and 'aunts'. They monitor childrens' educational performance by browsing through the TC and also run play groups where they meet and get to know the children personally...

    Some of the parents who have temporarily opted out of employment to be a family educator also put up material on the TC s for other parents to consult. Sometimes the advice is given for free, sometimes as a business. It is a business for Joshua Ginsberg. He puts a parents advice newsletter on the TC , usually monthly. Over 300,000 people subscribe to it, nowadays at a 25-cent fee per person, or less if you accept attached advertisements. Here's an entry from the current newsletter:

    "Now that TCs are universal and can access libraries of books, 3-d video, computer programs, you name it, it is clear that the tasks of both the Educator and the Communicator are far more stimulating that ten years ago.

    One of my recent lessons with my ten-year-old daughter Julie was in art appreciation. In the standard art appreciation course the TC shows replicas of famous artists' pictures, and a computer asks the pupil to match the artist to the picture. Julie said to the computer that it would be fun to see Constable's Haywain as Picasso might have drawn it. The computer obliged with its interpretation , and then ten more stylised haywains appeared together with the question 'who might have drawn these?'. I believe we are the first to have prompted the TC along this road, but it may now become a standard question when the computer recognises a child with similar learning patterns to Julie's.

    It is sometimes said that today's isolated sort of teaching has robbed children of the capacity to play and interact with other children. This is nonsense. We ensure that Julie and her four year old brother Pharon have lots of time to play with children in our neighbourhood . But in work we do prefer to interact with children who are of mutual advantage to Julie and to each other. The computer is an ace teacher, but so are people. You really learn things if you can teach them to someone else. Our computer has helped us to find a group of four including Julie with common interests, who each have expertise in some particular areas to teach the others.

    The TC also makes it easier to play games within the family. My parents used to play draughts, halma, then chess with me. They used to try to be nice to me and let me win. This condescending kindness humiliated me, and I always worked frenetically to beat my younger brother (who therefore always lost and dissolved into tears.) Today Julie, Pharon and I play halma together against the graded computer, and Julie and I play it at chess. The computer knows Pharon's standard of play at halma and Julie's and mine at chess. Its default setting is at that level where each of us can win but only if we play at our best. Thus Pharon sometimes wins his halma game while Julie and I are simultaneously losing our chess game, and this rightly gives Pharon a feeling of achievement. When Julie and I have lost at chess, we usually ask the computer to re-rerun the game, stopping at out nmistakes and giving a commentary. As it is a friendly computer it does a marvelous job of consoling us. Last week it told Julie that the world champion actually once made the same mistake as she had done - would she like to see that game?

    I intend to devote the next two letters to the subjects I have discussed here , but retailing the best of your suggestions instead of droning on with mine."

    While the computer's role in children's education is mainly that of instructor (discovering a child's learning pattern and responding to it) and learning group matcher, its main role in higher education is as a store of knowledge. Although a computer can only know what Man has taught it, it has this huge advantage. No individual man lives or studies long enough to imbibe within himself all the skills and resources that are the product of the millennia of man's quest for knowledge, all the riches and details from man's inheritance of learning passed on from generation to generation. But any computer today can inherit and call up instantly any skill which exists anywhere in the form of a program.

    This is why automatically updated databases are today the principal instruments of higher education and academic research. It is difficult for our generation to conceive that only forty years ago our scientists acted as tortoise-like discoverers of knowledge, confined to small and jealous cliques with random and restricted methods of communicating ideas. Down until the 1980s the world has several hundred sepaate cancer research organisations with no central co-ordinating database.


    2025 report authors' prologue

    chapter 6 fintech for the unbanked, media true to goal of end poverty

    chapter 7 changing manufacturing employment

    chapter 8 changing education

    chapter 9 digital infrastructure revolution

    chapter 10 -changing politicians

    chapter 5