The magazine Science News has reached in 2021 one hundred years (a century) of existence. To celebrate this anniversary, the magazine has published a list of what, according to its author, are the ten greatest scientific advances made between 1921 and 2021. This is the list, ordered according to the opinion of the article’s author about the importance of the discovery (from highest to lowest):
Giordano Bruno’s original name was Filippo Bruno. He was born in Nola, in 1548, and died in Rome, in 1600. He was an Italian philosopher and writer, but not a scientist, for he never practiced any science. So why is he often named (incorrectly) as a martyr of science, who for his scientific ideas was condemned and executed by the Inquisition of the Catholic Church?
What follows is based on a summary of his
life taken from my dictionary titled 1000 Great
Scientists, published in Spanish in 1996. To disprove this
mistaken idea, I decided to include him in the list of scientists.
At age 15 he entered the Dominican order and later was a professor in Naples, but in 1576 he had to flee, accused of heterodoxy. He traveled through Italy, Switzerland, France, and England, achieving considerable success with his philosophy lessons in Paris and Oxford.
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?
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| John MacCarthy |
The term artificial intelligence appears frequently in the media. It is usually used to refer to a computer application that behaves in a way that appears to be intelligent. But is it really intelligent? Or is this a case of meaning displacement, the application of a more appealing term to something not really new?
The term artificial intelligence was invented by John MacCarthy in 1956, in a seminar that took place at Dartmouth College in Hanover, U.S.A. At that time, the participants made exaggerated predictions about the imminent advances they expected in this field, some of which have not been fully performed 65 years later. Now the predictions are even more ambitious, but it is quite likely that none will come true in the short term, and that some will never come true.
The magazine Science News has just turned 100 years old. It began with the year 1922. From the beginning, it has numbered its magazines by semesters, rather than years, so the issues of the second half of 2021 bear the number 200. It is one of the longest-lived magazines of scientific information in existence. But its evolution in recent decades is worrying, and does not bring us to be optimistic about the current state of world science.
Economists speak of economies of scale, by which they refer to the idea that the larger a company, the lower the production costs, and therefore the higher the profits. The consequence of accepting this idea is the belief that companies must get bigger and bigger to make better use of resources, so their number would become smaller. It is not often taken into account that this leads to problems such as declining product quality, an almost inevitable consequence of the loss of competition. There is also an optimal design point, which if exceeded leads to cost decreases being reversed, and becoming increases.
After publishing his famous book Small is Beautiful, Ernest Schumacher received
a letter that read as follows:
The crucial point is that as a monolithic
organization increases in size, the problem of communicating between its
components goes up exponentially. It
is generally reckoned that the maximum size of a productive scientific research
team is twelve; over that size everyone spends all his time finding out what
everyone else is doing. (Cited by Joseph Pearce in his book Small is still beautiful).
Pearce says that the same idea of economies
of scale has spread to politics of scale,
which would inevitably lead to a world government:
[D]emocracy becomes subject to the theory of progressive centralization.
Individuals delegate their democratic functions to a local council; the local
council delegates its functions to a county council; the county council
delegates to the regional council or state government; the regional council or
state government delegates to the national government; the national government
delegates to a continental union; and finally, so the theory implies, the
continental union will delegate to a world government…
If, however, this theoretical world government should ever become
a reality, it will almost certainly call itself a democracy. People will have a
vote even if they don’t have a voice. The problem, therefore, is not whether
democracy is the way forward—because almost everyone believes that it is—the
problem is undemocratic “democracy.” The challenge for the future is how to
make democracy democratic.
Throughout history there have been various
attempts to form such a world government. We can mention Napoleon Bonaparte,
who tried to unify Europe by replacing the top rulers with members of his own
family and generals of his army; Adolf Hitler, who wanted to found an Empire
that would last 1000 years; Stalin, Mao Zedong and other communists, who
believed that communism would eventually prevail throughout the world, leading
to a communist world government, and didn’t care about the death of millions, as
long as their ideology succeeded. Some think that this world government is
about to be created, based on the current Western dominance in the United
Nations. But is it advisable to create a world government?
I am personally skeptical, and have proved
this in several of my futuristic science fiction novels, where the World
Government almost always plays the role of the villain.
•
In Under an
Orange Sky (1993, 2016), the world government wants to launch
the terra-formation of Mars, despite the fact that this would cause the death
of all Martians, intelligent beings inhabiting the subsoil of the planet.
•
In the continuation of the previous book, Descent into the Hell of Venus (1999, 2016),
some of the dangers of the World Government are explained in the following
words: Although the world is theoretically
united, there are still conflicts everywhere, civil wars, we could call them,
but everybody knows that these are the worst, cruelest and most inhuman of all
wars. There is also the possibility that said World Government
is occupied by a dictator who’d use it for his own benefit.
•
Finally, in Operation
Quatuor (2014), the World Government is one of the main
antagonists of the novel. As one of the characters explains: The government has managed to stop the population increase.
Now they want to reduce it, so they have established forced abortion for those
who already have a child, and compulsory euthanasia for those over ninety years
of age.
Starting from the principle that everything
created by man can be misused, a world government would probably become
an extremely dangerous tool, which would overshadow even the predictions of
George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty Four,
where the world government has not even been built, as the world was divided
into three superpowers (Oceania, East-Asia and Eurasia) in permanent war
against each other, all of which have turned into a suffocating dictatorship.
Thematic Thread on Politics and Economy: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
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| Ernest Schumacher |
Joseph Pearce is the author of the book Small is still beautiful, whose title clearly indicates the influence of Ernest Schumacher's best-known work, Small is beautiful. In this book, Schumacher proposes the idea that large companies and organizations are not the most efficient way to achieve human happiness, which in fact should be the goal of every economic activity, rather than increase the profits.
Pearce addresses the question of the Gross National Product (GNP), usually used to measure growth. GNP is often taken as a measure of success: the higher its growth, the better the economy is supposed to be. In Pearce's opinion, this way of measuring economic success is not appropriate for the needs of society, because it presents the following problems:
