Which road to the future will we choose?
Here we stand, with the keys to the future in our hands, on the 21st century’s 21st birthday. Economists and philosophers, climatologists and town planners are lining up to tell us that this post-COVID restart gives us permission to throw out the rule book and reshape our world.
“The next eight to 10 years will determine the quality of life for the next 100 to 200 years,” says Christiana Figueres, diplomat, former UN climate negotiator and author of The Future We Choose.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how fragile the world is,” says António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations. “Yet people have shown an enormous capacity to adapt to new circumstances – a capacity to change the way they live – so change is possible ...”
Another big thinker who believes we have reached a critical fork in the road is the much-loved author, lawyer, politician, polymath and champion of TV game show BP Pick-A-Box – Australia’s own Professor Barry Jones AC. He’s a man who has been declared a Living Treasure by the National Trust, and had a bay in Antarctica named after him. At 88, Barry claims that he is “old enough to remember the end of the Great Depression, blackouts, gas masks, rationing, night-soil collection in many suburbs, milk bottles filled each morning, blocks of ice delivered by a man with a horse and cart, and 11 mail deliveries each week.” Yet Barry is sufficiently young at heart to imagine the future.
Early in life, he read, predicted (among other things) Australia’s transformation from an industrial economy (manufacturing three-dimensional things “that hurt if you drop them on your foot”) to an information-based society. In 1982, he predicted that by the year 2000 there would be more computers than motor vehicles in Tasmania. An incredulous local promised that if Barry was right, he would (curiously) give him a crayfish. He kept his word and, Barry writes in his most recent book, , that “the crayfish was delicious”.
