Next Stop - The 21st Century

Laura D'Andrea Tyson

Dean, Walter A. Haas School of Business
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California

One defining reality of the 21st century involves demographics. People will live longer, and older people will account for a larger portion of the world's population.

Mass aging has several consequences. As longevity creeps up, the trend toward early retirement will begin to reverse. So people need to ask themselves, "How do I prepare for a longer life? Shall I retire early or late? Shall I change careers?" In the future, retiring at age 65 could mean having 25 to 30 years left -- rather than the 10 or 15 years that used to be typical.

Companies also need to think about changing demographics. The average age of consumers, what they buy, and how they buy -- all of this will change. For example, one surprise in the new economy has been the speed at which Internet use has grown among the older population.

Moreover, as people live longer, lifetime learning invariably plays a larger role in their quality of life. Again, look at the Internet: People in their fifties have been working for decades without it -- but they would really benefit from learning to use it.

Of course, the group that will be most affected by longer life spans is our children. Many of them can expect to live to age 90 or more -- so for them, lifelong learning will be especially important. There is increasing evidence that what happens between birth and age 3 is critical to developing a person's capacity to learn. So one task for the 21st century will be to get our early-education systems right -- in order to give our children a foundation for lifelong learning.

Laura D'Andrea Tyson (tyson@haas.berkeley.edu) worked in the Clinton administration From 1993 to 1996. she was national economic adviser for almost two years, and she also served as Chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Tim Berners-Lee

Director, World Wide Web Consortium
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
Cambridge, Massachusetts

The next century is going to turn our world upside down. The Internet combines people and ideas faster than they have ever been combined before. And that combination changes everything.

The basic social conventions of the industrial era -- the stable career, the 9-to-5 job, the gradually (but steadily) increasing salary -- were all built around the notion that people moved their bodies in response to information. If you wanted to buy something, you went to a store. If you wanted to build something, you worked in a factory. In the Net economy, the creation of value doesn't require that kind of physical movement. Income accumulates not in the form of cash but in the form of clicks. Free Web sites and email accounts enable "regular folks" to create multiple identities, or to start one project before they finish another.

Where is all of this leading? To a rediscovery of basic questions. People are discovering that the question "What needs to be done?" is bigger and more important than the question "How can I do it?" What do we see after we surf through page after page of business Web sites? In many cases, we see organizations that shrewdly view the Web as another medium for answering the question "Why does this organization exist in the first place? What is our purpose?" What do we see when we wade through the vast array of online learning tools that are now available? We see new ways to get at the most basic question of all: "What do you want to do with your life?"

The great thing about technology is that it forces us to figure out the world from scratch. In so doing, it gives us a chance to rediscover what's really important. So maybe the 21st century won't turn your world upside down. Maybe it will turn that world right side up.

Tim Berners-Lee (timbl@w3.org), the inventor of the World Wide Web, came to his career naturally: His parents helped design the Ferranti Mark I, the world's first commercially available computer. In his first book, "Weaving the Web" (HarperSanFrancisco, Fall 1999), Berners-Lee writes about the history of the Web and his role in that history. Berners-Lee occupies the 3Com Founders chair at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.

Lucy McCauley (lamccauley@aol.com), formerly the copy chief at Fast Company, is a freelance writer and editor. She contributes regularly to the Unit of One section.