Crack the bubbly! Demand will continue to increase, and markets will become more and more sophisticated. Globalization will roar forwards. Says the executive summary:

Based on responses from over 150 manufacturing companies in eight countries, the study identifies a number of key findings about possible changes in the coming years:

— Manufacturing will become increasingly global by 2020, with around 80 % of manufacturers expected to have multi-country operations, compared with just over half today.

— Supply chains will also increase in complexity and consolidate. Half the companies surveyed said they will be using fewer suppliers by 2020, but 40 % said they will be using more distributors as increased competition drives them to reach new markets.

— Manufacturers appear uncertain what actions to take about green issues, but as political and social pressure increases around emissions reduction, urgent action will be required to reach 2020 targets.

— Differences between the manufacturing industries in developed and emerging markets will also continue to evolve.

I actually feel a bit sorry for these consultants, who probably did most of their survey before large chunks of the global economy started to hit the fan a few months ago. The lead time on a big doorstopper of a report like this is probably months and months. But it does show the ever-present danger of attempting to extrapolate from last year's trends into the future. (And, just maybe, why I was wise not to go into management consulting after all.)

Another thing occurs to me: Did none of the 150 companies surveyed for this report think transportation costs might have gone up by 2020? I mean, I know peak oil is still just a theory, but it doesn't seem entirely far-fetched to think that the cheap transportation that allows us to make a widget in Asia and ship it for assembly to South America, after which it gets sold in the U.S., will be a lot harder to manage by 2020.

Note: The image up top is from a different report, "The Future Of Manufacturing," from last February. [Consultant News]

Since the cyberpunk 1980s, when the most popular visions of the future included corporate-urban caste systems, the idea of financial disaster has haunted scifi. While Babylon AD may have been a flop as a film, it's merely the latest in a long line of scifi tales that show a resource-depleted future divided between a tiny, glowing group of rich people and a global, subaltern class that lives in shantytowns. Even Dark Knight veered toward this vision of a future overrun by criminality, where skyscrapers have become dank, impoverished husks, and the ranks of public servants have shriveled down to one good cop, one good DA, and a mercenary weirdo.

The Road, both the Cormac McCarthy novel and the movie coming out next month, depict a future of nomadic poverty whose origins remain unexplained. Clearly there's been an economic disaster, but we're not sure if it's been spurred by Max Headroom-style corporate greed or something like a nuclear war.

One thread that runs through stories about financial collapse is the idea that corporations run wild while government withers away. That was certainly the basis of cyberpunk classics Blade Runner and Neuromancer, and that tradition continues today in spirited satires like Max Barry's novel Jennifer Government. In that book, everyone takes the last name of their employer — our hero, a detective, is one of the tiny group of government workers who barely hold their own against the money-fueled shenanigans of the corporate classes (even Jennifer has to send her kid to a McDonalds school).

Other authors, like Octavia Butler, imagine that the collapse of government in America will be accompanied by a rise in gang power, as well as (more dangerously) the power of Christian militias. In her intense, believable novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Christians kidnap "unbelievers" and put them in horrifying work/reeducation camps. Written before The Road, these novels also include harrowing scenes of homeless nomads on the road, trying to survive attacks from cannibals, Christians, and worse.

Having destroyed civilization or divided humanity into rigid economic castes, science fiction can try to solve problem Terminator-style, but throwing its characters out of the timeline in the hopes that they'll remake the world or find a better one. Japanese comedy Bubble Fiction: Boom or Bust has the most literal take on this plot device: A woman in contemporary Japan uses a washing/time machine to travel back to the economic boom days of the early 1990s in the hope that she can get a bunch of cash to help her out of present-day debts. The trouble with this kind of time-travel solution is that it may get our heroine out of debt, but it doesn't exactly save the world.

For world-saving solutions, you've got to go offworld and start terraforming. Butler's hero in the Parable novels works tirelessly to create generation ships that will take the downtrodden of Earth to another planet where they can reboot the economy. Ursula Le Guin's award-winning novel The Dispossessed takes place in a universe where a woman like Butler's heroine has succeeded and founded an anarchist-feminist colony on a moon in orbit around a planet of caste-divided capitalists. Unfortunately, the anarchist-feminists haven't solved all the problems of their parent society, and in fact the resource-hungry moon where they live has created a society of poor people whose government controls where they work and live.

The economic disaster of the planet Arakkis in Frank Herbert's Dune franchise is another target for terraforming. After hero Paul leads the oppressed Fremen in a successful revolution to wrest control of the planet's resources from a colonist ruling class, they slowly work to transform the planet from a desert to a rain-soaked, livable biosphere. Unfortunately, they recreate all the problems they suffered under despots like the Duke who rules Arakkis in the first Dune novel. Royal families battle to control the Fremen society, and rich family dynasties still control the destinies of the still-disenfranchised masses.

More successful are the colonists in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy, where several of the early colonists are explicitly trying to build an economy that is more just than the ones back on Earth. Even if these imaginary societies ultimately fail, there is still a tremendous pleasure in destroying them repeatedly to watch them flounder towards productivity again. Robinson does this by destroying most of Mars in a spectacular space elevator crash. But you can see this same urge to smash and rebuild the economy in the popularity of videogames like Sim City and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a space colonization strategy game that was a spinoff of the wildly-popular Civilization I and II.

Perhaps the most popular solution to economic turmoil in science fiction is slavery. This is the subject of Brian Frances Slattery's recent novel Liberation, but is also the a cornerstone of pop fantasies like Blade Runner (slave replicants), I, Robot (slave robots), Planet of the Apes ("uplifted" ape slaves), and of course Battlestar Galactica and The Matrix (both have angry machine slaves). Each of these slave classes is created to make a broken economy run again. The idea is that humans, freed of drudge work, will become more productive and create inventions to bring about a better world.

Sometimes those inventions are themselves robot slaves. Scientists are also always trying to solve the economic crises of Earth by inventing amazing AIs that will allocate resources perfectly for us. This is precisely what happens at the end of Asimov's original I, Robot book, where a robot becomes world president and no humans ever want for resources again. Less-successful efforts to save the economy via AI can be found in David Gerrold's underrated When HARLIE Was One (read the original, not the rewrite) and the movie Demon Seed. In the former, HARLIE the mega-bot would rather hallucinate and write poetry than come up with strategies to build more efficient widgets. And in the latter, Proteus the AI would rather imprison and rape Julie Christie than explain how to fix Earth's financial crisis.

And so you might say slavery is in some ways the classic science fiction fix for economic crisis. It provides a quick solution that spins out an infinitely-reproducible number of crises, problems, and moral dilemmas. Like time travel, slavery does not fix the financial collapse for everybody — just for the few who remain free. Even worse, your slaves tend to revolt Dune-style, take over the planet, and fuck things up exactly the same way you did. So slavery shares with terraforming the basic problem that wherever the human species goes, there it is.

You'll never get a good story without conflict, so scifi may not make a good model for real-life financial fixes. And yet it does manage to reflect at least one truth about real-life economic systems: We cannot seem to dream up a way out of our economic failures that does not have its own failures built in from the start. We are, like the humans in Planet of the Apes, always replacing one kind of slavery with another.

Tapping into current fears of economic collapse and the vanishing middle class, Fortuna portrays a world of extreme wealth stratification:

Set in 2100, "Fortuna" envisions an Earth where a collapsed economy and climate crises have eliminated the middle class, leaving a few very wealthy and the teeming masses in severe poverty. To give hope and avoid revolt, the elite create Fortuna, a mysterious game where one in a thousand wins a big payday and joins the upper classes. But their hidden goal to "reduce poverty" by 30% over 50 years comes with a deadly price tag.

Freddy Rodriguez and Lost’s Dominic Monaghan will play two of the game’s impoverished players, as will the film’s writer-director Barthelemy Grossmann.

[The Hollywood Reporter]

Here you can see the same NYSE building, with its characteristic circular meeting areas, on a crowded day. Over the years, those circular trading areas have retained their shape, but become encrusted with monitors and computer terminals.

Though there is a great deal of debate over what the exact forces were that caused the Great Depression, many facts are clear. On so-called Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, the news reported that the Dow Jones had plummeted 17% over the last month. Panicked, investors started bailing out of the market and traded a whopping 12.9 million shares that day, causing an even greater financial panic. The following week, on Monday and Tuesday, the market fell even further. 16.4 million shares were traded Tuesday, and by the end of that day the market had lost $14 billion in value. The week the stock market crashed, it is estimated that the market lost $30 billion in value, which was more than the U.S. spent in World War I. Like this week's stock crash, the 1929 crash was caused by panicked trading in response to bad news about the market.

While we can't say what exactly the future may hold for the market, and the global economy, history suggests that we're in for a long, slow recovery. The Great Depression lasted decades, and the market didn't reach its pre-Depression levels until the early 1950s. And yet the weird, selfish hopefulness of the stock market never dies. Here you can see a picture of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, currently being built by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture in China. This building, with its odd floating base, is a kind of parody of stock markets. Say the architects:

For millennia, the solid building stands on a solid base . . . Typically, the base anchors a structure and connects it emphatically to the ground.The essence of the stock market is speculation: it is based on capital, not gravity . . . [This suggests] an architectural invention: our project is a building with a floating base. As if it is lifted by the same speculative euphoria that drives the market, the former base has crept up the tower to become a floating platform.

As a great philosopher once said of capitalism: "All that is solid melts into air." That sounds beautiful until the solid thing turns out to be your house.

Image of contemporary NYSE via STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images; image of Shenzhen stock exchange via OMA.

In fact, nearly all the money put into developing synthetic organs in the U.S. (about $3.5 billion) has come from private industry. Apparently the government considers synthetic hearts too much of a "hot button" issue with religious groups. So funders snub anyone looking for cash to develop next-gen organs that will probably save our lives in 20 years. Unfortunately, you'll only be able to license your organs, since they're provided by private industry. Wonder if the right of first sale applies to synthetic organs? [Growing Body Parts via RedOrbit's aggregation of a Kansas City Star article]

io9: So you're talking about these social tools, and how communities can use them, but of course you're also talking about "user generated content," which is one way of saying "get people to work for you for free."

CS: Depends on your frame of reference.

io9: Are we looking at a future where getting a job means working for free for many years before you get to be a developer or producer for cash?

CS: If we think of Flickr as being like a newspaper, then yes, the content that was previously paid for is now free. But if you think of flickr as being like a bar, then what you get instead is that the user conversation now creates value for people out of earshott. No one complains that the bar marks up its booze prices because it's a place for people to get together.

io9: So the bar gets paid for your conversations?

CS: I think the whole 'you work, we collect the money' model has been over-emphasized by the fact that professional media covering these new tools will of course be biased to take the current media model as the 'correct' one. Merchants, a bar in Manhattan, charges $17 for a martini. Know what goes into a $17 martini?

io9: What?

CS: $3 of gin and $14 of "I'm in a bar where people pay $17 for a martini!"

io9: But that makes Flickr sound like an elite place where you pay to be around beautiful rich people.

CS: So the change in the price of drinking gin at home alone, or in a bar with others, is mainly a metric of social value, and we're quite used to paying the platform operator, which in this case would be the bar owner, for making a site where that value can accrue. Of course the whole 'is it a newspaper or a bar' thing is even one level too shallow. The thing Flickr is most like is Flickr. It has all kinds of novel characteristics which are exactly the things that get obscured by metaphor. So when media people look at Flickr (or Digg or YouTube) as new competitors in an existing media ecosystem, instead of a new ecosystem, they create bias towards old metrics.

Oh, and to your earlier comment, I don't mean to suggest that Flickr always equals merchants, just that we are more than used to business models where almost all of the value in the establishment comes from value the patrons create for themselves. It's just that the press doest see (or sees and doesn't like) that comparison, because its hard to argue that some injustice is being doen when viewed in the light of social life rather than media production.

io9: The problem I guess with the bar analogy is that the most "valuable" bars to be in are often valuable because they are full of elite people — which is sort of the opposite of what I think you're hoping for in this book.

CS: Well, even a $2 well drinks dive has the same economics. Consider happy hour. There is a discount on the nominal product precisely to create the necessary bit of social value.

io9: So to get back to the question of getting paid. Sounds like you're saying that we're tending toward a model where the people who make content (or art or writing) don't get paid,
but the people who make the tools that let them express themselves do.

CS: That is one part of the effect. Another part is that, on average people won't get paid, because the pool of creators has gotten too large. But significant talent will still be rewarded. Wedding photographers and stock photo people are going to get creamed. But Herb Ritts' fees may go up. When the bottleneck is not longer worth paying for (because it mostly doesn't exist) talent becomes the only differentiating metric.

io9: So the elite content producers may get more?

CS: I think so.

io9: Obviously a lot of people are decrying this idea, particularly in the media — "oh no we're losing taste makers!"

CS: We're not losing taste makers! I hate that argument — we're gaining taste makers, at an unbelivable rate. We're losing scarcity.

io9: So do you think in the end we'll get a world where more people will be compensated to do creative work? Or that creative work will become more lilke cooking, where everybody does it?

CS: More people overall, maybe, but many fewer on average. And most of the ones who do get compensated don't have it as their main source of income.

io9: Which other industries do you see this change affecting?

CS: Anything where there is a production bottleneck. So the obvious ones are non-litigation lawyering, librarians, anyone in the media distribution business, but also the info managing pieces of things like industrial design, medical decision making, etc.

io9: Are you worried at all that people might use your book to exploit users?

CS: Most of the uses of this sort of group-forming are hard to fake over any length of time (imagine a fake open source project — the coders would bail in a matter of weeks), but the uses of social tools for groups from Al Qaeda to the pro-anorexia kids seems to me to be the biggest social threat that will come from the medium.

Check out the book — although Shirky isn't a futurist, Here Comes Everybody is the best work of futurism I've read in quite a while.

Here Comes Everybody [ISBN.nu]

The release reads, in part:

"Security" is the word on everyone's lips these days, but there is more to this dramatic market growth than that. Video surveillance finds uses in a variety of vertical markets such as retail, education, banking, transportation and corporate business. And it's not always about security: new facial recognition software can analyze shoppers' behavior within stores, for example, tracking eyeball movements as shoppers view product displays.

European video surveillance markets are more mature than those in North America (some say the UK, with its 4.1 million surveillance cameras, is the most monitored society on earth), but massive deployments are also now taking place in North America and, in connection with the upcoming Olympics, in China . . .

But while digital technology offers advantages - higher resolution, easier searching and retrieval, and more efficient storage - many of the traditional security resellers of analog equipment are not yet comfortable with digital, and a massive retraining effort is going to be required.

"This is a modern version of the California gold rush," [ABI vice president Scott] Schatt concludes, "except that people are bringing cameras instead of pickaxes and shovels."

Ah, the future looks so bright. I'd better make sure I'm filming everything that happens in it with hidden cameras. Image via NYC Indymedia.

Video Surveillance: Explosive Market [ABI Research]

Krugman's offbeat look at the economics of interstellar trade (which we really meant to blog last week) comes from a paper he wrote 30 years ago when he was "an oppressed assistant professor." It's full of little jokes, like the idea that space explorers may one day "discover or create a world to which economic theory applies." (Unlike Earth, in other words.)

Krugman unveils two pioneering theorems of interstellar trade: 1) The transit time should be calculated according to the clocks on the ground, not the clocks on the ship; and 2) If sentient creatures can hold assets (such as bonds) on two different planets in the same "inertial frame," then competition will equalize the interest rates on the two planets. In a nutshell, for trade to be viable, you have to have common interest rates and a common framework for calculating transit time, so investors can decide whether to under-write a trip, or just stay on Trantor and buy a bond instead.

If we ever do actually colonize other star systems or start trading with other interstellar civilizations, Krugman may get a freighter named after him for his contributions to space economics. [Conscience of a Liberal]

International Studies professor John Hickman sums up his article thusly:

If and when interplanetary and interstellar trade develops, it will be novel in two respects. First, the distances and time spans involved will reduce all or nearly all trade to the exchange of intangible goods. That threatens the possibility of conducting business in a genuinely common currency and of enforcing debt agreements incurred by governments. Second, interstellar trade suggests trade between humans and aliens. Cultural distance is a probable obstacle to initiating and sustaining such trade. Such exchange also threatens the release of new and dangerous memes.

Problems of Interplanetary and Interstellar Trade [Astro Politics] (Thanks, Chris!)

In point of fact, all the wines were exactly the same. But the results of the MRI scans showed greater neurological activity in people's pleasure centers when they were told they were drinking expensive wine. The best (creepiest?) part of all this is that the authors of the study hope to use these findings to manipulate consumers. The authors write:

Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for the mechanisms through which the effect operates.

Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness [PNAS]