science policy

PROJECTING THE FUTURE RATIONALLY Analyst Joseph Coates sees science and technology as integral part of future economic, political, and social scenarios

Wil Lepkowski C&EN Washington

C hemistry is a great launch pad to all types of interesting, nonbench careers. Ask Joseph F. Coates, who

has managed to parlay a chemical back­ground into a career of the furthest out dimensions—future studies, or how sci­ence and technology will affect life 10 to 50 years from now.

Future studies is a field that attracts fuzzy dreamers and visionaries. But it also has a core of about 200 serious profession­als like Coates who connect the trends and phenomena they study with the prob­lems leaders will have to deal with tomor­row. Coates is one of only about 15 futur­ists who take what is called the "synoptic" approach to future studies. That is, he projects scientific and technological devel­opments as part of future economic, polit­ical, and social scenarios.

Coates has been doing future studies for almost 20 years as president of Coates & Jarratt, a consulting firm in Washington, D.C. He began futures work professionally at the National Science Foundation in the late 1960s and later at Congress' Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). He was, in fact, one of the founders of the field and sponsored some 30 such assessments dur­ing his time at NSF. His wife, Vary, is also a technology assessment personage, as president of her own firm, the Institute for Technology Assessment. He left OTA in 1979 and founded what is now Coates & Jarratt.

Coates, with colleagues John B. Ma-haffie and Andy Hines, has just published a book on the first quarter of the next century: "2025—Scenarios of U.S. and Global Society Reshaped by Science and Technology" (Oak Hill Press, Greensbo­ro, N.C.). It is about everything, or better put, how complex everything is in the face of technical change. He will be pre­senting a summary of the book and the implications of its findings at the World

Future Society meeting this week in San Francisco.

The book is an outgrowth of a con­tract, Project 2025, the Coates firm per­formed for several companies between 1991 and 1993. It uses as its base the four main drivers of change in the mod­ern world—information technology, ma­terials technology, genetics, and energy technology. It lays developments in those fields against social, cultural, politi­cal, and personal aspects of society and does it in the form of narratives written as though the authors are living in 2025.

For example, the book's transporta­tion scenario is entitled "People and Things on the Move." In it, Coates and coauthors see passage of the 1990 Clean Air Act as one of the most critical trans­portation milestones of the current era. In the list of milestones, the book then moves to 1998 with Motorola's planned deployment of its Iridium Satellite Net­work, which brings enhanced civilian use of the once highly secret global-posi­tioning navigation system. That system was recently declassified for civilian use

Coates: economy depends on technology

and has myriad transportation uses. Sev­eral luxury car makers already have equipped their vehicles to use it.

The next milestone is also 1998 when California spurs development of electric cars by mandating for use a limited num­ber of zero-emission vehicles. By 2000, a vast national computer infrastructure is in place making possible Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems based heavily on global positioning technology. By 2010, Japan and the European Union are competing for markets in new forms of nonpolluting, efficientiy managed transportation.

That spurs the U.S. to build a magnetic lévitation rail transportation system run­ning coast to coast. By 2020, the trend to­ward urbanization in the U.S. levels off. Five years later sees 40% of the U.S. work­ing population "telecommuting"—work­ing from home—thus sharply reducing au­tomobile volume on the highways.

The book is the Coates process at work, at least on the surface. Those for whom these scenarios are written are made to think and to compose their own "alternative futures." As Coates puts it: "The game is about trying to show our clients the next 25 years out of their own expertise. They don't normally pay atten­tion to the forces that are going to con­verge on their concerns. We want to widen their horizons toward things they don't normally think about.

"If you look at organizations that have failed," Coates continues, "they all share the common characteristic that a single individual had some [false] assumption about the future. So our primary function as futurists is to become aware of as­sumptions that affect [companies'] enter­prise and present alternative futures. A big error many futurists make is to see developments accruing faster than they really will. This comes from too optimis­tic a vision of science and technology. The more you do this work, the more you become aware of the things that might slow a process down."

Besides transportation, the book is re­plete with other future scenarios—for manufacturing, health care, leisure, envi­ronmental sustainability, automation and information technology, environmental and resource management, population trends, and worldwide tensions, of which there will be many. Coates lists global warming as his top concern glo­bally, but fears that its contingent aspects will slow action to mitigate it. On the do­mestic scene, large-scale unemployment caused by structural changes to the econ­omy is his main worry.

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How did Coates become a futurist? Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Coates, 68, says he was always interested in "knowing ev­erything." He says he wondered from the time he was 10 why adults who were ar­guing couldn't go out and find the an­swers for themselves. "Even at that age, I was struck by how much empty talk went on around us." He received a bach­elor's degree in chemistry at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and a master's de­gree in organic chemistry from Pennsyl­vania State University. Then it was on to Atlantic Richfield for eight years at the bench, and eventually to NSF and OTA.

With his ever-evolving view of the fu­ture, it is natural that Coates would have a lot to say about the various public pol­icy issues that shower down today on the body politic. He has been a promi­nent policy presence around Washington for a long time and has been a fearsome gadfly of sorts at various Washington seminars, conferences, and panels. A Coates comment frequently carries a point—often sharp enough to prick egos and raise tempers.

In the policy realm, Coates has just completed a consulting stint with a spe­cial Republican task force formed by House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Texas). Armey wants to know how current developments in science, tech­nology, and other forces might affect the way people will be governed. Coates says he was impressed that Republican members would want to take a serious look at future technologies and their im­plications for governance.

Coates says he can't divulge what he told the Armey task force. But he will say what he believes this Congress lacks and needs. "The challenge to the Congress in science and technology over time," he says, "is based on three propositions about which there is no denial. One, we're go­ing to add 3 billion more people to the world's population by 2025. Two, the overwhelming bulk of those people will earn their way by their own labor. Three, their labor rates are going to be anywhere from 8 to 50 cents [for every dollar some­one in the U.S. earns]. That means we— the U.S.—will be absolutely dead in the water in international commerce in any­thing that depends on low-cost labor."

With those facts, Coates says, the U.S. economy can depend on only one set of phenomena—the products, processes, and services coming out of new scientific and technological developments. "If that cor­nucopia isn't full, and abundantly full," he says, "we're just simply moving into the

position of the U.K. in the 1970s and '80s. That's the central issue for the Congress."

But the current Congress, according to Coates, has some very serious internal, organizational, and ideological problems to overcome. "The committee system paralyzes intelligent, coherent action," Coates says. "Everyone's got a piece, but nobody has an overview. Much more im­portant than that is the ideological issue in which they think that God Almighty created the corporation as the answer to all of humankind's problems."

Congress, says Coates, "is in systemat­ic denial of market failure, those areas important to the society in which the market system simply will not respond. It happens that R&D is one of those."

Those market failures, according to Coates, come in two categories. First, longer term objectives that the private sec­tor simply cannot, will not, or does not appreciate, such as fusion or the Human Genome Project. "Then," he says, "you need to look at the cases where the mar­ket failed right now in the middle of the economy—in the domain of materials and energy, for example. I see all kinds of re-

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search going on in things like photovolta-ics. But where is the research going on in the technologies of energy conservation? Where is the research really going in geo thermal, or in ocean thermal gradients? These are just so unique that you can't ex­pect the private sector to invest in such things.

"Or how about the research and con­ceptualization going into macroengineer-ing, those massive projects that can only be done by government? What's the up­coming equivalent of the Panama or Suez Canals? There are a whole score of things that fall into the clear market Mures that aren't just the long term."

Coates says Congress, "bowing to shib­boleths," is doing little systematic hard work. "Japan every five years for the last 20 years has run a major science and tech­nology study involving as many as 2,000 people. The Germans saw this, adopted it, took virtually the Japanese survey, ran it in Germany, and it's been a very successful document in terms of shaping what the agenda of R&D should be."

Coates would like to see the same type of study done by the U.S. government.

"Because of the Republican genuflection to the corporation and the conflict among and between government agencies, we haven't been able to marshal anything like that in the U.S. To turn it over to the Na­tional Academy of Sciences would be ri­diculous. What you'd get would be tooth­paste squeezed out of a tube. It could be done for 2 million bucks."

Coates seldom has had kind things to say about behavior of research scientists, despite the importance of what they do. "Most of these people," he says, "are a bunch of whiny bellyachers. The academ­ics want to keep the money flowing, and the academic universities who have a stake in all of this don't want to talk about national interests, about long-term needs, or threats to the economy. They want the money for professor x, y, and z. There's no integration, no plan, no system coming out of the science establishment.

Still, with Armey pursuing his futures initiative, Coates sees hope. "I just found it absolutely marvelous that these people were taking their assignment seriously. They were fully wide open and open-minded about it. There was no shutoff on

concepts that obviously stretched them. If one can get to Armey and get to his strate­gic planning task force and get some fresh concepts to them—not just from people like me—there's real hope that they'll see that there are things that need to be done."

Coates lives modestly and works out of his house in Northwest Washington. If he has accumulated wealth out of his fu­tures work, it isn't evident. "One never goes into futures work to get rich," Coates says. "One of the things about our clients is that they are ambivalent about the future. First, they fear they might learn something they'd be happier not knowing. Second, they don't want to put their money on the line to get what they think might be some damn fool report."

But he says business has seen so much radical change over the past 15 years that it is looking for tools for view­ing what's ahead. The spur is complexi­ty. "The corporation, after a lag period of a few years, has come back to looking at the future because it has become aware of how much more complex the exter­nal environment has become."^

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