Another failed prediction

As you know, I love to point out the mistakes made by those who make future predictions. Since I was little more than a teenager, I have been saving clippings from the press and scientific journals that make more or less reasonable forecasts about the evolution of science and technology. In an earlier article I have pointed out that such predictions are seldom met, even when made by people who are both scientists and visionary, famous science fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov.

I just unearthed an article published by Alexander Kusko in the IEEE Spectrum magazine in April 1968, with the following title:

A prediction of power system development, 1968 to 2030

And the following subtitle:

By predicting the trend of future power system design some 60 years hence, we should be better equipped to solve some of the technical and sociological problems that the industry faces today.

The assumptions on which Kusko's predictions were based were the following:

1. The population will triple. What did actually happen? The world’s population in 1968, according to UN data, was about 3.5 billion people. The world population in 2015 was 7.35 billion. According to UN estimates, the world population in 2030 will amount to between 8.2 and 8.8 billion people. Far from the 10.5 billion estimated by Kusko.

What is immortality

Pieter van Lint - Allegory of immortality

Immortality is in fashion. Every few weeks, the media publish news or interviews related to this matter. In addition to the one I mentioned in an earlier article, let's look at two others, quite recent:

•         We will live 1000 years (Aubrey de Gray, May 1, 2016).

•         Man is about to attain immortality and artificial intelligence, which will turn him into Homo Deus (Yuval Harari, September 11, 2016).

But first we must define what we mean by immortality; otherwise, we will hardly know what we are talking about. As one reader pointed out in my previous article, living 1000 years is not the same as being immortal. If you live 1000 years and then die, you are not immortal, you have just lived longer. This applies, whatever the duration of life. Living 1000 million years and then dying would not be the same as being immortal.

Those who believe that someday we will be immortal do not put all the eggs in the same basket. In recent years, three different ways have been proposed to achieve immortality:

A global conspiracy?

Isaac Asimov

In 1976, at the peak of the pessimistic forecasts about the catastrophic rise in global population, foreseen by the first report of the Club of Rome (1972), Isaac Asimov published a science fiction short story (The winnowing), which suggested a (highly unethical) way to stop this catastrophic increase in population. This is the summary of the story:

In 2005, the unstoppable population growth causes famine in the third world countries. To contain it, the world authorities (the UN), controlled by the developed world, decide to apply a triage to the world population. To do this, a scientist (who does not want to do it, but is threatened with reprisals against his family) is ordered to develop a protein, poisonous for 70% of the population, but harmless for the remainder, depending on each individual DNA, so that its effects will be dramatic, but random. The protein will be introduced in the food sent to alleviate famines, so as to bring the world population down to more manageable levels. The project is not applied exactly as planned, because the biologist who must develop the protein gives it to eat to the world leaders without their knowing, so that 70% of them will die. As the protein has been adapted to the scientist’s DNA, by eating it he commits suicide, thus escaping the consequences of what he has done.

The mystery of too many variables

Standard theory of particle physics

We have now two great physical theories:

·         On one side, quantum mechanics, which applies primarily to very small objects (those scarcely affected by gravity), and is the basic tool for the standard theory of particle physics.

·         On the other, general relativity, which applies to very large objects (from the planets to the whole universe, those for which almost nothing matters except gravity), and is the main tool for the standard cosmological (Big Bang) theory.

Unfortunately, the two theories are not mutually compatible, so that physics is far from having resolved its outstanding issues. Moreover, these two theories depend on about forty independent variables. Many physicists think that they are too many. If it were true, it would mean that the configuration space of nature has about forty dimensions. If it is difficult to imagine a four-dimensional space, what about forty!

The sin of the scientist

Isaac Asimov

In an article published in 1969 with the same title as this one, Isaac Asimov argued that science should be subject to ethical constraints, and analyzed several cases in which a scientific discovery could be considered morally unacceptable. I consider here a few cases, not necessarily the same as those chosen by Asimov, and later will comment on his conclusion.

• The medical experiments with the Jews in concentration camps by Dr. Mengele and other Nazi doctors, or by the Japanese with their American prisoners. Even in such a blatant case, the perpetrators could find an ethical justification on their deeds, arguing that, as their victims were inferior beings who had no right to life, it was right to use them for experiments that could be beneficial to other human beings that enjoyed that right. It is an unacceptable justification, but they probably used it to silence their conscience.
• The two atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. This act of war killed over 200,000 non-combatant civilians. During most of Western history, including the first World War, this would have been considered unacceptable. The justification was that dropping the bombs saved the lives of thousands of soldiers, who would have died if the fighting had been prolonged. Is this enough, or are we again comparing the lives of two groups of human beings, some of which are considered more valuable than others? Anyway, Sergeant Leroy Lehman, who recognized Hiroshima before the release of the bomb, ended his days in a monastery.
• The same argument (that the lives of some human beings are more valuable than those of others) has been used in other circumstances. Sometimes, to increase the strength of the argument, even the human quality of the victims is denied. Some cases are obvious, both in history (slavery) and now (abortion).

First atomic bomb explosion in Alamogordo

In his article, Asimov concluded that there are cases where science has led to morally unjustifiable progress, and pointed at the use of poison gases as a war weapon whose sole purpose was killing human beings. It is noteworthy that the author of this discovery (Fritz Haber) was later awarded the Nobel Prize, not for poison gas, of course, but for other important findings in the field of chemistry (a process for synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen).

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Science in General: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

Predicting social future: political correctness

2001, A Space Odyssey

As I discussed in a previous post, scientists are often wrong when they predict the future of science. Science fiction writers make mistakes too, especially when they are trying to predict technical advances. Consider the film 2001, A Space Odyssey, which got wrong almost all the developments proposed for that year. Fourteen years after the date in the title, we still don’t have a base on the moon, manned spaceships to Jupiter, artificial intelligence, or humans in hibernation.

We should remember Asimov’s third law of futurics, which states that predicting the social consequences of future scientific progress is more important than accurately predicting that progress. A SF story predicting cars, but not the parking problem, would not have been a good SF story.

In 1941, before Asimov formulated this law, Robert Heinlein correctly applied it in his short story Solution Unsatisfactory, which predicted the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb, its use to end World War II and the subsequent nuclear stalemate between the great powers. Not bad, as an example of what you can do in a well-built science fiction story.

Predicting the scientific future

Man likes making predictions about the future. Scientists are human beings, therefore they make predictions about the progress to be expected in various fields of research during the coming years, decades and even centuries. These predictions are widely publicized by the media.

Are scientific predictions more likely to be satisfied than other predictions of the future? We might think so, since science is the most rational branch of human knowledge. What should we do to confirm or disconfirm this surmise? We should apply the scientific method to the predictions, i.e. wait until the scheduled time has come and check whether the predictions were fulfilled or not. Such studies are not usually done. Everyone is prepared to predict or to listen to predictions, but few bother to check if those anticipations actually came to happen.

There are a few egregious cases that many people remember. In 1956, the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, where the term Artificial Intelligence was coined, predicted that in less than ten years we would have computer programs capable of beating the world chess champion, or seamlessly translating between any two human languages. The total failure of this prediction is obvious: the first target came true 41 years later rather than 10, while the second has not been achieved after almost 60 years. As a result of this failure, research in artificial intelligence stopped for more than a decade and was not revived until expert systems reawakened interest in the discipline.

Science is a tool

Francis Bacon

The utopia The New Atlantis, written by Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Galileo and pioneer of modern philosophy of science, describes a perfect society that would automatically arise from the practice of science, which the inhabitants of the island of Bensalem have made the basis of their society and its government. Like many of his encyclopedic followers, who a century later created the myth of indefinite progress, Bacon believed that science in the future will save man and solve all human problems, opening the way to a paradise on Earth.

This mistake is common. Tools are often confused with their good uses, forgetting that the same tools can also be misused. Let’s look at a few examples, among the thousands that could be cited:

The mystery of the Cambrian explosion

Opabinia

550 million years ago, during the Cambrian period, animals appear suddenly in the fossil record. This spectacular phenomenon has been given the name of Cambrian explosion. Why did it happen then, and not before, has been, for over a century, one of the great mysteries of paleontology.

The evolution of life on Earth seems to have been rather discontinuous. Life is likely to have appeared 3,500 to 4,000 million years ago. Not much later, around 3,000 million years ago, photosynthesis appeared. Eukaryotes (cells with nuclei) emerged 2,000 million years ago. From then until the Cambrian explosion, nothing much seems to have happened for 1,500 million years. Then all the types of organization of the animals existing today appear suddenly. Why?