In my country managers dislike planning. But their claim that future is fundamentally uncertain is met with scepticism from their foreign colleagues. Western managers insist that plans are necessary even if they will be corrected later.

That's why it surprised me that Western society has no plans for the next 50-100 years. Why the general principles of management do not apply in this case is beyond me. The plan is necessary.

I suggest a method which can become a part of this new planning process.

• To build a technology tree of scientific and technological progress in 21st century, based on interdisciplinary connections.
• To regularly calculate and publish the quantitative indicator of scientific and technological progress.

The 20th century brought many amazing discoveries: antibiotics, genetic engineering, heart transplants, Moon walk, thermonuclear fusion, superconductivity, transistor, supersonic aircraft, Internet and tens of other discoveries, as stunning and revolutionary as these.

The speed of progress in early 21st century defeats imagination. The decoding of human genome. Successes in miniaturisation and nanotechnology. The Moore's Law still remains true. Advances in our understanding of how organisms of animals and humans function. First humanoid robots. First results in joining live cells and machines. Universal global communications. The list goes on and on.

In the past decades most important directions of technological and scientific development in the next 50-100 years were described by authors like Ray Kurzweil, Eric Drexler and Vernor Vinge.

97% of products manufactured today will be discontinued before 2020. But no business today takes the cardinal changes in technology into account.

But are there any significant key points in the future or do we foresee only gradual development like today? These key points are taboo in our society, but they do exist.

That's immortality.

That's singularity.

And that's omnipotence.

The world will change irreversibly after each of these monumental events. And we must know when and how they will happen.

More than a half of people living today will see the sunrise of another star, make friends with an artificial intelligence and create his personal universe. Still, 99.9999% of them don't have even a remote idea about this.

Why?

Because the existing system failed to communicate real scientific results and prospects to the general public.

According to survey done in 1997 by National Science Foundation of the US among the general public, 35% said the dangers of genetic research outweigh the benefits. So, they're basically ready to sign the death sentence for the humankind, because it isn't possible to reach immortality with genetic research banned.

Researchers usually fail to indicate full potential of their work, except for obvious uses, for example Intel makes a promise of 20GHz processors, but fails to explain how they will be used. Even the correct forecasts, like many PRT scenarios, are convincing only for a small group of specialists, because they are not integrated in a common framework.

As a result, for most people the future looks the same as today, except for the progress in their own field, fashion changes and minor progress in home appliances. All assumptions about cloning, home robots, etc. exist in a form of doublethink – robots will and will not appear at the same time. The reason is that there is no common framework for these inventions.

People cannot see far in the future. Even researchers usually have planning horizon of only 5-7 years. But without understanding the progress, people miss the opportunities it brings.

Three groups in the society significantly harm the development due to the lack of understanding.

• Business and political decision-makers do not see the opportunities science creates.
• Researchers, specialising in one particular field do not notice the progress made in other fields and miss potential synergies.
• General public does not even realise that the progress is happening. As a result, important research is under-invested and sometimes restricted by misinformed public.

In the process of scientific and technological development we push the limits of feasible. But the society does not have the knowledge about new limits. This limits its ability to set new goals for scientists and engineers. Existing methods of communicating results and future possibilities are not enough.

We need something new.

Something that would work.

Something that would give
the society a guiding line.

Talking about forecasting, we must put aside Plato's The Republic, Thomas More's Utopia or Nostradamus' Quatrains, as they are merely idealistic models or dim predictions. True attempts to forecast the future appeared only in 18-19th centuries, when the notion of scientific progress became common. In 1949, German researcher Ossip K. Flechtheim coined the term futurology to designate a new science of prognosis. The number of forecasts soared, they started appearing in various books and magazines.

But the first noticeable attempt to forecast future of humankind by combined forces of experts in various fields was made in 1972, with the publication of "Limits to growth". That book created a furore. Still authors mostly ignored the technological aspect of the future and thus failed to recognise importance of Moore's law, formulated in 1965, or Feynman's classic 1959 talk There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom.

In the end of 20th century large magazines and newspapers again turned to forecasting. They published versions of future history and top ten lists of biggest inventions to come. Famous sci-fi writers, such as Arthur Clark, made timelines for 21st century.

However, these forecasts always remained sets of separate predictions, not connected to form a single synergetic picture. The result was often nonsense and never a valid hypothesis. The milestones were vague, the dates never depended on progress in other fields, the experts were too different to give a coherent picture.

All the above mentioned problems and shortcomings result from one fatal fault – we do not employ the scientific method in forecasting the future.

This is surprising, because first theories of scientific and technological progress appeared more than 20 years ago. Patterns of Technological Innovation by Devendra Sahal was published in 1981.

A lot was done in understanding progress and innovations. The process of technological development is now well understood. But this knowledge was never successfully applied to educate general public.

Time has proven that complex methods of forecasting are either impractical or impossible to implement, but simple models like stock indices often work surprisingly well.

For every erroneous prediction there was a reason. We need to recognise the errors, find the mistakes in our reasoning and correct them. This simple gradual process already produced the Theory of Evolution, Theories of Relativity, and more. There is no reason to think that scientific method cannot produce a coherent forecast for 21st century.

To have some understanding of the future, one needs to follow science and technology news and. Average person cannot do that. Neither can he understand the concepts of infinity, singularity or double exponent growth. So we have to give the information to them in predigested form – conclusions and forecasts in a plain and simple language.

How simple? According to National Science Foundation only 9% of 2,000 people surveyed in the USA could define a molecule.

We cannot hope to educate people, but we still need to give them the answers.

The proposed idea is to create roadmap for scientific and technological development (Technology Tree), consisting of interconnected timelines of specific research fields. This model will then be used to assess and analyse the possibilities, develop scenarios of the future and make specific predictions. Information about past and present progress will also be collected and systematised.

This information will be immediately useful for researchers in various fields. Next, the very essence of these results will be communicated to people, who lack understanding of science and technology (Technorate).

In regards to organisational aspects, I believe that the best way to gather necessary resources today is through use of Open Source-like Internet-based model. That would allow a great number of specialists to contribute to the project and to control the quality of submissions through "moderation" and peer-review. This would also provide greater flexibility and keep the costs low.

Because of globalisation and the long term of the forecasting, there is no point in tying the results to some particular countries or corporations. It is recommended to use more reliable categories – research areas.

1. Primary R&D areas will be selected. They should be rather general and cover most of science. The examples are "Computing", "Biotechnologies", "Aerospace". The number of 10-20 would be optimal.
2. Key technologies and scientific advances ("milestones") will be defined, from current developments to the final stages before singularity. For "milestones" we should focus on the things that are possible in principle and objectively necessary (or at least desirable).

We must be very careful in setting the "milestones" as most advances are gradual improvements. For example, we must clearly define nanotechnology "milestone". Does it mean the lithography, as currently used in making chips, or the first universal assembler?

3. In every field the "milestones" should be arranged and relations between them established.
4. Then all fields have to be intertwined with dependencies. For example, high-precision measuring instruments ("Physics") will allow high-precision brain scans ("Medicine"). Alternatively, it can be brought by advanced nanotechnologies ("Physics" or "Engineering").

To establish this kind of connections, scientists with broad outlook will be required.

5. Using expert estimates or some quantitative anchors (such as computing power roughly predicted by Moore's law) we will to assign dates to "milestones". That would allow to draw interdependent developments timelines of in each area.

Timing of inventions and discoveries is extremely important as illustrated by the following examples:

Not taking into account this sort of dependencies in the scientific development in the past caused people to expect some things too early, for example, artificial organs could not be perfected unless we have excelled in designing new materials, reducing the size of our computers and making smaller mechanisms.

The results of this model can be used directly to inform other scientists about possible developments in their areas, brought about by advances in other fields.

Complex arrays of information are usually difficult to visualise. People cannot grasp the stock market as a whole, but simple indicators such as stock indices allow us to easily understand the situation. In the same way we can hope to simplify the complex picture of scientific progress, by calculating a limited number of indices, based on our Technology Tree model. The main goal is to show everyone that science progresses and progresses quickly. The indices can be used to evaluate past result, analyse present conditions or forecast the future.

One of the possible ways to calculate the index is to specify quantitative "importance" of every "milestone" and calculate the progress in a specific field as

Of course, it is possible to use more advanced calculations developed by scientometrics.

Every field should have an important final "milestone", such as immortality for "Medicine". Then the indices will provide a simple estimate of when this "milestone" will be achieved.

The indices will be regularly published in the scientific magazines and on the web, together with short comments explaining the events that changed. Eventually, mainstream media will catch on to this idea.

Hopefully people will be able to use Technorate indices to estimate the time of arrival of greatest advances, such as immortality, plan their personal future accordingly and create public demand for fundamental and applied scientific research. At the same time the indices will give politicians and businesses enough information to respond to this demand.

The implementation of Technology Tree and Technorate will allow people to make better choices when:

• planning their education and that of their children
• selecting areas for research
• distributing state financing for applied and fundamental research
• doing long-term planning for countries and large corporations

The appearance of indices will also provide additional stability as people understand that in the long-term everyone will benefit from the scientific development.

The lack of understanding of future inevitably leads to wrong choices made.

I believe a consistent but detailed picture of the future may be developed by combined efforts of scientists and engineers, sharing a common vision of scientific progress as beneficial and worthy for society, through the use of Internet-based Open Source-like model.

The results of the forecast can then be simplified so that general public can understand the results and apply them in their life and business.