Last month (June Issue) our image-smashing columnist explored how the flat world described in Tom Friedman's best seller, The World Is Flat, might affect the world of claims. One writer even suggests allowing “self-handling” of much of the claims process, at least the “linear” parts that technology can handle. That leaves the rest of us to do the thinking parts. Additionally, some technology allows machines to think for themselves. So, what do you think?

In the 21st century's flat world predicted by Tom Friedman, national borders will become less important, something this writer who is exploring the future believes. Friedman even cites one 19th century writer as predicting the type of international “all for one and one for all” society a flat world can create — no, not the Three Musketeers of Alexandre Dumas, but the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engles. A workday will not be limited to only nine to five, but will function on the basis of an around-the-clock 24/7/365 cycle where what doesn't get finished by 5 p.m. in Peoria will be completed by 10 a.m. in Kuala Lumpur and be back on the desk by 8 a.m. in Peoria. The bulk of business will be intangible, existing in cyberspace where computers do all the grunt work. Corporations will be international, and everyone will reap the profits. Well, maybe. Maybe not….

In such a world, physical things will be built by robots, packaged on automatic assembly lines by machines, loaded into intermodal containers and hauled on an automated transit system to loading docks where more machines will mechanically transfer them to a computer-guided transoceanic cargo ship. It will self-navigate itself to some other continent using some new form of energy we don't currently know about. There the containers will be automatically unloaded onto railcars that will be hauled to regional distribution centers for delivery to local customers, whose bank account will be automatically debited for the costs. The role of the middleman will disappear in such a system. Well, there might be a token human aboard the ship or the railway train, but the rest will operate by computer and bar codes. Even humans will have bar codes, showing their identity, medical records, and maybe their last will and testament encoded on a computer chip and imbedded in their hind ends.