6 – ICT Green Growth – Scotland 2060

This future is not fully dependent on oil or not even the globalisation or globalised capitalism as we know it today. The British-Venezuelan economist Carlota Perez (link) is pretty confident, we are at the brink of a paradigm shift, a prosperous new Technological Revolution, a deployment period of ICT Green Growth, where “cheap information and communication” make innovations possible and a green economy desirable.

The bestselling US-author Jeremy Rifkin has a similar perception of our future, talking about (cheap) Collaborative Commons instead of Capitalism. Why his latest book is called: “The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism” (links).

In my own book on this future context in Germany, I refer to these two researchers and to scenarios of consulting companies like KPMG, Ernst & Young and try to outline the 7+ Megatrends of the future towards 2050 and 2060: like the shift from G7 to E7, the seven Emerging Economies which by 2050 will generate a GDP far more than twice the size of the G7 or the new middle class of the world, almost 5 billion people in 2030 already, three more than today.

The most significant Megatrend in my opinion however will most probably be the Social Development and Equity, the individual empowerment of billions of new Prosumers, dedicated to ICT Green Growth.

In this New Golden Age (Perez) Equity is certainly a Megatrend. If we 3D-print our products ourselves, exchange services for free (Collaborative Commons) and grow our own vegetables and 100% plant protein meat like Beyond Meat (link) in our urban, vertical greenhouses like Plantagon (link), we do not need stock markets, banks or other money lenders nor brokers like in our capitalism today.

By the way, in the year 2050 almost 90% of Northern Europeans live in such urban areas (link), according to the UN. Then, Good Governance and thus Institutions (Ferguson) will be more crucial for our competitiveness than the bulls and bears on the worldwide stock markets. As Rifkin and Perez tell us, everything will be priced close to “zero marginal cost” anyway, so profits will plummet. But not our wealth.

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