Remembering the Father of “Megatrends”


John Naisbitt. Photo Credit: Petra Spiola


John Naisbitt passed away. The author of the phenomenal book Megatrends dies on April 8, 2021. I remember, John Naisbitt's name was heard quite often in various discussions and articles in the late 1990s. He was a visionary futurist whose works affect millions.

Together with other great futurists, Alvin Toffler who wrote the book Future Shock, Naisbitt became an important figure in the field of future studies. His name is often mentioned in the course "Futuristic Studies" with Prof. Iskandar Alisyahbana which I took in my last year at ITB. Later, when I started working at Mizan Publishers, one of Naisbitt's books High Tech High Touch was also published in Mizan in 2001,

After that period, I rarely follow discourses on future studies and didn't hear about Naisbitt until a while ago I found in my social media timeline a link to the obituary of his demise at the age of 92.



Megatrends, which was first published in 1982, became a hot topic of conversation at that time. The book has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide, has topped the New York Times bestseller list for 2 years, and published in 57 countries, including Indonesia. The word "megatrend" became a kind of mantra to attract interest in various seminars and articles and gave rise to derivative terms that worked with it. Naisbitt himself has also written other books using the term such as Megatrends Asia, Mastering Megatrends, Megatrends 2000, and China Megatrends.

In this phenomenal book, John Naisbitt predicts the future by understanding the present using the content analysis method, by analyzing the news content from hundreds of newspapers and magazines over a very long period of time. Naisbitt predicted ten major changes in technology and economics. Most of his predictions from the 1980s have become everyday facts for us today.

I would like to note here only three of Naisbitt's interesting predictions.

First, Naisbitt predicted the rise of automation and the possibility of super technologies such as artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence has been predicted since the 1960s, for example in the film 2001: Space Odyssey. But the difference is, Naisbitt added that this technology can never replace humans. As the sophistication of innovation increases, we need more and more human touch.

We experience this a lot now, even from things as simple as an annoyance when dealing with customer service by chat-bots. This is the main topic of the book he wrote with his daughters Nana Naisbitt and Douglas Phillip, High Tech-High Touch. It recommends that a larger portion of the use of technology be balanced with services that make users feel that they are treated as human beings, not part of a machine.

Second, biology and medicine will be at the forefront of innovation. The current research advances in biotechnology and neuroscience are astonishing. Companies like Phillips are researching mind-controlled equipment for people with disabilities. Theodore Berger and his team at the University of Southern California are developing brain implants that can restore or create new memories.

Biology pushes new frontiers. There are many mind-bending technologies from medicine and biology. It can be said that Naisbitt's predictions are quite precise, whether it be for cancer research, food alternatives, or environmentally friendly energy sources, biology is rapidly replacing silicon as the technology of choice.

Third, the development of a self-help society. In 1982, Naisbitt predicted a massive increase in information. At that time it was still unthinkable that there will be encyclopedias compiled together by many people such as Wikipedia. And online learning and sharing platforms haven't grown either. But now, millions of people are turning to online tutorials and using crowd-sourced encyclopedia. A university degree will decline in value because what matters more is study skills, learning how to learn, and developing new skills, not diplomas.

Naisbitt has proven to be a visionary, predicting trends that shape the future more than three decades before they occur. His vision of China as an alternative to the West economically, politically, and socially is also slowly taking shape. He helped the transformation of China and gave many lectures on future studies at the institute he founded in Beijing.

Despite sounding very optimistic about technology and information, Naisbitt reminded us that technology sometimes generates new social problems, ranging from violence caused by video games to a lack of closeness to nature and other people.

Intoxication with technology can shrink the human psyche, he said. Like many other visionaries, Naisbitt also warned that instead of providing expensive game consoles for children, go get them a ball. Playing together in the open is better. A message worth keeping in mind from a technology and information visionary, the "Father of Megatrends".




Indonesian version

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