Full Text: The Future's So Bright...

John Seely Brown

Former chief scientist at Xerox Corporation, now consultant and "chief of confusion"

Shannon O'Brien

Senior at Marin Catholic High School in Greenbrae, California, and gymnastics instructor

Resolved: The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades.

Brown: Sure, the future looks great. Folks of my generation won't have to pay off the gigantic debt our government is currently endowing today's kids with and we can continue to live and enjoy a virtual economy - spend today; pay tomorrow.

But let me be a bit more optimistic. From where I sit, I have never seen so much cool innovation as is beginning to happen in the world. We are experiencing a "Cambrian Explosion" of innovations that will impact every aspect of how we live, work and play. Computers are now getting powerful enough to do both cool and deep stuff. We can model incredibly complex physical and biological phenomena that in turn enable us to build nano structures, bio-inspired machines and medicines heretofore unthinkable.

These innovations, unlike many during the dotcom bubble, will directly impact our quality of life through more efficient uses of energy, new forms of clean energy, medical devices for non-invasive surgery and designer drugs that minimize adverse side effects, to name just a few. These advances might just provide us tools and methods to reverse or at least abate the damage we have been doing to our environment and global warming, more generally. Most specifically for me, though, is the belief that we will see a new form of education emerge--not one based on being taught but one more oriented to passion-based learning within niche communities of interest.

Let's face it, most of what we learn we learn with and from each other doing things, things that matter to us. For example, the capability of today's more participatory web starts to enable us to form communities of interest and to build and share things together. The remix movements are an obvious example, but also consider extreme sports such as extreme surfing. The speed of innovations happening there, not done by corporations but rather done by surfers engaged in passionate and continuous tinkering, leads to awesome advances shared nearly instantaneously over the web and around the world. Yes, what I see unfolding is an organic culture of learning for us all.... from sports fanatics to geeks to authors, artists and amateur astronomers. Let's just call it the rise of the pro-amateur class--serious explorations and creations we do for the love of doing it. Remember the term amateur comes from the Latin 'amatour' meaning for love. This more learner-centric, socially based learning, will enable us to keep up with the pace of change and enable us to feel comfortable with having multiple careers as both we and the world unfold at a challenging pace.

O'Brien: I am a teenager, so of course the future looks bright. The future is exciting, different, a step in a new direction. I know I have a lot to experience and even more to learn. The future holds freedom, the future holds responsibilty. From a teenager's perspective, the future is a giant leap into the hopeful unknown.

I worry about the future a great deal though. You mentioned that great technological advances have been invented throughout the years.

Amazing technological advances can help bring some fun to your day (X-box, Tivo) but they also tear away from people communicating and bonding like they used to. Many teenagers sit on their computer surfing MySpace or on AIM instead of having actual relationships with their friends. Everyone rushes through the streets jabbing on their cellphone, iPods stuck in their ears. No one has time to be close to....well, anyone. The world is too fast paced. I believe everyone needs to slow down and take a good hard look at the world in front of them; you won't be there forever.

Maybe inventors ought to spend less time on developing a cellular phone with a video camera, laptop and stereo connected to it and start concentrating on more beneficial inventions such as a replacement for gasoline (a fossil fuel on its way to extinction), ways to repair the ozone layer, prevent pollution etc.

Who are the role models for the future of America? Britney Spears? 50 Cent? Are these the kind of people we want our children aspiring to be? I hope not. The media has pumped my generation with images of superficiality ("Desperate Housewives," "The Swan"), violence (video games, movies), drugs and alcohol, and casual sex (any teen movie). An America with morals such as these is not a place I choose to be.