Intranets replace offices – check, Basecamp is our corporate headquarters

Networks replace pyramids – check, each of us helps to create everyones to-do lists each week.

Trains replace cars – more like feet, Fedex, and Skype replace cars, because three of five of us live in downtown Vancouver, and the others live off continent.

Dense neighborhoods replace suburbs – see last entry

New social infrastructures evolve – my favorite is the torrent, but the blog and Facebook are potential winners. Which of these technologies will have the longevity of…say, marriage, or, on the dark-side, slavery.

Cheating becomes collaboration – Googledocs and Buzzwords, but where will this leave technologies like Turnitin?

Half of all learning is online – I would add “adult” as a caveat to that statement. I can’t see why we would want to teach children to read online, or tie their shoes.

Education becomes web-based – there are still some things that online education can’t replicate, and to be quite honest I don’t think I want it to. The scouting movement for example, or geology. I have a feeling field schools, and other excursions will be come more common as we move more of our learning into the cloud.

In terms of the nine shifts, in the past 5 years I have gone through 8 of them. The only one that doesn’t work for me personally is the fact that I have moved to the country (a small village) rather than a dense urban neighbourhood. But it is definitely not the suburbs, which Karen and I find deadly.

However, the problem with predicting the long range future is that all exponential upward curves are in danger of becoming S-curves or even sharp peaks because of the occurence of “black swans”. Some of the unpredictable events that might unrail any positive view of the future include the present financial crisis going through a permanent phase change to a collapse in major systems, terrorism going nuclear, or global warming accelerating out of control. Then all projections of the effects of a technology like the Internet become not so important.

We like to think that what we are working on is significant. Survival trumps all when things are on the edge of chaos. The future is likely not going to be anything that we have imagined.