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<DIV><FONT face="Arial Black" size=2>Dear Colleagues: so what does this
mean for the fine and performing arts and the humanities and the social sciences
and . . . </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Black">our lives?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Black">Denis Salter</FONT></DIV>
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<TD align=right bgColor=#cc0000 class=redbar height=18
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2001 </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR>
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<TD colSpan=2><B class=redtextlarge>'That's just so last
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<TD colSpan=3><B><NOBR>Patrick Dixon</NOBR><BR>08 June
2001</B><BR><BR></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><SPAN class=black>Travel
is redundant, anti-globalisation protests are mounting and academia
is ruled by 'shallow' gurus. Chris Bunting looks forward to 2010
with 'Europe's leading futurist' Patrick Dixon.
<P>Patrick Dixon lives in a bubble in 2010 and sees tomorrow as
history. Actually, when you get there, it is not really a bubble. It
is a sickly green, distinctly normal-looking attic at the top of his
house in Ealing, but he likes to call it his "cyberbubble" and has
ways of making it look that way to the outside world. A flick of a
switch and the webcam that continually broadcasts images of Dixon's
working environment on the internet (<A
href="http://www.globalchange./" target=_blank webcam.htm
com>www.globalchange. com/webcam.htm</A>) replaces the wall behind
us with a scene from a camera in his garden. "There," he says,
satisfied. "Now we are in the garden."
<P>He wanders off to fetch a cup of tea and the image on the
computer screen suddenly looks like something thought up by René
Magritte: Dixon is opening an invisible door in the shrubbery and
walking down the staircase beyond. Not everything is as you might
expect in this cyber world.
<P>Dixon, a fellow of the Centre for Management Development at the
London Business School, has been styled "Europe's leading futurist".
He is a darling of the international business conference circuit, a
star turn who will not get out of bed for less than five figures.
Businessmen empty their wallets for a hyperactive verbal assault
punctuated by his favourite phrase: "Oh, that kind of thinking is so
last century."
<P>His slogan, emblazoned on his website and repeated at least three
times during our interview, is: "Take hold of the future or the
future will take hold of you." And that future, concocted in "this
multidimensional cyberbubble, this time capsule if you like, that
enables me to travel into the future and try various things out" is
"coming towards you at the speed of light and will run you over if
you don't do something about it".
<P>A slightly built, dapper man with a firm handshake and a
deliberate way of maintaining eye contact, he wields "the future"
like a broadsword. For ivory-tower academics working outside
practical scientific research, he has an uncompromising prediction.
"There is a whole stream of intellectual life that will become
marginalised and totally irrelevant over the next decade. It is the
stream that spends most of its time with other academics and with
those who want to learn from academics," he says. "It is a stream
that, with ever greater competition for higher education funds, will
find it difficult to connect with an audience outside and therefore
by definition will be marginalised because there will be louder
voices. In today's world and especially in tomorrow's, if you cannot
capture the emotion and imagination of your audience, the idea is
worth nothing."
<P>On the other hand, he says: "There will be some people who the
academics despise for their shallow thinking who will become the new
gurus of the age, who will transform the thinking not only of
businesses but of governments and entire societies because they have
this extraordinary combination of sharp thinking and communication
skills."
<P>Dixon has written a clutch of blockbusters on subjects ranging
from the death of parliamentary democracy to the genetic revolution.
He is too modest to identify himself with the gurus of the age, but
says: "Many of them will be packagers rather than thinkers, and I
think I am a packager and a thinker. I am not a pure researcher. I
listen and then regurgitate. I am a communicator."
<P>Although Dixon constantly shifts ideas, his fascination with the
future is not just empty rhetoric. It has been a lifetime's
obsession. Aged ten, he published his first manifesto, on the future
of British Rail, predicting trains running on magnetic track,
high-speed services competing with planes and a much reduced rail
network connecting the big commercial centres. "All this has
happened, of course," he notes.
<P>After studying medical sciences at King's College, Cambridge, he
arrived as a trainee doctor at Charing Cross Hospital, London, and
by the end of his first day had been assigned to run an artificial
intelligence research programme trying to get computers to diagnose
illness. Within a few years, while continuing his medical career, he
had set up a company selling record-keeping software to the National
Health Service. By 1987 he was writing his first book, <EM>The Truth
about Aids</EM>, which grabbed national headlines with its criticism
of the government's attempts to play down the threat of the disease.
<P>Nine books followed and, as the subjects branched far beyond
normal medical concerns, "Patrick Dixon, futurist" was born. "I
began to get invitations to talk about what I'd written, but as the
books got more diverse, people started saying, 'I guess you can come
and do the future in general'," he says.
<P>His conversation shifts with a boyish energy from unsettling
ruminations on the possibility of monkeys, which share 97 per cent
of their genes with humans, getting human rights and being convicted
for murder, to excited exploration of the potential for digital
communication to transform working lives. "Imagine you have trading
teams in Hong Kong and London. Can we put the two together? Yes we
can," he announces. "We can put up a powerful projector washing an
entire wall in the office of the team leader in London and put up
there a permanent video conference showing the manager's opposite
number in his glass box in Hong Kong. They are sharing what looks
like a huge desk and they are both life size and they can converse.
Are they not really in the same space? How often would you really
need to travel if you were sharing that degree of intimacy?" After
an hour or so of wide-eyed prognostication, the temptation to
squeeze Dixon into a narrow box - defining him as a career
enthusiast and proselytiser for technological change, for example -
is strong. But he is not the sort to be confined by stereotype.
After a second trip through the shrubbery door, this time to deal
with the man seeing to his outdoor swimming pool, Dixon returns with
the announcement: "You are trying to package up a nice neat story
but in fact you are talking to an eclectic person, someone who has
tramped his way through a whole range of different spheres of life,
whether it is the boards of the largest companies - Microsoft,
Hewlett-Packard, IBM, ABN Amro, HSBC - or holding the hand of many a
dying person."
<P>He is a devout Christian and spent much of his medical career in
hospice work caring for the terminally ill. His book on Aids was a
plea for unconditional care and the greater involvement of the
Christian church in fighting the disease. He helped create the
international charity Aids Care Education and Training, of which he
became chief executive. A large slice of his income goes into the
charity's work. "That has taken me into many mud huts and slums. My
wife and I have just come back from a fact-finding trip in Mumbai,
Calcutta, Delhi and Bangkok looking at HIV-related programmes and
also women's and children's issues, income-generation projects and
slum projects. I have a clear view of the inequalities in the
world."
<P>And far from dismissing the video images of the May Day
anti-globalisation "riots" playing on one of the cyberbubble's
television screens, this adviser to multinationals pauses before
reflecting that such discontent is key to understanding our future.
He predicts growing protest at forces of globalisation and
technological change as people feel they are increasingly out of
control.
<P>His mood is darker now: "There is an intellectual and
philosophical vacuum. The socialist ideals have gone, the capitalist
dream is dead. Both of them have been debunked by the harsh
realities of the 20th century. What we are left with is a big
question mark about ourselves and our future."
<P>As we leave the cyberbubble through the shrubbery door, Europe's
leading futurist says: "All the time we ponder to reflect, science
accelerates even further into our uncertainty. At the moment we are
dithering. There is moral uncertainty and the future will not stop
for moral uncertainty. That kind of thinking is <EM>so </EM>last
century."
<P><STRONG>Future forecasts</STRONG>
<UL>
<LI>Monkeys with human genes on trial for murder
<LI>Injectable PCs instead of ID cards
<LI>Guide dogs provide sight from their eyes direct to blind
people's brains
<LI>Thoughts and emotions transferred directly from one brain to
another
<LI>Computer displays inside your spectacles</LI></UL></SPAN></TD></TR>
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