Outlining the Future Perspectives on Societal Development in the 21st Century Workshop, March 23, 1999, CAP, Munich Summary Program Participants Word-Download: Executive Summaries, Program, List of Partipants.

				Dr. Karlheinz Steinmüller Scenarios for the 21st Century What does future research have to offer? Dr. Karlheinz Steinmüller of the Secretariat for Future Research (SFZ) answered this question with the assessment that avoided excessive expectations and stemmed from a solid knowledge of the field. Future research, he said, can neither predict nor plan the future. It can take on an early warning function and offer useful courses of action; presuming, of course, that it has a firm grip on the present. Steinmüller used the information society as an example of how scenario-based future research can function. Scenarios are a means of condensing large amounts of empirical research and qualitative analysis. In the case of SFZ scenarios, more than 100 trends, along with their interrelations, are integrated. Action strategies of relevant actors are also factors in the scenarios. Looking towards the year 2015, the SFZ has developed two basic scenarios: a divided information society, in which growing social and environmental problems burden the economy, and that of a sustainable information society, in which reform and integrative forces are strong enough to open new perspectives on development and reduce social disparities. To test the usefulness and robustness of these scenarios, the SFZ pushes them through a discontinuity analysis. "Wild cards," low probability but high effect events, are added to the story lines to see if the logic of the scenarios is toppled. As they worked through the two versions of the information society, the SFZ found that several wild cards (e.g., a crash in world financial markets or the failure of the Euro) had strong enough effects to lead to a third scenario. In the populist information society, political tensions lead to social divisions and the disruption of global supply chains; states close themselves off and seek national, corporatist solutions. Steinmüller noted that part of the purpose of scenarios is to push trends to their extremes, in order to lead to a clearer view of the possibilities. Concluding his discussion, Steinmüller looked deeper into the 21st century. The basic assumptions here were particularly interesting: in the short term, technological and economic factors dominate, but in the middle and longer terms, values, norms and cultural tendencies have greater influence. Current thinking on the future sets out three main technological paths for the next century. The solar path, or the path of environmental protection, seeks to preserve the relationship with nature and the environment and follows the ideals of ecological, social and cultural sustainability. The "cybionetic" path sees mankind as an improver of nature; the natural environment will be rebuilt in a techno-organic way. The technosphere path aims for the greatest possible freedom from nature; the human spirit transcends its material boundaries, ending as pure mind, unconfined to the body.
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