I’m sitting here on Monday night at 11:30 p.m., in my bathrobe, feet up, in my hotel room in Aspen, Colo. I’m reflecting on the just-completed first evening of Brainstorm 2002. Brainstorm is a unique gathering of 160 specially invited smart people from around the world-in business, government, non-profit organizations, education, and of course, technology. Our goal is to consider what the next ten years will hold.
It’s an operating principle of the Fast Forward column that the rapid pace of change in society and the world cannot be fully understood without taking into account the role of technology and the Internet. And it was with this in mind that we originally set out in the fall of 2000 to develop Brainstorm. New capabilities wrought by tech and the Net underlie a vast proportion of change today–in communications, in corporate organization, in how families relate to one another, in the role of countries, in the growing power of the individual in societies worldwide, and in many, many other things as well.
Our agenda over the next two days will include sessions looking at the U.S. role in the world, how to prompt growth in developing countries, the role of the corporation in this time of globalization and resistance, how to think about global warming, the growing importance of genomics, what to expect from China, how much technology will change in the next decade, and the long-term implications of the recent tumult in the markets and the economy. By the time you read this we will also have heard from King Abdullah of Jordan, President Bill Clinton, and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres of Israel.
Attendees include New York City Schools Chancellor Harold Levy (whose replacement was just announced today-Joel Klein of Bertelsmann, a Brainstormer last year), CEOs of companies including Accenture (which sponsors Brainstorm), Activision, Hasbro, Herman Miller, Priceline.com, The Tribune Company, and WPP, as well as the heads of non-profits like The American Civil Liberties Union, Environmental Defense, Human Rights Watch, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. An incomplete list of tech luminaries here includes Jim Barksdale, Eric Benhamou, Jim Breyer, Sergey Brin, Mike Capellas, Bill Coleman, Scott Cook, John Doerr, Esther Dyson, Rob Glaser, Bill Joy, Craig Mundie, Nathan Myhrvold, Pierre Omidyar, Ted Waitt, Ann Winblad. We’ve got the former president of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernandez, as well as the chief of staff for the president of Rwanda. The list goes on and on, but you get the picture.
What we’re trying to do is build dialogue across disciplines, to achieve the impossible goal of understanding the future. I’m joined here by 18 of my FORTUNE colleagues. We’re looking for story ideas (some of which you’ll see in an issue of the magazine in September), getting to know fabulous new sources, and generally steeping ourselves in a deeper understanding of the complex web of forces at work in the world.
Tonight we heard brief but passionate three-minute statements from Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (and member of the Kiowa Native American tribe) Scott Momaday, Colorado Governor Bill Owens, former Texas Governor Ann Richards, and Tibetan Buddhism scholar Robert Thurman, among others. Their subjects ranged from the critical importance of trade to the role of the sacred in our lives. Everyone was left with their heads spinning, which is just what we wanted. It isn’t easy to try to try to think about so many different topics and try to see their interrelationships, but that’s our immodest aim.
I’m telling you all this to whet your appetite. I’ll be writing more about Brainstorm in next week’s column, when I’ve had time myself to digest the diverse and mind-bending content. For now, at least you know what your humble but peripatetic columnist is up to.
“Fast Forward” is David Kirkpatrick’s weekly column for Fortune.
