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One View of Changes in the Near Future

An excerpt of the predictions that ran in the 2007 article.

Bill Draves ’71, founder of the Learning Resources Network, believes these nine changes will alter our lives in the next ten or fifteen years. Most of them, he says, are already well under way.

1. Most people will work at home. Organizations ranging from Best Buy to the federal government are moving more employees into telecommuting, because people who work from home work longer hours and are more productive.
2. Virtual offices, or Intranets, will replace physical offices. In an office, managers supervise how employees spend their time, and that’s simply dysfunctional, because businesses are really interested in results. Bosses will switch from supervising activities to supervising outcomes, which is far more efficient.
3. Networks will replace the organizational chart. In the old pyramid structure, which was based on the factory model, information was limited to the top brass. But with a network, relevant information and decision-making power is shared across the organization, increasing efficiency.
4. Trains will replace cars. In Europe you can now take a train from Paris to London (a seven-hour drive) in just two hours. The United Kingdom is going to spend $20 billion on trains in the next fifteen years, and Toronto is devoting $6 billion to a light rail system. Trains will be equipped with wireless access, allowing people to work and travel at the same time.
5. Suburbs will decline. As knowledge workers become more acutely aware of the value of their time, they will want to live within walking or biking distance of shops, stores, and light rail systems. Poor people will move to the suburbs. In fact, as of 2007, more poor people are living in the suburbs than in cities. This shift will have an environmental payoff: the Baltimore Sun recently reported that simply eliminating suburbs would reduce driving by 20 to 40 percent.
6. New social infrastructures will evolve. In particular, new systems of health care and continuing education are needed, because people will change jobs almost yearly in this century. People will need to receive continuing education no matter where they work or how often they change jobs.
7. Values and work ethics will change. All of our values are for the factory — showing up on time, putting in long hours, and getting your work done. Now, because time is so valuable and because knowledge keeps expanding, we need to work faster and smarter. In the last century, if you were learning with others, it was called cheating. In this century, we value collaborative learning because people are more productive when they work with others.
8. Half of all learning will be online. All subjects, even those such as music and ballet, can be enhanced with an online component. Online learning will do for education what the invention of the tractor did for food, making learning opportunities cheaper and more readily available in a wider variety of options.
9. Technology will replace buildings. Higher education has this “edifice complex” — we’re still spending too much money on buildings. In this century, technology expenses have to exceed building expenses, or individual institutions will be in real danger, because buildings are simply obsolete — they’re just a cost.