How Are 40 Predictions of the Information Age in 2000 Working Out in 2016?

Herein are 40 predictions made in the year 2000  by James Dale Davidson, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur , and Lord William Ross-Mogg, formerly editor of The Times in London and vice-chairman of the BBC, on what the Information age portends in their book  The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age.   You be the judge how their predictions have fared.

1)       The end of the power of politicians and the national governments as we have known them will occur.

2)      The collapse of morality due to corruption of the leaders of Western governments will take place.

3)     Widespread revulsion and angry reaction against existing political institutions will be commonplace.

4)      The Information Revolution will spread across national boundaries  and produce a global economy,

5)     The Information Transformation will liberate and elevate individuals with ideas and make them rich, while the middle class with online skills will suffer lose of wages and benefits.

6)      A large part of the global economy will be liberated from political control.

7)      Random organized petty and drug crime, including internet  hacking will increase, and will be beyond government control. 

8)    Governments everywhere will face financial crises, as their taxing capacity will decline by 50-70%, and online users escape federal detection of their incomes.

9)     The Technology Revolution will antique our laws, reshape our morals, and anger our citizens.

10)  The middle class with middling skills in high income countries will be aflame with resentment against the rich and government who cannot deliver on its promises.

11)  The speed of change will outrace the moral and economic capacities go gov3rnment for adaptation to technologies.

12)  We will witness a new and dispersed transaction economy outside the bounds and control of government. 

13)  There will a clash and backlash between the old and young as progressive redistribution schemes falter.

14)  Market forces, not political control, will compel societies, to reconfigure their structures.

15)  Disorder, disorientation, and destabilization will reign during the transition to an information society.

16) Incomes of blue –collar workers will dwindle and will continue falling. 

17)  A whole range of online-induced changes will allow small groups and individuals to function outside of government.

18)  Data corruption,  cybercrime and hacking will become common and difficult to control. 

19)  The civilization that brought you word wars, the assembly line, social security, and high taxes will wither on the online vine.

20)                        Megapolitical conditions will endanger governments, corporate conglomerates, labor unions, and large scale institutions who find it difficult to escape federal regulations because of their size. 

21) The transition to the information age will be unpleasant and unpopular due to disorientation and breakdown of old institutions. 

22) Economies of scale, with the ability to reach and connect with millions at the click of a key, will disperse technology and change everything.

23) Politics in the modern age with preoccupation with controlling and rationalizing power will die and economic efficiency rather than power will prevail.

 

24) Widespread revulsion and inarticulate disdain for  politics and government power will prevail. 

25) The cost of bloated government will cause the “senile decay” of government.

26) Government will be controlled by its customers, not by employees of the establishment.  Customers, i.e., ordinary citizens, will demand lower operating costs, and tax rates reflecting  not what government can collect but rather what customers can retain.

27) Efficiency for individuals and private companies will triumph over power of large organizations and government. 

28)                        Information Technologies will lower capital costs, replace workers, shorten production cycles, disperse organizations, and lower centralization.

 

29) It will become possible for individuals and companies to locate anywhere, use resources from anywhere, and produce products that can be sold anywhere.

30)                        Global commerce will spread, Main Street commerce will suffer, cybercommerce will transcend locality, and the tyranny of place will no longer exist.

31)  People will be able to consult a digital doctor, an expert system with encyclopedic knowledge of symptoms, signs, and your digital history, and virtual visits,   virtual diagnoses, even virtual surgeries will exist. 

32) Fewer people will do more work.

33) Suspicion and opposition to globalization, free trade, foreign ownership, the well-educated, and job displacement will fester and grow.

34) Popular hatred of the information elite, rich people, and disappearing jobs and benefits will mount. 

35)  A rowdy reaction to cutbacks in wages and unsustainable benefits will produce a climate of protests and violence, and complaints of racism, against whites, particularly white males.

36) Victimization will produces complaints of a rigged system against  blacks, females, homosexuals, and Latinos against repression and discrimination by society as whole and white men in general.

37)  Black anger will grow as will out-of-wedlock births and black crime.   Educational attainment will fall, and federal welfare programs will decline in spite of protests.

38)                        Electoral politics will be undergoing a massive shift to populism, and messianic political leaders will emerge promising a return to the past.

39) Comprehensive privatization  will replace organizational and governmental centralization, and commerce will occur at a distance or among small groups with a trusting relationship with each other.s

40)                        Collapse of overgrown bloated bureaucracies because of massive unfunded pension and entitlement liabilities.

The bottom line of these predictions is that individuals will finally be free to determine their own destinies in a truly free market, ruled neither by big governments nor corporate hierarchies.   Dream on will say the socialists. Free markets are not compatible with social justices.