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How is the field of economics dealing with technological change?
This is the interesting thing. Part of the thesis in most of my books critiquing the traditional economics is that they missed the most important driving variable in the whole economic process -the evolution of technology and the unfolding of the Industrial Revolution itself. Which is really all about change. Economic theory considers technology as a given. This is why economics, I’ve always said, is backing into the future looking through the rear view mirror.

Both Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Sterling have said that a good futurist is one who can predict the present. Do you agree?
I think that’s a good way of saying it. There’s another thing about being a futurist, and it relates to personal responsibility for the future. In other words, we are all making the future every minute that we live, by way of our collective and individual decisions. If we think of it like that, everybody is really a futurist.

Tell me about your Layer Cake With Icing.
This is one of my earliest diagrams. I use a layer cake as a metaphor for a total productive system of an industrial society. If you can visualize it, the icing on the top is the private sector, which rests on the layer below, the public sector. These top two layers are the only ones economists typically measure. But in my analysis, there are two lower layers that are non-monetized and invisible to economists, but which are really supporting the whole thing. These include the Love Economy - unpaid productive work like raising children and maintaining the household, serving on the school board, do-it-yourself housing, rehab - and Mother Nature, the vast wealth of biodiversity that keeps our air and water clean and provides all the food and fibre and resources we need to sustain life, which go completely uncounted. When an economic system doesn’t take into consideration these two vital lower layers, which support the official money economy, then both the society and ecosystem get kind of cannibalized. Wall Street and the financial community all over the world are really living in a fool’s paradise. (more…)

Multidisciplinary teams of scientists are joining forces to design materials with built in stimulus response. These smart materials can be customized with sensitivities to signals such as heat, light, impact, pulses of electric currents, and motion. While chemists research the realm of the supersmall with the mission to develop enzyme-like tools to construct supersmart self-assembling materials, tissue engineers are building polymer scaffolds that support the growth of human organs and tissues. Robert Langer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Jay Vacanti, from Harvard Medical School, initiated this burgeoning field of tissue engineering and have successfully synthesized new biodegradable polymer systems that have supported the growth of livers, cartilage (nose, ears), and nerves. The cells that are seeded on these structures are smart “natural” materials; they manage to recreate their respective tissue functions. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Scott White studies self-repairing plastics. He is an associate professor in aeronautical and astronautical engineering and takes his design inspiration from the rhinoceros horn. He and a multidisciplinary team of scientists designed a biomimetic polymer with embedded capsules full of “healing” liquid that, upon rupture, self-corrects cracks in plastic and fiberglass. According to White, this self-healing plastic can be used anywhere synthetic polymer is used now, from microchips to the wings on a full-size aircraft.

SELF-TIGHTENING (left). An image sequence of a thermoplastic shape-memory polymer developed by Andreas Lendlein shows the transition from the temporary shape of a straight rod to a self-tightening knot. It has use as a suture that ties itself during minimally invasive surgical procedures.

SELF HEALING (right). An optical microscope image of Scott White’s self-healing plastic. The microcapsules are colored red and the catalyst is black (the dark specs in the image). The healing agent has penetrated through the crack front, the solid red line across the center of the image.

Aerospace engineers and architects, respectively, benefit enormously from the efficiency and versatility of porous gels and flexible films. In the realm of the superlights, less is always more. A material’s lightness is important to consider when designing such things as mobile structures, portable appliances, and fuel-efficient vehicles. With handheld electronic devices and electric cars, superlight lithium batteries are used in place of heavy lead-acid batteries; lightweight materials are especially critical for electric vehicles, since the point with these is to conserve energy. Carbon-fiber materials such as nylon and Kevlar, both light and strong, are commonly used for sporting equipment associated with speed, like car racing and cycling, and in the aerospace industry, where aerogel does most of its work today. Aerogel is as much as 99% air and is typically made out of silica, but it can be made out of a wide variety of materials, including carbon and polymers. According to The Guinness Book of World Records, the latest and lightest versions of aerogel weigh just 1.9 mg/cm3 and are produced by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Although it is the lightest solid on Earth, aerogel is primarily used aboard spacecraft as a collection device for interstellar and cometary dust. Its pores and particles are smaller than the wavelength of light and it has low thermal and sound conductivity. Aerogel is the thermal insulation material of choice for the Warm Electronics Boxes (WEBs) on the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers.

SUPERLIGHT SOLID. Aerogels were developed in the 1930s, but have only recently found practical applications in space. Particles shot into aerogel at high velocities in an experiment leave carrot-shaped track marks (7.12). The insulating properties of aerogel protect the flower from the flame (7.13). A block of aerogel weighing only 2 g can support a brick weighing 2.5 kg (7.14).

Through electron and atomic force microscopes, physicists and chemists are looking to nature to build materials from the bottom up. The impact of this unprecedented development - nanotechnology - has yet to materialize on the macro scale. Nanoscience is the study of systems with nanometer dimensions and the manifestation of Richard Feynman’s big idea more than 40 years ago. According to George M. Whitesides, Mallinckrodt Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University, it is “a contender with genomics for changing the world.” Ever since IBM famously positioned 35 xenon atoms into the form of its corporate logo, it has been widely accepted that we can manipulate matter at the atomic scale. The big question remains: Now that we can move atoms, what will we do with them? Perhaps mimicking biological, not mechanical, systems will lead us to our answer.

NANOTUBES (left). In 1996, Sir Harold Kroto was jointly awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry with Richard Smalley and Robert Curl of Rice University, Texas, for the discovery of C60, which led to the development of carbon nanotubes. Image Courtesy of Kroto.

ATOMIC LOGO (right). The Scanning Tunneling Microscope made it possible for the IBM logo to be spelled out in atoms.

SYNTHETIC OPALS. As computer chips become smaller, their tiny electrical connections are likewise getting smaller, and limits will inevitably be reached. So the search is underway for an entirely new materials system to replace current technologies.

Synthetic opals are a new kind of material that may one day enable faster chips that work entirely with light instead of electricity. This innovation could hold the key to the next generation of ultra-fast computers, and may find applications no one has yet imagined. The synthetic opals shown here are composed of perfectly spherical, nanometre-sized balls of ordinary glass, precisely organized into a close-packed, 3D array. Into this base, scientists engineer “functional defects” such as waveguides that trap the light, enabling it to bend ninety degrees without loss, and creating circuits of light.