The Next Fifty Years : Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century

Rating:
Summary: Why good scientists rarely make good futurists
Review: A wonderful example across the sciences as to why people working in a field have excellent visibility over the next 5 years, and very poor visibility (or at least very unoriginal) when asked to speculate over longer time periods. For those of you familiar with the research of these people, their vision of the future looks extraordinary like the work they do, only extrapolated in ways that are obvious to those in the field. What I expected was the "creative destruction" by people of their own agendas. All the computer scientists (Brooks, Holland, Gelernter and Schank) disappointed in this regard. Richard Dawkins was the only intriguing one.

Just to calibrate the thought again. If you want to learn the views of some pretty good scientists on the larger backdrop of their research, this is a good book to read. However, other than the fact that they are working on what they are working on, there is no convincing argument as to why the world will turn out the way they envision. Not to mention, good scientists tend to be spectacularly wrong on long term visions (remember Lord Kelvin's claim about the end of chemistry a century ago).

I still look forward enthusiastically to a book with this same title, but a different cast of contributors.

Rating:
Summary: An exciting glimpse into the future
Review: As Yogi Berra said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." However, if anyone can make meaningful predictions, it's the twenty-five leading scientists and authors whose essays grace The Next Fifty Years.

It's an exciting book. Almost every piece is enlightening, stimulating, and remarkably well written. I read a lot of books and articles about science, but still came across dozens of new ideas, convincing arguments and sparkling insights. Here are a few items that got me thinking:

Physicist Lee Smolin points out that subtle changes in light waves as they cross space may provide the first test of quantum theories of gravity--we won't need to build accelerators the size of the solar system to gain this information.

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller speculates that gene activation chips will soon allow researchers to map the changes in our brains caused by "every state of mind lasting more than a few hours." The result will be a far richer understanding of human consciousness.

Mathematician Steven Strogatz expects that new methods for creating complex, evolving systems on computers will mean that we humans will "end up as bystanders, unable to follow along with the machines we've built, flabbergasted by their startling conclusions."

Richard Dawkins predicts that by 2050 it will cost just a few hundred dollars to sequence one's own personal genome, computers will be able to simulate an organism's entire development from its genetic code, and scientists may even be able to reconstruct extinct animals a la Jurassic Park.

Computer scientist Rodney Brooks thinks wars may be fought over genetic engineering and artificial enhancements that have the potential to turn humans into "manipulable artifacts."

AI researcher Roger Schank foresees the end of schools, classrooms and teachers, to be replaced by an endless supply of virtual experiences and interactions.

In many cases, the bold ideas of one writer are challenged or balanced by another, making the book a kind of high-level dialogue. Cosmologist Martin Rees, for example, takes on Smolin's idea of evolving universes, and neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky is much less optimistic about our ability to conquer depression than is psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

It's not all perfection, however. A few of the essays seemed relatively uninspired. These included psychologist Paul Bloom's pessimistic view of our ability ever to understand consciousness or the nature of thought--"We might be like dogs trying to understand calculus." And I found computer scientist David Gelernter's essay on the grand "information beam" that will transform everyone's lives an unconvincing one-note techno-fix. Also the book really needs an index--that simple addition would have made it much more useful.

However, it's a book that tackles big questions about our future in as thoughtful, insightful and well informed a manner as I've ever encountered. It's worth reading and re-reading.

Robert Adler, author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation (Wiley, 2002).

Rating:
Summary: Excellent collection of essays
Review: In brief, the book covers a very wide range of scientific disciplines and has the courage in its essays to try and estimate how the future in the various disciplines will pan out. There are some very interesting trends in current research brought to light, and some very interesting put downs of old trends that were accepted by the scientific community and the public at large. A good read, with varied fields covered. Language is at the level an educated layperson can understand.

Rating:
Summary: Valuable, cutting edge of science collection
Review: In this review of John Brockman's accessible and valuable collection of essays by some of our finest scientists, allow me to concentrate on one essay, "In the Shadow of Culture" by biologist Brian Goodwin. Indeed, let me concentrate on one idea in that essay. (In a sense this may demonstrate the value of the entire collection.)

Goodwin writes about consciousness and feelings in a manner that reveals what I think is a fundamental misconception. Here in part is what he writes:

Clearly, a primary aspect of consciousness is feeling... So within the question "Where does consciousness come from?" there is the question, "Where do feelings come from?" The answer we are forced to give in science is that feelings arise from a particular dynamic organization of insentient matter, such as nervous systems at a particular level of complexity and order. Our feelings arise as emergent properties from something that has not the slightest trace of anything that could be called feeling or sentience. (p. 48)

The feelings that he sees arising are not, however, emergent properties of the organization of our gray matter and its interaction with the world, but are better understood as perceptions of that organization. As evolutionary creatures all our interactions are experienced as feelings, some good, some bad, some painful, some boring, some neutral, some below the threshold of awareness, some so unrelated to our status in the world as to be almost without affect, depending on the circumstances in which they are experienced. The emergent properties of Goodwin's complexity science are properties not of the perception of phenomena but of the phenomena themselves. Thus an emergent property of water, in an example given by Goodwin, is the precise structure of a snowflake. In our brain/body system an analogous emergent property would be the precise structure of the neurological, muscular, glandular, etc. aggregate at any given time. Our perception of that aggregate is experienced by us as feeling (sometimes called consciousness).

Consider the experience of taste or scent. There is no way you can adequately describe the taste of a mango or the scent of a rose to someone else. A rose smells "sweet." It smells "floral," etc. We are always reduced to sharing our subjective experience of the world with others through the use of analogy or comparison. Light of a certain wave length hits our eyes and is perceived by the eye/brain system. We experience the perception as "red" and we have certain feelings associated with red. If it is in the shape of a strawberry (and we're hungry) our feelings about it may be pleasantly anticipatory. If it is in the cylinder of a traffic light as we are in a hurry to get somewhere, we may experience it as an annoyance. In any case what we are experiencing is light of a certain wave length in an enormously complex context. But how to describe the pure sensation of redness to someone else? It's impossible because what we are attempting to describe is indescribable. Our consciousness is likewise indescribable. We do know that one person's experience of color is similar to another's. A strawberry is seen as "red" and not orange by almost everybody. Whether the subjective sense of red is the same is impossible to determine. We will always have to compare the experience to something else in an attempt to see if our experience is the same. We will never be sure.

"Consciousness" then is not an emergent property of the brain but is our subjective experience of an emergent property. It is a perception. Incidentally, this is why it is believed in Hinduism, for example, that our brains constitute a sixth sense, a way of perceiving the world in addition to the senses of taste, smell, touch, hearing and sight, and are not, e.g., calculating machines. We can "see" things that other animals cannot.

There is an awful lot of ink about the "mysterious" and unfathomable nature of consciousness and feeling being spilled in learned journals and in books published by esteemed presses that would disappear overnight if this fundamental distinction between experience and phenomena were kept in mind.

Another way to look at this is to understand that pain and pleasure, boredom and exhilaration, and all the other emotional experiences of humans (and animals) are mechanisms that work to direct our behavior in adaptive directions. The real emergent phenomena are our behaviors. Thus inert matter organized by evolution leads to the building of rocket ships to transverse space and to the cultivation of varieties of apples and grains to nourish the organisms that design and build those machines. The "consciousnesses" and the "feelings" experienced are not to be confused with the actual drawing of the blueprints or the tightening of the lug nuts.

The sense that Goodwin (and many others) have that there is not a clear connection between feeling and consciousness, on the one hand, and inert matter and energy on the other, is nonetheless entirely valid. At the deepest level we can make no connection between one thing and another. What is the connection between the symbols in the equation 2 + 2 = 4? What is there between the plus sign and the two? Empty mental space? Or what is the connection between one moment and the next? No one knows. Indeed, does time flow or is time an eternal now or a cycling thing? We do not know. Indeed, at the most fundamental level we know nothing about the world. We know only how to manipulate phenomena to our (perceived) advantage, or, put another way, how to behave in ways similar to those that the evolutionary experience of our species has found adaptive in the past.

Rating:
Summary: Thinking about the next fifty years
Review: John Brockman has brought together a group of thinkers to create an online think tank called the EDGE. In an attempt to overcome the great divide between literary intellectuals and scientists that C.P. Snow defined as the "Two Cultures", Brockman created the EDGE to be "The Third Culture".

The Next Fifty Years, is a collection of essays from some of the thinkers from the EDGE. They explore the next fifty years on different topics ranging from Csikszentmihalyi's engineered IQ and Dawkin's thoughts on the genome to colonization on Mars and the importance of Mathematics in the year 2050.

The essays were stimulating and I found this book to be well worth the effort to read. Any book that triggers new thoughts and ideas is one that I will treasure. As many of the scientists point out, trying to predict the future is a futile endeavor, but for me it gives a great insight into the present to see what these minds are pondering today. The ideas that might shape the next fifty years, might not turn out to be accurate, but the ideas and research that are happening today will effect us one way or another in the next 10 years. As humans we over estimate what can be achieved in year, but under estimate what can be achieved in a decade, and in general completely miss the mark when trying to estimate anything that exceeds those time lines. But I think Brockman chose fifty years, to give the thinkers some creative freedom.

If you are interested in science, and you are interested in what some of our best brains are mulling over at present, then you will enjoy this diverse collection of essays on the future.

Rating:
Summary: Splendid collection of informed speculation
Review: Perhaps we can get a general picture of what science will be like in the next fifty years by noting that of the 25 scientists that John Brockman has cleverly assembled here (and even more cleverly induced to write speculatively about the future), five are biologists, eight are psychologists, three are neuroscientists, but only one is an astronomer/cosmologist (Martin Rees) and only two are physicists. Clearly the emphasis is on biology and the brain. No doubt something will happen in the next fifty years that will make Brockman's eminently reasonable choice of scientists seem improperly skewed; yet it is just this baseline of expectation that will allow us to compare. (By "us" I mean those, not myself, who will be alive fifty years from now!)

The truth is, something always happens that surprises us. To extrapolate from present trends to future actualities is to be assured that we will miss something. That "something" is by its very nature unpredictable. Nuclear energy is an example. No nineteenth century physicist could have predicted the atomic bomb. Go back further in time and no one could have predicted electrical appliances or the telephone. Before photography and electricity, the idea of television was next to impossible.

On the other hand some developments are not only predictable but have been foreseen. These include airplanes and rockets to the moon, submarines and motor cars. These are examples of new technology being predicted from existing technology. Some of what is written about in these 25 essays by imminent scientists is of this order: an extrapolation of current trends and technology to a time fifty years in the future. What will we know and what will we have developed by then? is the question being addressed in this fascinating collection.

In a sense what these essays do is the near equivalent of what science fiction has done for us in the past. Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller puts this idea in a slightly different way with this observation: "A century ago, we had to rely on the novels of Henry James to portray human consciousness in high-resolution detail and rich-spectrum color. In the future, we won't be able to rely on mass culture to do that--Viacom and Disney don't see the profit in it. But we may be able to turn to science to fill the void." (p. 87)

What makes this collection so effective and such an informed pleasure to read is the discipline specificity made possible because the ideas are coming from 25 individual directions. Developmental psychologist Paul Bloom, for example, sees the need for "a theory of moral development...informed by work across disciplines, including cognitive psychology and evolutionary theory." (p. 81) But he isn't optimistic. "It may be that the nature of moral thought or consciousness is simply beyond our understanding...We might be like dogs trying to understand calculus." (p. 82)

Dissimilarly John H. Holland believes that "The number one priority on a fifty-year scale is bringing Earth's human population down to a value more in line with renewable resources. Some of our most serious large-scale problems--inadequate food production, forest depletion, global warming, energy shortages--are traceable to a surplus of humans relative to resources." (p. 178) I also like his retrospective observation on pages 176-177, "By the mid-twenty-first century, much of medicine as it was practiced in the latter part of the twentieth century--for example, using surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation to treat cancer--will look as ineffective as the bloodletting of earlier centuries."

A startling view is that of AI expert Rodney Brooks in his very interesting essay, "The Merger of Flesh and Machines." He believes "there will be an alteration in our view of ourselves as a species; we will begin to see ourselves as simply a part of the infrastructure of industry." (p. 191)

In contrast is computer scientist Jaron Lanier's reaction to the idea of "an inevitable singularity, which is expected sometime in the next half century." (An idea I first encountered from L.A. futurist John Smart in association with the ideas of Ray Kurzweil.) "This singularity would occur when computers become so wise and powerful that they not only displace humans as the dominant form of life but also attain mastery over matter and energy so as to live in what might be described as a mythic or godlike way, completely beyond human conception. While it feels odd even to type the previous sentence, it is an accurate description of the beliefs of many of my colleagues." (p. 217)

Brockman provides a short bio for each scientist at the end of each essay along with a mention of some of their works. After reading psychologist Nancy Etcoff's lucid and penetrating essay, "Brain Scans, Wearables, and Brief Encounters," I have been inspired to read her Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, a book I have twice (inexplicitly) passed over. What really sold me on Dr. Etcoff are the following insightful quotes under the subheading "Freud Moves Out; Darwin Moves In" (pp. 283-286):

"The practice of psychotherapy will be reoriented from a focus on disease to a focus on vulnerabilities, from symptoms to adaptive defenses...."

"The energy, creativity, and charisma associated with mild mania may offer a fitness advantage to some people with the disorder, or to other people in whom the genes do not cause the disorder but have the beneficial effects."

"Certain symptoms will suggest design trade-offs prompted by mismatches between the present environment and the ancestral one, or simply exaggerated normal defenses."

"Mild depression may serve the adaptive function of conserving resources in times of hardship, signaling others that help is needed, and allowing time for reassessment of goals. Mild depression may also be a sign of submission when the individual cannot or does not wish to oppose the hierarchy."

Concluding, let me say that by projecting from the present we may anticipate the future, but we may also more clearly understand the present.

Rating:
Summary: A fairly good overview
Review: The making of predictions is necessary and important, for it can instill both optimism and caution. There is only a modest collection of predictions in this book, but they do give a fairly good representation of the different scientific fields and what to expect in these fields by the end of the fifth decade of the 21st century. Here is a brief summary and commentary of a few of them:

- "The Future of the Nature of the Universe" (Lee Smolin). The author predicts that quantum computing will become a reality in 50 years, as long as quantum mechanics remains true when extrapolated to macroscopic systems. COMMENT: Due to studies in decoherence and more honest interpretations of experiments testing the phenomenon of entanglement, quantum theory will instead be viewed in more "classical" terms in its formalism and foundations. Research into quantum computation, as understood presently, will fade from the scene.

- "Cosmological Challenges: Are We Alone, and Where?" (Martin Rees). The author is optimisitic about the SETI project and other attempts to detect the presence of life external to the Earth. COMMENT: Due to advances in solid state device physics, life on other planets will be detected via the by-products they put into their atmospheres. The information theory behind the SETI searches will become more refined also, increasing the probability of understanding a real message from another civilization.

- "Son of Moore's Law" (Richard Dawkins). The author predicts an exponential increase in DNA sequencing power, which he labels as the "Son of Moore's Law." The author also expresses a fear that there will still be theologians in 2050, this being done in the context of ethical debates on the genetic sequencing of "Lucy" and the possibility of the reintroduction of dinosaurs. COMMENT: The sequencing projects and the number of sequenced organisms will increase hyperexponentially. In addition, tens of thousands of new "transgenic" organisms will appear, all of them optimized to carry out certain biological functions. The field of horticulture will explode, with thousands of new species of ornamental plants appearing before 2050. The university will meet its demise by 2050, but theologians will not disappear. On the contrary, and perhaps unfortunately, the major religions will be with us for many centuries to come, and they will accompany humankind on their voyages to other worlds, for better or worse.

-"The Mathematics of 2050" (Ian Stewart). The author predicts major revolutions in mathematics, due partially to the increasing influence of the computer, bioinformatics, and financial engineering. He also predicts that the current split between "pure" and "applied" mathematics will end, with the result being just "mathematics". He mentions also the "Milennium Problems", one being the Riemann hypothesis, which he predicts will be solved by 2050, its solution being hinted at by considerations in physics. The P/NP problem will be proved undecidable, the Hodge conjecture will be disproved, the Birch/Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture will be proved, the Navier-Stokes equations will turn out not to have solutions in certain circumstances, the Yang-Mills mass gap problem will be settled but will be deemed irrelevant by physicists, and the Poincare conjecture will be "wide-open". Interestingly, the author is one of the few who have mentioned the role of "quantization of mathematics" via quantum algebra, quantum topology, and quantum number theory. COMMENT: The Poincare conjecture will be resolved by 2010 with its resolution being in the context of the "quantization of mathematics" mentioned by the author. In fact, the quantization of mathematics will be the driving force behind whole new areas of mathematics. Pure mathematics will continue to be viewed as disjoint from applied mathematics. In fact, there will be an intense effort, as evident from the last two meetings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, to keep pure and applied mathematics as separate disciplines. Mathematical finance will continue to explode and there will be intense competition between financial firms to develop highly sophisticated algorithms for financial prediction and portfolio manangement. Financial mathematics will also have more overlap with physics and meteorology, as energy and weather derivatives take on even more importance. The next fifty years will see the rise of financial firms, and others, managed, staffed, and run completely by intelligent machines. In addition, due to hardware advances and the development of highly sophisticated algorithms in mathematical biology and bioinformatics, the entire biosphere will be sequenced by 2050. Complete mathematical models of the entire human body will be developed by mathematicians working in the biotechnology industry, and drug discovery will be viewed as essentially mathematical, with the actual physical chemistry and manufacture being essentially automatic. In this same light, combinatorial chemistry will become a branch of mathematics in its own right, attracting the attention of hundreds of mathematicians. Advances in artificial intelligence will bring about, with indications by the year 2040, of intelligent machines able to construct original concepts and theories in pure mathematics. Skepticism as to the possibility of thinking machines will be alleviated because of these developments. "Artificial" mathematicians will begin to become competitive with "natural" ones by the year 2050. Further, cryptography will continue to explode as a field of mathematics, due to the increasing need for online security and individual privacy. Increased computer power will fuel this need, and the competition between encryption and de-encryption algorithms will become very intense. lastly, by 2050 it will be accurate to say that mathematics will enter into every phase of human and machine activity. There will be no process, no business transaction, no entertainment function, no leisurely activity, that will not depend predominantly on mathematical structures or algorithms.

Rating:
Summary: Quite an eclectic mix but came good in the end
Review: When I started this book, my first reaction was - who are all these authors? I only recognised 20% of the names. Hardly had I thought this then the Introduction told me exactly who they were - very timely.

However, as I progressed through the book, there was quite a variance in the quality of the writing. Some authors, such as those on Cosmology, communicated well, but then others were far too high-level for a general audience. It was the latter chapters that brought me considerable delight & education when discussing the Mind, Psychology etc (not my favourite subjects I may add).

If all the contributors had tuned their work to the same general audience, then this would have deserved 5 stars; if it wasn't for the redeeming work by the psychologists & neuroscientists I'd have probably rated the book as 3 stars.