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Joseph N. Pelton
Preparing for
the Next Cyber
Revolution
How Our World Will Be
Radically Transformed
– Again!
Preparing for the Next Cyber Revolution
Joseph N. Pelton
Preparing for the Next Cyber

Revolution
How Our World Will Be Radically
Transformed – Again!
Joseph N. Pelton
International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety
Arlington, VA, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-02136-8 ISBN 978-3-030-02137-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02137-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018961701
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information
storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors
or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims
in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgments
This is a book that took a number of years to develop and evolve into its current
form. Many people helped me to think about how the future is unfolding in today’s
world in such a chaotic and sometimes economic and politically unpredictable way.
This book is not about small themes and issues. Indeed it is about fundamental
issues such as: Can “democratic” values and systems survive the Internet? Can
today’s forms of capitalism and employment survive “super automation”? These
issues demand a great thought and consideration by politicians, economists, tech-
nologists, and indeed everyone in society that values a stable, peaceful, and prosper-
ous world that can escape the scourges of war and suppression of democratic
values.
Colleagues and friends such as Professor Ram Jakhu of Canada, Dr. Scott Madry
of North Carolina, and Dr. Peter Martinez of South Africa, among others have
helped to clarify my thinking on the difficult and challenging topics addressed in
this book. My friend, frequent coauthor, and superb editor Peter Marshall helped
with not only the research, final editing, and structure of this book but also helped
to dissect the critical thinking. Others have helped to inspire key thoughts in this
book through their seminal writings. In this respect, I would particularly like to
thank environmentalist Timothy Morton whose concept of “hyper objects” is a sig-
nificant idea. It helps to explain why coping with climate change, technological
innovation, and super automation is such a difficult problem to cope with in modern
society. With sincerest thanks to all.
Arlington, VA, USA Joseph N. Pelton
v
Contents
1 What Is the Cyber Revolution?�� 1

An Epochal Shift in Human History?�� 1
What Has Changed to Create the Cyber Revolution
That Is Now Unfolding?�� 5
Why Are These Large-Scale Future Threats Suddenly So Urgent?�� 7
Entering the Fourth Wave Economy�� 10
A Quick Tour Guide of the Cyber Revolution �� 12
New Directions�� 14
2 We Need Better Planet Management Skills �� 19
The Three Hyper-Objects That Imperil Our Future�� 21
Taking on the Hyper-Object Challenges to Save the Human Race�� 23
Focusing in on the Major Challenges We Face�� 25
Over Population �� 25
Climate Change�� 26
Converting to a Fourth Wave Economy �� 26
How to Proceed?�� 26
So What About the Fourth Wave?�� 33
Twenty-First Century Perils that Need to Be Closely Monitored�� 37
3 The Prime Drivers of Change �� 43
Exploring the Prime Drivers of Change�� 43
The Exciting New ‘Smart Industries’ That Can Help Save Our Planet �� 45
Mega-Deaths or Giga-Deaths?�� 48
Demographics Is One of the Key Drivers�� 51
Examining All Six Major Drivers and Their Implications
for the Future�� 52
Population Growth and Super-Urbanization�� 55
Climate Change and Unsustainable Growth�� 55
Societal and Political Values of Un-moderated Economic Expansion�� 57
Growth Versus Survival�� 58
vii
viii Contents
Super-Automation and Technological Unemployment�� 58

Unreformed Health Care and Educational Systems�� 59
Life in a Broadband Cybernetic World�� 64
Coping with the Future�� 65
4 Smart Cities, Megacities and Meta-Cities �� 67
Introduction�� 67
The Coming Emphasis on Smart City Technology and Systems�� 68
How Urban Life and Especially Smart Cities Will Be Transformed �� 70
Transportation in the Smart City�� 70
Energy�� 71
Environmental Systems and Climate Change Concerns�� 72
Telecommunications and IT Systems and Government Services�� 73
Utilities�� 74
Education and Health Care�� 75
Smart Urban Planning Systems �� 75
Security, Resiliency, Cybersecurity and First Responders�� 76
Conclusions�� 77
5 Climate Change and Sustainable Development�� 79
Initiatives for Coping with Climate Change and Implementing
Sustainable Development�� 82
Moderating Population Growth �� 83
Phase Out of Carbon-Based Energy Sources�� 86
A New Technology Framework �� 87
Strategies for Developed and Developing Economies�� 89
6 Life in a Cybernetic World�� 93
Welcome to the Cybernetic Revolution �� 93
A Re-imagined World�� 94
The Automated World and Civil Liberties �� 96
Are We Destined to Live the World of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s
Player Piano?�� 97
What Is the Real Threat of Smart Machines That Think Like Humans?�� 99
Are Universal Basic Income (U.B.I.) Payments Coming?�� 101
Can the U. N. Sustainable Development Goals Change the World?�� 102
7 Where Is Technology Leading Us: The Good, the Bad,
and the Ugly�� 105
Alternatives to Progressive Knowledge as Destined
by Technological Man�� 107
Coping with Disruptive but Potentially Breakthrough Technologies
and Concepts�� 111
What Super-Automation Will Offer to an Overcrowded
and Fast-Paced World�� 111
Contents ix
Coping with Cyberattacks and Techno-Terrorists�� 112

Co-existence with Smart Robotics and the Singularity �� 113
The Re-invention of Public Policy for the Fourth Wave Economy�� 114
Empathy, Morality and Ethics�� 117
8 Healthcare and Educational Systems in the Age
of the Cyber Revolution�� 119
Spending Choices for Social Services Versus National Defense
and Infrastructure �� 124
The Coming Revolution in Smart Health Services�� 125
The Future of Educational and Training Systems in Age
of the Cyber Revolution �� 129
9 Political and Economic Reform in the Fourth Wave�� 135
Modern Capitalism: Its Strengths and Weaknesses �� 139
Motivations for Re-inventing and Restructuring Capitalism �� 141
Capitalism, Technological Unemployment and Modern
Cultural Clashes �� 144
An Agenda of Action �� 148
10 Brave New World �� 155
Critical Choices to Cope with the Coming Cyber Revolution�� 158
The Cyber Revolution and Climate Change�� 159
The Cyber Revolution, Family Planning and Overpopulation�� 160
The Cyber Revolution, Super-Automation, and Sustainability
Within the Fourth Wave Economy �� 161
The Cyber Revolution and the Smart City�� 163
The Cyber Revolution and Education, Training and Healthcare �� 164
Economic and Political Reform �� 166
Next Steps�� 167
Conclusion �� 168
Appendix 1: The U. N. Sustainable Development Goals�� 171
ppendix 2: Key Issues of the European General Data Protection

A
Regulation (GDPR)�� 201
Appendix 3: U. S. Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights �� 215
Glossary�� 229
Index�� 235
About the Author
Joseph N. Pelton Ph.D., is the former Dean and

Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the International
Space University. He also is the founder of the Arthur
C. Clarke Foundation and the founding president of the
Society of Satellite Professionals International – now
known as the Space and Satellite Professionals
International (SSPI). Dr. Pelton currently serves on the
Executive Board of the International Association for
the Advancement of Space Safety. He is the Director
Emeritus of the Space and Advanced Communications
Research Institute (SACRI) at George Washington
University where he also served as director of the
accelerated Master’s program in telecommunications
and computers from 1998 to 2004. Previously he
headed the Interdisciplinary Telecommunications
Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr.
Pelton has also served as president of the International
Space Safety Foundation and president of the Global
Legal Information Network (GLIN). Earlier in his
career, he held a number of executive and management
positions at COMSAT and INTELSAT, the global sat-
ellite organization where he was Director of Strategic
Policy.
Dr. Pelton has been a speaker on national media in
the United States (PBS NewsHour, Public Radio’s All
Things Considered, ABC, and CBS) and internation-
ally on BBC, CBC, and France 3. He has spoken before
Congress, the United Nations, and delivered talks in
over 40 countries around the world. His honors include
the Sir Arthur Clarke, International Achievement
Award of the British Interplanetary Society, the Arthur
xi
xii About the Author
C. Clarke Foundation Award, the ICA Educator’s

Award, the ISCe Excellence in Education Award, and
being elected to the International Academy of
Astronautics. Most recently, in 2017, he won the Da
Vinci Award of the International Association for the
Advancement of Space Safety and the Guardian Award
of the Lifeboat Foundation.
Dr. Pelton is a member of the SSPI Hall of Fame,
Fellow of the IAASS, and Associate Fellow of the
AIAA. Pelton is a widely published author with some
50 books written, co-authored or co-edited. His Global
Talk won the Eugene Emme Literature Award of the
International Astronautics Association and was nomi-
nated for a Pulitzer Prize. His most recent books
include The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space
Beckon!, Global Space Governance: An International
Study, and the second edition of The Handbook of
Satellite Applications.
As director of Project SHARE, while Director of
Strategic Policy for INTELSAT, he played a key role in
the launching of the Chinese National TV University
that now is the world’s largest tele-education program.
He received his degrees from the University of Tulsa,
New York University, and Georgetown University,
where he received his doctorate.
Chapter 1
What Is the Cyber Revolution?
Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human

intelligence, leading to The Singularity – technological change
so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of
human history.
Ray Kurzweil, The Law of Accelerating Returns (http://www.
kurzweilai.net)
I really think there are two fundamental paths [for humans]:
One path is we stay on Earth forever, and some eventual
extinction event wipes us out…. The alternative is, become a
spacefaring and multi-planetary species.
Elon Musk (Nick Stockton, “Elon Musk Announces His Plan to
Colonize Mars and Save Humanity” Science, Sept. 27, 2016
https://www.wired.com/2016/09/elon-musk-colonize-mars/)
An Epochal Shift in Human History?
The world as we know it is changing. This is no small change but fundamental

change. These are sea-changes that will alter the course of human history. There are
now truly massive drivers of change afoot. These basic shifts are much larger than
most people comprehend. Certainly, we are not prepared for the “Cyber Revolution”
or transformations that ‘Space 2.0’ can bring about. These capabilities can open the
door to what we call “the Fourth Wave Economy.” In this Fourth Wave Economy
work will be redefined. The Internet will challenge democracy. NewSpace systems
can not only create a new space economy but also totally new capabilities that might
allow us to create new space structures that could allow us to better cope with cli-
mate change or even terraform Mars so that its newly created atmosphere can sus-
tain vegetation and life.
Earning a living will take on new meaning in this Fourth Wave, an economy that
will be circular rather than disposable. New technologies and new social and politi-
cal practices can at least enable us to have a chance to meet the challenges of our
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 1

J. N. Pelton, Preparing for the Next Cyber Revolution,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02137-5_1
2 1 What Is the Cyber Revolution?
times. Oddly enough the drive to cope with the effects of climate change will not
only be our biggest problem but will also represent an opportunity. Coping with
atmospheric change on Earth and perhaps on Mars – could also be one of the largest
drivers of economic growth. Change that once took millennia to occur will now
come to our planet in decades.
Ray Kurzweil has heralded the coming breakthroughs in artificial intelligence a
true mega-driver of change. He has dubbed the movement to create human-like AI
the “Singularity.” Alvin Toffler would likely have called it the force behind the
“Next Wave.” In the author’s book Megacrunch, I suggested that change would be
driven by several forces that include “super automation,” population growth, cli-
mate change, and other accelerators of economic, social and political change. These
accelerators of change will be almost oxymorons. On one hand these breakthroughs,
like super automation, will create huge problems of human employment, compensa-
tion, and the need to put the brakes on human population growth. Yet these same
breakthroughs may prove vital to coping with climate change, coping with the so-
called ‘Sixth Extinction’ and other challenges of the ‘Fourth Wave’ Economy. Thus
technological breakthroughs will be both the ‘yin’ and the ‘yang’ of our future dur-
ing the rest of the twenty-first century.1
Regardless of what we call this next epochal change in human history we can
look forward to fundamental and even radical change in every aspect of our lives.
This is not something looming in the distant future, but something that will unfold
with stunning rapidity within the next few decades. The new Fourth Wave econ-
omy will probably take full effect within the next half century. Disruptions to
democratic values and processes, climate change challenges and disruptions
related to super automation, and over population are indeed occurring now. It will
not be as sudden as the transformation of humanity as presented by Arthur
C. Clarke in his novel Childhood’s End, when all youth in the world in a matter of
days merge into a giant mind meld where they begam functioning together as a
giant global brain. Yet this is the going to be the biggest shift in what people do
with their collective lives that ever before in human history. Changes will include
how we earn a living, how rapidly we procreate, and where and how we live. If we
are lucky we will even stave off the Athropocene disruption of our biosphere that
is spaceship Earth. The question is will humans be smart enough to face the
demands of future and do so within a very short period of time? In terms this vital
condensed period of the Cyber-Revolution time we have to pull off a lot major
changes at an accelerated pace.
It has been 4 million years since the arrival of the Southern Ape Man on Planet
Earth. If we look at this period of 4 million years as what might be called a Cosmic
1
In truth, it turns out that ‘technological fixes’ to human social issues are quite hard to accomplish
and when implemented lack staying power. Automobiles were touted to the London City Council
around 1900 as a fix to massive heaps of horse manure and city pollution. More recently, the noted
economist John Kenneth Galbraith in the 1950s wrote a book that was much celebrated at the time.
It predicted a bright future fueled by technology. This book The Affluent Society that held out so
much hope for the future is today considered an exercise in looking to the future through rose-
colored glasses. (John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, (1958) https://www.goodreads.
com/book/show/41589.The_Affluent_Society)
An Epochal Shift in Human History? 3
Super Month, then every second of this cosmic time represent 2 years. On this
cosmic scale the invention of agriculture comes 1.5 h before midnight of the 30th
day of the month. The Renaissance comes 4 min to midnight, and the Industrial
Revolution is just 2 min shy of midnight. We have less than a minute of Super
Month Time to avoid the sixth extinction, control human population growth, cope
with climate change and transform our political, economic and social systems in a
way that represents a pathway to survival.
In short, we seem ill-prepared for all the changes that will affect all our lives.
This sea-change in how and why we do almost everything will truly be revolution-
ary and change the entire race of Homo sapiens in many diverse ways. We will
become a true space-faring species armed with powerful new technologies
undreamed of only a few years ago. Smart robots will not only take over labors in
agriculture, mining, and manufacturing but also in a rising spectrum of service
occupations – in areas that we today consider to be the domain of humans, such as
accounting, health services, pharmacology, engineering and more.
Why are we so very unprepared for this massive change to our lives? The answer
apparently comes from environmental philosopher Timothy Morton, who invented
the term “hyper-object” in 2007. Morton explained this concept of a hyper-object
and what it meant in a book by that name in 2013. It is a term he used to describe a
concept so large and so “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans”
that we really have a hard time grasping it or its implications for our past, present,
and especially our future.2
The universe, second-generation star systems, climate change, exponential
increase of the human race, cosmic hazards – and for some of our politicians, trigo-
nometry – might be said to fall into the category. Tell most people that an asteroid
will hit Earth and end the human race in another week, and they will react with
alarm and hysteria. Tell them that population growth, climate change, cosmic haz-
ards and other mega-trends will destroy the human race in another 1000 years and
such warnings – despite being substantiated by reams of scientific fact – will have
little positive effect. Such cautionary messages will be discarded without much fur-
ther thought. This type of longer-term warning becomes easy to dismiss by mem-
bers of the general public because it is too far in the future and too massive in scope
to be truly comprehended – to whit a ‘hyper object’.
Far-sighted individuals such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have talked
about what it might take to colonize Mars and why it is vital to do so. Musk is devel-
oping a super rocket known as the Big Falcon Vehicle (BFV) (or Big F….ing
Vehicle) that would, in theory, be able to take a significant number of astronauts to
Mars. Musk has explained his vision of settling Mars and why it will take a colony
of a million people to make such a colony sustainable for the longer term. Other
visionaries have even more ambitious schemes. Arthur Clarke has even envisioned
how ‘von Neumann’ self-replicating machines might, in time, be able to transform
a planet the size of a Jupiter into a star so that it could generate a new solar energy
source for colonies further out from the Sun.
2
Meara Sharma “Why We Can’t Comprehend Climate Change”, Washington Post, April 8, 2018,
p. B-1, B-5.
People have not grasped that we are truly on the technological verge of being
able to create new types of structures in space that could save us from massive solar
storms, or allow an atmosphere to form on Mars, or create a heat pipe that could
pump trapped heat out into the void of outer space. We have yet to realize our poten-
tial or understand the seriousness of the threat we face from dangerous hyper-objects
that threaten our longer term existence. This book is thus both a cautionary tale and
an exploration of the human potential. Our challenges are technological, social,
cultural and political. In the age of the Internet, the political challenges may prove
the largest.
CEO of Planetary Resources, Inc., Peter Diamandis, has teamed with such part-
ners as James Cameron in his efforts to create an asteroid mining company that will
bring new riches to a global economy and would in time bring actual industrial
production systems to outposts in space. Even this author, in his book The New Gold
Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon, has talked about a trillion-dollar space economy
and the unlimited resources that extend beyond the limits of the world we that we
live in. Too often our political leaders have a tough time ‘thinking outside the box.’
Of course, this is not thinking outside of the box but thinking outside of the orb. Our
“box” or “orb” on which we live needs to be seen for what it actually is. Our world
is a 6-sextillion-ton orbital spacecraft that is traveling through space at 100,000 km
or about 66,000 miles an hour.
There is a future potential of a vast new multi-trillion-dollar space economy and
the potential of a space industry that extends beyond the gravity well we dwell
within on Planet Earth. But such a possible future is generally rejected as farfetched
or simply irrelevant. This is because for 99% of all humans, such things are simply
not real. Such flights of fancy, science fiction, or space enthusiast speculations can
be ignored as not being relevant to most people’s everyday lives. The average man
or woman in the street thinks in terms of things that relate to occurrences that hap-
pen a day, a week, or perhaps a year from now.
Really big and massive things that are decades in the future tend to become
‘hyper objects’ and discarded as being too complicated and too remote in time to be
considered a topic for average people. Almost all thoughts about the very long-term
future and especially large-scope subjects that are complex and difficult to under-
stand become what Tim Morton calls a hyper-object. Such ‘science fiction’ does not
relate to the world we live in. For most of us, our world contains mortgage pay-
ments, sports events and news, TV and movies, marriage and divorce, the birth of
kids, trips to the emergency rooms of hospitals or clinics with broken ankles and
other ‘real life’ issues and problems.
But in truth there is today a space and cyberspace revolution afoot. This revolu-
tion, that is producing new technologies, new services and new capabilities, is
reshaping the world we are living in and reconstituting our economies, redefining
the nature of our jobs, and disrupting the way things are done.
This technology-driven revolution that is bringing the Fourth Wave of disruptive
change to the global economy also brings us the opportunity to recognize and
confront the key hyper-object challenges that humanity faces today. These chal-
lenges are, in order of importance: climate change, population growth (especially
What Has Changed to Create the Cyber Revolution That Is Now Unfolding? 5
in terms of megacity vulnerabilities, air and ocean pollution and resource

consumption), cosmic hazards and super-automation, a global employment crisis,
and jobs lost due the coming of the Cyber Revolution. There is, of course, always
the joker in the deck, represented by weapons of mass destruction and potential
world war involving chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
There have always been large-scale and disruptive threats to the world economy
and social and cultural revolutions that humans will seemingly always have to face,
but these hyper-object threats are larger and more profound than those faced in the
past. This latest Cyber Revolution that is coming to your neighborhood soon will be
even bigger in scope and impact than a world war. Perhaps only the Black Death had
an impact on humanity that might be considered comparable in its disruptive force,
but the plague impacted tens of millions of people, while the Cyber Revolution will
impact maybe as many as 10 billion people.
hat Has Changed to Create the Cyber Revolution That Is

W
Now Unfolding?
What has changed? The answer is, almost everything. We just don’t know it yet.
The global population is rising to dangerous levels that might reach 12 billion by
2100. Worldwide vulnerabilities have risen with urbanization that has now reached
53%. This mega-trend might reach 80% urbanization by 2050. Urban infrastructure
is subject to the rising possibility of terrorist attack and natural disasters. One of
these mega-threats that is under-reported is the rising potential of solar storms,
called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). This type of solar storm will, in coming
decades, pose a much greater threat due to current shifts in Earth’s magnetic field.
This natural magnetic shielding currently largely protects us from solar storms, but
the shields are coming down.
Scientists now tell us we have entered the Anthropocene Age, where human
industrialization and population has put us on a pathway to potential global transi-
tions that threaten the viability of our planet as a safe place for human life. These
potential changes are calamitous climate change, global warming, water shortages,
ocean flooding of cities and the destruction of the vital infrastructure on which over
a billion people depend and many trillions of dollars are invested. The threats are
increasingly clear. The key follow-on question is, can our space and cyberspace
technologies and systems provide us the capabilities to reverse climate change and
global warming? Can desalinization plants and water purification systems provide
us the water reserves we need? Can the rise of ocean levels, the intensity of hurri-
canes and typhoons be reduced?
Finally, there is the additional concern of super-automation that raises a new type
of specter looming over global employment. AI, smart robots, and clever algorithms
will upend global employment, but with forethought, can their impact on jobs,
income and fruitful human occupation be minimized? Simple extrapolation of cur-
rent trend lines related to super-automation technologies indicates that almost all
service jobs that exist today will be reduced. This is crucial, since 80% of the jobs
of those that live in economically developed economies are in the service sector.
Most employment projections are concealing or under-reporting the amount of job
loss or job redefinition that will occur.
Bill Gates, who has even proposed putting a tax on smart robots, is one of the few
who has envisioned the scope and scale of the Cyber Revolution. His company,
Microsoft, is one of the major developers of AI systems and has one of the best
overviews of how AI could impact global employment – and in a huge way. As such,
he is also one of the few people who has put his finger on the size and future mag-
nitude of this transition.3
The question is whether economists, technologists and political leaders antici-
pate the degree to which AI drives change. Will they and other leaders move quickly
enough to find new and constructive answers to this massive change? Our unvar-
nished answer at this time is no. The leaders of the world economy are sitting on
their hands and hoping that somehow it will all be okay. This is not an answer. This
is, in fact, a giant cop out, and very soon we could be in deep trouble with very few
answers and even fewer essential reforms. This book is a call for leadership to wake
up and to start taking action.
Almost 30 years ago the author made predictions in his book Future Talk and
e-Sphere: The Rise of the World Wide Mind about the rise of ‘electronic immigrants’
that could result in jobs being exported to other lower wage countries. As the cost
and price of broadband communications and IT services plummeted, this is exactly
what has happened.
Decades later, politicians bemoaned the fact that no one anticipated this problem
with service jobs being shipped overseas. However, there were warnings. Super-
automation and its impact on employment remains a huge problem that economists,
technologists, and political leaders need to address while there is still time.
Technology is creating this issue, but technology can also help to solve it. Yet we
feel so helpless to solve these problems, because they are so huge, it seems best to
simply ignore them.
Our business community and political leaders are not prepared for the threats
that the coming Fourth Wave portends. Yes, big changes are coming, but what can
the individual do about it?
No one seems well positioned to cope with climate change, overpopulation or
super automation. And if the Cyber Revolution is going to create a Fourth Wave
economy, where smart robots and AI algorithms take over a massive number of
service jobs in the future, what could possibly be done about it?
As hinted earlier, the very technologies that constitute super-automation may
also help us cope with these problems. Indeed, this might be a key part of the
solution. It just might be possible that the best hope for the future would be to see
how Fourth Wave systems could help address these problems.
3
Geoff Colvin and Ryan Derousseau, “Bill Gates Proposes a Robot Tax” Fortune, February 22,
2017. http://fortune.com/2017/02/22/bill-gates-proposes-a-robot-tax/
Why Are These Large-Scale Future Threats Suddenly So Urgent? 7
The key thesis of this book is that we just might be able to use hyper-object
threats such as climate change, over population and super automation as a new eco-
nomic opportunity. Oddly enough the problems that confront us might also hide
within them the solution to these problems.
hy Are These Large-Scale Future Threats Suddenly

W
So Urgent?
These problems have become urgent because we live in the ‘Age of Future
Compression.’ New space and cyberspace technologies are exploding onto the
scene with unprecedented speed. The future is coming at us faster and faster. What
was once science fiction is quickly being replaced by science fact and beta-testing
of systems based on space and cyberspace technological reality. We are no longer
just having future-oriented thoughts about space travel or solar power satellites or
smart robots that in coming years will likely become as capable as humans.
IBM’s Watson is here and being applied to medical diagnosis, to smart city plan-
ning, and even to filling out tax returns. We have filings at the International
Telecommunication Union for large-scale low Earth orbit constellations of small
communications satellites and remote sensing. These innovations and much more
are already here or are on the cusp of happening. Plans for new space ventures are
blossoming not only in places like Silicon Valley but also in Toulouse, France, and
Star City outside of Moscow, Russia. Further, remarkable new space ventures are
underway in places like ISRO headquarters in India and the Chinese National Space
Agency as well as with a number of start-up Chinese space companies such as
CASIC that is developing the OneSpace launcher.4
At the 2018 Space 2.0 Conference in San Jose a group known as Orion Span
announced their Aurora One ‘luxury space hotel’ that they suggested might be in
space and operational by 2022. This modular system is projected to start with a
crew of two and with six guests – if they can find paying customers that can afford
$10 million for a 12-day stay in orbit.5 And if this seems too much like vapor-
ware, it should be noted that Bigelow Aerospace has both its Genesis 1 and
Genesis 2 spacehabs already up and flying as beta tests for their space hotel.
Robert Bigelow, who heads Budget Suites hotels on Earth, is hoping to play host
in Earth orbit (Fig. 1.1).
However, ‘Space 2.0’ driven products and services are only a part of the evolving
new economy that are symptomatic of the Fourth Wave economy that is driving
innovation. It is actually the cyberspace industries that are truly driving our future
4
Jeffrey Lin and P.W. Singer, “Watch Out SpaceX: China’s Space Start Up Industry Takes Flight,”
Popular Science, April 22, 2016. https://www.popsci.com/watch-out-spacex-chinas-space-start-
up-industry-takes-flight
5
Maureen O’Hara, “First luxury hotel in space announced”, https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/
aurora-station-luxury-space-hotel/index.html
Fig. 1.1 The mock-up of the Aurora Station space hotel by Orion Span. (Graphic courtesy of
Orion Span)
and the Fourth Wave forward. Just as Space 2.0 is coming out of Silicon Valley so
are new AI algorithms and a myriad of new Internet-based disruptive technologies.
Ray Kurzweil, when he was made director of engineering for Google in 2012,
said that AI algorithms will be “smarter” than humans as early as 2029. He has
defended this seemingly over-ambitious prediction as being far from radical:
Today, I’m pretty much at the median of what AI experts think and the public is kind of with
them…..The public has seen things like Siri [Apple’s voice recognition software that
Kurzweil developed], where you talk to a computer and a ‘computer’ talks back to answer
all your questions. They’ve seen the Google self-driving cars and almost daily new innova-
tions. Predictions of new technologies about amazing new capabilities do not seem to be so
radical any more.6
Ray Kurzweil won the Arthur C. Clarke Innovators award in 2015 and he chatted
about sustainable energy. He said that the cost of photovoltaic cells was decreasing
very rapidly, and that this would allow the amount of solar energy systems to reach
a level of doubling as rapidly as every year in the future. He indicated that these
kinds of breakthroughs in sustainability and green energy would become common-
place when the Singularity was achieved.
What will be so different about the age of the Singularity? Large-scale
employment, wealth, national power and warfare will likely be totally redefined.
We might well see a single Russian multi-billionaire oligarch become not only
one of the world’s most powerful people but one of the world’s most powerful
“pseudo-nations.” Let us repeat that, so that it can sink in completely. In the area
6
Adam Withnall “World’s leading futurologist predicts computers will soon be able to flirt, learn
from experience and even make jokes”, The Independent, February 23, 2014. https://www.inde-
pendent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/robots-will-be-smarter-than-us-all-by-2029-
warns-ai-expert-ray-kurzweil-9147506.html
Why Are These Large-Scale Future Threats Suddenly So Urgent? 9
of super automation and the Singularity, a person can buy artificially intelligent
soldiers, subjects and military power. We did not want to believe that when we
saw a possible future in the movie Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. Yet, such a
future could occur. Perhaps in 20 years, one could invest a few billion dollars and
buy a totally dedicated clone or AI-controlled robotic army that one person or
computer program could totally command.
Such a robotic army of clones, controlled by only one person or a powerful
cadre, could become overnight one of the top hundred military armies in the world –
if not one of the top fifty. The old equations of power based on land area, human
population, or agricultural production are suddenly evaporating into the shadows of
the past.
At a Comsat conference in Washington, DC, in the early 1980s, Arthur C. Clarke
said that the most important invention of the twentieth century was artificial intel-
ligence. At the time the HAL computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey sprang to
mind. None of us at the time, however, had a clue as to what a specter of sufficiently
powerful robotic machines of the future might bring. Today we are just beginning to
think about AI-enabled robots and what they might be able to do. Ultimately, they
can and probably will change every dimension of modern life. We are just beginning
to understand what such a future reality will truly mean for jobs, warfare and power.
Again, the key question is whether these powerful new technologies can be used to
address the biggest challenges that face human society.
Everyone from Isaac Asimov to Elon Musk – and even several of the Terminator
movies – has warned us about a future dominated by AI machines. In most cases
people think of something like “Skynet” or VIKI from the I, Robot movie when they
think of possible coming robotic threats. They envision a future world where the
machines take over the world in order to rule people. They don’t realize that the
much more likely near-term outcome could be a time in which unprincipled people
with money and power create cyber-powered networks and machines to create their
own centers of power and control. The result might be the rise of rogue corporations
or even rogue nations with unbridled cyber-based power. It is this cyber threat from
AI-enabled robotic systems that could constitute a much more real and much nearer
term threat. This is not to dispute that the longer-term threat could come as well.
Ultimately the biggest near-term threat might be not finding creative ways to use
smart machines and AI algorithms to address the collective ‘hyper-object’ threats of
climate change and overpopulation. The most difficult challenge of all might ulti-
mately turn out to be super-automation – in terms of unemployment and social and
economic displacement in society.
There is radical and fundamental change coming. This change, if we are not care-
ful, could have a devastating impact on just about everything. The nature and very
definition of work, education, health care, warfare and even human survival as a
species are going to be swept up in the sea-change we are calling the Fourth Wave.
But this change will be driven not by clone-equipped armies. It will not be driven by
families buying a servant robot to clean their houses and cook their meals. Much of
the fundamental shift in the world economy will be driven by the “NewSpace”
economy and all of the amazing new technologies that are generating a cornucopia
of new capabilities.
Entering the Fourth Wave Economy
Alvin Toffler in his groundbreaking book The Third Wave explained how humans
evolved for millions of years as hunter/gatherer nomads until, about 10,000 years
ago in 8000 b.c., they discovered the advantages of farming and agriculture. With
the planting of seeds and the cultivation of crops they could create towns and cities.
There could be specialization of skills, and new professions blossomed; people
could be warriors, architects, craftsmen, etc. This was the first wave in the evolution
of human civilization.
With the Renaissance there was a burst of new knowledge and the rise of scien-
tific experimentation and engineering techniques. This enabled the birth of the
Industrial Age. At this time 90% of the population of the world worked on the land
as farmers, miners or related labors. Over a period of some 200–300 years the
employment patterns around the world changed. More and more people worked in
factories to produce products and machines. Those machines included tractors, har-
vesters, seeders and plows that allowed the industrialization of farming. Other
machines enabled the mechanization of mining. Today, in industrialized countries,
about 3% of the workforce is engaged in farming or mining. The Industrial Age, or
the Second Wave, lasted from around 1700 up until the middle to latter part of the
twentieth century.
In the 1950s the industrialized plants that made machines and products began to
be automated. These plants could increasingly produce computers, processors and
smart telecommunications and information technology products that could replace
the industrial worker in more and more tasks. Fewer and fewer workers were needed
on assembly lines that were not only automated, but the plants could operate 24 h a
day with software that could direct everything.
The Third Wave, based on a service economy, increased unemployment of indus-
trial workers. Workers on assembly lines hit their employment peak in the 1960s.
There are many workers still in industry today, but more and more their jobs are in
services such as sales, accounting and various forms of planning and management.
Toffler’s books, Future Shock and the Third Wave, and David Bell’s books about the
post-industrial society, were about how the service economy was driving employ-
ment and economic growth.7
The First Wave lasted 10,000 years, the Second Wave 300 years, and the Third
Wave gave birth to the service economy, which has now lasted some 60 years, but
its days seem numbered.
The Fourth Wave will be the age of NewSpace and AI and the new technologies
that they will engender. These will include 3-D printing/additive manufacturing,
sustainable and renewable energy systems, self-aware machines (SAMs) and
intelligent robotic systems, plus a remarkable range of Internet-based applications
that disrupt established industries and services. There will also be a host of other
7
David Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (1973) Basic
Books, New York.
Entering the Fourth Wave Economy 11
developments that include ‘smart’ drones, reusable rocket launchers, on-orbit

services and more. The Fourth Wave will be fueled by new industries and chal-
lenges that will be spawned by the trillion-dollar NewSpace industry and AI sys-
tems and will redefine what people do with their lives, as the meaning of work and
productivity are reinvented.
The presidential election of Donald Trump in the United States, the passage of
Brexit in the UK, the rise of Marine Le Pen’s popularity in France and the shifts of
political allegiances in Eastern Europe are not accidents. In a variety of ways these
‘popular rebellions’ are all fueled by those who see technological innovation and
the impending arrival of the Fourth Wave as a bad thing rather than as a potentially
good thing. They are concerned about the loss of jobs in industrial rust belts that are
visual reminders of the downside of the shift of employment from the Second Wave
to the Third Wave. Voters in the United States and Europe are worried about the
prospect that new technologies and automation could decimate the service jobs of
the Third Wave, on which so many workers depend. They are beginning to fear that
the Fourth Wave economy might well erode all but high-tech jobs as super-
automation advances.
Political leaders will – as they have so many times in the past – ask the stun-
ningly uninformed question: “Well, why didn’t someone warn us this was coming?”
The answer is, of course, that they did, but it was preferable for them to ignore the
“dying canaries” that warned us of technological unemployment, the downsides of
super automation, the hazards of global overpopulation and super urbanization.
Even the consequences of climate change are not fully understood by the electorate,
though many sensed they were going to be a part of a diminished future.
Coal miners, assembly line workers and millions of others who are seeing their
jobs disappearing are scared, angry and confused, and see no hope for the future.
With trends associated with super automation, the future is clearly in a state of tran-
sition. No politicians are going to be able to bring back the lost jobs from the past.
We are indeed entering a new economy that is driven by automation, artificial intel-
ligence, big data, networking, the NewSpace systems and disruptive economic con-
cepts that are centered on education and learning new skills.
However, these populist rabble-rousers are able to stir emotions, especially
against immigrants, and exploit the angst that comes from the rapid economic tran-
sition now so prevalent in today’s world. This means that the modern world is at a
critical crossroads.
Several key trends are happening at the same time:
• New opportunities are opening up as a result of disruptive new technologies,
such as labor-saving devices and self-aware AI, and a wide range of new indus-
tries that can speed the rate of innovation.
• Several key problems are confronting the world economy in tandem. These
include: (i) rapid global population growth and even more rapid urbanization;
(ii) climate change and growing global pollution; (iii) threats from terrorism
(including cyber-terrorism), rogue nations with chemical, bacteriological and
nuclear weapons and religious extremism; (iv) inadequate education and health
care systems; and (v) new economic and employment concerns that arise from
super automation and the Singularity, which will compound job-related and eco-
nomic issues associated with the Fourth Wave economy.
• Political leadership, regardless of their orientation, has been slow to recognize
the complexity of the technological, environmental, economic and demographic
issues that face modern society and the need for fundamental shifts to adjust to a
Fourth Wave world. Instead of reform and basic adjustments to the above prob-
lems, there are emotional appeals to supporting populist agendas and in some
cases extremist appeals to racism or anti-immigrant sentiment. This will only
hinder the possibilities of rational response to current challenges that the Fourth
Wave constitutes.
A Quick Tour Guide of the Cyber Revolution
In the chapters that follow we will present the challenges of the Fourth Wave and
possible strategies, using proactive planning (or futuring) to help us survive a time
of great turmoil and transition – perhaps greater than humankind has faced to date.
In Chap. 2, we will explore hyper-object threats in more depth. This also entails
examining in greater detail the key dimensions of the threats related to overpopula-
tion and the growth of megacities, climate change and pollution-related problems,
and how new capabilities can be applied to the challenges posed by the mega-trends
that could threaten our future. We will first explore the nature of the major hyper-
object challenges to be faced in the next few decades and then possible NewSpace
and cyberspace responses that can help respond to these large-scale problems. This
will examine how we might have to adapt our economic and technological practices
and as well as our industrial production, supply, and market-based systems to meet
the challenges.
As a first step we need to better understand the challenges posed by climate
change, surging demographics, super-urbanization, natural disasters and especially
cosmic hazards, including those that could become more deadly in threatening vital
infrastructure as well as the coming era of super-automation and the Singularity. All
of these forces will reshape our world in powerful ways. Once we grasp the full
scope of the threat, we can begin to find ways to marshal Fourth Wave systems and
technologies to address these so-called hyper-object challenges – politically, eco-
nomically, environmentally, technically, socially and culturally.
In Chap. 3, we will begin to explore how the expanding new space and cyber-
space industries could help us address these various twenty-first century problems
that we have characterized as the Cyber Revolution. These growth industries have
many applications that go beyond coping with major challenges. The prime focus of
this chapter, however, is to examine how these industry innovations can help to
address the problems of overpopulation, overcrowded cities, and climate change
and accommodate the changes that come from super-automation and the Fourth
Wave economy.
A Quick Tour Guide of the Cyber Revolution 13
In Chap. 4, we will explore the potential of smart cities and proactive planning
as a key response mechanism. This means we will explore techniques developed
and tested in modern urban planning and the creation of smart cities, to see how
this can help. We will begin to examine the need for and opportunities presented by
greater cooperative economic and political actions in the smart city era. This is
critical, since 80% of the world’s population will live in an urban environment.
Ironically the growth of the Internet and global social networking may form a valu-
able tool to support proactive planning, but these same capabilities also may also
constitute a major barrier to the use of these techniques within modern
democracies.
In Chap. 5, we consider the challenge of what type of education and health care
systems are best suited to the needs of society in the decades ahead, as the many
diverse demands of the Cyber Revolution become clearer and the challenges more
demanding in terms of coping with a world community under pressure to reform.
In Chap. 6, we will go on to examine the meaning and the impact of the so-called
personal communication revolution and nearly universal broadband networking in
the age of the Cyber Revolution. There will be particular challenges related to living
and thriving in the world of the Internet that will ultimately become the Internet of
Everything. This world of broadband services and omni-present social networking
will create its own unique set of challenges, which will include such issues as the
lack of personal and societal privacy, the invasive nature of ubiquitous automation
and the need to cope with constantly changing technological systems and software
that requires mental agility to adjust to its latest iteration. In this world of universal
Internet and constantly adapting software humans will strive to keep pace with ever
faster and demanding smart machines that never rest. On top of it all will be the
need to cope with information overload.
Chapter 7, the concluding chapter, will provide an overall analysis of the many
twenty-first century challenges that will beset our spaceship planet in the Cyber
Revolution. By the end of the century virtually every aspect of life as we know it
today will have changed. It is essential that we change the ways we cope with cli-
mate change, the ways we seek to control urbanization and population growth, the
ways that we plan our cities, the ways that we provide education and health care, the
way that we share knowledge and use broadband communications and the way we
live and earn an income. This will all change as we share our planet with smart
robots and as the Singularity takes root and alters life on our planet. Some people
feel that this change will be scary and disruptive, and the ‘progress’ that is coming
is really not progress. The future, however, is a one-way gate. What humans may
become will be revealed by the technological future, and we must be ready and
adapt to change. We must find ways to marshal the force and intelligence of high
tech industry to save our planet from overcrowding, climate change and super-
automation. We must not only survive the Cyber Revolution but advance the human
race to the next stage in its evolution. The twenty-first century represents a narrow
and potentially perilous pathway to the future. Let us all hope we can succeed in
creating a better future.
New Directions
The twenty-first century is a time of great transitions. We are going to see massive
changes in the environment, global politics, urban planning, and in economics
and business systems. We will also see massive changes in our demographics,
educational and health programs, and in how we use and invent new technologies;
this will lead to all sorts of institutional reform. The overall result will be massive
changes in how we live, work, procreate and move to becoming a multi-planetary
species.
The challenges are everywhere. We need to cope with the almost explosive tran-
sition from the Third Wave to the Fourth Wave economy that will redefine the nature
of work. If anyone thinks that today’s world is in a state of excessive change, just
wait for the next fifth. The biggest dominoes are yet to fall.
In the 1950s and 1960s the U. S. Agency for International Development (AID)
brought to El Salvador a distance education program that was aimed at schooling
the rural population, and it worked well to educate rural youth. The problem was
that when the newly educated youths graduated from these new educational pro-
grams there were no jobs. The result was revolution. Today Silicon Valley is bring-
ing the world wonderful new technology that includes big data, artificial intelligence,
expert systems, smart robots, wonder drugs and broadband data networking. This is
super-automation. These smart knowledge products and services have brought
about labor-saving systems and a population that lives longer and with many
increasing social benefits. But the purveyors of new cyberspace products and ser-
vices have not brought to the U. S. electorate what they wanted. This was an array
of meaningful and well-paying jobs.
In some ways this mix of super-automation, the challenge of climate change,
overpopulation, rapid urbanization, longer life through improved medical care
and life-long education coupled with a shrinking number of meaningful and well-
paying jobs is a heady mix that is explosive – even dangerous. To many, including
this author, the future is fraught with some considerable peril. We have had a
foretaste of this revolutionary cauldron of frustration in the U. S. 2016 Presidential
election. Both Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left appealed
to sectors of the U. S. electorate that wanted change. Many of the electorate – on
the left and on the right – were frustrated with the status quo. Voters in rural
America perceived that their wants and needs have been overlooked and that tech-
nology or immigrants had taken their jobs. They voted for whom they thought
might serve as a change agent to address their grievances. Voters on the left wanted
to see more social services, free college education and someone that would fight
for them.
In the end, virtually no one got what they wanted or expected in the election. Nor
was the United States unique. The Brexit vote in the United Kingdom was clearly
led by a protest vote against the Common Market and the European Union. The vote
in Germany that weighed heavily against Angela Merkel was a protest vote against
unwanted immigrants.
New Directions 15
The ingredients of change are everywhere. New modes of manufacturing and

production, especially additive manufacturing and 3D printing, are being produced
by the cyberspace industries. There are the NewSpace entrepreneurs and the rise of
what is called by some Space 2.0. In this arena, we see the Silicon Valley innovators
invading the turf of the traditional aerospace industries. Everywhere innovation is
redefining how and why we do things. Everywhere one looks we see cyber-savvy
people re-inventing society via an impressive network of new IT and smart services.
Add new software, and one can re-invent the world of taxi cab services (i.e., Uber
and Lyft). Add software, and Air B&B re-invents the hotel world. Add software, and
the retail industry can be upended (i.e., Amazon and Alibaba). And the revolution is
just beginning. Software and cyber smarts will in time significantly reinvent educa-
tion, health care, political campaigns, vehicle design and manufacturing, and per-
haps even government and governmental services.
The net result is the increasing eroding of jobs as we once knew them and disrup-
tive technologies expanding across the world. The trends lines as a result are askew.
We see populations still expanding, automation expanding, underemployment or
unemployment increasing, the rate of increase for climate change accelerating, and
political cohesion increasingly strained. We see massive changes that are contend-
ing against other. Expanding population is really the worst thing to contemplate as
we look at automation, the Singularity and climate change. Toss into this circum-
stance illegal immigration and streams of refugees from war-torn and gang-infested
countries, and one can see a cocktail for social unrest and increasing political strife.
All the while we see new and brilliant conceived technology being churned out
of Silicon Valley. Of course, Silicon Valley is no longer just in southern California.
It is also in southern India, in research labs and universities in China and has spread
across the world. In Cape Town, South Africa, there is a high-tech company called
New Space that is manufacturing key components for smart cube satellites the size
of a tennis ball canister. In the age of broadband Internet connections advanced
technology can be everywhere.
Disruptive technologies and clever new products and services can bring change
and innovation, but most societies can become politically and economically unsta-
ble if there is too much change and too many people feel that the change that is
occurring is hurting rather than helping them.
What we may find is that democratically governed countries are more fragile
than we had thought to be the case. Democratic governments have been relatively
stable, and economic growth has largely been sustained since the time of the end of
World War II. But a new age of change seems to be coming.
Software developers and artificial intelligence (AI) programmers are busily at
work to replace and largely make redundant what accountants, property appraisers,
bankers, insurance brokers, and a host of other professional service providers now
do for a living. Uber may have generated new jobs for part-time drivers, but its ulti-
mate business model is based on driverless taxis (See Fig. 1.2).
Airbnbs may have provided a new source of income for some households, but its
business model is aimed at undermining the traditional hotel business. Google’s and
Telsa’ driverless cars and vehicles will not only impact taxicab drivers but will
Fig. 1.2 Driverless cars – benefit, bane, or both? (Credit: Internet commons)
eventually take its toll on truck drivers, bus drivers and more. The Space 2.0 indus-
try is likely to create lower cost remote-sensing systems that can replace a wide
range of jobs in law enforcement, urban planning, farming, and environmental pro-
tection. Automated space systems or drones will likely automate many communica-
tions, information or delivery services now carried out by humans.
This is not to attack companies involved in cyberspace services but rather to sug-
gest that they should recognize that their business models are short-sighted. The
first reform in their thinking must be to see how their products and services can ease
the conversion from the Third Wave economy to the Fourth Wave economy. In
doing this analysis they must see how they can also begin to maximize gains for a
global society beset by large-scale challenges. As noted earlier Bill Gates has sug-
gested a tax on robots to aid this transition. Others have focused on providing a
living wage for all people in a society. Yet others have focused on constraints on
population growth and guarantees of education and health services within a highly
automated society.
The bottom line is that there are truly a number of threats ahead that must be
faced. There are at least three challenges or threats to human society that are at the
core of the Cyber Revolution, which must be addressed and solved by the end of the
twenty-first century. These three challenges, mentioned earlier, are so large that they
can accurately be described as the hyper-object threats:
• Overpopulation. This includes concerns for life extension that is increasing
the ranks of the retired workers for decades longer than in the past, and require-
ments of the elderly for medical care and pensioner benefits. There is the
related problem of the world crowding more and more people into megacities
as urbanization rises from 53% to perhaps 80% in the next 50 years. Ultimately
it is the requirement for fewer people when the global population is still soar-
ing upward. One metric that is probably on the optimistic side is that for every
50% increase in human population the chances of survival for the human race
is cut in half.
New Directions 17
• Environmental Damage and Climate Change. There are still increasing

amounts of air and ocean pollution, release of greenhouse gasses into the envi-
ronment, thawing of the icecaps and of the Siberian frozen peat fields, the release
of methane from massive mines and herds of cattle, the continued expansion and
operation of coal-fired energy plants and so on, all accelerating climate change.
With the rise of the global population from 7.5 billion to as much as 12 billion,
there will be more consumption and more pollution. Cities that have pledged to
move toward zero-carbon footprints are to be commended, but if population
growth is not curtailed the problem will continue to grow.
• A Disruptive Transition to a Fourth Wave Economy. The key to making a
non-catastrophic transition to a new economy where super-automation, smart
robots and ultimately the Singularity reduce the labor requirements of humanity
cannot just occur willy-nilly. A global population of 4–5 billion provides much
more genetic diversity than is needed to maintain the gene pool. We need to con-
sider how to use our smart technology, services, tax policies and political leader-
ship to match global population with the need to stabilize climate change trends
and to match labor force needs with available workers.
These are intellectual, technological, sociological, cultural, environmental, and
economic challenges where the wizards of Silicon Valley and leading research cen-
ters around the world can potentially provide new and innovative answers. There is
even sufficient brain-power in these locations that they can likely create new prod-
ucts, services, tax codes, tariff structures and other incentives and penalties that
could help attack these interrelated problems.
Unless these bright, creative minds can come up with new and viable ways for-
ward, the world’s economic, political and environmental peace will be massively
disturbed, if not destroyed. We not only need to stop Earth’s heating up and stop the
build-up of carbon-based greenhouse gases, but we need to reverse these trends and
move toward a shrinking global population. It would be wonderful to find a way to
create profitable new industries to move us toward a solution.
And while we are in the mood to ask for miracles, it is probably reasonable to go
whole hog and ask for more, that is, holistic solutions to the following problems that
are being examined in this book, such as (i) employing smart city planning tech-
niques to cope with the problem of extreme urbanization and the growth of more
and more megacities; (ii) finding new, productive and better approaches to health
care and education; (iii) creating new IT systems, broadband Internet and electronic
and space systems that provide for more than just higher rates of throughput or
information overload to a world already overloaded with too much information, too
many people, too much energy and resource consumption and shrinking opportuni-
ties for meaningful work. The need is to start finding ways to deploy new t echnology
to address the problems rather than to simply increase profits. We have already been
there and done that. Now, in the time of the Cyber Revolution, it is time for some-
thing new.
Millennials, at least in the economically developed world, can expect to live to
be a hundred or more. Yet in a time of expanded life cycles they are also potentially
facing shrinking opportunities for full and effective employment. Today it is coal
miners and factory workers in the Rust Belt of America looking for work. Tomorrow
it will be millions of college educated younger people. The parallels to what hap-
pened in Central America in the 1950s and 1960s should not be overlooked.
The Cyber Revolution and the coming Fourth Wave economy are first and fore-
most a warning. The future is not going to be like the past. We are facing a period of
radical and unprecedented change. This is not a call for a new and modified diet. It
is not a call to be more conscientious about recycling or to buy a Prius or to learn a
new trade or skill in case super-automation happens to take away your current job.
No – this is big time, fundamental change. It is change we are in no way prepared
for, and younger people are set to be the losers – big time indeed.
This book is seriously suggesting that we are facing major changes shaped by
such forces as super-automation that will lead us to ‘the Singularity’ around 2030
and the creation of cyberspace-related industries coupled with systemic loss of tra-
ditional jobs. There will be a continued rise of big data and cybercrime, global
overpopulation, and climate change. These disruptive forces and others will com-
bine to force humans to change – on an epic scale! It will alter our lives, our jobs,
our economic systems, our family planning and practically everything else. We will
cope, adapt and in time – hopefully – prosper. We will make this happen for one
very important reason. That reason is survival.
The coming Fourth Wave economy will hugely impact our political systems,
restructure capitalism, impact our religious beliefs and restructure how we intro-
duce new technology into our industrial systems. And amid all these concerns and
issues that will raise civilian threats and issues related to a new global economic and
social system there are several hyper-objects that lurk as ominous challenges,
largely hidden from the view of not only the general public but many policy mak-
ers – with a head-in-the-sand view of the future – as well.
But always there is hope. This book is not about desolation and despair. It is
ultimately about hope. It seeks to chart a new pathway to tomorrow that allows us
to cope with the many daunting challenges that pose very large challenges to human-
ity’s future.
Chapter 2
We Need Better Planet Management Skills
On a planet of nearly eight billion people with billions more on

the way, natural limits simply don’t mean much.
Erle Ellis, author of Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction
The first thing we should do is to start saying to ourselves and our children: “We live
on a planet that is a spaceship with limited supplies.” The human passengers have to
live off the supplies of our spaceship has grown too large and too rapidly. There
were 800 million people in 1800, 1.8 billion in 1900, and 6.5 billion in 2000. There
will be perhaps as many as 12 billion of us in 2100. We humans are big eaters and
garbage producers. We are starting to be in serious trouble as result of all the
resources we consume. An even larger problem is all the waste that we are produc-
ing in the form of greenhouse gases that we cannot easily offload into space.
Our spaceship travels at amazing speeds of about 100,000 km/h as it circuits the
Sun. Our large spaceship actually travels about a billion km a year in its orbit and
absorbs enormous energy from the Sun in the process. Despite the size of our space-
ship planet, it is still limited in its resources. Earth is destined to sail through a
cosmic wilderness that possesses a number of hazards for humanity. Earth will last
for billions of years to come, but our species chances of survival for that long against
solar storms, potentially hazardous asteroids, human-produced weapons of mass
destruction, or virulent disease and pandemics – not so much.
If our planet were as large as Jupiter, for instance, its gravitational power would
be just starting to be sufficient to overcome the strength of the nuclear forces trapped
inside the planet’s atoms. Such a giant planet would fuse atoms together and thus
begin to morph from being a planet and to becoming a star.
Scientists have figured out that if you start with the mass of an atom and then
increase from this atomic scale with successively larger spheres that grow 10 times
bigger, then 100 times bigger, then a 1000 times bigger – and you keep doing this
36 times – something key finally happens. The mass has now grown hugely in the
size and would be somewhat larger than Jupiter. At this scale the force of gravity is
stronger than the strong nuclear force, and gravitational ‘fusion’ creates a star.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 19

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been, as Mr. Strahan asserts, a sot, a time-server, a toad-eater, a
bad official and a worse friend; but he managed to give a different
impression. Addison’s friends and neighbours found him a modest,
honourable, sweet-tempered gentleman; and Steele, whom he had
affronted, wrote these generous words: “You can seldom get him to
the tavern; but when once he is arrived to his pint, and begins to look
about him, you admire a thousand things in him which before lay
buried.”
This seems to me a singularly pleasant thing to say about
anybody. Were I coveting praise, this is the form I’d like the praise to
take.
The pressure of disparagement, which is one result of the cooling
of our blood after the fever-heat of war, is lowering our enthusiasms,
thinning our sympathies, and giving us nothing very dazzling in the
way of enlightenment. Americans are less critical than Englishmen,
who so value their birthright of free speech that censure of public
men has become a habit, a game of hazard (pulling planks out of the
ship of state), at which long practice has made them perfect. “The
editor of the ‘Morning Post,’” observed Mr. Maurice Hewlett wearily,
“begins his day by wondering whom he shall denounce”; and
opposing editors, as nimble at the fray, match outcry against outcry,
and malice against malignity.
I doubt if any other than an Englishman could have written “The
Mirrors of Downing Street,” and I am sure that, were an American
able to write such a book (which is problematic), it would never occur
to him to think of it, or to brag of it, as a duty. The public actions of
public men are open to discussion; but Mr. Balfour’s personal
selfishness, his parsimony, his indifference to his domestics, are not
matters of general moment. To gossip about these things is to gossip
with tradesmen and servants. To deny to Lord Kitchener “greatness
of mind, greatness of character, and greatness of heart,” is harsh
speaking of the dead; but to tell a gaping world that the woman
“whom he loved hungrily and doggedly, and to whom he proposed
several times, could never bring herself to marry him,” is a
personality which “Town Topics” would scorn. “The Mirrors of
Downing Street” aspired to a moral purpose; but taste is the
guardian of morality. Its delicate and severe dictates define the terms
upon which we may improve the world at the expense of our
neighbour’s character.
The sneaking kindness recommended by Mr. Stevenson is much
harder to come by than the “raptures of moral indignation,” of which
he heard more than he wanted, and which are reverberating through
the world to-day. The pages of history are heavy with moral
indignation. We teach it in our schools, and there are historians like
Macaulay who thunder it rapturously, with never a moment of
misgiving. But here and there, as we step apprehensively into
historic bypaths, we are cheered by patches of sunshine, straight
glimpses into truths which put a more credible, because a more
merciful, construction upon men’s actions, and lighten our burden of
dispraise.
I have often wondered why, with Philippe de Commines as an
avenue of approach, all writers except Scott should deal with Louis
the Eleventh as with a moral monstrosity. Commines is no apologist.
He has a natural desire to speak well of his master; but he reviews
every side of Louis’s character with dispassionate sincerity.
First, as a Catholic: “The king was very liberal to the Church, and,
in some respects, more so than was necessary, for he robbed the
poor to give to the rich. But in this world no one can arrive at
perfection.”
Next, as a husband: “As for ladies, he never meddled with them in
my time; for when I came to his court he lost a son, at whose death
he was greatly afflicted; and he made a vow to God in my presence
never to have intercourse with any other woman than the queen.
And though this was no more than he was bound to do by the
canons of the Church, yet it was much that he should have such self-
command as to persevere firmly in his resolution, considering that
the queen (though an excellent lady in other respects) was not a
princess in whom a man could take any great delight.”
Finally, as a ruler: “The king was naturally kind and indulgent to
persons of mean estate, and hostile to all great men who had no
need of him.... But this I say boldly in his commendation, that in my
whole life I never knew any man so wise in his misfortunes.”
To be brave in misfortune is to be worthy of manhood; to be wise
in misfortune is to conquer fate. We cannot easily or advantageously
regard Louis with affection; but when Commines epitomizes history
in an ejaculation, “Our good master, Louis, whom God pardon!” it
rests our souls to say, “Amen!”
We cannot easily love Swift. The great “professional hater”
frightens us out of the timid regard which we should like—in honour
of English literature—to cherish for his memory. But there is a noble
sentence of Thackeray’s which, if it does not soften our hearts,
cannot fail to clarify our minds, to free us from the stupid, clogging
misapprehension which we confuse with moral distaste. “Through
the storms and tempests of his [Swift’s] furious mind the stars of
religion and love break out in the blue, shining serenely, though
hidden by the driving clouds and maddening hurricane of his life.”
One clear and penetrating note (“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
came”) is worth much careful auditing of accounts.
The picture of John Wilkes drawn by Sir George Otto Trevelyan in
his “Early History of Charles James Fox,” and the picture of Aaron
Burr drawn by Mr. Albert J. Beveridge in his “Life of John Marshall,”
are happy illustrations of unpopular subjects treated with illuminating
kindness. Wilkes was a demagogue and Burr a trouble-maker (the
terms are not necessarily synonymous), and neither of them is a
man whose history is widely or accurately known. Both historians are
swayed by their political passions. An historian without political
passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting. To Trevelyan all
Conservatives were in fault, and all Liberals in the right. Opposition
to George the Third is the acid test he applies to separate gold from
dross. Mr. Beveridge regards the Federalists as the strength, and the
Republicans as the weakness, of the young nation. Thomas
Jefferson is his test, and a man hated and hounded by Jefferson
necessarily wins his support.
Nevertheless, Wilkes and Burr are presented to us by their
sympathizers in a cold north light which softens and conceals
nothing. Men of positive quality, they look best when clearly seen.
“Research and fact are ever in collision with fancy and legend,”
observes Mr. Beveridge soberly; and it is to research and fact that he
trusts to rescue his accomplished filibuster from those unproved
charges which live by virtue of their vagueness. Writers of American
school histories, remembering the duty of moral indignation, have
played havoc with the reputation of Aaron Burr; and American
school-children, if they know him at all, know him as a duellist and a
traitor. They are sure about the duel (it was one of the few facts
firmly established in my own mind after a severe struggle with
American history); but concerning the treason, they are at least as ill-
informed as their elders.
British children do better, perhaps, with John Wilkes. Little
Londoners can gaze at the obelisk which commemorates his
mayoralty, and think of him as a catless Whittington. The slogan
“Wilkes and Liberty” has an attractive ring to all who are not of
Madame Roland’s way of thinking. No man ever gave his partisans
more to defend, or his opponents better chances to attack; and
friends and foes rose repeatedly and fervently to their opportunities.
A century later, Sir George Trevelyan, a friend well worth the having,
reviews the case with wise sincerity, undaunted confidence, a careful
art in the arrangement of his high lights, and a niceness of touch
which wins halfway all readers who love the English language.
Wilkes was as naturally and inevitably in debt as was William
Godwin, and Wilkes’s debts were as naturally and inevitably paid by
some one else as were Godwin’s; but when Trevelyan alludes softly
to his “unambitious standard of solvency,” this sordid detail becomes
unexpectedly pleasurable. So easily are transgressions pardoned, if
they provoke the shadow of a smile.
Lord Rosebery’s “Napoleon: the Last Phase” is a work nobly
conceived and admirably executed; but its impelling motive is an
austere resolve to make what amends a single Englishman can
make for an ungenerous episode in English history. Its sympathy for
a fallen foe bears no likeness to the sympathy which impelled
Théodore de Banville, broken in health and hope by the siege of
Paris, to write a lyric in memory of a young Prussian officer, a mere
boy, who was found dead on the field, with a blood-stained volume of
Pindar in his tunic. Lord Rosebery’s book is written with a proud
sadness, a stern indignation, eminently fitted to its subject; but he is
not so much kind as just. Napoleon is too vast a figure to be
approached with benevolence. It is true, as Mr. Wells asserts, that,
had he been unselfish and conscientious, he would never have
conquered Europe; but only Mr. Wells is prepared to say that a lack
of these qualities won him renown. He shares the lack with Wilhelm
the Second, who has had neither an Austerlitz nor a Waterloo.
There is a wide assortment of unpopular characters whose
company it would be very instructive to keep. They belong to all
ages, countries and creeds. Spain alone offers us three splendid
examples—the Duke of Alva, Cardinal Ximenez, and Philip the
Second. Alva, like the Corsair, possessed one virtue, which was a
more valuable virtue than the Corsair’s, but brings him in less credit,
because the object of his unswerving loyalty and devotion was not a
guileless lady, but a sovereign, less popular, if possible, than himself.
Cardinal Ximenez, soldier, statesman, scholar, priest, ascetic, author
and educator, was also Grand Inquisitor, and this fact alone seems
to linger in the minds of men. That, for his day, he was a moderate,
avails him little. That he made a point of protecting scholars and
professors from the pernicious interference of the Inquisition ought to
avail him a great deal. It might were it better known. There is a play
of Sardou’s in which he is represented as concentrating all the
deadly powers of his office against the knowledge which he most
esteemed. This is the way the drama educates.
And Philip? It would be a big piece of work to win for Philip even a
partial recognition of his moderate merits. The hand of history has
dealt heavily with him, and romance has preyed upon his vitals. In
fact, history and romance are undistinguishable when they give free
play to the moral indignation he inspires. It is not enough to accuse
him of the murder of the son whom he hated (though not more
heartily than George the Second hated the Prince of Wales): they
would have us understand that he probably poisoned the brother
whom he loved. “Don John’s ambitions had become troublesome,
and he ceased to live at an opportune moment for Philip’s peace of
mind,” is the fashion in which Gayarré insinuates his suspicions; and
Gayarré’s narrative—very popular in my youth—was recommended
to the American public by Bancroft, who, I am convinced, never read
it. Had he penetrated to the eleventh page, where Philip is alluded to
as the Christian Tiberius, or to the twentieth, where he is compared
to an Indian idol, he would have known that, whatever the book
might be, it was not history, and that, as an historian, it ill became
him to tell innocent Americans to read it.
But how were they to be better informed? Motley will not even
allow that Philip’s fanatical devotion to his Church was a sincere
devotion. He accuses him of hypocrisy, which is like accusing
Cromwell of levity, or Burke of Jacobinism. Prescott has a fashion of
turning the King’s few amiabilities, as, for example, his tenderness
for his third wife, Isabella of France, into a suggestion of reproach.
“Well would it be for the memory of Philip, could the historian find no
heavier sin to lay to his charge than his treatment of Isabella.” Well
would it be for all of us, could the recording angel lay no heavier
charge to our account than our legitimate affections. The Prince of
Orange, it is true, charged Philip with murdering both wife and son;
but that was merely a political argument. He would as soon have
charged him with the murder of his father, had the Emperor not been
safely isolated at Yuste; and Philip, in return, banned the Prince of
Orange—a brave and wise ruler—as “an enemy of the human race.”
Twenty-five years ago, an Englishman who was by nature
distrustful of popular verdicts, and who had made careful studies of
certain epochs of Spanish history, ventured to paint Philip in fresh
colours. Mr. Martin Hume’s monograph shows us a cultivated
gentleman, with a correct taste in architecture and art, sober,
abstemious, kind to petitioners, loyal and affectionate to his friends,
generous to his soldiers and sailors; a man beloved by his own
household, and reverenced by his subjects, to whom he brought
nothing but misfortune. The book makes melancholy reading,
because Philip’s political sins were also political blunders; his mad
intolerance was a distortion, rather than a rejection, of conscience;
and his inconceivable rigidity left him helpless to face the essential
readjustments of life. “I could not do otherwise than I have done,” he
said with piercing sincerity, “though the world should fall in ruins
around me.”
Now what befell Mr. Hume who wrote history in this fashion, with
no more liking for Philip than for Elizabeth or the Prince of Orange,
but with a natural desire to get within the purlieus of truth? Certain
empty honours were conferred upon him: a degree from Cambridge,
membership in a few societies, the privilege of having some letters
printed after his name. But the University of Glasgow and the
University of Liverpool stoutly refused to give him the chairs of
history and Spanish. He might know more than most men on these
subjects; but they did not want their students exposed to new
impressions. The good old way for them. Mr. Hume, being a reader,
may have recalled in bitterness of spirit the words of the acute and
unemotional Sully, who had scant regard for Catholicism (though the
Huguenots tried him sorely), and none at all for Spain; but who said,
in his balanced, impersonal way, that Philip’s finer qualities, his
patience, piety, fortitude and single-mindedness, were all alike “lost
on the vulgar.”
Lucrezia Borgia is less available for our purpose, because the
imaginary Lucrezia, though not precisely beloved, is more popular in
her way than the real Lucrezia could ever hope to be. “In the matter
of pleasantness,” says Lucian, “truth is far surpassed by falsehood”;
and never has it been more agreeably overshadowed than in this
fragment of Italian history. We really could not bear to lose the
Lucrezia of romance. She has done fatigue duty along every line of
iniquity. She has specialized in all of the seven deadly sins. On
Rossetti’s canvas, in Donizetti’s opera, in Victor Hugo’s play, in
countless poems and stories and novels, she has erred exhaustively
for our entertainment. The image of an attractive young woman
poisoning her supper guests is one which the world will not lightly let
go.
And what is offered in return? Only the dull statements of people
who chanced to know the lady, and who considered her a model wife
and duchess, a little over-anxious about the education of her
numerous children, but kind to the poor, generous to artists, and
pitiful to Jews. “She is graceful, modest, lovable, decorous and
devout,” wrote Johannes Lucas from Rome to Ercole, the old Duke
of Ferrara. “She is beautiful and good, gentle and amiable,” echoed
the Chevalier Bayard years later. Were we less avid for thrills, we
might like to think of this young creature, snatched at twenty-one
from the maelstrom of Rome, where she had been a pawn in the
game of politics, and placed in a secure and splendid home. The
Lucrezia of romance would have found the court of Ferrara
intolerably dull. The Lucrezia of history took to dullness as a duck to
water. She was a sensible, rather than a brilliant woman, fully alive to
the duties and dignities of her position, and well aware that
respectability is a strong card to play in a vastly disreputable world.
There was a time when Robespierre and Marat made a high bid
for unpopularity. Even those who clearly understood the
rehabilitation of man in the French Revolution found little to say for
its chosen instruments, whose purposes were high, but whose
methods were open to reproach. Of late, however, a certain
weariness has been observable in men’s minds when these
reformers are in question, a reluctance to expand with any emotion
where they are concerned. M. Lauzanne is, indeed, by way of
thinking that the elemental Clemenceau closely resembles the
elemental Robespierre; but this is not a serious valuation; it is letting
picturesqueness run away with reason—a habit incidental to
editorship.
The thoroughly modern point of view is that Robespierre and
Marat were ineffective; not without ability in their respective lines, but
unfitted for the parts they played. Marat’s turn of mind was scientific
(our own Benjamin Franklin found him full of promise). Robespierre’s
turn of mind was legal; he would have made an acute and successful
lawyer. The Revolution came along and ruined both these lives, for
which we are expected to be sorry. M. Lauzanne does not go so far
as to say that the Great War ruined Clemenceau’s life. The “Tiger”
was seventy-three when the Germans marched into Belgium. Had
he been content to spend all his years teaching in a girls’ school, he
might (though I am none too sure of it) have been a gentler and a
better man. But France was surely worth the price he paid. A lifeboat
is not expected to have the graceful lines of a gondola.
“Almost everybody,” says Stevenson, “can understand and
sympathize with an admiral, or a prize-fighter”; which genial
sentiment is less contagious now than when it was uttered, thirty
years ago. A new type of admiral has presented itself to the troubled
consciousness of men, a type unknown to Nelson, unsuspected by
Farragut, unsung by Newbolt. In robbing the word of its ancient glory,
Tirpitz has robbed us of an emotion we can ill-afford to lose. “The
traditions of sailors,” says Mr. Shane Leslie, “have been untouched
by the lowering of ideals which has invaded every other class and
profession.” The truth of his words was brought home to readers by
the behaviour of the British merchant marine, peaceful, poorly paid
men, who in the years of peril went out unflinchingly, and as a matter
of course, to meet “their duty and their death.” Many and varied are
the transgressions of seafaring men; but we have hitherto been able
to believe them sound in their nobler parts. We should like to cherish
this simple faith, and, though alienated from prize-fighters by the
narrowness of our civic and social code, to retain our sympathy for
admirals. It cannot be that their fair fame will be forever smirched by
the tactics of a man who ruined the government he served.
The function of criticism is to clear our mental horizon, to get us
within close range of the criticized. It recognizes moral as well as
intellectual issues; but it differentiates them. When Emerson said,
“Goethe can never be dear to men. His is not even the devotion to
pure truth, but to truth for the sake of culture,” he implied that truth,
besides being a better thing than culture, was also a more lovable
thing, which is not the case. It takes temerity to love Goethe; but
there are always men—young, keen, speculative, beauty-loving men
—to whom he is inexpressibly dear because of the vistas he opens,
the thoughts he releases, the “inward freedom” which is all he
claimed to give. It takes no less temerity to love Emerson, and he
meant that it should be so, that we should climb high to reach him.
He is not lovable as Lamb is lovable, and he would not have wanted
to be. A man who all his life repelled unwelcome intimacies had no
desire to surrender his memory to the affection of every idle reader.
It is such a sure thing to appeal from intelligence to the moral
sense, from the trouble involved in understanding to the ease with
which judgment is passed, that critics may be pardoned their
frequent misapprehensions. Problems of conduct are just as
puzzling as problems of intellect. That is why Mr. Stevenson
pronounced a sneaking kindness to be “instructive.” He offered it as
a road to knowledge rather than as a means of enjoyment. Not that
he was unaware of the pleasures which follow in its wake. He knew
the world up and down well enough to be thankful that he had never
lost his taste for bad company.
The Divineness of Discontent
When a distinguished Oxford student told Americans, through the
distinguished medium of Harvard College, that they were “speeding
with invincible optimism down the road to destruction,” they paid him
the formal compliment of listening to, and commenting upon, his
words. They did not go so far as to be disturbed by them, because it
is the nature of men to remain unmoved by prophecies. Only the
Greek chorus—or its leader—paid any heed to Cassandra; and the
folly of Edgar Poe in accepting without demur the reiterated
statement of his raven is apparent to all readers of a much-read
poem. The world has been speeding through the centuries to
destruction, and the end is still remote. Nevertheless, as it is
assuredly not speeding to perfection, the word that chills our
irrational content may do us some small service. It is never believed,
and it is soon forgotten; but for a time it gives us food for thought.
Any one born as long ago as I was must remember that the virtue
most deeply inculcated in our nurseries was content. It had no
spiritual basis to lend it dignity and grace, but was of a Victorian
smugness; though, indeed, it was not Victorian at all, but an
inheritance from those late Georgian days which were the smuggest
known to fame. It was a survival from Hannah More and Jane Taylor,
ladies dissimilar in most respects, but with an equal gift for restricting
the horizon of youth. I don’t remember who wrote the popular story
of the “Discontented Cat” that lived in a cottage on bread and milk
and mice, and that made itself unhappy because a wealthy cat of its
acquaintance was given buttered crumpets for breakfast; but either
Jane Taylor or her sister Ann was responsible for the “Discontented
Pendulum,” which grew tired of ticking in the dark, and, being
reminded that it had a window to look through, retorted very sensibly
that there was no use having a window, if it could not stop a second
to look through it.
The nursery theory of content was built up on the presumption that
you were the favoured child of fortune—or of God—while other, and
no less worthy, children were objects of less kindly solicitude. Miss
Taylor’s “Little Ann” weeps because she sees richly clad ladies
stepping into a coach while she has to walk; whereupon her mother
points out to her a sick and ragged beggar child, whose
“naked feet bleed on the stones,”
and with enviable hardness of heart bids her take comfort in the
sight:
“This poor little beggar is hungry and cold,

No father nor mother has she;
And while you can daily such objects behold,
You ought quite contented to be.”
Hannah More amplified this theory of content to fit all classes and
circumstances. She really did feel concern for her fellow creatures,
for the rural poor upon whom it was not the custom of Church or
State to waste sympathy or help. She refused to believe that British
labourers were “predestined to be ignorant and wicked”—which was
to her credit; but she did, apparently, believe that they were
predestined to be wretchedly poor, and that they should be content
with their poverty. She lived on the fat of the land, and left thirty
thousand pounds when she died; but she held that bare existence
was sufficient for a ploughman. She wrote twenty-four books, which
were twenty-four too many; but she told the ever-admiring
Wilberforce that she permitted “no writing for the poor.” She aspired
to guide the policies and the morals of England; but she was
perturbed by the thought that under-paid artisans should seek to be
“scholars and philosophers,” though they must have stood in more
need of philosophy than she did.
It was Ruskin who jolted his English readers, and some
Americans, out of the selfish complacency which is degenerate
content. It was he who harshly told England, then so prosperous and
powerful, that prosperity and power are not virtues, that they do not
indicate the sanction of the Almighty, or warrant their possessors in
assuming the moral leadership of the world. It was he who assured
the prim girlhood of my day that it was not the petted child of
Providence, and that it had no business to be contented because it
was better off than girlhood elsewhere. “Joy in nothing that
separates you, as by any strange favour, from your fellow creatures,
that exalts you through their degradation, exempts you from their toil,
or indulges you in times of their distress.”
This was a new voice falling upon the attentive ears of youth—a
fresh challenge to its native and impetuous generosity. Perhaps the
beggar’s bare feet were not a legitimate incentive to enjoyment of
our own neat shoes and stockings. Perhaps it was a sick world we
lived in, and the beggar was a symptom of disease. Perhaps when
Emerson (we read Emerson and Carlyle as well as Ruskin) defined
discontent as an infirmity of the will, he was thinking of personal and
petty discontent, as with one’s breakfast or the weather; not with the
discontent which we never dared to call divine, but which we dimly
perceived to have in it some noble attribute of grace. That the bare
existence of a moral law should so exalt a spirit that neither sin nor
sorrow could subdue its gladness was a profundity which the
immature mind could not be expected to grasp.
Time and circumstance lent themselves with extraordinary
graciousness to Emerson’s invincible optimism. It was easier to be a
transcendental philosopher, and much easier to cherish a noble and
a sweet content, before the laying of the Atlantic cable. Emerson
was over sixty when this event took place, and, while he lived, the
wires were used with commendable economy. The morning
newspaper did not bring him a detailed account of the latest Turkish
massacre. The morning mail did not bring him photographs of
starving Russian children. His temperamental composure met with
little to derange it. He abhorred slavery; but until Lincoln forced the
issue, he seldom bent his mind to its consideration. He loved
“potential America”; but he had a happy faculty of disregarding public
affairs. Passionate partisanship, which is the basis of so much
satisfaction and discontent, was alien to his soul. He loved mankind,
but not men; and his avoidance of intimacies saved him much wear
and tear. Mr. Brownell says that he did not care enough about his
friends to discriminate between them, which was the reason he
estimated Alcott so highly.
This immense power of withdrawal, this concentration upon the
things of the spirit, made possible Emerson’s intellectual life. He may
have been, as Santayana says, “impervious to the evidence of evil”;
yet there breaks from his heart an occasional sigh over the low ebb
of the world’s virtue, or an entirely human admission that the hopes
of the morning are followed by the ennui of noon. Sustained by the
supremacy of the moral law, and by a profound and majestic belief in
the invincible justice, the “loaded dice” of God, he sums up in careful
words his modest faith in man: “Hours of sanity and consideration
are always arriving to communities as to individuals, when the truth
is seen, and the martyrs are justified.” Perhaps martyrs foresee the
dawning of this day or ever they come to die; but to those who stand
by and witness their martyrdom, the night seems dark and long.
There is a species of discontent which is more fervently optimistic
than all the cheerfulness the world can boast. It is the discontent of
the passionate and unpractical reformer, who believes, as Shelley
believed, in the perfectibility of the human species, and who thinks,
as Shelley thought, that there is a remedy for every disease of
civilization. To the poet’s dreaming eyes the cure was simple and
sure. Destruction implied for him an automatic reconstruction, a
miraculous survival and rebirth. Uncrown the king, and some noble
prophet or philosopher will guide—not rule—the people. Unfrock the
priest, and the erstwhile congregation will perfect itself in the practice
of virtue. Take the arms from the soldier and the policeman, the cap
and gown from the college president, authority from the judge, and
control from the father. The nations will then be peaceful, the mobs
orderly, the students studious, the criminals virtuous, the children
well-behaved. An indifferent acquaintance with sociology, and a
comprehensive ignorance of biology, made possible these pleasing
illusions. Nor did it occur to Shelley that many men, his equals in
disinterestedness and his superiors in self-restraint, would have
found his reconstructed world an eminently undesirable dwelling-
place.
Two counsels to content stand bravely out from the mass of
contradictory admonitions with which the world’s teachers have
bewildered us. Saint Paul, writing to the Philippians, says simply: “I
have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content”; and
Marcus Aurelius, contemplating the mighty spectacle of life and
death, bids us pass serenely through our little space of time, and end
our journey in content. It is the meeting-point of objective and
subjective consciousness. The Apostle was having a hard time of it.
The things he disciplined himself to accept with content were
tangible things, of an admittedly disagreeable character—hunger
and thirst, stripes and imprisonment. They were not happening to
somebody else; they were happening to him. The Emperor, seeking
refuge from action in thought, steeled himself against the nobleness
of pity no less than against the weakness of complaint. John Stuart
Mill, who did not suffer from enervating softness of heart,
pronounced the wholesale killing of Christians in the reign of Marcus
Aurelius to be one of the world’s great tragedies. It was the outcome,
not only of imperial policy, but of sincere conviction. Therefore
historians have agreed to pass it lightly by. How can a man do better
than follow the dictates of his own conscience, or of his own
judgment, or of whatever directs the mighty ones of earth who make
laws instead of obeying them? But the immensity of pain, the long-
drawn agony involved in this protracted persecution might have
disturbed even a Stoic philosopher passing serenely—though not
harmlessly—through his little space of time.
This brings me to the consideration of one prolific source of
discontent, the habit we have acquired—and cannot let go—of
distressing ourselves over the daily progress of events. The classic
world, “innocent of any essential defeat,” was a pitiless world, too
clear-eyed for illusions, too intelligent for sedatives. The Greeks built
the structure of their lives upon an almost perfect understanding of
all that it offered and denied. The Romans, running an empire and
ruling a world, had much less time for thinking; yet Horace,
observant and acquiescent, undeceived and undisturbed, is the
friend of all the ages. It is not from him, or from any classic author,
that we learn to talk about the fret and fever of living. He would have
held such a phrase to be eminently ill-bred, and unworthy of man’s
estate.
The Middle Ages, immersed in heaving seas of trouble, and lifted
Heaven-ward by great spiritual emotions, had scant breathing-space
for the cultivation of nerves. Men endured life and enjoyed it. Their
endurance and their enjoyment were unimpaired by the violence of
their fellow men, or by the vision of an angry God. Cruelty, which we
cannot bear to read about, and a Hell, which we will not bear to think
about, failed signally to curb the zest with which they lived their days.
“How high the tide of human delight rose in the Middle Ages,” says
Mr. Chesterton significantly, “we know only by the colossal walls they
built to keep it within bounds.” There is no reason to suppose that
Dante, whose fervid faith compassed the redemption of mankind,
disliked his dream of Hell, or that it irked him to consign to it so many
eminent and agreeable people.
The Renaissance gave itself unreservedly to all the pleasures that
could be extracted from the business of living, though there was no
lack of troubles to damp its zeal. It is interesting and instructive to
read the history of a great Italian lady, typical of her day, Isabella
d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua. She was learned, adroit, able,
estimable, and mistress of herself though duchies fell. She danced
serenely at the ball given by the French King at Milan, after he had
ousted her brother-in-law, the Duke Ludovico, and sent him to die a
prisoner at Loches. When Cæsar Borgia snatched Urbino, she
improved the occasion by promptly begging from him two beautiful
statues which she had always coveted, and which had been the
most treasured possessions of Duke Guidobaldo, her relative, and
the husband of her dearest friend. A chilly heart had Isabella when
others came to grief, but a stout one when disaster faced her way. If
the men and women who lived through those highly coloured,
harshly governed days had fretted too persistently over the
misfortunes of others, or had spent their time questioning the moral
intelligibility of life, the Renaissance would have failed of its fruition,
and the world would be a less engaging place for us to live in now.
There is a discontent which is profoundly stimulating, and there is
a discontent which is more wearisome than complacency. Both
spring from a consciousness that the time is out of joint, and both
have a modern background of nerves. “The Education of Henry
Adams” and the “Diaries” of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt are cases in point.
Blunt’s quarrel was with his country, his world, his fellow creatures
and his God—a broad field of dissatisfaction, which was yet too
narrow to embrace himself. Nowhere does he give any token of even
a moderate self-distrust. Britain is an “engine of evil,” because his
party is out of power. “Americans” (in 1900) “are spending fifty
millions a year in slaughtering the Filipinos”—a crude estimate of
work and cost. “The Press is the most complete engine ever
invented for the concealment of historic truth.” “Patriotism is the
virtue of nations in decay.” “The whole white race is revelling openly
in violence, as though it had never pretended to be Christian. God’s
equal curse be on them all.”
“The whole white race,” be it observed. For a time Blunt dreamed
fond dreams of yellow and brown and black supremacy. Europe’s
civilization he esteemed a failure. Christianity had not come up to his
expectations. There remained the civilization of the East, and
Mohammedanism—an amended Mohammedanism, innocent of
sensuality and averse to bloodshed. Filled with this happy hope, the
Englishman set off from Cairo to seek religion in the desert.
Siwah gave him a rude reception. Ragged tribes, ardent but
unregenerate followers of the Prophet, pulled down his tents,
pillaged his luggage, robbed his servants, and knocked him rudely
about. Blunt’s rage at this treatment was like the rage of “Punch’s”
vegetarian who is chased by a bull. “There is no hope to be found in
Islam, and I shall go no further,” is his conclusion. “The less religion
in the world, perhaps the better.”
Humanity and its creeds being thus disposed of, there remained
only the animals to contemplate with satisfaction. “Three quarters of
man’s misery,” says the diary, “comes from pretending to be what he
is not, a separate creation, superior to that of the beasts and birds,
when in reality they are wiser than we are, and infinitely happier.”
This is the kind of thing Walt Whitman used now and then to say,
though neither he nor Sir Wilfrid knew any more about the happiness
of beasts and birds than do the rest of us. But that brave old hopeful,
Whitman, would have laughed his loudest over Blunt’s final analysis
of the situation: “All the world would be a paradise in twenty years if
man could be shut out.” A paradise already imaged by Lord Holland
and the poet Gray:
“Owls would have hooted in Saint Peter’s choir,

And foxes stunk and littered in Saint Paul’s.”
To turn from these pages of pettish and puerile complaint to the

deep-seated discontent of Henry Adams is to reënter the world of the
intellect. Mark Pattison confessed that he could not take a train
without thinking how much better the time-table might have been
planned. It was an unhappy twist of mind; but the Rector of Lincoln
utilized his obtrusive critical faculties by applying them to his own
labours, and scourging himself to greater effort. So did Henry
Adams, though even the greater effort left him profoundly
dissatisfied. He was unelated by success, and he could not reconcile
himself to that degree of failure which is the common portion of
mankind. His criticisms are lucid, balanced, enlightening, and
occasionally prophetic, as when he comments on the Irishman’s
political passion for obstructing even himself, and on the perilous
race-inertia of Russia. “Could inertia on such a scale be broken up,
or take new scale?” he asks dismayed; and we read the answer to-
day. A minority ruling with iron hand; a majority accepting what
comes to them, as they accept day and night and the seasons.
If there is not an understatement in the five hundred pages of the
“Education,” which thereby loses the power of persuasion, there is
everywhere an appeal to man’s austere equity and disciplined
reason. Adams was not in love with reason. He said that the mind
resorted to it for want of training, and he admitted that he had never
met a perfectly trained mind. But it was the very essence of reason
which made him see that friends were good to him, and the world not
unkind; that the loveliness of the country about Washington gave him
pleasure, even when he found “a personal grief in every tree”; and
that a self-respecting man refrains from finding wordy fault with the
conditions under which he lives. He did not believe, with
Wordsworth, that nature is a holy and beneficent thing, or with Blake,
that nature is a wicked and malevolent thing; but he knew better than
to put up a quarrel with an invincible antagonist. He erred in
supposing that other thoughtful men were as discontented as he
was, or that disgust with the methods of Congress corroded their
hours of leisure; but he expressed clearly and with moderation his
unwillingness to cherish “complete and archaic deceits,” or to live in
a world of illusions. His summing up is the summing up of another
austere and uncompromising thinker, Santayana, when confronted
by the same problem: “A spirit with any honour is not willing to live
except in its own way; a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to
live at all.”
As our eagerness and our reluctance are not controlling factors in
the situation, it is unwise to stress them too heavily. Yet we must
think, at least some of us must; and it is well to think out as clearly as
we can, not the relative advantages of content and discontent—a
question which briskly answers itself—but the relative rightness.
Emerson believed in the essential goodness of life, in the admirable
law of compensation. Santayana believes that life has evil for its
condition, and is for that reason profoundly sad and equivocal. He
sees in the sensuous enjoyment of the Greek, the industrial
optimism of the American, only a “thin disguise for despair.” Yet
Emerson and Santayana reach the same general conclusion. The
first says that hours of sanity and consideration come to
communities as to individuals, “when the truth is seen, and the
martyrs are justified”; the second that “people in all ages sometimes
achieve what they have set their hearts on,” and that, if our will and
conduct were better disciplined, “contentment would be more
frequent and more massive.”
It is hard to think of these years of grace as a chosen period of
sanity and consideration; and the hearts of the Turk and the
Muscovite are set on things which do not make for the massive
contentment of the world. The orderly processes of civilization have
been so wrenched and shattered that readjustment is blocked at
some point in every land, in our own no less than in others. There
are those who say that the World War went beyond the bounds of
human endurance; and that the peculiar horror engendered by
indecent methods of attack—poison-gases, high explosives and
corrosive fluids—has dimmed the faith and broken the spirit of men.
But Attila managed to turn a fair proportion of the civilized world into
wasteland, with only man-power as a destructive force. Europe to-
day is by comparison unscathed, and there are kinsfolk dwelling
upon peaceful continents to whom she may legitimately call for aid.
Legitimately, unless our content is like the content extolled by Little
Ann’s mother; unless our shoes and stockings are indicative of God’s
meaningless partiality, and unless the contemplation of our
neighbour’s bleeding feet enhances our pious satisfaction. “I doubt,”
says Mr. Wells sourly, “if it would make any very serious difference
for some time in the ordinary daily life of Kansas City, if all Europe
were reduced to a desert in the next five years.” Why Kansas City
should have been chosen as the symbol of unconcern, I do not
know; but space has a deadening influence on pity as on fear. The
farther we travel from the Atlantic coast, the more tepid is the
sympathy for injured France. The farther we travel from the Pacific
coast, the fainter is the prejudice against Japan.
It may be possible to construct a state in which men will be content
with their own lot, if they be reasonable, and with their neighbours’
lot, if they be generous. It is manifestly impossible to construct a
world on this principle. Therefore there will always be a latent grief in
the nobler part of man’s soul. Therefore there will always be a
content as impious as the discontent from which Pope prayed to be
absolved.
The unbroken cheerfulness, no less than the personal neatness,
of the British prisoners in the World War astounded the more
temperamental Germans. Long, long ago it was said of England:
“Even our condemned persons doe goe cheerfullie to their deths, for
our nature is free, stout, hautie, prodigal of life and blood.” This
heroic strain, tempered to an endurance which is free from the waste
of emotionalism, produces the outward semblance and the inward
self-respect of a content which circumstances render impossible. It
keeps the soul of man immune from whatever degradation his body
may be suffering. It saves the land that bred him from the stigma of
defeat. It is remotely and humanly akin to the tranquillity of the great
Apostle in a Roman prison. It is wholly alien to the sin of smugness
which has crept in among the domestic virtues, and rendered them
more distasteful than ever to austere thinkers, and to those lonely,
generous souls who starve in the midst of plenty.
There is a curious and suggestive paragraph in Mr. Chesterton’s
volume of loose ends, entitled “What I Saw in America.” It arrests our
attention because, for once, the writer seems to be groping for a
thought instead of juggling with one. He recognizes a keen and
charming quality in American women, and is disturbed because he
also recognizes a recoil from it in his own spirit. This is manifestly
perplexing. “To complain of people for being brave and bright and
kind and intelligent may not unreasonably appear unreasonable. And
yet there is something in the background that can be expressed only
by a symbol; something that is not shallowness, but a neglect of the
subconscious, and the vaguer and slower impulses; something that
can be missed amid all that laughter and light, under those starry
candelabra of the ideals of the happy virtues. Sometimes it came
over me in a wordless wave that I should like to see a sulky woman.
How she would walk in beauty like the night, and reveal more silent
spaces full of older stars! These things cannot be conveyed in their
delicate proportion, even in the most large and elusive terms.”
Baudelaire has conveyed them measurably in four words:
“Sois belle! Sois triste!”
Yet neither “sulky” nor “triste” is an adjective suggesting with

perfect felicity the undercurrent of discontent which lends worth to
courage and charm to intelligence. Back of all our lives is the sombre
setting of a world ill at ease, and beset by perils. Darkening all our
days is the gathering cloud of ill-will, the ugly hatred of man for man,
which is the perpetual threat to progress. We Americans may not be
so invincibly optimistic as our critics think us, and we may not yet be
“speeding” down the road to destruction, as our critics painfully
foretell; but we are part of an endangered civilization, and cannot
hold up our end, unsupported by Europe. An American woman,
cautiously investing her money in government bonds, said to her
man of business: “These at least are perfectly secure?” “I should not
say that,” was the guarded reply; “but they will be the last things to
go.”
A few years ago there was a period that saw the workingmen and
working-women of the United States engaged in three hundred and
sixty-five strikes—one for every day of the year—and all of them on
at once. Something seems lacking in the equity of our industrial life.
The “Current History” of the New York “Times” is responsible for the
statement that eighty-five thousand men and women met their
deaths by violence in the United States during the past decade.
Something seems lacking in our programme of peace.
Can it be that Mr. Wells is right when he says that the American
believes in peace, but feels under no passionate urgency to organize
it? Does our notable indifference to the history of the past mean that
we are unconcerned about the history of the present? Two things are
sure. We cannot be nobly content with our own prosperity, unless its
service to the world is made manifest; grace before meat is not
enough to bless the food we eat. And we cannot be nobly content
with our unbroken strength, with the sublimity of size and numbers,
unless there is something correspondingly sublime in our leadership
of the wounded nations. Our allies, who saved us and whom we
saved, face the immediate menace of poverty and assault. They face
it with a slowly gathered courage which we honour to-day, and may
be compelled to emulate to-morrow. “The fact that fear is rational,”
says Mr. Brownell, “is what makes fortitude divine.”
Allies
“Friendship between princes,” observed the wise Philippe de
Commines, “is not of long duration.” He would have said as much of
friendship between republics, had he ever conceived of
representative government. What he knew was that the friendships
of men, built on affection and esteem, outlast time; and that the
friendships of nations, built on common interests, cannot survive the
mutability of those interests, which are always liable to deflection. He
had proof, if proof were needed, in the invasion of France by Edward
the Fourth under the pressure of an alliance with Charles of
Burgundy. It was one of the urbane invasions common to that
gentlemanly age. “Before the King of England embarked from Dover,
he sent one of his heralds named Garter, a native of Normandy, to
the King of France, with a letter of defiance couched in language so
elegant and so polite that I can scarcely believe any Englishman
wrote it.”
This was a happy beginning, and the end was no less felicitous.
When Edward landed in France he found that Louis the Eleventh,
who hated fighting, was all for peace; and that the Duke of Burgundy,
who generally fought the wrong people at the wrong time, was in no
condition for war. Therefore he patched up a profitable truce, and
went back to England, a wiser and a richer man, on better terms with
his enemy than with his ally. “For where our advantage lies, there
also is our heart.”
The peculiar irritation engendered by what Americans discreetly
designate as “entangling alliances” was forced upon my perception
in early youth, when I read the letters of a British officer engaged in
fighting the Ashanti. The war, if it may be so termed, was fought in
1873, and the letters were published in “Blackwood’s Magazine.”
The Ashanti had invaded Fantiland, then under a British
protectorate, and the troops commanded by Sir Garnet Wolseley
were presumably defending their friends. This particular officer
expressed his sense of the situation in a fervid hope that when the
Ashanti were beaten, as they deserved to be, the English would then
come to speedy terms with them, “and drive these brutes of Fanti off
the map.”
It is a sentiment which repeats itself in more measured terms on
every page of history. The series of “Coalitions” formed against
Napoleon were rich in super-comic, no less than in super-tragic
elements; and it was well for those statesmen whose reason and
whose tempers were so controlled that they were able to perceive
the humours of this giant game of pussy-in-the-corner. A mutual fear
of France drew the Allies together; a mutual distrust of one another
pulled them apart. Sir Gilbert Elliot, afterwards Lord Minto,
endeavoured from the beginning to make England understand that
Austria would prefer her own interests to the interests of the
Coalition, and that it was not unnatural that she should do so. The
situation, as he saw it, was something like this:
“Austria: ‘If I am to dance to your tune, you must pay the piper.’
“England: ‘So long as I lead the figure, and you renounce a pas
seul.’”
Unfortunately the allurements of a pas seul were too strong to be
anywhere resisted. Prices grew stiffer and stiffer, armies melted
away when the time for action neared. Britain, always victorious at
sea, paid out large sums for small returns on land. Her position was
briefly summed up by Sir Hugh Elliot—more brilliant and less astute
than his brother—at the hostile Court of Prussia. Frederick the Great,
overhearing the pious ejaculation with which the Englishman greeted
the arrival of a satisfactory dispatch from Sir Eyre Coote, said to him
acidly: “I was not aware that God was also one of your allies.” “The
only one, Sire, whom we do not finance,” was the lightning retort.
One more circumstance deserves to be noted as both familiar and
consolatory. Napoleon’s most formidable purpose was to empty
England’s purse by waging a commercial war. When he forbade her
exports to the countries he fancied he controlled, he was promised
implicit obedience. In March, 1801, Lord Minto wrote serenely to
Lord Grenville: “The trade of England and the necessities of the
Continent will find each other out in defiance of prohibitions. Not one
of the confederates will be true to the gang, and I have little doubt of
our trade penetrating into France itself, and thriving in Paris.”—
Which it did.
The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines
us to think hopefully of our own times. The despairing tone of
contemporary writers would seem to indicate that the allied nations
that fought and won the Great War have fallen from some high
pinnacle they never reached to an abysmal depth they have never
sounded. When Dean Inge recorded in “The Contemporary Review”
his personal conviction that the war had been “a ghastly and
unnecessary blunder, which need not have happened, and ought not
to have happened,” this casual statement was taken up and
repeated on both sides of the Atlantic, after the exasperating fashion
in which a Greek chorus takes up and repeats in strophe and
antistrophe the most depressing sentiment of the play. And to what
purpose? Did any sane man ever doubt that Austria’s brutal
ultimatum to Serbia was a ghastly and unnecessary blunder? Did
any sane man ever doubt that Germany’s invasion of Belgium was a
ghastly and unnecessary blunder? But if Dean Inge or his
sympathizers knew of any argument, save that of arms, by which the
Central Powers could have been convinced that they were
blundering, and persuaded to retrieve their blunder, so that what
ought not to have happened need not have happened, it is a pity that
this enlightenment was not vouchsafed to an imperilled world.
It is possible for two boys to build up a friendship on the basis of a
clean fight. It is possible for two nations to build up a good
understanding on the basis of a clean fight. The relations between
Great Britain and South Africa constitute a case in point. Germany’s
fighting was unclean from start to finish. Therefore, while there are
many to feel commiseration for her, there are none to do her honour.
The duration of the war has little to do with this strong sentiment of
disesteem. Had it lasted four months instead of four years, the deeds
done in Belgium and in France would have sterilized the seeds of
friendship in the minds of all who remembered them. To an abnormal
sense of superiority, Germany added an abnormal lack of humour,
which made her regard all resistance as an unjustifiable and
unpardonable affront. Her resentment that Belgians should have
presumed to defend their country was like the resentment of that
famous marauder, the Earl of Cassillis, when Allan Stewart refused
to be tortured into signing away his patrimony. “You are the most
obstinate man I ever saw to oblige me to use you thus,” said the
justly indignant Earl. “I never thought to have treated any one as
your stubbornness has made me treat you.”
The emotional ebb-tide which followed the signing of the armistice
was too natural to be deplored, save that it gave to obstructionists
their chance to decry the matchless heroisms of the war. No people
can be heroic over the problem of paying debts out of an empty
treasury. Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to
selfishness. Bargaining is essential to the life of the world; but
nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process. If it were
given to debtors to love their creditors, there would have been no
persecution of the Jews. If it were given to creditors to love their
debtors, there would be no poverty on earth. That all the nations,
now presumably on friendly terms, should be following their own
interests would seem to most of us the normal thing it is, if they did
not so persistently affect to be amazed and grieved at one another’s
behaviour, and if the mischief-makers of every land were not actively
engaged in widening breaches into chasms.
It is inevitable and logical that the men who were pacifists when
the word had a sinister meaning should heartily detest their
countries’ allies who helped them win the war. The English “Nation
and Athenæum” wrote of France in 1922 as it might have written—
but did not—of Germany in 1914. Poincaré it likened to Shylock,
France to a butcher eager for the shambles. “French militarism at
work in the Rhineland is a lash to every evil passion.” “Europe is kept
in social and political disorder by the sheer selfishness of France.”
“There was a France of the mind. Victory killed it, and a long slow
renovation of the soul must precede its resurrection.”
Like the ingenuous Mr. Pepys, the “Nation” does “just naturally
hate the French,” and takes it hard that the world should persistently
regard them as a valuable asset to civilization. The concentrated
nationalism which held Verdun now expresses itself in a steely
resolution to hold France, and to recover for her out of the wreckage
of Europe the material aid of which she stands in need. Coöperation
is a good word and a good thing. To a Frenchman it means primarily
the interest of his own country. What else does it mean to any of us?
Britain’s policy of conciliation, our policy of aloofness, Germany’s
bargaining, and Russia’s giant bluff, all have the same significance.
“Be not deceived! Nothing is so dear to any creature as his profit,”
said Epictetus, who, having stript his own soul bare of desires, was
correspondingly ready to forgive the acquisitive instincts of others.
Mr. Edward Martin, writing very lucidly and very sympathetically of
the French, admits that their conception of their duty to the world “is
to defend France, keep her functioning, and make her powerful and
prosperous.” It sounds narrow, and practical, and arrogant. It also
sounds familiar. France feels herself to be intellectually and
artistically a thing of value. The best service she can render to the
world is her own preservation. How does America feel? The very
week that Mr. Martin offered his interpretation of Gallic nationalism, a
writer in the “Review of Reviews” (New York), after asserting with
indescribable smugness that Americans “have been trained to an
attitude of philanthropy hardly known in other countries,” proceeded
to illustrate this attitude by defending high tariffs, restricted
immigration, and other comforting pieces of legislation. “Our best
service to the world,” he explained, “lies in maintaining our national
life and character.”
This is just what France thinks, only her most zealous sons forbear
to define prudence as philanthropy. They believe that the world is the
better for what they have to give; but they know that it is not for the
world’s sake that they so keenly desire to be in a position to give it.
They are profoundly sentimental, but their sentiment is all for la
patrie. Internationally they are practical to the point of hardness, and
they see no reason why they should be otherwise. There is for them
no pressing necessity to assume that they love their neighbours as
themselves.
It is different with Americans in whom idealism and materialism
dispute every inch of the ground. A Texan professor, sent by the
American Peace Commission to investigate conditions in Germany,
published in “The North American Review,” May, 1922, a paper on
“American Ideals and Traditions,” which was widely quoted as
embodying a clear and fervid spirit of hopefulness, much needed in
these disillusioned days. The writer took the high ground that
Americans were the first people in the world “to make the spirit of
disinterested human service the measure of a nation as well as of a
man. What is now termed American humanitarianism is but the
American spirit of philanthropy at home, translated into international
relations.” This “simple historical fact” is the key to all our actions.
“The entrance of America into the Great War was not a species of
interruption in the normal flow of its idealism; but was the irresistible
on-pressing of the great current of our ‘will to human service.’”
One wonders if this particular idealist remembers what happened
in Europe, in the United States, and on the high seas, between July,
1914, and April, 1917? Does he recall those thirty-two months,
close-packed with incidents of such an order that their cumulative
weight broke down our hardy resistance to “service,” and drove us
slowly but splendidly into action? Great deeds are based on great
emotions; but the conflicting emotions of that period are not
accurately described as “irresistible.” The best of them were too long
and too successfully resisted. We gain no clear impression of events
by thinking in ornamental terms. Headlines are one thing, and history
is another. “In judging others,” says Thomas à Kempis, “a man
usually toileth in vain. For the most part he is mistaken, and he easily
sinneth. But in judging and scrutinizing himself, he always laboureth
with profit.”
The continued use of the word “entangling” is to be regretted. It
arouses an excess of uneasiness in cautious souls. All alliances
from marriage up—or down—must necessarily entangle. The
anchorites of Thebais are the only examples we have of complete
emancipation from human bonds. That simple and beautiful thing,
minding our own affairs and leaving our neighbours to mind theirs, is
unhappily not possible for allies. Neither is a keen and common
desire for peace a sufficient basis for agreement. Peace must have
terms, and terms require a basis of their own—justice, reason, and
the limited gains which are based on mutual concessions. “Whether
we are peaceful depends upon whether others are provocative.” Mr.
W. H. Mallock tells us a pleasant story of an old Devonshire woman
who was bidden by the parson to be “conciliating” to her husband. “I
labour for peace, sir,” was the spirited reply. “But when I speak to he
thereof, he directly makes hisself ready for battle.”
There are students of history who would have us believe that
certain nations are natural allies, fitted by character and
temperament to agree, and to add to one another’s pleasure and
profit. Germany and Russia have been cited more than once as
countries instinctively well disposed towards each other, because
each supplements the other’s talents. Bismarck ranked the Germans
as among the male, and the Slavs as among the female nations of
the world. The driving power he rightfully assigned to Germany. “The
soft Slav nature,” says a writer in “The New Republic,” “emotional,
sensitive, but undisciplined, has derived most of such progress as it
has made in material civilization from German sources.”
Both countries have proved unsound allies, and Russia has the
feminine quality of changeableness. “Dangerous to her foes,
disastrous to her friends.” Both make the same kind of currency, and
stand in need of business partners who make a different sort.
America, with the gold of Europe locked up in her treasury, is the
most desirable, but least accessible, partner in Christendom. As the
great creditor of the civilized world, she has been impelled to assert
that no participation on her part in any international conference
implies a surrender of her claims to payment. France, as the great
sufferer by a world’s war, has made it equally clear that no
participation on her part implies a surrender of her claims to
reparation. The anger and shame with which the Allies first saw the
injuries inflicted on her have been softened by time; and that strange
twist in human nature which makes men more concerned for the
welfare of a criminal than for the welfare of his victim has disposed
us to think kindly of an unrepentant Germany. But France cannot
well forget the wounds from which she bleeds. Less proud than
Britain, which prefers beggary to debt, she is infinitely more logical;
and it is the unassailable strength of her position which has irritated
the sentimentalists of the world, whose hearts are in the right place,
but whose heads are commonly elsewhere.
The French press has waxed sorrowful and bitter over France’s
sense of isolation. Her cherished belief in the “unshakable American
friendship” has been cruelly shattered, and she has asked of Heaven
and earth where is the (proverbially absent) gratitude of republics.
That there is no such thing as an unshakable national friendship is
as well known to the clear-headed and well-informed French as to
the rest of us. They were our very good friends in 1777, and our love
for them flamed high. They were our very bad friends in 1797, and
by the time they had taken or sunk three hundred and forty American
ships, our affection had grown cool. It revived in 1914 under the
impetus of their great wrongs and greater valour. Some good feeling
remains, and bids fair to remain, if the press and the politicians of
both lands will kindly let it alone; but popular enthusiasm, a fire of
straw, burned itself quickly out. After all, we ourselves are no longer
the idol of our whilom friends. A fairy god-mother is popular only
when she is changing pumpkins into coaches, and mice into
prancing bays. When she gives nothing but good advice, her words
are no more golden than her neighbour’s. In the realm of the
practical, a friendship which does not help, and an enmity which
does not hurt, can never be controlling factors.
Great Britain sets scant store by any ally save the sea. She has
journeyed far, changing friends on the road as a traveller by post
changed horses. She has fought her way, and is singularly devoid of
rancour towards her enemies. The time has indeed gone by when,
after battle, the English and French knights—or what was left of
them—would thank each other for a good fight. Those were days of
lamentable darkness, when the last thing a gentleman craved was
the privilege of dying in his bed by some slow and agonizing
process, the gift of nature, and gratefully designated as “natural.”
The headsman for the noble, the hangman for the churl, and the
fortunes of war for everybody, made death so easy to come by, and
so inexpensive, that there was a great deal of money left for the
pleasures of living. That stout-hearted Earl of Northumberland who
thanked God that for two hundred years no head of his house had

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Preparing for the Next Cyber Revolution

How Our World Will Be Radically

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The Revolution Will Not Be Funded Beyond the Non Profit

Preparing for the Next Cyber

ISBN 978-3-030-02136-8 ISBN 978-3-030-02137-5 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018961701

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Arlington, VA, USA Joseph N. Pelton

1 What Is the Cyber Revolution?�������������������������������������������������������������� 1

Super-Automation and Technological Unemployment������������������������������ 58

Coping with Cyberattacks and Techno-Terrorists�������������������������������������� 112

Appendix 1: The U. N. Sustainable Development Goals������������������������������ 171

 ppendix 2: Key Issues of the European General Data Protection

Appendix 3: U. S. Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights ������������������������������������ 215

Joseph N. Pelton Ph.D., is the former Dean and

C. Clarke Foundation Award, the ICA Educator’s

Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human

An Epochal Shift in Human History?

The world as we know it is changing. This is no small change but fundamental

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 1

in terms of megacity vulnerabilities, air and ocean pollution and resource

 hat Has Changed to Create the Cyber Revolution That Is

 hy Are These Large-Scale Future Threats Suddenly

Entering the Fourth Wave Economy

developments that include ‘smart’ drones, reusable rocket launchers, on-orbit

A Quick Tour Guide of the Cyber Revolution

The ingredients of change are everywhere. New modes of manufacturing and

• Environmental Damage and Climate Change. There are still increasing

On a planet of nearly eight billion people with billions more on

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 19

“naked feet bleed on the stones,”

“This poor little beggar is hungry and cold,

“Owls would have hooted in Saint Peter’s choir,

To turn from these pages of pettish and puerile complaint to the

“Sois belle! Sois triste!”

Yet neither “sulky” nor “triste” is an adjective suggesting with

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