(HOST) At the start of a new year, it’s customary to look toward the future, so all through January commentator Olin Robison has been gazing into his crystal ball – with some rather surprising results.
(ROBISON) Making predictions is of course risky business; and, oddly enough, the shorter the time frame, the more risky it is. When you make short or even medium term predictions, friends later take undue pleasure in pointing out how wrong you were. So, I think I will stick to the longer term stuff. Not as long as the New York Times recently did in making predictions a hundred million years out. Up beside that, my hundred year time span seems modest.
My first prediction grows out of a dinner party in New York City some time back, when the post-dinner discussion turned to the question of what discovery in the future would have the greatest impact on the greatest number of people. Most of the predictions focused on health care issues, such as finding a cure for cancer.
This is already being done; it just isn’t yet economical. Saudi Arabia desalinates vast amounts of ocean water and then pumps it some four hundred miles inland to make possible a good life in the capital city of Riyadh, a city of over four million people. Riyadh is in fact a desert city, but you would never know it today. But it takes the wealth of an oil-rich country to do that.
When it becomes really cheap, so that dozens of arid and impoverished countries can do what Saudi Arabia now does, life will be dramatically transformed for hundreds of millions of people.
I predict that this will happen sometime in the next hundred years.
My other long term prediction is more controversial. But, since a hundred years from now none of us will be around, it seems reasonably safe. I predict that in one hundred years the whole of North American will be one country. If, as some scholars are now predicting, we are moving from the nation-state model to some sort of market-state model, then my prediction makes good sense.
There are already more Californians than there are Canadians, and that gap is going to continue to increase. Over time, the United States is going to have to be much bigger in order to compete with China and India – or maybe even an enlarged Europe, or even Brazil. And so it is a natural. Canada has vast natural resources, and Mexico has an enormous pool of cheap labor. Over the long term, common interests will trump local politics, which are, of course, alive and well in all three countries.
So there. That ought to wake you up! But that really is what I think will happen.
Olin Robison is past president of both the Salzburg Seminar and Middlebury College. He now lives in Shelburne.