Generation Reinvention # 10: The Next 20 Years

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Futurists think about the future, and through their well-considered deliberations emerge fascinating scenarios about how our lives may dramatically change. One organization looking at the Boomer future is the Institute for the Future (IFTF).

Several years ago the IFTF identified seven “big stories” that form the basis of Boomer decision making and can help us anticipate future choices and lifestyles.

The seven stories include:

· Extending capacity to live longer and work more vitally into later years (e.g. anti-aging and age mitigation);

· Resequencing traditional life stages (e.g. becoming a first-time father at 58);

· Enlarging self-help in health, housing, and finance (e.g. consumer-driven healthcare);

· Bringing communal lifestyles into contemporary and future contexts (e.g. cohousing communities);

· Creating new kinds of institutions to address aging (e.g. Silverprint Colorado, a statewide initiative to create a strategic plan for aging in Colorado);

· Forming new strategies to generate wealth (e.g. a plethora of new online sites marketing to Boomers, such as VibrantNation.com); and,

· Using global networks to address future problems and opportunities (e.g. medical tourism).

We are joined today by Richard Adler, the architect and leader of this important research study.

Thirty years ago, he was appointed to a position at the Aspen Institute Program on Communications and Society, where he considered the potential of “pay television” to change the economics of TV programming, anticipating subscription networks like HBO that emerged a few years later. He was supported by the National Science Foundation to assess the effects of advertising on children. He later wrote scripts for a PBS series on economics and ended up as the television critic for The Wall Street Journal.

In the early 1980s, when new digital media were emerging, Richard joined the IFTF, a nonprofit think tank in Silicon Valley, where he focused on the emergence of “online services.” In the mid-1980s, at a time when these services were being used by less than one percent of Americans, he was asked to provide a “vision” for the state of the technology in the year 2000. He predicted (correctly) that by 2000, half of all Americans would be online.

Today he continues his work with the Institute for the Future and the Aspen Institute.