Don Sundquist
Tennessee Governor
What will the century be like without tax reform?
The way we meet the challenge of tax reform will determine whether our state is successful in competing in the 21st century. Almost every major issue facing the state depends on how we address Tennessee's budget and tax situation. We cannot afford to drift throughout the next century without adapting our tax structure to the realities of the economy in the information age. It invites the failure of health care; threatens the collapse of higher education; short-changes school children; wishes away the long-term care needs of rising numbers of older Tennesseans and stifles economic development by making Tennessee attractive only to companies in search of the unskilled and the unschooled and those willing to work for less at yesterday's jobs. The lack of tax reform will assure Tennessee's descent into the ranks of the least, lowest, and the last of the 50 states.
Dennis McCarthy
Editor of the journal Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy at the University of Tennessee
How will the Internet assist the next generation of scientists?
We can't fathom how it will affect us. We really can't. It is changing the way science works. We are just on the tip of an explosion that's allowing scientists to have access to information that wasn't available before. Today that data is available to virtually anyone. It will profoundly shape theories and research. It's like you've got a giant wood lot and you've got a few trails that go through it. What the Internet is going to create are trails upon trails upon trails. You're going to see things you've never seen before.
Mike Edwards
Developer; outgoing director of the Public Building Authority
What's interesting is the gyrations we'll go through before we get there. There are two emerging lifestyles right now that appear to be mutually exclusive. One is communities that are mixed-use, that say it's not bad to have a grocery store and residences and employment within a walking scale, if it's planned right.
Then there's this cyberspace, that's not on a walking scale at all.
One brings people closer, getting them out to work and play with the people who live near them. The other does bring some people closer socially, with best friends communicating by laptop coast to coast, but keeps them in the house.
That collision is going to occur and remedy within 20 years. By 2100, that will have been worked out for 80 years; it'll be ancient history. Then we'll be living in the paradox of virtual reality and reality.
Robert Loest
IPS Funds
I think we'll see the human race form an emergent group intelligence similar to what you get when you get enough honey bees together; they form a "hive mind." They form full-time, broad-band connections with one another, but you have to have a critical mass of them to do it, with unlimited feedback. It won't be too long before we will have enough people connected broad-band, with no limit on feedback through the Internet and cellular phones. It's gonna get weird. People will behave in a fundamentally different way. There won't be any aberrant behavior; you can't have screwy kids in school. We'll operate at a far higher level of intelligence than we do as individuals.
Unidentified clerk
99 Cent Deals on Western Avenue
Is everything on sale there really just 99 cents?
Clerk: Yes, everything's 99 cents or less.
Follow-up: How far into the next century do you think everything can stay priced at 99 cents or less?
I don't think we'll be here 100 years from now. I don't think the world will last that long and I don't think we have anything to worry about (click).
Massimo Pigliucci
Associate Professor of Botany at UT, skeptic, evolutionist
By the year 2100 Knoxville and East Tennessee will have finally gotten over their monkey business. Very few people will still have a problem admitting that "man (and women) derived from a lower order of animals." In fact, some may even be disturbed at the use of the term "lower order" when applied to such wonderful creatures as monkeys. However, the rest of the country, and furthermore, the rest of the world, will have also moved forward in their thinking, which means that we will still have a debate about science and our deepest-held beliefs. By 2100 such debate will focus on the claim of scientists that there is nothing special about human consciousness. They will say that neurobiology is now advanced enough to understand how the brain tricks us into thinking of our true selves as a ghost in the machine. Furthermore, artificial intelligence experts will have produced a conscious computer whose behavior nobody can distinguish from its human counterpart. But that would mean that science has pushed away the last vestige of human uniqueness and its place in the cosmos, too much to take for Tennesseans even in the 21st century. It will take us another century or so to catch up.
My second prediction is that the University of Tennessee in Knoxville will be the largest community college in the nation, characterized of course by an excellent football team. Decades of refusals by the Tennessee Legislature to fund the place as a research university will have resulted first in lower and lower quality of our graduate students—most of whom will be found in more enlightened places such as Kentucky, Mississippi, and even Alabama. Following them, our faculty will have left once their salaries had fallen so far behind the national average to not even make for a good joke when getting together with colleagues at other institutions. Instead, the place will be run by a lean and mean administration directly appointed from Nashville, whose sole goal will be to become even leaner and meaner and to provide the best for their customers, I mean students. Of course, no Tennessean in his right mind would send a gifted child to such a place—but for that we don't have to wait 100 years, it's already happening.
Tommy Prince
Vice Chairman, Knox County Board of Education
The way we're able to live longer, Sam [Anderson] will probably be chairman of the school board again. He'll be 145 years old. And Roy Mullins will be superintendent.
On the serious side, we now seem to be paying a lot of attention to equity—equity in buildings, equity in curriculum, now we're even talking about uniforms, everybody looking the same. I think 100 years from now, that will have disappeared, the sameness. The large schools will be a thing of the past, because of the Internet. It's going to be a highly individualized curriculum.
This standardization is a bureaucrats' wonderland, and to what extent the constituents will tolerate more and more regulation and more and more standardization...I think there will be a backlash. I hope there is. I think the teachers still will be important. There has to be some basic standards, but I think once they are met, you'll move into a more specialized curriculum, and teachers will be crucial. But I think [they] will be more brokers of information than teachers.
John Evans
Director of Knox County's office of solid waste
In the next millennium, what do we need to worry about when it comes to solid waste?
We're faced with the prospect of either producing less waste or siting more landfills... Landfills are going to need to be further away and therefore more expensive. I think we're okay for the next 20, 30 years. And the state is thinking about banning yard waste—grass clippings, leaves, limbs, brush—from landfills. That'll save 20 percent of the space—easy.
Follow-up: What about disposable diapers? Trouble ahead?
That's a bunch of hooey. Diapers mummify their contents. It's basically surrounded by plastic.
Bruce Wheeler
UT Professor of History, co-author of Knoxville, Tennessee: Continuity and Change in an Appalachian City
After a false start or two, the University of Tennessee will establish a campus in downtown Knoxville that will be used as an urban design studio, and also for the theater, music, art, and planning departments. The College of Business will have a major division there and the College of Social Work will relocate there. By the year 2100, this branch will have as many students as the main campus.
Todd Steed
Local musician
West Knoxville will meld into one giant mall. Each neighborhood like West Hills, Fox Den, etc. will be required to have a nice roof with sun-holes in it to cover the entire neighborhood. Bus service will be eliminated completely, but a Disney-theme trolley will run from one end of the mall to the other.
The Tennessee River will become solid.
Someone will write a great biography on Cas Walker and I will buy five copies.
Phillip Fulmer Way will be renamed Stadium Drive after he goes two more years without a national championship. Then, the Vols will win another national title five years later and they will rename it Phillip Fulmer Way yet again. Kingston Pike will be renamed "FAMOUS VOL ATHLETE PIKE."
Bob Hill
Chairman, Farragut Planning Commission
Newspapers as we know them will no longer be available on a daily basis. News will rarely be dispensed by using print on paper. Everyone will receive news in a more or less continuous mode via electronic media. Electronic media will be as easy to access and use as the telephone was in the year 2000. Censorship will be difficult if not impossible. The accuracy of newspaper information that is taken for granted in 2000 will be challenged continuously in 2100. This may lead to some problems with government stability since with the advent of electronic media, everyone will have a forum without the attendant need for a printing press.
Darlene Swinford
Frog collector
What's going to happen to your collection of more than 1,400 frogs in the next century?
I've got ceramic frogs, wood frogs, lots of hand-made frogs, those blown-glass frogs—you know they don't make any two alike—and stuffed frogs. I once had a six-foot stuffed frog that someone gave me. I made it a little swing in the corner of my living room because I had a big living room when I lived in Florida. Then I sold it because it was just too big. I sold it at a yard sale. This woman saw it sitting out in the yard and stopped to buy it for her sister because she collects frogs, so I was glad it was going to another frog collector.
Follow-up: But what's going to happen to all of your other frogs in the next century?
I don't know. I'm just hoping one of my daughters will want them and keep the collection going.
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