I was at a conference in London the other day run by the Economist Group. There was a fascinating presentation by a futurist that suggested any person born today would be expected to live until the age of 150.

Most people take a step back and think – no way!  And yet the idea is not so bizarre.  The reality is that with advances in Artificial Intelligence, robotics and genome technology, there is a general expectation that all diseases as we know them will be eliminated in next 20 years.  No cancers, no viruses, no age impacted diseases related to mental health, etc. The only challenge therefore will be to manage the skeletal structures in old age and other physical breakdowns in bodily parts.  3D printers will fix most of those issues!

It is an interesting development and certainly not without precedence, given the acceleration in life expectancy that has occurred in recent times.  The implications run beyond simple life expectancy through to taxation and pension policies.

So the challenge will be on communities that rely on managing people through their life cycles to ensure this extends into extreme old age and not just the horizons we have expected in the past.

For all of us, though, there is a deeper issue.  How do we plan, contemplate and indeed adapt to these changing horizons?  Do we put our heads in the collective sands and say this won’t happen to us?  Or do we take an active approach towards exploring the future and manage these outcomes?

I think we all have a responsibility to step up to the plate.  Regardless of whether we think change will happen sooner or later, change will happen.  This applies to healthcare in our communities or the broader perspective of climate change and in the interests of future generations we must take control of these issues NOW.

The purpose of this blog is to start a conversation on issues that are important to us all.  It is not designed to be political, but by its nature will certainly drive political responses. Having said that I want all people of any political persuasion to step out of the current cesspit of global politics and to start engaging in conversations on issues that are important to us all.

I live in Melbourne, Australia and I am a social progressive but I was encouraged by the work of a Sydney based conservative MP, John Alexander @JohnAlexanderMP, who has advocated the use of high speed rail to address the problems of housing affordability.  This is simply a perfect solution to a major problem. It addresses the social issue of mobility in large cities. But it also casts the conversation around enabling people in far flung communities to access the major cities for employment.

All too often, critics try to shoot down high speed rail on the back of a business case that doesn’t quite work out as it is near on impossible to prove the numbers because we can never understand the future.  It is what one futurist, Roy Amara, best summed up as this dilemma:  “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”. In other words, our understanding of change is only related to our knowledge of the present.  It is fundamentally difficult for anyone to gauge the future without knowing the scale of change that will occur over time.  So when we consider technology changes such as high speed rail, automated (driverless) transport, etc, we can only realistically do so in the context of our knowledge of today.

So what I will suggest is that we let the future take hold.  Manage our conversations based on what might be … rather than what we can currently see.

In this context, can you imagine a time when a train will leave Geelong, stop at Avalon,   loop into Tullamarine and then run into Ballarat before heading to Bendigo.  All the while taking people on the high speed (and I mean really fast) journey to their destinations.  Will this let people live in remote locations while at the same to enjoying low cost housing but being able to work in the city?  Too right it will!

How cool is that?

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