Deep Thinkers See How Things Will Be in 2058
C. Ben Mitchell
Deep thinkers see how things will be in 2058
60 essayists analyze future problems and prospects in 50-year forecast
By Alan Boyle
Science editor
updated 12:03 p.m. CT, Fri., April. 18, 2008
How will the world look in the year 2058?
Sixty thinkers from around the world rise to that challenge in a
collection of essays titled "The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today."
The consensus view is that we'll muddle through many of the issues that
vex us today - including climate change and terror threats. And we'll
hit upon so many medical and technological wonders that today's
50-year-olds will have a fair chance of finding out firsthand how the
world will look in 2058.
The problem with having so many predictions of the future is that they
can look like a collection of to-do lists: The most popular item on the
checklist would be getting your complete genetic code analyzed, so that
the doctors can give you custom-made medications for what ails you (or
what might have ailed you without the drugs). And don't forget the
cyber-implants: Several essayists, including inventor-futurist Ray
Kurzweil, heralded the day when nanomachines would merge with our own
bodies.
In addition to those well-worn themes, "50 Years From Today" is
jam-packed with nuggets of less conventional wisdom from experts in
fields ranging from bioethics to counterterrorism. Here are a few
examples:
Diseases ranging from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to schizophrenia and
bipolar disorder will be shown to be caused by infectious agents that
take advantage of genetic predisposition, says psychiatrist E. Fuller
Torrey, president of the Treatment Advocacy Center. Researchers will be
surprised to find that many of those infectious agents are being
transmitted from animals to humans. As a result, it will be uncommon to
keep cats, birds or hamsters as pets - but we'll still have dogs around,
because they've been "man's best friend" for so long that we've already
adjusted to their infectious agents.
International terrorism will be brought under control because
governments will realize counterterrorism is primarily a police function
rather than a job for the military, says Ronald Noble, the
secretary-general of Interpol. Passports and IDs will be linked to a
global monitoring system, much as credit cards are today. "People will
no longer be able to travel and engage in transactions with anonymity,"
thanks to surveillance and biometrics, he says. All this will pose
"thorny issues" for a post-privacy era.
Several essayists said water will become as big a resource issue as
petroleum is today. "We cannot go green without thinking blue," former
White House chief of staff Leon Panetta and former Energy Secretary
James Watkins say. Norman Borlaug, father of the "Green Revolution" in
agriculture, says there will have to be a "Blue Revolution" to provide
enough water for the planet's burgeoning population. Thus, cleaning up
the oceans and providing fresh water should rank right up there with
controlling greenhouse gases.
The outlook for longer life spans is a mixed bag: Kurzweil says the
pace of life extension will outrun the passage of years, offering at
least the possibility of an indeterminate life span 50 years from now.
But trends also point to a decline in average life expectancy, due to
the increased incidence of obesity among today's young people, says
Wanda Jones, director of the Office on Women's Health at the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services.
Pros and cons for longer life
Arthur Caplan, a columnist for msnbc.com and director of the University
of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, takes something of a middle
road: In his essay, written from the point of view of his grandchild, he
foresees a world where people can look forward to 140 years of
high-quality life. (In a comic twist, the essay also bemoans Caplan's
death, "frail and decrepit," at the young age of 80.)
Caplan, who is 58, told msnbc.com that he bases his prediction on the
promise of regenerative medicine, as well as a better understanding of
how lifestyle and genetics affect health. All these new technologies
will raise new ethical issues, he acknowledged - for example, whether
future generations will be genetically modified to fix defects and even
introduce enhancements.
"People will have to think harder about whether they want to have kids
the old-fashioned way," he said. "Why would you choose to take a random
chance, knowing that your child would have a chance of having a defect
but going ahead anyway? You start to get into blame and guilt about
disability in a way that we don't really do now."
Greater longevity will also have social implications, he said. "You're
not going to just have people living till 140 without changing your
ideas about retirement, career, education, leisure, marriage,
childrearing - also, even eligibility for social benefits. My hunch is
that you're going to have to tack on a few more years before you get
that senior discount card."
The bad, the good and the ugly
In his essay, Case Western Reserve University theoretical physicist
Lawrence Krauss sorts through the "bad, the good and the ugly." For
Krauss, the "bad" issues that have to be dealt with focus on climate
change, energy shortages and nuclear weapons - and the "good"
technologies ahead include medical breakthroughs, computer intelligence
and virtual reality.
Dealing with the bad and taking advantage of the good will depend on
whether society can bring an end to today's "ugly" struggle between
science and religion, Krauss said. That observation is particularly apt
for a week in which this year's presidential candidates passed up an
opportunity to attend Science Debate 2008 - and in which a new movie
titled "Expelled" renews the creationism-vs.-evolution argument.
"If we allow nonsense to be purveyed with impunity, then I think it
feeds down - it's a slippery slope," Krauss told msnbc.com. "We can't
honestly address the serious problems we're going to face in the next 50
years until we're willing to accept the world the way it really is,
without fear."
The first and last word
In "50 Years From Now," the first essayist to have his say is Vint
Cerf, who was one of the founding fathers of the Internet almost 40
years ago. Today, he's vice president and chief Internet evangelist at
Google, and one of the world's most widely consulted technological
seers.
Cerf foresees a world in which the infrastructure used today for
transporting oil has been replaced by water tankers and water pipelines.
The energy for a global electrical grid is provided by solar, wind and
nuclear plants. Outposts are taking root on Mars and Titan, knit
together by an Interplanetary Internet. And discoveries about the Higgs
field and the nature of mass, pioneered by the Large Hadron Collider,
are raising the possibility of inertialess travel at the speed of
light.
This e-mail exchange with Cerf, conducted while he was traveling in
Spain, serves as the last word here:
Q: A lot of the essays in the book, yours included, refer to the global
warming / energy issue but imply that the problems have been overcome
without putting a crimp in technological development. Why is your
projection of life 50 years from now so optimistic on the rising
technological trend line?
Vint Cerf: I am an optimist by nature and believe strongly that
technology can be brought to bear to create alternatives, even in crisis
situations.
I just spent a half-day at the Bletchley Park museum near London. As
you will recall, it was at Bletchley Park that a remarkable and diverse
group of Britons produced some of the most critical intelligence of
World War II through the use of the Bombe and Colossus special-purpose
computers. They created alternatives where there were none before, as
did the Americans with the Manhattan Project. I believe that the problem
of global climate change will ultimately spur our global society to
respond and while the condition does not appear to be reversible, we
will find ways to adapt to it.
That there will be many negative side effects is not in dispute. Ways
of life will change and in some cases degrade, but I believe that we
will find ways to adapt. We may find that we have to move into
underwater habitats. We will need to invest massively in more
environmentally responsible energy production. And the world's
ecological and economic systems will almost certainly change, too. But
we will survive.
Q: I'm interested in your reference to the Higgs field and potential
implications for new technologies, obviously because of the imminent
startup of the Large Hadron Collider. You mention the E.E. Smith
inertialess drive, which is really quite intriguing - that's something I
hadn't heard before in reference to the LHC. Could you expand a bit on
how understanding the theoretical underpinnings of inertial mass might
lead to propulsion technologies (even in hand-waving terms)?
A: I am only a layman in this area, but it is my understanding that the
Higgs field is what imbues other atomic particles with mass and that the
Higgs boson is the particle that delivers the force of the field. If we
had a way to manipulate the Higgs field, we might be able to establish
inertialess conditions that could overcome Einstein's fundamental speed
limitations.
Q: Could you provide a brief update on the Interplanetary Internet
project?
A: The project is in its 10th year and it is now planned to carry out
tests of the Interplanetary Protocols using the Deep Impact spacecraft
that launched a probe into Comet Tempel 1 in October 2006. The
spacecraft is still operational, and the plan is to upload the Delay
Tolerant Networking protocols onto the onboard computer. NASA has given
the project permission to test these protocols from Earth. A successful
test will qualify the protocol for future deployments on production
space missions. We also hope to carry out demonstrations and tests on
board the international space station.
Q: Any thoughts on Ray Kurzweil's singularity? I'm not sure if you've
seen his essay in the book, but it makes clear he thinks that the
machines we build 50 years from now will be ... us. In your estimation,
will artificial implants and enhancements have a significant impact on
how we think of ourselves in 2058, or will it not be that big of a
deal?
A: I continue to worry about the potential to upload ourselves into a
silicon analog. I think Kurzweil could be right about the relative
intelligence of the computers of the distant future, but a machine
intelligence may not be commensurate with instantiation of a biological
intelligence within the silicon version. However, I do agree that
artificial implants will provide us with supranormal capabilities that
are presently inaccessible to most humans today.
Q: I like the idea that trying to explain the new jobs of the future
would be as difficult as trying to explain what a Webmaster does to the
man in the 1950s gray flannel suit. Nevertheless, do you have any
thoughts on what any of those jobs might be, even in very general terms?
(E.g., virtual-worldmaster...)
A: I can imagine people actually working in virtual environments where
productive, cooperative work is undertaken, and I think we will find
people helping others to take advantage of masses of information that
are inaccessible or too vast to process in real time today. With
billions of Internet-enabled devices or at least programmable devices on
the network, there seems to be ample room for new services that manage
these devices to be developed. "Hi, I'm your virtual entertainment
manager! What movies would you like to watch next week?"
Q: Do you think imagining the future, as you and your colleagues have
done in this book, will help shape that future - or do you see this
exercise as merely a fun, readable exercise of the imagination?
A: I think imaginative exercises can have a profound impact on the
future - what you can imagine can sometimes turn into something you can
figure out how to build. I hope that reading these essays, there will be
a few young people who will realize some of the speculative ideas or
discover more interesting ones of their own.
An expanded version of this report has been published as a item on
Cosmic Log.
* 2008 MSNBC Interactive
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24201711/
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