The future of science

Friedrich Nietzsche

With the loss of the impetus of Christianity, cyclical conceptions of history have resurfaced in the West. Let us see how Nietzsche expresses this in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Part III, 2.2), at the same time as predicting the replacement of man by the Superman, so he should have been immune to it:

And that spider creeping slowly in the moonlight, and that same moonlight, and you and I, standing before this door chatting about eternal things—must we not all have existed once before? And must we not come again and travel that path that stretches before us, that long and dreadful path? Won't we have to return eternally?

Twentieth-century atheist cosmologists often expressed a preference for a cyclic cosmology, which in their view would make God unnecessary to explain the existence of the universe. Although some of those theories (steady-state cosmology and the alternation of the Big Bang and the Big Crunch) are no longer in vogue, thanks to the data we now have about the origin and future of the universe, new theories continually emerge to replace them.

Predictions by Arthur C. Clarke until 2020 (and beyond)

Arthur C. Clarke

In a previous post I pointed out that short-term predictions are dangerous, because the expected date does not take long to arrive, and the "prophet" runs the risk that someone (like me) takes a note of the predictions and checks if they really took place.

In this post I am going to apply the same principle to long-term forecasts, where the effect is even more dramatic. Of course, it is more difficult that those predictions are remembered, but there is always someone (like me) who keeps press clippings from 1963 and can check if they were fulfilled.

Some predictions by Ray Kurzweil for 2020

Ray Kurzweil

Short-term predictions are dangerous, because the expected date does not take long to arrive, and the "prophet" runs the risk that someone (like me) takes a note of the predictions and checks if they really took place.

On December 13, 2009, the New York Daily News published an article with the following headline:

Top futurist, Ray Kurzweil, predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020

The Incredible Shrinking People

As I mentioned in my previous post, Isaac Asimov wrote the novel Fantastic Journey, based on the script of the science fiction film of the same title; not the other way around, as many people believe. In the film and in the novel, a submarine and its crew are reduced to microscopic size and injected into an artery of a comatose human being, to perform an operation in his brain from within, which would be impossible from the outside.

Will it ever be possible to do something like this in the future? Or are there limits to what technology can achieve?

Monitoring futuristic scientific news

In a previous post I mentioned that many published scientific news are not really new discoveries, but future forecasts. In a later post I made a more complete study by analyzing 56 journals of six different years and verifying that the number of scientific news that can be called futuristic seems to be growing over time, having passed, in little more than 20 years, from one out of three, to one out of two, approximately.

This gave me the idea that it would be interesting to know what had happened to these futuristic news after some time. For each specific news, three things may have happened:

1. The forecast of a possible discovery has been confirmed.

2. It has not been confirmed, but a new field of research has been opened, and the news in question continues to be investigated as possible future science.

3. Or it has not been confirmed, and the news in question has fallen into oblivion.

62 years later: scientific predictions by George Thomson

George Paget Thomson

In a previous post in this blog I expressed distrust about the predictions made by scientists and popular writers about the future of science and technology. Most of them never take place. Sometimes they are overly optimistic, sometimes overly pessimistic.

Sometimes, however,  they are true, if only in part. In 1955, George Paget Thomson (Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of electron diffraction) published a book about technological predictions (The Foreseeable Future, Cambridge University Press). I will summarize here the conclusions of his first chapter about the future of energy:

Until the population increase can be stopped, which is not foreseeable until 2050, energy consumption will continue to increase. Among the various sources, hydraulics will quickly reach its practical limits; coal and oil will be depleted sooner or later; solar energy is too dispersed and its use too expensive; wind and tidal power will never be major sources. The only alternative is nuclear energy: for the time being, fission energy, until fusion becomes possible.

This paragraph written 62 years ago could have been written today. In this field, progress has been very slow. In contrast, Thomson’s predictions about the evolution of transportation have been less accurate and can be summarized as follows:

Increasing the maximum speed of cars does not make sense. The maximum speed in railroads (100 miles per hour) has hardly grown in the last century and  is not expected to improve much. The only option to increase the speed of shipping would be by building large submarines powered by atomic energy, capable of moving at 60 or 70 knots. Major advances can only be envisaged in commercial air navigation, which will soon reach 2.5 times the speed of sound: crossing the Atlantic will take one hour.

Concorde

Thomson’s predictions for commercial air navigation have not been met. The only step in that direction, the Concorde, was a failure. The super-submarines have never come into existence. By contrast, railroads have more than doubled their top speed.

In biology, he correctly predicted the rise of biotechnology, genetics and the industrial use of microorganisms. In medicine, on the other hand, he expressed doubts about increasing the average duration of human life beyond 70 years (by 1955 it was 63) unless it were possible to eliminate death completely and maintain youth indefinitely. In his words:

This new state of affairs will profoundly alter man’s attitude toward death, perhaps not for his good. It will make him more cowardly, as he will have more to lose.

Thomson fails dramatically in his predictions about the future of computing. He believes that one can now say that computers do think (while they were in the first generation!), But the only future applications he envisages are the verification of scientific theories and performing economic and electoral predictions. As their publication can influence the result of what they predict, he assumes that these predictions and polls will be considered top secret by governments. In this way, according to Thomson, the use of computers will lead, in the long run, to less information dissemination. What has happened is exactly the opposite.

It is interesting to mention his predictions about the importance of scientific popularization, which compensates for the growing specialization in science and technology:

[Popularization] is not easy to do, and those who dedicate themselves to it deserve as high a place in scientific estimation as the researchers. Generally, those who are not specialists in a field are better able to explain to others.

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Futurology: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

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.

Futurology

In an earlier post I mentioned that many of scientific news published today are not really new discoveries, but future previsions. What I did was analyze a specific issue of the magazine Science News, and found that just three news, out of 18 it contained, corresponded to concrete findings.

At the suggestion of one of my readers I made a more meaningful analysis, by reviewing, not just a single magazine, but 40, of four different years, to see if the effect stays constant or changes with time. The results were as follows:

Year	Nr. of articles	% Futurology
1990	176	32
1995	162	33
2001	177	47
2006	167	40
2008	161	48

More about immortality

Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil calls himself futurist, meaning that he knows how to predict the future of technology. Actually, what he does is adjusting his predictions as time passes, when he sees that they won’t be fulfilled, as I explained in a post on the horizon effect, which dealt with his predictions about artificial intelligence.

Lately, Kurzweil’s predictions have expanded their scope to medicine. One of his obsessions is that we are about to become immortal. At first he thought this would happen when we will be able to download our consciousness into the memory of a computer, and continue living inside it after our biological death. A few years ago, he predicted that this would take place before 2035.

No longer so confident in this prediction (2035 is around the corner), he now expect us to be immortal shortly before 2050, when he will be 102 years old, so that, by delaying the fulfillment of his prophecies, he begins to risk not to be able to see them.

In a widely publicized interview with Computerworld, Kurzweil now expects us to become immortal through the development of a family of nano-robots that will be injected into our blood and act as a new, much better than our original immune system, detecting and attacking all possible pathogens and cancer cells before they can affect us. Without diseases, we would be immortal. Let's look at a paragraph about that interview:

Imaged prepared by Waquar Ahmad

Futurist Ray Kurzweil said that anyone alive come 2040 or 2050 could be close to immortal. The quickening advance of nanotechnology means that the human condition will shift into more of a collaboration of man and machine, as nanobots flow through human blood streams and eventually even replace biological blood, he added. That may sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, but Kurzweil, a member of the Inventor's Hall of Fame and a recipient of the National Medal of Technology, says that research well underway today is leading to a time when a combination of nanotechnology and biotechnology will wipe out cancer…

That figure, 86% hits, is provided by Kurzweil himself, and in my opinion is far from being real, as Kurzweil usually does not score failures, just delays the date of his predictions. The headline of the story (Nanotech could make humans immortal by 2040, futurist says) would be more suitable if it had been replaced by the following: Ray Kurzweil delays by 10 years the date when we will attain immortality.

Normal and cancer cells

One must be very optimistic to think that in 30 years we will be able to design a better immune system than the one we acquired during a 1000 million years evolution, after a never ending arms race between multicellular beings on the one side, and pathogenic microorganisms and cancer cells on the other. Also remember that these organisms are quite capable to adapt to new situations very quickly, so they would probably find ways to escape from our nano-robots, whose software would have to be constantly changed to adapt to them. I think it probable that we will never be able to defeat them completely.

Finally, overcoming disease is not enough to achieve immortality, we must also stop aging. Otherwise, as I said in last month’s post, we would live for 100 or 110 years, and then die. Too many advances, to be achieved in just about 30 years.

The same post in Spanish
Thematic thread on Immortality: Preceding Next

Manuel Alfonseca

Disappointment in the face of unreasonable optimistic forecasts

Arthur C. Clarke

The future is unpredictable. The information revolution that began in the 80s with the personal computer, followed in the 90s with the global expansion of the Internet, and continued in the first decade of this century with the smartphones, came as a surprise for many futurists. Half a century ago, all predictions agreed that future computers would be larger. In fact, they became smaller. By 1965, something like Internet seemed a prediction for the next century (see the story by Arthur C. Clarke, Dial F for Frankenstein). Looking back, many of the scientific advances of the twentieth century were surprising. Why then do we insist on making predictions, if they are almost never met?

The March 2016 issue of the Spanish version of the journal Scientific American includes an article entitled Neuroscience: how to avoid disappointment, by Professor Alfredo Marcos, which reviews some of the modern predictions about research on the human brain, which he considers far too optimistic. If these forecasts are not met, as can be expected, the disappointment of the public and the governments that sponsor and fund these scientific efforts could lead to a wave of excessive skepticism. These are a few of his words:

However much we learn about the brain, we must not expect that it will provide us with the immediate healing of all our medical and social ills, from Alzheimer's to violence; much less with the keys to human existence.

Crazy to predict the future

E.F.Schumacher

Consider this quotation of the book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973), by E.F.Schumacher:

There have never been so many futurologists, planners, forecasters, and model-builders as there are today, and the most intriguing product of technological progress, the computer, seems to offer untold new possibilities. People talk freely about 'machines to foretell the future'. Are not such machines just what we have been waiting for? All men at all times have been wanting to know the future.

These words are still true today, over forty years after they were written. What’s more, they apply especially to science and technology, two fields of human activity which at first glance should be free of fantasy and keep their feet glued to the ground.

More about the end of science

Science News, January 19, 2008

In a previous post I mentioned some inklings that seem to indicate that scientific development is decelerating. In this post I will focus on further evidence: the fact that most of the new discoveries being made in many sciences are almost always conditional. Rather than findings of fact, usually they just forecast possible findings that could be made in the future.

To show that this surmise may be true, I will consider a particular issue of the magazine Science News, one of the most prestigious among those engaged in high-level popular science. Specifically, I have taken the issue of January 19, 2008, which contains 18 news. Let us consider the titles or the first words, where I have enhanced those terms that indicate that the results of the investigation were provisional or tentative (unless you are really interested, you don’t have to read them all, you can skip to the last three paragraphs):

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.