Arizona State University: Visions for Tomorrow

About this issue: Our non-photographic images for our view of the future come to us from the School of Art in Arizona State University's splendid College of Fine Arts and the Department of Design Sciences of the College of Architecture. The outside covers are an original airbrush acrylic, and the initial puzzle spread is a photographic spectrum from 19th century monotone to 20th century computer-assisted image. Many of the other art reproductions were drawn from the School of Art's unique Print Research Facility, which enjoys worldwide fame. Several dozen artists have produced more than 120 editions of prints since the facility's inception in 1978. While the primary medium employed thus far has been lithography, the school's research facilities include the production of intaglio, collotype, screenprinting, Woodbury-type photography, fine art typography, and the printing of limited edition photography and books.

continued from page 1 United States. But as President J. Russell Nelson has said, "We do not confuse size with quality at ASU. Although outstanding students and faculty are attracted by our beautiful campus and our urban Sun Belt location, we believe they choose to come here because ASU is a major research and teaching university with a growing reputation for achievement.

So, from its strengths-particularly in the areas of engineering, business administration, fine arts, law, and urban and public programs-we have invited futurists to envision the world of tomorrow.

And for you...fit some of the pieces of your life-to-be into the puzzle calledtomorrow. - Don Dedera As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still; it is we who move in infinite space.

- Rainer Maria Rilke When, in 1920, author-journalist and historian Hendrik Willem van Loon was writing his classic, The Story of Mankind, he was faced with the challenge of trying to explain to his young readers the immensity of time. And so, in his frontispiece, he wrote: "High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a bird comes to sharpen its beak.

"When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity has gone by."

And on cloudless Arizona nights there is the awesomeness of staring at a star and knowing that what we see, in all likelihood, may well have dissolved into nothingness hundreds of millions of years ago. Because the light we are seeing sprang from that star as long as 10 billion years ago-almost countless sharpenings of the beak by van Loon's little bird, but a wearing away of the giant rock at Svithjod that can be counted in millimeters.

To talk in terms of time segments as minute as a hundred years in the past-when Arizona State University began as the Territorial Normal School at Tempe-or 35 years into the future would seem, at first Blush, to be the ultimate exercise in triviality...not even a heartbeat of our bird. But, like the past, the future, too, surrounds and envelops us although the limits of our eternity, as earthlings, shrink to time dimensions that can at least be expressed -to the fiery birth of our planet about 4.5 billion years ago, to its predictable return to oblivion in another 5 billion years when the sun that sustains us flickers and fades and ultimately dies. But, still and all, even in a framework of "only" 9.5 billion years, of what possible significance are the past 100 years that have shaped a great university, or the next 35 years-a time tunnel down which today's futurists feel they can look and bring into sharp focus the way life will be on the basis of present knowledge, but beyond which is to "see through a glass, darkly?" Such capsules of time, although tiny in the overall, are of dynamic importance to us because we are mortals with the blip lifespan of a night insect flying into an electrified garden light and, as the German lyric poet, Rilke, observed, it is we-not the future, itself-"who move in infinite space." We move to meet the future with all of the wonders that science, technology, and our expanded understanding of our universe are popping in front of us like a string of firecrackers. It is A.D. 2019, suddenly.

Only three or four short decades, the futurists tell us, but an unfolding of new life-styles, new developments, new ways of doing old things, new ways of doing things not even dreamed possible a few short years ago, and that may be without parallel in our history.

It is in this centennial year-the age of the visionary at Arizona State University ...the white-smocked scientist, the engineer hunched over his mock-up of a solar collector, the computer technician shaping software to find answers to new questions raised by yesterday's solutions to the previous day's questions, the cancer researcher beginning preliminary studies on a new marine specimen-a promising one. Still -four or five years down the roadanother cure for still another strain of the disease that, just a handful of years ago, was an automatic death sentence?

"If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one," the English novelist and playwright John Galsworthy told us. And the thinking about it at ASU has been an on-going proposition for years. It is boyish-looking Bernard Ronan, associate director of ASU's Center for Public Affairs, speaking of his former associate, the late Herman Kahn, founder of the New York-based Hudson Institute and the Goldwater Professor of American History at Arizona State who died in mid1983: "He was firmly convinced that the perspective he had to offer was a unique one that would enhance the ability of people to grapple with the perplexing

Text by Don G. Campbell

Arizona Highways (ISSN 0004-1521) is published monthly by the Arizona Department of Transportation. Subscription price $15 a year in U.S. and possessions, $18 elsewhere; single copies $1.50 each, $2 each outside US. Please send subscription correspondence and change of address information to Arizona Highways, 2039 West Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009 or call (602) 258-6641.

Second class postage paid at Phoenix, Arizona. Postmaster: Send address changes to Arizona Highways, 2039 West Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009. ©Copyright 1984 by the Arizona Department of Transportation. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited materials provided for editorial consideration.

C E N T E ASU N N I A L

issues that are there in the future, and which we should start thinking about. "The work we were doing in the Hudson study, and capsulated in our summary, Visions for Tomorrow, was impacted by those who are overly optimistic and overly pessimistic about the future," Ronan adds.

"Too many people see the future in terms of machinery...as qur salvation. Both sides are missing a basic trend-people are making a life-style choice in a state like Arizona, coming here not because of what they don't like in the Midwest, or wherever, but what they like bere. And Kahn saw the same sort of dynamics in Vermont as well as Arizona--the whole notion of Sun Belt is an idea, and not a matter of geography.

The way that people, through increasing affluence and developing technology, can reach out and grab their dreams. Arizona is a metaphor for things taking place all over the country."

And just as it was technology-in this case air conditioning-that enabled postWorld War II emigrants to Arizona to live in a sometimes uncomfortably hot environment, so is similar technology, much of it already "on line," going to change everything from the way we build our houses, to the way we drive our cars, to the way we mow our lawns in the next 35 years. Old fears-of many diseases, of worldwide famine, of a paralyzing energy crunch-will recede as 1984's work in the fields of economic research, genetic engineering, and the harnessing of solar energy reach, or approach, fruition.

It is craggy C. Roland Haden, dean of ASU's College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, grumbling about the inefficiency of energy generation in 1984: "In a steam generating plant," he snorts, "you're getting about 30 percent efficiency. That means you're throwing away 60 percent to 70 percent of your coal or gas to produce electricity.""The direct conversion of solar energy to electricity in the next 30 to 35 yearsthrough improved silicon collectors-is very viable. We're already doing it with the equipment we have now in the production of hot water. And, in 30 years, we'll be into large scale generation of powerdirectly from the sun to electricity-at a fraction of today's costs, plant maintenance, and in the life-span of the plants, Today's steam plants, run on fossil fuels, wear out rather quickly: generally they have a 30-year maximum life-span. With solar generation, little wears out.

"And," he continues, "geography will be no consideration; once you've converted it to electricity it's a simple matter of transmission. But even in the colder climates, like the northeast, the equipment in another 30 to 35 years will make direct conversion possible even in Vermont."

While the next three decades will see man finally harness the ever-present miracle that awed and nurtured him 2 million years ago, the Johnny-come-lately miracle of his own creation, the computer, will assume awesome proportions of its own in the same time frame. The sun was always there, a relatively minor star among the billions like it in the galaxy, but man's exploration into the world of mechanical intelligence can be counted in flicks-back, perhaps, to 1812 and Professor Charles Babbage's "Analytical Engine" at Cambridge University but, for our purposes, back no farther than the early 1960s.

"As soon as the next five to 10 years," Dean Haden says, "the so-called 'fifth generation' computer will be a reality although it's really a mistake to talk in terms of 'generations,' because it's a continuing evolution with improvements coming along constantly. But what we're going to see in 30 to 35 years are computers that are not simply larger in terms of speed and capacity, but working on a somewhat different concept, as well-parallel processing, because there's just so much you can do, serially...one process after another. What we'll have is one large machine operating on parallel aspects of the same problem-sorting through a number of different scenarios, weighing them, and coming up with a form of reasoning. Not simply recognizing solutions, but doing some association of perhaps unrelated facts, just as a human does. An artificial intelligence, of course, but very, very close to human intelligence." So close to human intelligence, in fact, that futurist Dr. William Reif, associate dean, College of Business Administration, sees the computer far beyond the mere processing of data, and heavily into the processing of ideas, themselves... "machines that have human thought processes...that learn from experience just as the human does. "What we're talking about are machines not only capable of reading, and assimilating-on a daily basis-not only the entire contents of dozens of technical publications, The Wall Street Journal, and so on, but then rendering many business decisions...to close out this operation, or to reallocate the company's resources from 'A' to 'B.'"

Whoso neglects learning in his youth, Loses the past and is dead for the future. Euripides

ASU

And the machines, 35 years down the road, will be operating in a vastly different economic climate than we know today -one in which the new, median priced, single-family home will sell in the neighborhood of $507,000 and where the per capita income will be approximately $106,000 a year, all based on economic projections suggesting an average six percent-a-year increase in the Consumer Price Index.

Because of computer technology, Reif feels, radical changes are ahead in our definitions of "work" and "leisure," and serious moral, social, and even religious questions will be raised by these new definitions.

"Our projections suggest that in the year 2020," he continues, "not more than 10 percent to 15 percent of the population will be employed as we now understand the word-that's all that will be needed to support the other 85 percent to 90 percent. Entire industries, as we know them today -banking and insurance, for instanceare almost 100 percent programmable even now. The life-style alternatives will be almost endless...to hunt or fish, simply to raise a family, or to pursue the arts. And those who choose to work will have almost no limitations placed on them as to where and when they will engage in it. By that time, probably no more than 100 to 150 giant multinational corporations will control about 60 percent to 70 percent of Gross National Product. But, at the other end of the spectrum, we'll have literally millions and millions of oneand twoperson entrepreneurs working from wherever they choose to work."

But it is in the field of knowledge and education, Reif worries, that staggering social and moral and religious questions are raised.

"Already, today, we almost have the technology to record on a single computer chip all of the recorded knowledge of humankind since the dawn of time. And, through genetic engineering, it will be entirely feasible to implant this in an infant's brain at birth."

And he pauses. "But who is to decide which infant receives it, and which doesn't?"

But while convenience, safety, and/or efficiency are always ever-present stimulations behind new developments in any field, the overwhelming, driving force that gets things done, Dean Haden remarks wryly, "is the bottom line...when it makes clear-cut economic sense to do something a new way rather than cling to the past."

And so it will be economics that will explode the practical application, in the next 30 to 35 years, of solar energy, computerization, and robotics. Because, in many areas, our present ways of doing things are already, and demonstrably, economically foolish. Leaving our energy needs in a world with finite fossil fuels at the mercy of steam and coal burning plants that are only 30 percent efficient at best and are burned out in 30 years...stamping out and hand-assembling manufactured goods in wasteful cookie-cutter patterns when both computers and robotics make an almost infinite variety of customized products possible at a fraction of the waste and cost...providing shelter, both residential and commercial, through "stick" construction methods that haven't basically changed in 2000 years and which is why, The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

Rilke Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. Eliot

ASU

Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart.

ASU

Today, the average home nationally costs $70,000 based on construction costs in the $50-to-$60-per-square-foot range.

"There was a lot of work done as long as 15 years ago," Dean Haden adds, "in the field of modular construction or unit construction, and in the use of new materials, but there was little demand for all of it then and the work was shelved-in large measure, too, because of artificial constraints in terms of codes. It's certainly time, now, to rethink these codes, written for stick construction and well intentioned, for the public's safety, but outdated. We just can't afford the kind of building we've experienced. In 30 to 35 years computers and robots will be the standard-the robots doing the work and with the computer injecting the originality so that, at the end, you'll have a package ready for fast assembly on the site, and every one of them will be different."

The impact of this on the shape of our cities, according to Professor Roger Schluntz, chairman of ASU's Department of Architecture, will manifest itself in greater housing density "...perhaps smaller homes than we have now but, overall, far more efficient as far as space utilization is concerned, and with no appreciable sacrifice of privacy. And, in all likelihood, with a higher percentage of condominiums and other forms of detached, and semidetached, housing.

"Visually," Professor Schluntz continues, "the bigger change will be in the commercial areas. We've gone through a long period of sameness in commercial architecture...of sterility. We're going to see tomorrow's buildings with more peoplerelated activities built around their base ...more liveliness. I think that the glasssheathed buildings are on their way out, as we strive for optimum solar efficiency."You're going to have a new variety in commercial buildings, if for no other reason than-because of solar utilizationthe north side of a building is going to have to be different from, say, the south side."

Thus architecture, like construction itself, will change because of irresistible economic pressures.

But if it is the bottom line-cost effectiveness-that really seals the marriage between high technology and the fields of energy, manufacturing, and construction, it will be no less an influence in effecting sweeping changes in human activities that, like that of the computerized sheepshearer in Australia, seem far removed from the world of bytes, silicon chips, and floppy disks.

And what of knowledge obsolescence? "In the high technology field," Reif continues, "some disciplines are already operating on an 18-month cycle, or 'generation,' of knowledge. Which means that some engineering students, for instance, are already learning obsolete material in their junior year of college.

"What happens, 35 years away, if we are burning people out after only two years of productivity? Do we discard them, and simply hire new ones? Buying and selling people? After two years of work does the engineer simply join that 85 percent of the population whose contribution isn't needed? Or, does the engineer, versed in We can only pay our debt to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.

Tweedsmuir

ASU

The Future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

C. S. Lewis the complexities of the fifth generation of his discipline, work for two years and then lay off to catch up on his education so that, two years later, he can come back with his understanding of the seventh generation, and replace the sixth genera-tion engineer who replaced him?"

And, at the layman's level, the so-called "personal computer" of A.D. 2019 will have all of the capacities "we normally associate with today's super computers," the College of Engineering's Haden continues. "And they will be as interwoven into our everyday life as tightly as simple electric-ity is today.

"For instance," he elaborates, "picture, in 30 years, something on the scale of a per-sonal computer plugged into your home security system-one not simply 'smart' enough to detect disturbances, but to know the members of your family, and their habits, well enough to analyze the sound and make a judgment as to whether it's cause for alarm: there's a disturbance, but the computer analyzes it simply as one of the kids getting into the refrigerator and no reason for any kind of action."

But, at the same time, Dean Haden continues, the computer/security system's analytical prowess is such that it will not only investigate disturbances but, when warranted, take some form of action-alerting the household, the fire or police department, and even taking a more positive and aggressive stance against the event, or intruder.

A gun-toting robot? A smile. Perhaps a rather overly dramatic, overly glamorized interpretation but, at the same time, acknowledgement that today's work in robotics is still in its infancy.

While it's an old concept -"we've been into machines that replace a human function for a long time, such as the bottle capping machine," Haden notes, "but we've only recently started calling it robotics, and the notion of robots that will do your housework is certainly not out of line in the next 30 to 35 years."

And so, in 2019, we're looking at vacuum cleaners that "know" where the household furniture is and where, in what In the past we have had a light which flickered, in the present we have a light which flames, and in the future there will be a light which shines over all the land and sea.

Churchill

ASU

For example, the carpeting to be cleaned is...a lawn mower that similarly "knows" the contours of the lawn...machines that turn themselves on, off, and store themselves.

"Already," Dean Haden continues, "we have research going on enabling sheep ranchers in Australia to scan each sheep with a sensing device that plots the pattern of its body and then a robot shears it to the sheep's own individual contours."

And, just as sensing devices in the next three decades will move off the sheep ranch and into the home, so will they be commonplace in both improving automotive performance and safety, ASU's dean of engineering predicts.

"We're already seeing a lot of it applied in the automotive field-in controlling fuel mixture and that sort of thing but, down the road, these will go much farther-not simply diagnosing when the car is 'sick,' or is about to be, but telling the owner specifically what's wrong and what must be done to correct it. The car won't merely tell you that you're low on oil-it simply won't start," Haden adds.

In terms of safety, the computer/sensing developments will go far beyond even those developments now under researchsuch as sensors that will detect when the driver has had too much to drink and the car refuses to start-but to more complex "thinking" decisions: rejecting the driver's attempt to accelerate because he's too close to the car ahead or because the passing clearance isn't adequate-given the speed of the oncoming traffic, that of the car ahead, and the capabilities of the driver's own car.

"Much of law," Dr. Edward Johnson of ASU's College of Law, reminds us, "is economics, and computer models are being developed to help lawyers be more efficient. And we already have advocates for a system where the plaintiff's computer and the defendant's computer would present differing sides of a case, and a third, an arbitrator computer, would decide the merits of a case. These would be instances, of course, where subjectivity doesn't have a place-a computer can calculate damages, but can it calculate fault?"

As the director of community relations for the College and active in that institution's Law and Technology project, the first such center in the country to explore the legal ramifications of future technology and the practical applications of that technology to the practice of law, Johnson sees, in the next 30 to 35 years, legal questions being answered in hours or days that, today, would require weeks or months of laborious and expensive research in the compilation of legal precedences, in patent exploration.

"A lot of work is already being doneand much more will be done in the next 30 years in analyzing, via computers, legal issues like the calculation of damages and when to go to court with a suit, or not-is it worth going to trial in the light of the odds on succeeding, based on previous cases in various jurisdictions?"

If a computer in every law office-a development already well underway-is a fait accompli in 2019, so will the presence of satellite disks on every home rooftop be firmly secured, and the present three

I hold that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future. Ibsen

major television networks as news communicators may be little more than a footnote in the history books.

"One of these days, well within the next 30 to 35 years, you're going to find the producers of news programs asking themselves: 'why should we turn this over to the networks to distribute when we can use satellites serving the individual stations and simply bypass the networks?'" Dr. Eldean Bennett, chairman of ASU's Mass Communications Department, asks rhetorically.

"And the next step will be: 'why bother with the stations, either, when we can beam our news programs directly into the homes themselves?' We already have on the market home satellite disks at about $1695, down to about seven feet in circumference and quite unobtrusive, and both price and size will come down even more in the years ahead. Why settle for six channels when you can have 74 off one channel alone? Satellites are so much more economical and practical-it'll solve, forever, the problem of having popular entertainment shows on at the same time in every town in the country. We'll be able to pick and choose...settling on what's right for me in my part of the country, at my time of the day, and in concord with my life-style."

Long-debated dreams of a local newspaper that will simply "spit" out of a machine into the living room, Dean Bennett feels, will probably be no more closer to reality in 30 to 35 years, however, than they are now. "The technology's there, all right, and it's being done, experimentally, in Japan right now, but I can't see the cost coming down enough to make it feasible," he adds.

While newspapers as we know them today will remain visible, "because they are physical products that people like, and will continue to be the only way of remaining totally informed," Dr. Bennett says, "I think that in the next 30 to 35 years it will be commonplace to dial the newspaper's library, indicate by code the information you want, and have it transmitted to you in your home through your own computer and TV set."

The Earth turns, the seasons change, and new ways of life wash over us like the waves crashing over a boulder on the beach.

Man of the Future, what shall be The life of Earth that you shall see? What strange new facts the years will show? What wonders rare your eyes shall know? To what new realms of marvel, say, Will conquering science war its way? -William Cox Bennett Don G. Campbell, a newspaper business editor in Arizona during the 1960s and '70s, currently is a staff writer and consumer columnist for the Los Angeles Times. In addition, Don writes a weekly real estate column which appears nationally via the Register and Tribune Syndicate.

Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today. Nietzsche