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Philosophy, sociology and religion

Philosophy, sociology and religion

Smarter, wiser, happy or sad?

27 Mar 2003

The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century
John Brockman (ed)
2002 Weidenfeld & Nicolson 256pp £12.99hb

Long ago, when I was a postdoc at Harvard, I read a book by Herman Kahn, futurologist and all-round guru at the Hudson Institute in New York State. He gave a ranked list of the 50 major problems that science and technology – broadly defined – needed to solve over the coming decades. “A pill to control appetite” ranked something like seventh from the top (Kahn was grossly obese), while “effective methods of controlling world population growth” was down in the high 20s. I have mistrusted futurology ever since.

This mistrust is reinforced by a chrestomathy of predictions put together by some bright sparks in the UK Office of Science and Technology’s Foresight team a few years ago. Their aim was to underline that the main purpose of the Foresight exercise is to forge links between academia and industry by bringing together the two sides to think about likely futures, and not to be deluded that such visions of tomorrow would be accurate in usable detail.

The collection includes such gems as: “heavier-than-air flying machines are not possible” (Lord Kelvin, 1895); “there is a world market for 15 computers” (IBM chairman, 1945); and “space flight is hokum” (Astronomer Royal, 1956). My all-time favourite is “the time has come to close the book on infectious diseases”. This comment, made by the US Surgeon General some 30 years ago, is remarkable not only for its misguided arrogance, but also for its stunning disregard of the high mortality caused (then as now) by infectious diseases in developing countries.

So I may be the wrong person to review this book. The dust jacket promises “a glittering panel of some of the world’s leading scientists brought together to discuss the future of science – and its implications”. And the 25 contributors are indeed a collection of notable science writers, who have thoughtful and interesting things to say; a significant subset are also outstandingly distinguished research scientists.

Not surprisingly, the book defies any crisp summary. Insofar as any overarching message does emerge, it is that anyone who burbles about “the end of science” in the sense that everything will soon be known – as some have done recently – is lamentably out of touch with their purported subject.

The 25 chapters are divided into a first dozen on “The future, in theory”, and a second set on “The future in practice”. The opening three chapters, by Lee Smolin on fundamental physics, Martin Rees on cosmology and Ian Stewart on mathematics, are superb.

Smolin analytically catalogues what he thinks the seven “big questions” were 50 years ago, suggesting that we have answered the first four but are still working on the other three. He then lists today’s “big seven” questions, the first four of which continue and deepen past explorations while the last three are new. Smolin hazards the guess that in 50 years’ time only two will remain unanswered. These are: “what explains the exact values of the parameters that determine the properties of the elementary particles?”; and “what explains the large ratios of scales we observe?”, such as why the length scale of the universe is 1060 times bigger than the Planck scale.

Likewise, Rees gives a lucidly compressed account of current ideas and ignorance about the evolution of the universe (or multiverses), while Stewart surveys the current state of play regarding the 23 great problems that the mathematician David Hilbert set out a century ago. Stewart focuses on the seven remaining unsolved problems, each of which now has a million-dollar prize awaiting the solver. Boldly, he offers a guess at how these seven will stand in 2050.

Seven of these first dozen essays discuss aspects of cognitive science and consciousness, with varying degrees of focus on the authors’ particular interest. I especially liked Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on “The future of happiness” and Robert Sapolsky’s counterpoised essay “Will we still be sad fifty years from now?”. Steve Strogatz gives a substantial and admirably hype-free account of chaos, complexity theory and “small worlds”, and Stuart Kauffman rounds off the section with a lively – although some would say idiosyncratic – view of “What is life?”.

These first essays do a good job of looking to the future of fundamental research in their allotted areas. However, I found the second group of 13 essays, under their banner of practical implications for the future, to be on the whole less satisfactory. They start well enough, with Richard Dawkins noting: “Today, a chest X-ray will tell you whether you have lung cancer or tuberculosis. In 2050, for the price of a chest X-ray, you will be able to know the full text of every one of your genes. The doctor will hand you not the prescription recommended for an average person with your complaint but the prescription that precisely suits your genome.”

Most of the other “future-in-practice” essays either deal with tomorrow’s (excessively?) information-rich wired world and the bionics of “the merger of flesh and machines”, or revisit earlier themes of consciousness, childhood development and the analyst’s couch. A notable exception is John Holland’s essay on the meta-level process of thinking about “what is to come and how to predict it”; I would have placed this essay at either the start or end of the book.

Instead, the book concludes with an essay by the biologist Paul Ewald entitled “Mastering disease”. Harking back to our US Surgeon General, the essay could have been an appropriate finale, because the problem is hugely important and has wide implications for the shape of 2050. Sadly, what we get is a quirky marshalling of selected anecdotes to support the notion that “we are already dying of terrible global pandemics of heart attack, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer – pandemics caused by infectious agents that are lethal but overlooked. We have been worrying about a few stray cats [the conventionally recognized infectious diseases, such as malaria, TB, HIV, etc] while we are being stalked by leopards”. Maybe Ewald’s ideas are right; after all, no one denies that infectious agents are implicated in some subspecies of his “leopards”. But I will bet against.

Overall, John Brockman’s book is great fun to read. But as a vision of important questions for science in 2050, it is more than a bit Kahn-like. There is no mention of climate change – neither the basic science of it nor the implications for tomorrow’s world. Ditto for human population growth. Ditto for feeding the world of 2050, and the associated problems of future water supplies. Ditto for alternative energy sources. Ditto for diminishing biological diversity, much less its likely adverse consequences for the delivery of ecosystem services that humans depend on.

Indeed, Ewald’s cat/leopard metaphor appears to be the only substantial reference to animals other than humans in the entire book. Nor is there much discussion of the ethical and practical dilemmas that tomorrow’s genomics will usher in. Abortions following the use of ultrasound to determine a foetus’s sex are already causing local female/male birth ratios to drop to as low as 0.8 in parts of India and China; the consequent social problems are arguably but a shadow of larger ones to come. The closest the book gets to these central ethical issues for 2050 is Roger Schank’s chapter on “Are we going to get smarter?”

The real question – never asked, much less addressed here – is: are we going to get wiser?

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