| 'That's
just so last century'
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.
(Feature about Dr Patrick Dixon Published: 08 June 2001
Times Higher Educational Supplement)
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 (www.globalchange.
com) replaces the wall behind us with a scene from a camera
in his garden. "There," he says, satisfied. "Now
we are in the garden."
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.
Dixon, Chairman of Global Change Ltd, has been styled "Europe's
leading futurist".
He is a darling of the international business conference circuit,
a star turn. Businessmen empty their wallets for a hyperactive
verbal
assault.
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." Punctuated by his favourite
phrase: "Oh, that kind of thinking is so last century."
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".
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."
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."
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."
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.
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, The Truth
about Aids, which grabbed national headlines with its criticism
of the government's attempts to play down the threat of the disease.
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.
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 or senior teams of the largest companies - Microsoft,
Hewlett-Packard, IBM, ABN Amro, HSBC - or holding the hand of many
a dying person."
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."
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.
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."
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 so
last century."
Future forecasts
 |
Monkeys with human
genes on trial for murder
|
|
Injectable PCs instead
of ID cards
|
|
Guide dogs provide
sight from their eyes direct to blind people's brains
|
|
Thoughts and emotions
transferred directly from one brain to another
|
|
Computer displays
inside your spectacles |
This feature appeared in the Times Higher Educational Supplement
8 June 2002
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