Technology with a human face

Ernest Schumacher

In his famous 1973 book Small is Beautiful, Ernest Schumacher advocates a technology with a human face, because (according to him) the way modern technology has been developed dehumanizes us. Let's look at a few quotes from the chapter in his book with the same title as this post:

...the modern world has been shaped by technology. It tumbles from crisis to crisis; on all sides there are prophecies of disaster and, indeed, visible signs of breakdown.

...technology, although the product of man, tends to develop by its own laws and principles, and these are very different from those of human nature or of living nature in general. Nature always, so to speak, knows where and when to stop... Technology recognises no self-limiting principle... [T]he super-technology of the modern world, acts like a foreign body, and there are now numerous signs of rejection.

The age of the Nobel Prizes in science

Age of scientific Nobel Prizes, by decades

In my conference closing the 1997-98 term at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, entitled The myth of progress in the evolution of Science, I wrote this:

The Nobel prizes provide an interesting measurement of the evolution of scientific progress during the twentieth century. These prizes award the most important advances in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology and Medicine. Statistics show a few worrying trends, such as the progressively higher age of the scientists who have received the Nobel Prize: the average age has gone up from 47 in the first decade to 60 in the last. The number of Nobel prizes awarded to people below 40 has gone down from nine in the thirties and fifties to zero in the nineties. Not one person born after 1950 has yet received a Nobel prize.

Moore's law, a self-fulfilling prediction?

Gordon Moore

In an article that can be downloaded from the Stanford University website, entitled Are ideas getting harder to find?, the authors raise the following situation:

In many models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and the long-run growth rate is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence... showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. A good example is Moore’s Law. The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling every two years of the density of computer chips is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s... [W]e find that ideas — and the exponential growth they imply — are getting harder to find. Exponential growth results from large increases in research effort that offset its declining productivity.

The unreasonable effectiveness of science

Paul Davies

Paul Davies is an British physicist, expert in cosmology and quantum mechanics, well known for his activity in scientific popularization. In one of his articles [1], with the same title as this post, he wrote the following:

The fact that this rich and complex variety emerges from the featureless inferno of the Big Bang… as a consequence of laws of stunning simplicity and generality… has a distinct teleological flavor.

And in his most famous book, The Mind of God (1992), written in response to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Davies wrote the following words:

The success of the scientific method at unlocking the secrets of nature is so dazzling it can blind us to the greatest scientific miracle of all: science works.

What Davies poses here has much to do with one of the most pressing problems of our time, the debate between realism and anti-realism, if we use the terms of analytical philosophy. This debate can be summarized in the following words:

What happened to the predictions for 2017?

Drone

At the end of every year, many predictions are made about the following year. This applies especially to politics and the technological field. In this blog we are not interested in politics, so we’ll talk a little about technological predictions. What happened to those that were made for 2017 near the end of 2016? Have they been fulfilled?

This question is difficult to answer satisfactorily (with a yes or no), for those who make predictions usually do them on purpose in an ambiguous way, so the next year they’ll be able to say that they were right. For instance:

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

The end of science

Servers at LAAS
by Guillaume Paumier
Licensed under CC BY 3.0
via Wikimedia Commons

In my previous article I wrote this: perhaps our scientific civilization won’t endure beyond this century. This is what I mean by the title of this article (the end of science), rather than the possibility that science is over because it has already discovered everything that can be discovered, which is very unlikely, as I pointed out in another post.

Science has been an integral part of our civilization for centuries, more than is usually believed, for scientific activity was already palpable during the Middle Ages. Isn’t it absurd to predict that such activity can be ended? How might this happen? Here I propose a few, far from exhaustive considerations: