Our respondents agreed with the prediction language that the emergence of virtual worlds will foster productivity and connectedness and be an advantage to many, but there was significant dispute among them about whether some level of tech “addictions” would also show up in the general population.
A fourth major finding in this survey was widely noted in press coverage and somewhat overemphasized. Most respondents agreed with a prediction that resistance to the effects of technological change may inspire some acts of violence. Yet, the more significant argument of these respondents about violence was largely ignored in the first wave of coverage, which left an impression, I fear, that our survey found that a notable class of Unabomber types would become an important part of the cultural landscape. The more salient assertion of this group was that most violent struggle in the future will emerge from classic sources: religious ideologies, politics, and economics. The consensus here was that a cohort of technology refuseniks will emerge between now and 2020 and choose not to participate in the digital communications network, but that this group would not necessarily be linked to any major level of violence.
For me, the “money” question in this survey involved this prediction:
As sensing, storage, and communication technologies get cheaper and better, individuals’ public and private lives will become increasingly “transparent” globally. Everything will be more visible to everyone, with good and bad results. Looking at the big picture—at all of the lives affected on the planet in every way possible—this will make the world a better place by the year 2020. The benefits will outweigh the costs.
A fifth major theme of this survey was that there was such sharp and even dispute in the responses to this scenario. Some 46% of survey takers agreed with the prediction, 49% disagreed, and 5% did not respond. There was nearly unanimous feeling that some level of privacy must be retained, but no firm sense of how that would happen. Some argued that new privacy protections would be built into the law.