What does the future hold? Rather than consult the Magic 8 Ball, we went to a Milwaukeean who, if you judge a person by his title, would seem to have the answers.

Futurist David Zach is one of the few professionally trained futurists in the United States, with a master's degree in Studies of the Future from the University of Houston-Clear Lake. He has worked with over 1000 corporations, schools and associations offering insights on the personal and professional impact of strategic trends.

He gets his thoughts, ideas and facts from a daily study of books, magazines, newspapers, coffee shop discussions, and on-line explorations that include a healthy dose of OnMilwaukee.com. We caught up with Zach recently and asked him about all things, first and foremost -- the future.

OMC: Give us the David Zach story. Where did you grow up, how did you get to Milwaukee?

DZ: I grew up in Monroe, which if you didn't know is the Swiss Cheese Capital of the United States. Great childhood. We lived out in the country in the middle of a woods, so we had trees to climb, rock quarries to explore, creeks to stomp in and lots of wild animals to have as pets. It seems that I always had a pet raccoon around someplace. Dad was a doc and my Mom was a non-practicing nurse who raised five boys in her spare time.

Went to UW-Madison for political science and philosophy and then to the University of Houston for a masters in Studies of the Future. I came to Milwaukee because Johnson Controls offered me an internship so I could finish my degree. After that I taught in the School of Education at UWM for four semesters and then four years at the Northwestern Mutual mothership doing corporate planning stuff.

As soon as I moved here, I got involved in projects like Goals for Milwaukee 2000 and Future Milwaukee. When I'd tell someone that I had a degree in Future Studies they'd either get this glazed look or they'd ask me if I could speak to their Rotary Club. I think I did about 10 talks when someone unexpectedly gave me a $40 honorarium. They had no idea what they had started. I was amazed that you could get paid for giving speeches. Come to think of it, I'm still amazed.

DZ: Something between an astronaut, a politician and a scientist. I was pretty fascinated by new ideas, the unknown and the big "out there." Always had my nose in a science fiction novel. Reality: bad eyes, too tall, hate politics and suck at math. That pretty much left "the unknown" as my vocation. You can't get much more unknown than the future.

DZ: Sure. First of all, this isn't some title that I grabbed out of the air, like I said before, I actually have a master's degree in this stuff. The second thing to say is that this doesn't make me Nostradamus or a fortune teller. I have no special powers to see what's going to happen and I'm probably one of the more skeptical people out there when it comes to fortune telling. My work is not about predicting things, it's about helping people to think about trends and their implications. And then, to make it so people will actually pay me to do this, I create these quirky, funny speeches.

DZ: It's everybody from big companies like IBM and 3M to a lot of community colleges. The funny thing about living in Milwaukee is that I hardly ever work here. I think it's the notion of experts come from someplace else. It works for me, though I'm not all that crazy about flying any more.

DZ: Wow. Lots of ways. One, of course, is that I was just as shocked as everyone else and I felt the discouragement that went with it for a while. The speaking business was already hurting from the recession in 2001 and after 9/11, the only business I had for the rest of the year was just a little bit of work with government and education groups. All the business clients cancelled after 9/11. You'd think they'd want to hear from a futurist about that time.

The real difficult thing for me after 9/11 was being optimistic about the future, which is sort of an occupational requirement if you call yourself a futurist. In some ways it was good that business was down in the last few months, because I really needed to rethink some of my messages. Fortunately, it didn't have to change that much. I've always tried to take a long-term perspective and I've always tried to have people look at the big picture. I think after 9/11, people finally began to realize that thinking about the big picture wasn't so flaky and a realistic thing to do.

DZ: Yes. Through all of this, I have to say that I am still an optimist, because I do believe strongly in the capacity of people to imagine possibilities and find solutions. We'll find our way through to a better place and we will be a better people. History shows that we always work our way through problems. Of course, it also shows that we often pay a very heavy price to make that history.

I do believe in progress and I do believe in this experiment called America. Not that it's always right, but it's better prepared than almost any other culture to learn about its mistakes and make corrections. Sure there's lots of dissatisfaction with the way we do things, but that's the price of a free society; you always have dissention because there's never just one way to do things. Just like the constitution reads, "a more perfect union," not a "perfect" union. I don't believe in perfect futures. I do believe in practical, good ones.

DZ: That was fun. They called me at the end of December, wanting a futurist to talk about changes since 9/11 and trends for 2002. You sit in the TV studio up at Fox 6 and you stare into a camera while someone you can't see talks in your earplug. It flew by, even though by TV news standards, five minutes is like having your own mini-series.

DZ: Mostly fun, anecdotal stuff. For instance, after 9/11 there was a big rise in marriages and engagements along with lots of romantic gifts. There was also a rise in afternoon hotel rentals! Any guess about a little baby boomlet next June? Any guesses how many of those babies will be named Rudy or George? A lot more than will be named Osama, that's for sure. Internet dating memberships were up 20%, and puppy dog sales were up 30%. TV sales were down and dinner parties were way up.

DZ: It means that just like there are no atheists in foxholes, neither are there individuals. After an attack like that, people need to be reaffirmed by somebody other than themselves. We've spent so much of our cultural capital lately telling people that they're strong individuals and they don't need anybody else. If there's one thing I think all of us learned after 9/11, it's that Unum is just as important as E Pluribus.

DZ: Hmmm. I don't know if these are just restricted to 2002, but these are a few items in the big picture that we better think more about. Very clearly, we've got lots of choices that we have to make, but we're incredibly ill prepared to make them. With nanotechnology, we're learning how nature builds things, so eventually we may see a total reconceptualization of how things are manufactured. Microchips will continue to double in power every 18 months and get cheaper. Right now, advanced microchips have about 100 million transistors in them.

Extrapolate that out to around 2015 and we've got chips with over 100 billion transistors. Think about how powerful computers are today. There's no real reason to think that they're not going to be almost inconceivably powerful in the next decade. The other thing is the genetic code. We've cracked it and now we're rapidly figuring out what each sector means.

There's a great quote from Stewart Brand, "We're becoming like gods, so we better get good at it." We have the power, but we don't have enough humility in the face of that power. The more I learn about this stuff, the more Catholic I become. I know the answers to this are not found within us as individuals. We have to all start learning more about this stuff. Too many people are either totally against these emerging technologies or they're completely unaware. Neither attitude is going to work. We have to learn and we have to make choices through them, not around them.

There are four really important subjects for today: philosophy, theology, history and biology. Those subjects are the source of the questions we now face. We've now built a world in which the right to stop learning is gone. If anyone stops learning at any point in their life, they're dead in the water. They're toast. If you're not curious, you have no future.