Keynote Address by Joseph Firmage

	Joseph Firmage, CEO, Project Voyager and Chairman of the International Space Sciences Organization

Thank you all very much. It's an honor and a pleasure to address you this afternoon. This morning's discussions were interesting and engaging, and I hope to be able to continue the intellectual stimulation, but you'll be judge of that.

Let's start out - I've titled my presentation today evolving imagination, because I think that in the midst of such great change, all of our imaginations really do need to evolve, they need to evolve them in interesting ways and stretch both our intellectual faculties and our ethical faculties. I'd like to contextualize this a little bit first, however, and I'd like to contextualize it by framing all the debates of globalization within the, sort of, more ethic trajectory of the evolution of our universe and life on this world.

I'm a student of science and, of course, those of us who studied science know that there are revolutions occurring now in virtually every field of study. In cosmology, there are great debates under way as to the origin of the universe, the prevailing point of view is that the big bang happened fifteen billion years ago and everything came out of a gigantic explosion. Others hold some other interesting views. In astrophysics, we're gaining increasingly coherent views of deep space objects presented to us through Hubbell's eyes in orbit, that are re-writing textbooks almost monthly, it seems and then, of course, as we bring our lenses closer and closer to home, as we look at worlds just next door in Mars, for example, we're discovering amazing new possibilities for life just in our backyard.

Of course, we're all very concerned about one particular discipline of science, which studies ecology and the biological systems that make life possible here. This is the continuation of an ethic trajectory that, a few million years ago, culminated in the rise of sentient primates and, of course, in just the past two thousand years, we've invented the means to record our knowledge, to share it, to repeat it to our children. Of course, this isn't drawn to scale; if was, recorded history would be some microfraction of a pixel on this screen. But this image to me helps to conceptualize and set the stage for type of sweeping imaginations that I'd like to ask you to share with me during my address to you today, and it's the type of imagination that those of us involved in the Future Visions Conference are, in fact, sharing and studying this week.

Let me spend a few moments giving my brief summary of the area in which we live. We have, over the past several decades, made some astonishing discoveries, many of which are still being absorbed by the public. The first, I think, that is most interesting is a physics discovery, made early in this century, and it was the notion that everything that we know, everything that we see, everything that we are, including our own bodies-- we are all made of a light-like force. If you ever remember seeing in school the pictures of atoms as the blue, and green, and red colored balls that are, sort of, stuck together like styrofoam, that's not really a very accurate mental picture, think of it more as a luminance, a monochromatic luminance; shapes that come together in interesting patterns and motions. We are close to a map of the human genome, and we are using it to begin to design forms of life. This is by any measure an awe-inspiring and humbling point in the history and trajectory of our species. Close to my neck of the woods, we have been working in the past several years on the invention of what I would characterize as a species mind, a species brain--the Internet--enabling us to form new groups and it's an infinite domain in which we can share our ideas and through which we can sell our products and services.

It's interesting to note that over the past five years, about fifty billion dollars or so, has been sunk into the ground and lofted into the air in the form of bandwidth. The ability that we will have to transmit information over the next several years is about to explode. What this means essentially is that a period of noise in diversity approaches our eyes. So much information that often times we will feel like we are drowning in it, particularly when we are tasked to respond to it by the taskmasters of economics.

Needless to say, the combination of all these transformations and others are creating profound shifts in geo-politics, economics, religions, and social thinking, in general. Also close to my heart is another discipline of human ascension that, over the past few decades, becomes to create the first primitive canoes that are capable of voyaging out from our particular cosmic shore and visiting other worlds. NASA is the name of the canoe factory today, but one wonders what the real sailing ships may look like one day. Indeed, the space age is less that twenty-thousand days old and a sizable percentage in the physics community believes that transformations are ahead, at least, as profound as the transistor. People often forget that the transistor gave birth to this wonderful new economy, and gave life to Silicon Valley, was an unexpected physics discovery fifty years ago. I don't think the physics discoveries are yet finished.

As we've been hearing about from so many speakers, we are living these changes in real time. All of us can pinch ourselves when we wake up in the morning with this sort of privilege, the opportunity and the fear that comes along with living this kind of transformation. A friend of mine by the name of John Peterson said to me that one particular slide is interesting. This type of transformation could be characterized as a singularity, where you have waves of change that are exponentially more potent and powerful. A set of change that compresses in time, yet stretching in extent, essentially reaching a point of infinity in finite time. These are the kinds of transformations that are implied by comprehending the human genome, understanding the function of proteins or opening the frontier of space.

Let me now focus this lens on a particular domain of inquiry and study that represents my profession and my particular expertise, honed in the school of hard knocks. Let me talk about the network of corporate and individual machines that represent this globalization infrastructure that we've talking about for the past couple of days. Let me describe it in some language that might be a little bit different from the way that you've heard it described elsewhere. In my view, we are building a civilization upon an integrating network of controlled and controlling machines, from Palm Pilots, to web bands, to space stations, to ballistic missles, to bank-both corporate machines and technological devices that are increasingly connected through a nervous system of the Internet.

In my view, it is an ideologically programmed, technologically equipped economy that is leaping up on its feet through us and around us. It's a social organism that is not unlike a hive, with both individual functions and roles, and collective functions and evolution. I've coined my own sort of name for this ideotechnomics-an ideologically informed, technologically scripted macro-economic system. Of course, this isn't a machine necessarily to be frightened of, although it is a machine to be, in some respects, in awe of, as we look at it. It provides us vital support services. It is the infrastructure that protects us, feeds us, clothes us, provide us healthcare and education, and it does this at least in the West mainly, through freely determined occupations. The remarkable quality of capitalism is that it gave us the ability to sort of freely choose how to serve each other through this ideotechnomics macro system.

But, of course, there are some fundamental concerns that we all have. Some of which are conscious and many of which are still largely irresolved and unconscious. Let me describe a few of them for you. Forgive me if I put words in your mouth, but these are thoughts that occur to me and occur to many others that I meet with regularly.

Here are just some basic questions. How will globalization affect my life? Or the life of my children? Should I fear technology? Or love it? Or neither? Or both? Are there any ethical principles inherent in prevailing economic theories or not? How effectively does capitalism confer human rights in accordance with democratic principles? What's the correlation? How close is that correlation? This is a very interesting and important question.

Next question. This is a particularly interesting one for those of us who are engaged in the birth in the new economy, which is frequently hailed as the great democratizing force where intellectual property will replace physical labor and we'll all sort of get rich together. But, there's a very interesting question that has to be answered first. Will the ownership of intellectual capital be more or less democratically distributed than the muscle of manual labor? That's a very important question that we'll help answer whether the digital divide grows or collapses, irrespective of who has access to it.

There's another fairly simple question. Will my salary be determined by how well I compete with ideotechnomics for productivity? Twenty years from now will your salary be measured by how well or how much more you can do than the machine can do in an automated fashion, whether it's intellectual work or manual labor?

And then here's an interesting question at least, I experienced it, because I have these damned devices, you know, I have to carry them with me everywhere. All of us do, it seems, these days. But, what is happening to our time? With these, with the growth of communications technology it almost seems that work can invade our lives more consistently and effectively, making it, of course, more efficient for productivity, but unclear what that does to our personal time.

So, these are really fundamental and interesting questions, at least to me, and then, of course, in the backs of our minds, we always have this sort of voice saying, "Wait a minute, what kind of life are we going to build ultimately? What's the point? What's the end game for all of our economic activity? What's the end game for globalization? What's the end game for technology? If not to try to create some kind of heaven on earth? Some kind of notion of a life that we can imagine but can't yet realize. What are some of the qualities that such a life might offer? Well, will it give and sustain happiness to six plus billion human beings? Whatever globalization does, over the long term it will surely has to be measured by that measure, among others. Will it provide an organic life style to the masses or not? Or will it obliterate the organic life style? Will it be able to preserve rich bio-diversity? Is it possible to evolve ethics into the machines that we use both the corporate ones and the devices? And then back to this question. What about your time? Will you have to work harder and harder and harder because the capacity of ideotechnomics is more and more robust, intellectually and in terms of manual labor?" These are interesting questions.

So, the way I look at it, we sort of have a basic choice and Jim Garrison framed this choice very nicely in his address yesterday evening. Of course, everyone has touched upon this choice in many ways in this conference. We have a couple of directions we could go. We could reverse course and try to reach this sort of notion of a identic existence by de-industrializing the world, becoming less and less dependent upon technological automation for our needs and somehow, someway, try to sort of turn the clock back in some way. Of course, that's not a widely held view, it's a minority view, but it's a view that motivated Seattle, in many ways, in many respects.

There is another view, and that is rather than sort of continuing on a straight course and speed that's driven by the forces I've described, we can evolve our course and make conscious decisions, but make the decisions that are not band-aid decisions, but systemic decisions that actually do change the course of our civilization. Now how would you actually go about doing that?

Well, the ideas that I'm going to share with you from this point forward in the presentation you must consider to be highly speculative. I have no academic degree in economics and, therefore, you should keep the shaker handy. But I do have a lot of experience in the emerging frontier of the new economy and I would like share some of the insights that I've gained in the past few years, today.

Let's study ideotechnomics for a moment and ask ourselves how we might evolve this machine of globalization. As we look at it, this machine is comprised of human beings and technology-we think of human beings, of course, and technology as increasingly connected. As you are aware, the interface points are proliferating rapidly. There are now hundreds of billions of devices that are in the process of being connected to a global nervous system that we interface with on a daily basis. But, let me share with you a quote from a former employer of mine, a former CEO of Novell. He said that, you know when I was vice president Joe, just remember one thing when you're running this group that you have. "Pay for performance, pay only for performance, and pay very, very well." I think that's a fair encapsulation of the way that technology drives our, the evolution of our businesses today. So there's another factor that needs to be placed into this picture, it's the ideology in ideotechnomics. It's monetary policy, valuation models and accounting rules. These are the ideological programs, literally the code that we run our economic system by, and it's these rules, processes and methodologies that both human beings and technology obey in the deference to the quote above- "Pay for performance, pay only for performance, and pay very, very well."

Well, what very, very well means is defined by monetary policy, valuation models and accounting rules. So, it seems to me that an interesting area for examination would be, if we want to evolve the trajectory of globalization and the ideotechnomic infrastructure that supports it, we might look to it's ideology as a possible area for examination.

So, to frame some possible ideas in that respect, let me just drop a sketch of the evolution of ideotechnomics, past, present and future, particularly with each of these, you might consider these speculations, but with respect to the past, for just a moment, to set the stage. In the past, our ideology has been a mish-mash of both state run and free-market economics of all types and varieties, ranging from futile distance of politics and economics merged to, of course, the colossal ideological warfare of the twentieth century between state run Communism and free-market capitalism. In the olden days, of course, it was permissible to arbitrage labor through slavery. So, one of the primary strategies for ideotechnomics 1.0 was, well, let's make slaves and we can make a profit. As far as humans are concerned, property defines the ruling class and craftmanship skills define the upper class. This is, of course, has been the case throughout the late second millennium and, therefore, unskilled labor has been marginalized consistently.

Now, if we sort of continue on with analysis among the technology, technology of the past for ideotechnomics was, in terms of currency, provided by precious metal and paper money, and labor was leveraged with mechanical tools.

Now, let's continue onto to the present. Look at ideotechnomics 2.0, as I call it. Let us look at ideology. Over the past one hundred years, the free-market economic system has succinctly prevailed and, I think, for good reason: there's an awful lot of appeal to the notion of freedom, in every dimension, the notion of productivity rules, so we measure output of goods as services as the success meter for this economic system.

Today, it's no longer possible to arbitrage labor through slavery, but you can come close. You can arbitrage labor through globalization, pick up your factory and move where people cost less money to employ. There are very ambiguous ethics underneath that notion that makes sense to say, well, we can lift a primitive culture out of utter desperate poverty, but the question is well, what are you lifting them into and how far will they be able to rise once they're there? There are both good and not so good answers to those questions.

Still today, property defines the ruling class and, of course, the ruling class defines what property is. In this case, intellectual skills now are defining the upper class and part of that, most of us are part of that, we are relatively more adept than the center of the bell curve of the population in our ability to use our minds to make a living. Still, both skilled and unskilled labor are now being marginalized in the information economy as the feet of ideotechnomics becomes more robotic, and more mechanized, and more powerful, it makes even skilled labor less and less valuable and, therefore, of course, while sort of climbing this ladder that now reaches into intellectual property. Technologically, we've gone from the era of using simple mechanical tools to industrial automation and now even global logistics. This notion that globalization is allowing capital to become independent of geography is a very real notion that is, in part, ordered by the ability to plug into Federal Express.

Fifty years ago, this, I believe, ideotechnomics 2.0 was really born, and it was born to the transistor which has given rise to the entire world of information technology. There are trillions and trillions of these little devices. There are probably billions of them in this room, helping us make decisions. What this has given rise to, of course, are robots, electronic corporations, e-corporations, dot coms, if you will, and even new forms of currency that are quite novel, don't depend on paper anymore.

So, this sounds like a mixed blessing, lots of good features, and there's certainly a few bad. Let's talk about some of the problems before we imagine what future solutions there may be to these problems. Well, I think, one of them, one of the top problems of our present prevailing system is that nothing other than growth of revenue and profit is formally measured in our monetary policy, financial statements and accounting rules. So, questions of whether a given products or services genuinely needed or simply advertised to success, is a fair question. Sustainability. What about the sustainability of the system? Where is that formally measured in our accounting policy? If you think it's really important to make a profit, why is it not really more important to sustain the biosphere? And, if it's really more important to sustain a biosphere, why aren't we measuring it explicitly in our financial statements?

And then, of course, the question of the actual standard of living. Is it rising, for most people? As it's certainly rising for many, I think it's arguable that it's rising for all; but whether that is, in fact, is the sustainable, I'm not sure. Here's an interesting result, of course, is that we have over-capacity in almost every industrial sector. If all we're measuring is growth of revenue and profit, then we have no more sophisticated means of determining what it means to grow a business, well then, it's not surprising that we have an over-capacity, especially as technology makes on machines so much more potent and powerful.

There's a related problem that impacts each of us individually, and I've touched on this a moment before, but here's theoretical explanation, I believe, of why your time seems to be evaporating. Productivity is measured as the output of goods and services with no distinction drawn as input means of labor. So, if we invent a new machine that can do things faster and faster and faster, and we don't distinguish in terms of input, means of labor, well then sure, the fact that past productivity is to use machines, not the human being. Now, ok, that's fine when we're talking about mining coal, maybe, but what about when we're talking about information technology professions? How smart will computers get? You heard the speeches.

Again, it isn't clear that intellectual property will be more democratically distributed under prevailing economic structures, so although it's possible that the digital divide will magically close, and maybe I'm missing something, I haven't seen the model that convinces me that this is so.

And then, society tends to fund it's most important functions, or at least many of it's most important functions, like education, social services, caring for people who are retired, all of us will be retired one day, soon, in the not too distant future, we'd certainly like to be more reassured than we are now, that we'll actually be able to live. We fund these social programs through taxation which is always a battle, of course, between the politicians and everybody else and, therefore, all of these services are funded somewhat begrudgingly.

And then finally, and perhaps as important as anything else, the footprint. The question of footprint. Let's say that somehow we auto-magically, through globalization or any other means, were able to lift six billion human beings out of poverty, and give individuals an income that allowed them to become members of the capitalistic system. What will that do to the footprint of human society? Forget the economics, just what about the resources?

So, these are severe problems, I think, in the current state of affairs in our macroeconomic system. If we just sort of look at the last point in more graphic detail, according to World Watch, in the past 30 years, we've lost some 15 or 16 percent of virgin rain forest and, in the meantime, through electronic commerce and the modernization of the world, the scalability of our consumption is rising. Now, consumption isn't rising geometrically, but it might. If we actually succeeded with globalization, wouldn't it? What will that do to this diagram? So we have to ask ourselves these really sober questions. People say, "Joe, why are you always so depressed? Why don't you just take something for that?" Actually, I'm a profound optimist, and I'll get to the optimistic side of this in just a moment, but if we ignore these issues, we will be bitten by them and we can't, we cannot deny them. We absolutely have to face up to them and look them squarely in the eye. Are we building a machine that is likely to rape earth?

What scale of civilization can our machine support? How do we shift what consumers want to consume through means other than regulation, limitation? How do we dramatically slash the footprints? Not a Band-Aid on it. How do we dramatically cut the footprint? Where's the step function? The order of magnitude change?

Now let me now begin the most speculative part of my address, which talks about some notions for the future. I've broken them into two phases, as I call it, ideotechnomics 3.0 and ideotechnomics 4.0, carrying this versioning notion that's endemic to all of our software jobs.

Let me just try to succinctly state the objectives for ideotechnomics 3.0. Number one, introduce a selection pressure for sustainability to introduce some systemic notion that selects the sustainability into our economic systems. And then, secondly, take first steps to map economic yardsticks closer to actual human happiness. So, let me talk about two specific initiatives that might frame this sort of intermediate step that's called ideotechnomics 2.0. One is called transparent commerce and working with several folks including Jim Krantz and Senator Krantz' son, on this initiative, but it's a very interesting project. Let me describe it briefly.

We are now gifted with the ability to track electrons and atoms with incredible resolution. The transparency of accounting has gone through the roof. We can now instrument the Internet to every gear across the value chain. Well, how about using the transactional transparency to put the footprint on the price tag of everything we consume? A simple iconographic labeling system, which could be made incredibly richer for on-line commerce, in fact, as a motive to go buy things on line so that you can learn about what you're buying and look at the footprint of everything that you buy. It's non-dogmatic, it's non-draconian, it's free-market and it's educational, simultaneously, and now it's actually feasible.

Another idea, a little bit more controversial but, I think, closer to where we have to be, whether it's right or wrong, it's closer to where we have to be, ultimately. How about some kind of notion of a voucher for life? You've heard of this notion of school vouchers and, although I'm definitely on the left side of the political spectrum, I actually happen to think that there's a really interesting idea, but it could be taken to a whole other level.

How about recognizing the value creation inherent in the stewardship of life? Today, if you're a really gifted software entrepreneur, you can go out and invent a hundred thousand lines of code that does something useful out of nothing material except your brain, and in collaboration with markets, you can go create three billion dollars worth of market cap value. In other words, money was created in the process of projecting future value of an innovation. What's the future value of educating a child and why can we not monetize that value in the same way? By creating money supply, just as we would with the innovation of technology. What might this look like? Well you could create a monetizable birthright, cashable only by organizations certified to fulfill it's democratically defined charter, and you could actually fund it through international money supply, instead of taxation. Why not fund education? What's the future market value of an educated citizenry? And why might that not be able to be calculated and financed in ways, a bit more creative than taxation? Of course, there are a lot of criticisms to this, so I'll just touch on a couple of them.

It would be inflationary, Joe, obviously it's going be inflationary, its creating money, because no purchaser is paying for the value. I disagree. I don't think that it need be considered inflationary at all. Why? Though there is not an individually defined customer who is purchasing that value. We are all willing to pay the value in the long run, so why not monetize it conservatively, predicting statistical understanding, in advance? That's exactly what markets do with technology companies every day, and new monies are created in the markets every day.

So, another concern as well, it violates the notion of free markets. I don't think so. I don't think it does. In fact, it seems to me to enable democracy to define new values through which wealth is created. Value processes like education, environmental preservation and, it turns educators and environmentalists into the leaders of a new economy.

So, let me move on from this vision of ideotechnomics 3.0 and talk about the next step. Let me frame the next step by the last question that remains unaddressed, fundamentally unaddressed. In fact, probably exacerbated by this motion. As I said, whatever means we find to lift people out of poverty, what happens to the footprint? In fact, I would go so far as to say we better not lift everybody out of poverty unless we figure out how the hell to control the footprint that results. So that problem remains, and it's the subject of a sketch, at least, for this notion of ideotechnomics 4.0.

And let me summarize the objectives as I did for the previous version. Objective number one, sustainability by design. Sustainability by design. Find the way to dramatically slash the footprint of the system.

Objective number two, create an economy that explicitly measures its enterprises by how little you have to do for them. That's news to us. If we are going to benefit from the automation that technology has given us, how is that going to happen? How is that going to trickle down to the average kid in the twenty-first century? This sounds like an outrageously exotic notion. I don't think it is, but maybe I'm wrong. In any event, it's interesting to think about.

Objective number three, evolve away from our service to its profit model information technology profit models, and toward its service of earth's happiness model. This is only going to happen if we evolve the programming of it, and it should be of no surprise to us that we're sitting here half schizophrenic saying, "Why is the machine doing this, when we want to go there?" Well, we paid it to do that and we paid it very well to do that. So, unless we find a way to pay it very well to help us go that direction, it won't take us there.

Let me read to you a paragraph from a paper that I will be releasing shortly, that attempts to give some more precise language to these objectives, and it's kind of lengthy. I didn't put it up on the slide, but let me just read it for you. I'll give you some of the weird ideas that are circling around in my head.

How might the valuation and accounting models work for organizations within such an economy? a) By formally distinguishing between the productivity of machines and the productivity of human beings, enabling the fiscal practices concerning productivity of machines to diverge from the fiscal practices concerning the productivity of human beings. Let's guarantee forever our ability to distinguish ourselves from the machine of ideotechnomics, and recognize the intrinsically distinctive status of organic life. b) By driving down through automation, leveraging technology, leveraging the hell of out technology. Leveraging down through automation, the human work per capita, required for an excellent collective quality of life and, thus, concentrating the necessary working years of our lives to an ever narrowing band or percentage of the time of our lives, opening the rest for whatever works or passions we would love to pursue. By extending the conflict of a life, of a voucher for life to accommodate an ever-increasing birthright financed by society's capacity to reduce the human work per capita required of a high quality of life.

In other words, we expand the life voucher as our technology allows us to, as we can allow it to work for us. By allowing new rationales to emerge for the existence of a business, such as the notion of membership companies, whose employee and shareholder basis are one and the same, with services to offer internal and external customers and whose balance sheets and income statements account for existing, and new measures of performance. Finally, by explicitly integrating post-capitalist performance measures into commercial valuation paradigms. Formally measuring the success of free-market enterprise in terms of natural sustainability and the individual life freedoms provided by the egalitarian organizational of membership, so that the most successful enterprises wind up being those that can account for the most freedoms gifted to their median constituent.

This would gradually removing the primary focus and the motivation to perpetually enlarge the population of a corporation's constituency - customer base, if you will - and also beginning to shift the guiding force within the evolution of ideotechnomics away from our "voluntary service" of its profit model and toward it's involuntary service of earth's happiness model. If we want a green world and the free time to enjoy it, let's train Adam Smith how to make both equitably, and whether these ideas that I've discussed for you are on the money or not, I will not be able to answer, but whether they're right or not, these general notions, these types of ideas, I think, hit somewhere closer to the mark of the ideas we've got to think about if we want to make globalization actually work and not be an utter catastrophe.

So, let me bring this to a close with an answer to the question of how we tackle this footprint issue. As part of my ideotechnomics 4.0, we're going to depend upon scientific advancements that are only speculative, at present, but are, in fact, the subject of intense aggressive work by several of pioneering organizations. I'd like to take you on a trip of the imagination for just a moment. Let me set it up if I can. It's very hard to conceptualize the modern world with environmental sustainability and a dramatic reduction in the need for subsistence-level work within the wasteful limits of our industrial technology today.

So, imagine a twenty-first century society that discovers a breakthrough in power generation. Essentially, perpetual energy at essentially no cost. As we discovered how to make electricity, when we understood it, since we discovered how to make radio waves when we figured them out. Since we discovered how to cure ourselves, as we figured out how our bodies function-do you think it's reasonable to believe that we'll be able to build machines that can perpetually accelerate stably when we understand how every atom does this all the time? I believe so, and a few very well credentialed pioneering enterprises have the same just as lofty goal-with some very interesting progress. Such knowledge would give us a new source of benign, wasteless energy for virtually every type of machine we have.

Imagine a soccer ball-size electricity source in your basement with no incoming copper wires, no incoming gas and no fuel bill. Imagine limitless conversion of seawater to fresh water. Imagine a green Africa with a vibrant society of human and natural life. Imagine a twenty-first century society that discovers how atoms gravitate together, a profound mystery that remains with us, and invent a new array of transportation platforms, machines whose means of propulsion are as magical to us in appearance as the lifting wing and engine of the 747 would certainly have appeared to Isaac Newton. Imagine a pollution-less atmosphere. Imagine a permanent end to growing snarls of freeway traffic. Imagine a society that recognizes the human right to move about as freely as the goods of this economy across any border, any time. Imagine beautiful organic, open world cities, perhaps beginning with those held closest to our hearts. Imagine a society of 2050 committed and equipped to ensure the ability of parents and grandparents to steward every single child born into this world, gifting every young star with shelter, nourishment, education and a path into the joys of free sentience. Yes, when pigs fly, as many people have told me. We will learn whether pigs will fly, hopefully soon enough, to and from our collective decisions.

If the scientific wonders I've described here are proven impossible, then this, the economy 4.0 I've described, may, in fact, be impossible. But there are indeed very good reasons to believe that these catalysts are more than simply plausible. A dream and a hope, however it's accomplished, in whatever the formula that may actually work, we need to resolve the conflict between economics and life by re-programming economics to serve life. We need to preserve the freedom of markets. We need to enable people to step off the treadmill. We need to find a way to save Africa and our children, and I hope that we can open new frontiers that allow the human imagination to soar once again.

I will close my address by giving this audience a sneak preview of coming attractions. Part of the challenge of breaking into the twenty-first century is to present a way to educate and provide a new type of entertainment that's scientifically and spiritually nourishing to people through the modern technology that we've painstakingly crafted. So, I want to share with you a homepage of a forthcoming portal that is actually just a draft concept, but it will give you the idea. Imagine somewhere around January 1, 2001, a new type of place appearing online that allows every twelve year old and every fifty-two year old with a personal camera across the sweep of vision of the cosmos, and perhaps one day, in the next hundred years, this view of a desktop and you can shift two of you in a vehicle, just perhaps.

Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate your attention today.