Why the Next 10 Years Count Even More Than You Might Have Thought

World Future Society Corey Jamison and I attended the World Future Society Conference this year. I have been trying to attend this conference for a few years, and life has always made me have to postpone it. This year I was determined to make it happen, and it was worth the effort.

I found two things most interesting: • They are talking in 2010 about things that were discussed at TED two years ago. And, that was fine and good with me. It said to me that the TED stuff is real, not just fringe. It also made me realize that smart people in different places are all thinking about the discoveries and possibilities that are on our frontier.

• Speaker after speaker talked about the next 10 years. Initially, I was very surprised by this. I had thought they would be talking about 2025, 2050, but what I realized is that the Futurists see such dramatic changes happening in the next ten years that there is an excitement and focus on it because it is the future they have been seeing and hoping for most of their lives.

One speaker talked about the need for us 60-somethings to live through these next ten years because coming medical advances will increase our life expectancies significantly. Other presenters discussed bionics and the fact that we will not only be able to replace any body part that fails, but the new part will be better than the original.

It was unanimous among those on stage and in attendance that the technology advances we will experience in the next 10 years will show the changes of the last decade were just tentative, first baby steps. When it comes to putting the new breakthroughs to work in changing the way we live, we are just emerging from the birth canal, and have barely learned how to turn over and crawl. In the next ten years, we will start to stand, walk and run.

They are saying, and I am with them: we haven't seen anything yet.