Next Stop - The 21st Century

But you won't win those customer calculations unless your brand stands for something that's both unique and genuine. The two jobs that I had before coming to America Online -- at Century 21 and at Six Flags -- were about breathing life into old brands. In each case, the challenge was to remind customers about what made the company special. When I was at Six Flags, I would ask people, "How is Six Flags different from Disney?" I'd get many different answers -- which is not good. Six Flags had forgotten what its core advantage is. It isn't just that all of its parks are bigger than Disneyland -- although they are. It's that Six Flags parks exist all across the country: 90% of Americans live within a day's drive of one of those parks. We began to advertise: "Bigger than Disneyland, closer to home" was one of our slogans. In other words, we started selling convenience. Attendance at Six Flags parks went from 18 million to nearly 25 million while I was there.

Just as important as what you do with a brand is what you choose not to do. Great brands say no to new ideas far more often than they say yes. At MTV, we used to say that we'd rather have two good ideas that work together than two great ideas that conflict. Over the years, AOL has said no to lots of fancy technology and lots of gee-whiz features. It continues to believe that users want the technology to be invisible. Ray Oglethorpe, AOL's president of technology, says that his job is to make hard things easy. And that's a hard job. But that's what has built this company into such a strong brand.

Bob Pittman (pittman@aol.com) began his career, at age 15, as a part-time disc jockey in his native Mississippi. He is best known as the programmer who created MTV and VH-1. AOL is the leading provider of branded Internet services, with more than 19 million subscribers and almost $4 billion in annual revenues.

Michio Kaku

Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics
City College of New York
New York, New York

Memo to the folks in Silicon Valley: You will have good jobs for 20 more years. By 2020, though, computer chips will be cheaper than bubble-gum wrappers, and PCs will be in museums.

Already, we can put tens of millions of transistors on a piece of silicon the size of a fingernail. But the trend toward smaller and smaller transistors can't go on forever. Soon we'll start etching on molecules. A whole new generation of computers will emerge: DNA computers, protein computers, quantum-dot computers. Silicon Valley will become the Rust Belt of the new economy.

What kind of jobs will flourish? Those that involve the two things that technology isn't good at: Computers don't have common sense, and they don't have real vision. They can see, and they can hear, but they don't understand what they see and hear. That's why you just can't automate specialized human services. Financial planners will still have jobs, and so will policemen and maids. The number of jobs related to leisure activities is going to explode as well. Entertainment, which is already big, will get bigger. There will be a bull market in artists and actors.

In 20 years, life will finally live up to our movie-driven fantasies. You'll talk to your watch to get on the Internet. Your glasses will be able to recognize people's faces and tell you their names -- even when you can't recall who those people are. Who knows? One day, you might be strolling down the street and pass by a homeless person. Your glasses might tell you, "Look! There's Bill Gates! He couldn't make the transition to the post-silicon economy."

Michio Kaku (mkaku@aol.com) is the host of a syndicated radio program and the author of "Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century" (Doubleday, 1997). A codeveloper of string-field theory, Kaku is now working to complete Einstein's unified field theory -- aka "the theory of everything."

J. Craig Venter

President and chief scientific officer
Celera Genomics
Rockville, Maryland

The story of digital technology over the past 20 years has been one of personalization -- the personal computer, personal Web pages, My Yahoo! The story of medicine over the next 20 years will also be one of personalization. And what happens in medicine will affect much of what happens in society over the next 20 years.

What do I mean by "personalized medicine"? Simple: You'll know the variations between your specific gene code and the human genome, and those variations will determine what kinds of drugs you'll be given and which genetic illnesses you'll be screened for. For example, I and another researcher have already isolated three genes that cause colon cancer. In the next few years, tests will be available to determine whether someone has a greatly increased risk of getting that disease. People will get tested for their risk level early in life, and if they're at risk, they'll be tested regularly so that the disease can be caught soon after it develops. That's a far cry from waiting until age 50 to have your first screening test.