(GK: Garrison Keillor, SS: Sue Scott, TK: Tom Keith, TR: Tim Russell, RD: Rich Dworsky)
GK: I'd like to welcome to our show now two scholars who have conducted a major study of the future....Dr. Sarah Bellum and Dr. Dewey Haffta.
SS: Thank you.
TR: Glad to be here.
GK: So I assume that in the next twenty years we're probably looking at some major changes ...
SS: Indeed. Total change.
TR: The rate of change itself is going to increase.
SS: Exponentially.
TR: Many people won't even be able to deal with the rate of change.
SS: But luckily for them, drugs are being developed that will help a lot.
GK: What sort of drugs?
TR: They're sort of like sedatives but they don't make you drowsy.
SS: You're very alert and very relaxed. Super serotonin drugs. Massive serotonins.
GK: Interesting.
TR: One thing won't change and that's the economy. It'll go on growing and growing. Productivity: way up.
SS: Way up. Thanks to computerization but also due to the fact that the work week will increase to about a hundred hours a week.
GK: A hundred hours a week!
TR: Work will be more or less a constant activity. The line between work and private life will be blurred by the fact that so many people will be telecommuting.
SS: People will actually carry their hard drives with them ---
TR: All the time.
SS: You'll pop the hard drive into computer hardware on a plane, on a train, at athletic events, plays, concerts ---
TR: Your kid's soccer game.
SS: Your gym will have computer hardware on the StairMaster, the treadmill ---
TR: In church, there'll be pews in back equipped with keyboards and screens ---
SS: And of course you'll wear a headset and a cellphone ---
TR: Everywhere you go.
SS: Which means that nobody's going to have time to do things like yard work or repair stuff around the house ---
TR: Cooking and cleaning --- no time for that.
GK: Who's going to do it?
SS: Small children.
GK: Children are going to cook and clean?
TR: Our outmoded child labor laws, which date back to the 19th Century, will be modernized to allow children aged 6 to 14 to work up to sixty hours a week ---
SS: Which children can do with the help of drugs.
GK: Drugs!
TR: They give children a tremendous sense of focus.
SS: Child care is going to become a lot simpler with the use of drugs ---
TR: It's true.
SS: The term "terrible twos" will disappear. Children will learn discipline at a very early age, thanks to prescription medication.
GK: So child labor is going to come back ...
TR: There are a lot of repetitive jobs that children are very good at. And stuff they can't do like snow-plowing or lawn-mowing will be done by robots.
SS: And the people who used to do those things will be re-trained as pharmacists.
GK: I see. But this hundred-hour work-week --- isn't this going to be awfully stressful for people?
SS: It is. But we'll learn to manage.
TR: Sleep is affected by stress, but we'll have electrodes implanted in our brains to help us.
SS: You go to bed and attach your sleep wires and in fifteen seconds you'll be unconscious.
TR: Or if you want to have sex, you simply attach the sex wires ---
SS: Or one person can have sex and the other can sleep. It's up to you.
TR: And your alarm clock will wake you and also send signals to your brain to make you cheerful.
SS: No more hangovers. No gloominess, no grouchiness. Your whole body chemistry is monitored and adjusted, while you sleep.
TR: Biomonitoring. That's the big new thing.
SS: Your mood, your intelligence --- these things can be chemically adjusted, as easily as we adjust blood sugar levels.
GK: Will people still read books?
SS: Printed books?
GK: Yes.
TR: Yes, there will still be books, but computers will read them and condense them to the essential two or three hundred words. People who want to read the whole book can get medication that helps you read very very fast.
GK: What about bookstores?
SS: There won't be any. Just websites.
TR: Nobody's going to shop. There won't be enough time. Your p.c. will do your shopping for you.
GK: Not even grocery shopping?
SS: Your refrigerator and cupboards will automatically report to a National Provisions Center in Marshall, Minnesota, and if you are low on butter, orange juice, milk, yoghurt, whatever, a UPS driver will deliver them the next morning.
GK: So we won't use money anymore?
TR: There'll be a bar code tattooed on your wrist. You just wave at what you want and at the end of the month you get a statement and your p.c. pays it.
GK: Will people themselves change?
TR: Yes. Thanks to nutrition and genetic engineering, the average human height will increase ten percent in the next fifteen years.
SS: All of the homes of the 20th Century will be demolished and replaced by high-tech ones.
TR: Obesity will be very closely monitored and treated as a disease.
SS: A video camera inside your refrigerator will enable the National Obesity Center in Racine, Wisconsin, to monitor your eating habits.
TR: If there's a problem, health-care professionals will come to your home to administer drugs.
GK: I see. And this'll be in Wisconsin?
SS: The Midwest will increasingly become a monitoring and regulatory center for the nation, thanks to our high-tech workforce and also our Scandinavian heritage which encourages us to take an interest in the lives of others.
TR: The National Mood Center in Fargo, North Dakota, will monitor moods across the country ---
SS: Using a silicon chip in the brain which will link your nervous system to the Internet.
TR: The mood center will be able to change your dosage immediately.
SS: The National Directional Center in Ames, Iowa, will be able to find lost or confused persons thanks to tiny navigation devices attached to your hair.
TR: The National Wellness Center in Duluth will receive data from your bio-monitoring wrist band and from your shower head which will perform a CAT scan every morning while you take your shower.
SS: Life expectancy will very soon reach two hundred for women, a hundred and sixty for men.
TR: Because people will eat healthier, thanks to flavor chemistry and nutritional engineering.
SS: We'll have broccoli that tastes like prime rib, carrots that taste like chocolate. Hamburgers will be greasier than ever, though they're made entirely from soy products.
TR: So by the year 2050, the retirement years will comprise two- thirds of your life.
SS: The drugs needed to accomplish all of this will absorb about 65 percent of our gross national product.
TR: Which means that, while the economy booms, personal disposable income will actually drop dramatically.
SS: Nobody will travel anymore.
SS: But with drugs you won't care.
GK: But how are we ever going to pay for all these drugs?
SS: For one thing, by eliminating the prison system. Huge savings.
TR: Medical science is going to discover that 90% of all crime is the direct result of food allergies.
SS: And the remaining ten percent can be cured with drugs.
TR: Also we'll be cutting way back on education.
SS: Way back.
TR: Billions of dollars saved right there.
SS: Secondary education, as we know it, will practically disappear. Most colleges will go out of business.
TR: Instead, you'll have more training programs.
SS: We waste hundreds of millions of dollars teaching math and science to kids who're going to wind up asking people, paper or plastic?
TR: Your child's career track is actually pretty clear by the age of ten and that's when he or she can be routed directly into auto mechanics, computer programming, hospitality training, or some other specialty, and skip the unnecessary stuff.
SS: Thanks to drugs, children will learn faster and reach the job market by the age of ten or eleven.
GK: So there're going to be big changes in lifestyle.
TR: Huge changes.
SS: Immense.
TR: The family will change. Replaced by affinity groups, chosen by computer. People who can give you the support and comfort without any of the guilt.
SS: Cities will keep growing and spreading.
TR: Hundreds of miles.
SS: Minneapolis will extend all the way to the Dakota border.
TR: The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport will merge with the Mall of America to become the largest retail and hospitality center in the world. A hundred forty-three square miles. A hundred-thousand hotel rooms.
SS: This is the national trend --- airports becoming destinations.
GK: So people will fly to Minneapolis and never come downtown?
TR: There won't be a downtown.
SS: There'll be a plaque where it used to be. But no downtown.
GK: All those tall buildings?
SS: Gone. No need for them.
GK: I notice you haven't said much about computers.
TR: They're not going to be that important.
SS: I mean, they'll be all over the place, but people won't be that interested in them.
TR: We won't interact with them. The computers will just be on their own.
SS: Mostly your p.c. will serve as a spokesperson and do your p.r. and also it'll act as your social secretary --- it'll order gifts online and ship them to friends and family on birthdays and anniversaries, and it'll write thank-you notes to those people whose p.c.'s have sent gifts to you. Your p.c. will also keep track of your medications.
GK: We're almost out of time. One last question: what do you see as the single biggest change to come in the next few decades?
SS: You go first.
TR: No, you go ahead.
SS: I see the boundaries between entertainment, retailing, and prescription drugs becoming completely blurred in a few years.
TR: I see all boundaries becoming blurred. I think that with the combination of powerful microprocessors and the exponential growth in fiber-optics and wireless bandwidth that we're seeing, right now we're on the verge of achieving a level of communication that makes individuality obsolete. We're standing on the edge of an era of complete social convergence that people who think of themselves as unique will have to be given drugs to help them get over it.
GK: Let me ask you this: were you on drugs when you prepared this report?
SS: I see all boundaries becoming blurred. I see the boundary between male and female changing, I see the boundary between Minnesota and Iowa disappearing, I see the boundary waters canoe area being opened up to jet skis ...
GK: Thank you very much. (PLAYOFF MUSIC) Thank you, Dr. Sarah Bellum and Dr. Dewey Haffta.
(c) 2000 by Garrison Keillor