This is the first in a series of posts resulting from the Austin Technology Council’s CEO Summit, its first in ten years.  About 100 invitees gathered in the Four Seasons hotel for a full day of interesting discussions including brief addresses by Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell and Texas Governor Rick Perry.  Today I’m going to focus on the keynote address.

(A side note here:  The Four Seasons is very posh hotel but requires meeting attendees to go to the registration desk to buy day passes for wifi access.  There’s the nonsmoking queen version for $9.99, suitable for email, surfing, and business downloads.  The smoking king is $14.99 and gives you enough bandwidth to stream movies and TV shows in case your meeting doesn’t hold your attention.  Even La Quinta hotels generally have free wifi.  At least the bathrooms did not have attendants looking for tips.)

The keynote by Dr. George Friedman, who founded the global intelligence firm Stratfor, highlighted the themes from his best-selling book The Next Decade.  He has a stimulating view of what we should consider to be our real “technology” challenges ahead.

We are nearing end of what he called the “European imperialist phase of technology” that began with the telegraph and steam power for ships that let European nations project themselves around the world.  He cited many current uses of relatively old technology.  For example, the automobile was basically created in the 1930’s, but design took over the industry in the 1950’s.  Although there have been countless technological innovations in the auto over the subsequent decades, we still drive cars or trucks that basically look and function like what we could have driven in the 30’s. 

Friedman posits that today universities invent science; government first applies it at tremendous cost; then entrepreneurs take it to consumers.

He says the single most important trend today is the decline in the birthright rate per woman.  A rate of 2.1 is necessary to maintain population, and many countries are already well below that.  The next 50 years will see the world population increase 50%, but in 100 years it will stabilize. In the interim there will be big declines in places like Europe.  He noted that in the US that in 20 years the average age of bearing a first child has risen from 23 to 31, giving us fewer children and less time for them to help out the family.  Our percentage of life in the workforce is decreasing as we spend more time in school and live longer in retirement.  He says our biggest economic problem is those aged 65-80 with degenerative disease, who cares for them, and who pays for that care.  In other words, we are creating a problem by living too long.  (In the abstract we might all buy that, but on a personal level none of us are likely to quit taking our meds.) In the event that this is not solved by Judgment Day tomorrow May 21 as proclaimed on billboards across Texas and California, Friedman calls for technologists to address three issues:

1. biomedical solutions for degenerative diseases
2. materials science and/or something other than binary computing to enable us to build machines to replace skills lost as our labor pool declines
3. new sources of energy, more particularly space based solar collection transmitted back to earth, which become feasible as costs to lift machinery into space become more reasonable

He says that the lower standards of living that will result from not solving these problems are politically unviable.  And, he says we can’t conserve our way of energy problems by greentech measures; the population will be too large, and the only solution is new sources of power.  (Keep driving that V8 SUV and enjoy it!)

Friedman is looking far beyond the Consumer Internet and the IPO of LinkedIn to his definition of technology as what is required to solve the major problems ahead of us.

<photo of Dr. Friedman from Random House>