Sirkka Heinonen, Finland Futures Research Centre
Prospects for the future: what will the world be like in 85 years?
The longest essay in the project, and the one that mentions aircraft least.
Sirkka Heinonen’s contribution is the longest piece in the project and the one that mentions aircraft least. Her method is to take the eighty-five-year span seriously in both directions: forward to 2093, and back to 1923, on the grounds that the second is the only calibration available for the first.
The backward look is the essay’s strongest passage, because it is a list rather than an argument. For most of the period after 1923 there was no television, no computer, no internet, no mobile phone. No espresso machines, no waterbeds, no jumbo jets. No one had been to the moon. There was no intensive farming, no map of the human genome, and globalisation had not happened.
Against that she sets a constant. “Surprisingly, even amidst rapid change, people remain fundamentally the same.” The ancient instruction to know yourself still applies, and on the evidence of wars, conflicts and the abuse of power, “as moral entities, humans are just in their infancy.”
Where she expects the discontinuity
Heinonen leans on Ray Kurzweil for the shape of the technological curve: that by roughly 2040 development may become fast and various enough that it can go in any direction at all. From there she speculates freely — brain-computer fusion, routine genetic manipulation, organs grown from stem cells, a revision of ethical codes as real and virtual worlds merge.
Some of this has aged into period detail. The iPod appears in her list of things that did not exist in 1923, which dates the essay precisely. “The Sixth Life”, her name for universal access to virtual reality as a civic right after an assumed collapse of the internet, did not enter anyone’s vocabulary. The internet did not collapse.
Her structural claims have travelled better. She predicted the digital gap would close while a deeper one persisted between rich and poor, and that poverty and wealth would come to be measured by “genome capital and learning capacity” as well as income. The vocabulary is hers; the underlying concern about biological and educational inequality became mainstream.
Resources, migration and the built environment
The essay is at its most confident on scarcity. Shortages of energy, clean water and raw materials are named as the problems that will drive the biggest changes across the eighty-five years, with rising energy and food prices hitting the poorest regions hardest and a redistribution of the world’s resources following. She expects a new age of mass migration driven by food and water shortage, energy scarcity, political unrest and environmental disaster — one stream from Africa and Asia, another from South America to North America.
On buildings she is specific and, so far, roughly right in direction: all new buildings in 2093 built as passive-energy structures or better, generating what they consume, with older stock brought up through renovation. Food and energy crops grown in backyards, on balconies and in roof gardens. Eco-renovation as a precondition everywhere.
Two social predictions are less familiar. “Communal families” — broad reference groups bound by a shared activity, ideology or ethnic background rather than by kinship — she expects to be commonplace. And the salary model, she argues, will be replaced by what she calls a meaningful activity concept: a mosaic work profile combining paid work, study and voluntary work, with employers competing on employee wellbeing because the organisations offering the best conditions attract the best people.
Longevity, and the ethics she flags
Her boldest claim is medical. A longevity gene will be pursued “like the Holy Grail”, and gene manipulation will make lifetimes of 140 years possible. She does not present this as unambiguously good. She expects heated debate about whether artificially extended life is available only to the rich, and about the quality of life of the resulting “super-elderly”. Raising intelligence by gene technology, she suggests, will come to seem as ordinary as correcting sight with spectacles.
Back to the question the site asked
Only at the end does she reach flying, and she reframes it: “The information society will become the mobile experience society.” Physical and virtual movement will both be brisk, because people want to interact with each other. That is the same claim the section introduction makes about the durability of demand, arrived at from social theory rather than from traffic statistics.
The essay never answers what aircraft will look like. Given how the technical predictions elsewhere in the project have fared, that reticence looks less like evasion than like discipline.