When the primordial soup blossomed into life on Earth eons ago, the dawning of the year 2000 was not a foregone inevitability. But humankind survived wooly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, plague, famine, natural disasters and its own self-destruction to reach the rudimentary cusp of a greatest techno-logical era ever known.

Not even our progenitors within this century could have foreseen the burst of invention witnessed in the 1990s, which I believe will be dubbed “The Internet Age” in our offspring’s text books.

While the security industry is not attracting big headlines or made-for-TV movies today, the industry is well poised to be a society-molding influence that will be studied in awe by future historians.

Using many of the technologies in place today, the traditional security industry will be a “social service” long before Y3K. As an example, the Japanese con-glomerate Secom has already adopted the moniker of “social services” to describe its business dealings in the Far East.

Despite the rough economic decade just passed in Japan, Secom’s vision has not wavered. In the United States, the company is primarily known as the owner of Westec Interactive Security, a video central station based in Southern California. Secom recently sold Westec’s residential account base to Edison Intl., but maintains the Westec name and the commercial ac-count base. Mass-marketed, low-margin residential systems are not even a murky image in the com-pany’s keen vision for its position in the U.S. market.

Some of its projects include:

• Robots that feed handicapped people.

• Non-life insurance.

• Internet-based transmission of medical in-formation from radiology labs and other clinics to doctors and their patients, called Hospi-net.

• Encryption of sensitive cyber-information.

• Virus monitoring

• Fingerprint ID technology

• Home shopping, home banking and, of course, home security.

We’re not about talking microchips being embed-ded under your newborn’s skin, but maybe under your grandchild’s. Future generations will live on an Earth that looks more like “Star Trek” than “Blade Runner,” where populations “live long and prosper” with better medicine, less crime, more convenience and booming economies.

Amazingly, part of that future depends on your own vision for your company. Secom is already do-ing it in Japan today … who’s going to do it here?

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