I Got Future: How My World Will Look

By Frank Lucas

Are you curious about how your life might look in twenty years?
Interweaving two decennia back and forth, building on his own cosmopolitan
experiences, Frank Lucas identifies trends which will directly impact him in the
last quarter of his life. International relations, demographic changes, migration,
technology developments and climatic disruptions will change our lifestyles and
impact all of us in different ways. Throughout this accessible narrative, the author
explores the interrelationships of these themes and the impact these will have on
his way of life in the next twenty years. Despite recent global crises and no doubt
future events, which we do not know about yet, his view on the next two decades
is positive and uplifting, building on his experience that people are resilient and will
continue to improve the lives of ever more people on our earth. In his third book he
outlines his view on his own and no doubt your lifestyle in the next two decades.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Jul 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781543770858

Frank Lucas

Frank Lucas is a former heroin dealer and organized crime boss who operated in Harlem during the 60's and 70's. His career was the focus of the 2007 film American Gangster.

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Copyright © 2022 by Frank Lucas.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/singapore

CONTENTS

1     Introduction

2     International Relations

3     Technologies

4     Changing Demographics

5     People Migrations

6     Natural Environment

7     Lifestyles And Future Of Work

8     Global Crises

9     Skills And Learning

10   Summing Up

Appendix 1: My Future Lifestyle

1

INTRODUCTION

- Memories -

N ineteen-ninety-six was only a few years after the Iron Curtain fell in Europe. I turned thirty-eight and had grown up with the notion that the world was divided into two major spheres of influence: a democratic Western part led by the United States and the communist part led by the Soviet Union. The latter did not even exist anymore. The global community, whether experts in foreign affairs and politics or the general public, was still trying to understand how such a seismic shift could happen in an abrupt, yet peaceful manner. It was hard to believe that the Berlin Wall had fallen only seven years prior.

I understood that opening large parts of the world, which were closed for Westerners, created many business and private opportunities. Together with my wife and two daughters, I had already spent many years living and working in South Africa, the United States, and West Germany. I did not hesitate when the multinational company I worked for at the time asked me if I would be interested in joining a project team in the industrial heartland of the former East German Democratic Republic. I had been assigned a project there for a three-year duration. It was part of an unprecedented effort by the German government to unify the country and bring the standard of living of the former communist part of Germany up to the standard of its western counterpart.

The communist countries and their systems had imploded in 1990. Not only because of the enormous political and military pressure the United States and its allies had put on the Soviet Union, but their non-functioning economic system simply couldn’t take care of its own people. I had seen the latter with my own eyes when I entered the dilapidated chemical manufacturing site which our company was chartered to revamp and bring up to the latest technological standards.

Every morning, I drove to my office on water-filled potholed roads between smoke-belching production plants, underneath carbide clad pipe racks and across railway tracks. My office was inside a red-brick building, inaugurated in 1924 by the nascent Nazi Party. From my window I was still able to see the prison next to the chlorine factory, where every day inmates walked across bridges into the mercury-contaminated production units. The area was fenced off with barbed wire. On each corner was a watchtower. The prisoners had to work under unhealthy conditions. This prison, which was an integral part of the site, had been in use until just a few years before the end of the communist regime. I guess I witnessed how communism really had functioned as opposed to how it should have worked. This building was one of the first facilities we demolished as part of our reconstruction project.

The working environment I found myself in was challenging. Not only were the facilities in an unacceptable condition from an environmental as well as productivity point of view; we also had to deal with proud men and women, many of whom would lose their jobs. They and their parents’ generation had been through many profound upheavals in their lives: Nazi Germany, post-war Russian occupation, communist rule in the German Democratic Republic, and now they were in limbo between what had been familiar to them for many years and the new Western way of life.

Together with my wife and our two daughters the city of Leipzig became our new home. Living conditions for us as a young family were not less challenging. The city caused us a great deal of stress and inconvenience. I vividly remember the endless blocks of grey sameness. Row after row of buildings were clamped into scaffolding on which thousands of workers toiled. Uninhabitable houses were waiting for the demolition crews. Trucks bringing in the building supplies clogged up the already too-small cobblestone roads. There was no shortage of streets where the air shook with the noise of pneumatic hammers. Rain covered the streets, pavements, balconies, trees, cars, and roofs with brown mud, erasing the last few bright colours in this already grey city. Every city we ever visited and lived in had its own rhythm, a pulse that made it move. Back then it was the ubiquitous sounds of drills, jackhammers, pile drivers, bulldozers, the beeping of reversing lorries and building cranes which seemed to make Leipzig move from the old East to the newly unified Europe.

We were pioneers in a society being rebuilt after so many years in the communist sphere which defined the Cold War. Renovated apartments with Western standard amenities were rare; as were the local schools. The local traffic comprised of two-stroke Trabies which belched thick smoke from their exhausts, contributing to the polluted air. These cars, which could barely transport four people, came in two different colours and all featured DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republiek) car stickers. The first Western-style shopping mall was about to be opened and the airport was a mere muddy field with a few grey buildings which they called the terminals. Because there were few landlines, the company provided me with my first ever mobile phone: a Nokia, which weighed half a kilo and on which I could send only a few SMSs per month, costing ten cents each. The internet was still an odd thing for a few tech nerds.

The world was in turmoil. Fortunately, this change of the international order was a peaceful transition, but it was abrupt. How would the former communist countries develop? Would the people migrate to the West?

This all sounds like a scene from a different era, but it was barely twenty-five years ago. We know our memories get worse as time goes on. Our recollection of what we did yesterday is a lot better than for the same day many years ago. That said, dare I say that I still remember many details from our experiences back then, having still friendships and pictures from that time.

Therefore, this is about as long ago as the period I want to look ahead to in this book. When we looked back just over twenty-five years in the time we lived in Leipzig, we thought of the stories our parents told us about their personal experiences during WWII, and later during the Cold War. After WWII, Europe was impoverished; my mam was not allowed to study, as she had to work to help her mam in the household. In the Netherlands gas deposits were discovered and my dad worked all his life for the national gas distribution company which supplied households with natural gas. My parents started to benefit from a newly established national health system and my siblings and I enjoyed free education. On Sundays, my mam was proud to serve meat for dinner and we enjoyed our first camping holidays. When my dad was thirty-five years old, he was able to buy his first second-hand car. I was eight years old when my parents bought their first black-and-white TV and saw the first man walking on the moon. Fifteen years later when I was a student, the world worried about a possible nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. The sight of the Berlin Wall became all too familiar for me. We worried about acid rain and the depletion of the ozone layer, because of the emissions of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere. Countries across the world successfully worked together to eliminate the use of these chemical compounds. Today, our children can no more comprehend our tales of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain than I could understand the tales my parents told me about their experiences during WWII.

When we lived as a young family in the former East Germany, we kept our eyes on one thing and one thing only: bringing up our children and pursuing an international career that would provide for all of us, curious about the rest of the world. But we spent little time looking ahead. Why would we? We were so busy with our own lives and had clear goals and plans focussing on our children. Their schooling, our housing, car, work, and families.

But a few times we, like so many of us, pondered what the world would look like when our children had grown up. Because my wife and I needed to decide what kind of education would be best for our daughters, we tried to look as far ahead as possible. What could we have predicted back then about how the world would look today? How we had developed ourselves, what we had experienced and learned? At the time we assumed that the world would continue to change, and therefore our children needed an education that would give them the tools to manage many changes in technologies, norms, and work. We also foresaw that the world would continue to globalize and an international upbringing for our daughters would therefore benefit them. We never thought that the globalization would accelerate the way it did.

And now we live in Malaysia and I have retired from my full-time job. Our new home meets our expectations of living in a sunny and warm climate with an easy-living attitude, good housing, and medical facilities—a country I would struggle to find on the world map back when I was living in Leipzig. Our children have grown up and completed their studies as we thought was so important for them.

Could we have foreseen that climate change would become one of the most pressing issues humanity needed to address? Global temperatures are already rising at an alarming rate. And what about that mysterious poor country in Asia back in 1996 that was inaccessible to us? China, a world power in 2022? How did that happen? Not to mention the population growth, which is the root cause of countless challenges facing us now and in the future. A world in which I would be able to work across borders and even continents? A world where people cannot function without being connected to the internet, everyone glued to his/her smartphone? A world of ride-hailing, online shopping, robotics, and genetic engineering? Drones, selfies, fake news, GPS, video conference calls, deepfakes, social media, cloud computing: we could not even imagine those things back when secretaries still used electrical typewriters and fax machines in the offices. The digitalization is impacting every aspect of our lives. Altogether far-fetched ideas. Just twenty-five years ago! I recently spotted this advertisement from a business university in Hong Kong:

MSc. in Finance focussing on financial computing, blockchain & cryptocurrencies, cybersecurity & privacy, machine learning, algorithmic trading and textual analyses.

If I would have seen this back then, I would think this was some sort of joke.

So why do I want to gaze twenty years into the future? Why is that important to me? You and I know it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict what lays ahead, yet many of us still try to do it in one way or another. We love to hear correct predictions, even though most who attempt it tend to get it wrong. And yet, I want to give it my best shot. I know that the past does not always have to be the best guide to the future, but it is a good starting point. I will not look further ahead than twenty years, because then I will have reached the expected average age for men with my age: eighty-three. During the same time span, I can still look back and remember details which help me extrapolate into the future. That makes it somewhat more realistic and increases the chances that my predictions will be accurate. I also want to stay engaged with the world around me. Too often I see elderly men and women not understanding anymore why things around them happen the way they do. They are sentimental about how wonderful everything used to be: I do not understand those young people anymore. You can hear them say: When we were young, things were much better. Life was not so complicated and hectic. Nowadays the people are so impatient. I do not believe in any form of afterlife, so I want to be an active part of my worldly life as much as possible. Knowing a bit more about what will come my way will help me stay engaged, as I will be more open to learn and understand about those new developments with confidence and willingness to accept. It gives me the sense of having control over my fate. Besides, it is also about my curiosity. I am interested in new developments, one cornerstone of my professional career.

- Crystal Ball -

I do not have a magic crystal ball to look into the future—nobody does. After all, the world would be a boring place if we could predict it. I feel strongly about trying to plan according to what is forthcoming, because without at least a tangible vision and a few goals, one floats through life. Goals provide focus and direction and promote actions towards your ambitions and desires. Personally, having goals and a clear vision energizes me and helps me to put my energy into the things I believe are really important. But I realize I have to avoid a couple of traps that can cause me to stumble. People are emotional and can be irrational. I struggled to comprehend the reasoning of those US presidential supporters who believe in alternative facts, or those people believing in those baseless COVID-19 conspiracy theories. In the chapter about lifestyle and future of work, I will describe the at times senseless and irrational hatred people have against fellow citizens or people of diverse cultures. Human beings are hard to predict, if at all.

I am a firm believer in science and technology, and thus look outward and point to technology rather than look inward considering human relationships, spirituality, and emotions. I am a neophile, willing to try anything that smacks of the future. That bias towards predicting technological versus social progress is the Achilles heel of my predictions, for the next breakthrough technologies are easier to spot than any cultural changes. Just because it is difficult to predict what lies ahead doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to share my perspectives. We are not hostages to some unknown fate that will just happen to us. I can plan for a future of which I am still an active part, because we know a lot about human and technological history. There is an abundance of information about current affairs and ongoing research which will yield new developments. But I realize that predicting the future, and using the past as a guide, bears a few dangers. I can relate well to historic trends, but no doubt I am biased in my thinking towards the recent past and my personal experiences. Nevertheless, an ounce of personal experiences is worth pounds of abstract expert advice and data.

I built on current known trends like changing global and regional climate patterns, technologies, population growth, nations that we now consider developing, cultures which change and growing global interconnectivity. I try to put current patterns into perspective.

History seldom makes headlines, and for many, it is not terribly interesting. I am not a history buff, but the historical details fascinate me, as they help me understand the present and prepare me to face what lies ahead. It is a bit like going back to the future. The past offers a rich database of experiences. However, true and unbiased history can be unsettling as the victors repeatedly wrote it. Therefore, it is important to contextualize history.

- Values And Expectations -

Our cultures and values vary. Compare your own values with those of your children or parents. When I was a kid, I loved to watch the movies Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. It was about killing those savage redskins in the prairies of the American Wild West. My parents called the African-American US soldiers who lived in our town negroes. When we lived in South Africa during the apartheid regime, it was common language to call our Black workers in the factory’s kaffirs and our fifty-year-old Black gardener garden boy. When I worked in the region commonly referred to as the Middle East thirty years later, I called the Bangladeshi worker in charge of the kitchen tea boy and our maid cleaned the house. I do not have to tell you that these examples are no longer appropriate, because the values of our societies have changed.

Values I gained early in my life are not the same now. When I was a kid, my parents told me not to walk in certain streets on my way to school, because several of those American army personnel were what we now call African Americans, people my parents and, in fact, our community had not seen before. They have a black skin, wear thick golden necklaces and have golden teeth filling, my mam used to say. Be careful with them, they are different and you never know … she kept telling me. She grew up with such racial bias and that would always be the same, or so she believed. But in a world which has since changed, I now struggle to understand my parents’ reasoning at the time, as I have experienced a much more diversified global world.

When I was dating my wife in the late ’70s, I met her oldest uncle. In those days it was common in Catholic families that the oldest son study theology and become a priest. In fact, it was an honour. The Catholic Church sent our uncle out as a missionary to the Congo. I still remember black and white pictures of him wearing a white loose-fitting gown, open sandals, a long scruffy beard, a chain with a large cross around his neck, and a Bible in his right hand, standing in the middle of hundreds of poorly dressed Black children and women. This was in the middle of Africa, a three-month journey from his hometown in the Netherlands. He was a hero in the eyes of his family and the people who lived in the village. But at the time, it was already common knowledge that the king of Belgium brutally colonized and exploited the Congo. To maximize the profits made by the rich natural resources of this vast territory, the colonial government used forced labour on a wide scale. They treated local people as inferior due to their race and the colonial armies brutally put down several uprisings, resulting in massacres and other crimes against humanity. Even local children who stole something had their hands amputated so they would learn how to become good Christians. Today this is obviously barbaric and unacceptable, although in those days, our Western society accepted such treatment of human beings. The churches played an ambiguous role and our uncle took part in that model. On the one hand, they were driven by a strong desire to bring about material and social transformations to improve the