15 Potential futures for different types of infrastructure
Key Concepts
In this chapter we will:
- Explore various scenarios for the future of infrastructure using the CIS Framework
15.1 Introduction
In this chapter, we will explore potential futures for different types of infrastructure. The goal for doing this is to use the coupled infrastructure framework and reason for alternative futures using the perspectives from different actors into account. Since we live in uncertain times, the use of scenarios help us to explore the consequences of decisions we are facing.
15.2 The future of education
The first topic is human infrastructure. The main current approach to investing in human infrastructure is based on very old practices. Formal schools have been around for thousands of years and were found in China, Greece and the Roman Empire. The current emphasis of compulsory education goes back to Martin Luther who advocated that everyone needed to be able to read so that one could be able to read the Bible for themselves. Only around 1900 did compulsory education become common in various countries. The justification was to train children in the skills needed to become productive citizens of the nation. This coincided with the increased industrialization of society for which there was a need for trained workers who could read and write, do arithmetic, and execute tasks in an industrial production process. Until recently, only those from wealthy families could afford higher education.
The action situations of many schools are still based on the traditional notion that children are sorted according to age and under the leadership of a teacher who uses a standardized curriculum that all students in a state or nation need to follow. Typically outcomes are measured by written tests throughout the school term. This action situation does not take into account the diversity of students and the variety of skill sets needed by the nation in the future. The action situation selects for those students that perform well in doing the tests, and some of those students will become teachers for future generations. We, the authors of this book, are well aware of the problems associated with this action situation. Since we teach at Arizona State University, which likes to measure itself by what students achieve during their time in college instead of by whom we exclude, we have come across a very diverse population of students. Students do not always excel in the traditional system, but can blossom with additional accommodations. In fact, a more personalized pathway of learning seems to be appropriate instead of a standardized curriculum.
The current developments in education, especially via options of online learning, allows students to find relevant courses of their own interest which they can take at their own pace. The question is whether traditional schools and universities will continue to survive in the long term. At a minimum , if the focus of schools is knowledge transmission, the role of schools might soon become outdated. But schools also provide a function of investing in social infrastructure, allowing children and the broader community to build connections and organize social events.
How long will we continue to use traditional diplomas as measurements of human infrastructure? In a world that is constantly changing, people will need to constantly be trained to remain up to date. It is not unreasonable to assume that future educational systems will become more blended with other organizations, such as the workforce, and people’s human infrastructure will be evaluated on their recent professional activities and their micro-credentials.
15.3 Health futures
The life expectancy in the early 1800s around the world was around 30 years, and this level has more than doubled since. The countries with lowest life expectancy can be found in sub-saharan Africa, which is still higher than 50 years, and some countries, like Japan, the life expectancy is well above 80 years. The reason for the sharp rise of life expectancy is the widespread use of sanitation, vaccination for various infectious diseases and improvements in medicine.
The focus of healthcare has been moved from only treating disease to increasing quality of life. This also comes at a price. Good health care is not accessible for all in many countries. Those with more financial resources will be able to access better health care. To improve the quality of life one will be able to prevent diseases by regularly taking blood samples to test for various common diseases, taking supplements, analyzing one’s DNA and tracking one’s activities on smart watches. Those who cannot afford those preventive measures, may take action when symptoms of diseases are experienced. Those with lower incomes typically have lower life expectancies since their lifestyles increase risk via higher levels of obesity (due to cheap processed food), more stress, and less sleep. The opioid crisis in the USA illustrates this problem where the life expectancy of poor white men has been declining in recent years.
The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that inequality in access to medication is a global phenomenon. When vaccines became available, rich countries obtained the majority of the vaccines for their own citizens, but the pandemic will only be eradicated if there is a good vaccination rate at the global level. We also have seen the inequality of impacts within countries between groups of people. Essential workers, typically those who do the hard labor as cleaners, drivers, factory workers, had to go to work and be more at risk of infection of diseases. They could not afford to skip work. Contrast this to white collar workers who often could work remotely from home and did not experience the risk of those with worse health insurance.
The increased amount of health information which could provide better estimates of particular health risks, also generates some risks. Could this information be used by insurance companies or employers to adjust rates or labor contracts? We already see companies with genetic information from those interested in their heritage collaborating with police to detect criminals from DNA at crime scenes. Who else will be able to use this information? How private will health status information remain? We may be able to match potential donors and recipients, but how much may less powerful individuals be coerced to donate their organs. We already see this happening with blood donations, as well as organ harvesting for kidneys in various countries in the global south.
15.4 How we live and work in the future
Humanity increasingly lives in cities, and the urbanization trend is expected to continue. By 2050, more than two-thirds of the world’s human population will live in urban areas. Nevertheless, there are different potential futures to imagine how we may live and work in the future. On the one hand, we have sprawling cities of largely single family houses in car dependent cities, like Phoenix, Arizona. On the other hand, we have high density cities with compact apartments and decent public transportation, which are features of the majority of new cities around the world. This latter trend is likely to have a lower ecological footprint (less building material, lower emissions for transportation, more opportunities for recycling).
At the time of writing this chapter there is a housing crisis around the world. One of the key factors is the increasing ownership of residential houses by investment companies. After the 2008 housing crisis, those companies started buying up housing stock. Since those companies are focused on maximizing return on investments, rents are increasing rapidly in many cities around the world. Those companies have no incentive to provide affordable housing, so the affordable housing stock decreases and leads to an increase in homelessness.
The COVID-19 pandemic led to a change in the housing market too. Workers who can work from home, started looking for bigger houses in desired locations. Furthermore, supply chain problems led to a delay in home building. As a consequence, some areas, like Florida and Arizona within the USA, experienced overheated housing markets with annual rent increases of more than 20%. And due to the 2008 housing crisis, there are more restrictions for who may get a mortgage, increasing the power of investment companies who can pay cash. The increasing dominance of the financial sector in the housing market is a global trend impacting affordability (Marcuse and Madden, 2016; Rolnick, 2019).
We already have addressed how the nature of work and how we work may change due to different types of skills needed as well as the opportunity to work remotely. Moreover, due to the increasing development of productive artificial intelligence, many tasks (including white collar tasks) will become automated. This may lead to shorter working hours, but may also affect social infrastructure since having a professional life can be an important part of somebody’s identity. Who makes decisions about what tasks will become automated and which jobs remain active? Will those individuals steering the process of automatization become much more wealthy and powerful? In the movie WALL-E [xxx], obese blobs, representing humans, were binge watching and eating in space ships. Will this be the destiny of humanity, or will people be able to do work outside the efficient automated globalized supply chain?
15.5 Earth-space sustainability
Increasingly we are dependent on satellite infrastructure, that is moving high above us at and at high speed. Communication networks, weather measurements, the GPS coordinates of your car and your destination on your map app, are all critically dependent on well functioning infrastructure in space. However, the space around the low Earth’s orbit is unregulated. With decreasing costs of sending satellites to space, we see an unregulated increase of governmental and private organizations active in investing in space infrastructure.
Space is not empty, especially the low Earth’s orbit. There is an increasing problem of space debris, which consists of (parts of) defunct satellites. Due to the so-called Kessler Syndrome, there is a real risk that low Earth orbit will become inaccessible. The Kessler Syndrome refers to a situation where the density of objects in low Earth orbit is high enough such that collisions between objects could cause a cascade in which each collisions generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions.
It isn’t a far stretch of the imagination to see that space debris is analogous to air pollution. For a sustainable future on Earth, we will have to address the space debris problem because we rely increasingly heavily on space infrastructure to conduct global measurements of the state of the environment and for communication via satellites to implement solutions (imagine a Tesla that cannot be connected to the internet).
There are other factors that connect our desired transition to a sustainable future with outer space. There is a rapid increase in demand for lithium, nickel, cobalt and other rare minerals, needed for the creation of batteries, smart phones, and the like. Those rare minerals are located in a limited number of locations, and those limited resources are being exploited rapidly. To be able to make a transition to a sustainable future, we need to improve the capacity for recycling those minerals or get those minerals from somewhere else. This is one of the reasons behind the current space race. Some of those rare minerals can be found in asteroids, the Moon and Mars, and the space industry is developing knowledge and technology to extract these minerals. Like the low Earth orbit, there is no enforceable regulation for outer space mining. But that leads to questions about fairness. Which actors will be able and allowed to extract rare minerals from space, and how will the benefits be distributed among actors on Earth? Will there be regulations on how space mining takes place, especially since other actors may use those celestial objects for research purposes?
15.6 Critical reflections
In the exploration of potential future trends of four types of infrastructure, we see that conflict about access is a key shared concern. Although technologies become available which could provide better access to educational opportunities, health care, living sustainably off the grid using rare minerals from space, how are those opportunities being distributed? Will this be a small elite while the majority will not have access to those affordances and live to extract resources for the happy few. That would not be a global sustainable future. But if we do not allow individuals taking risks to advance exploration, will we derive those technological innovations? Will national governments step in?
15.7 Make yourself think
1. What are utopia and dystopian futures you can envision for the next 50 years?
15.8 References
Marcuse, P., and D. Madden (2016) In defense of housing, The politics of crises, Verso
Rolnick, R. (2019) Urban Warfare: Housing under the Empire of Finance, Verso
