It's another new year, and that means it is time once again for the Edge Annual Question. This year's question is:
My initial reaction to their question, I'm sorry to say, is annoyance. As we've stated before:
In thinking, writing, and talking about the impact of transformative future technologies, there is a strong temptation to sum it up as, "This changes everything."
You'll frequently hear that statement, but the problem is that it is not very descriptive and it's also very likely not true.
Rather than falling back on the standard "everything changes" line, we recommend systematic studies,
and in particular we suggest an inquiry into the effects of future
technologies in three areas of human endeavor and interaction: energy, conflict, and health.
But with that caveat aside, the wide range of responses to the Edge Annual Question does make for some interesting reading.
Right away, on Page 1, we get Ed Regis suggesting that the game-changing development to watch for is Molecular Manufacturing:
Nothing has a greater potential for changing everything than the
successful implementation of good old-fashioned nanotechnology.
I
specify the old-fashioned version because nanotechnology is decidedly
no longer what it used to be. Back in the mid-1980s when Eric Drexler
first popularized the concept in his book Engines of Creation,
the term referred to a radical and grandiose molecular manufacturing
scheme. The idea was that scientists and engineers would construct vast
fleets of "assemblers," molecular-scale, programmable devices that
would build objects of practically any arbitrary size and complexity,
from the molecules up. Program the assemblers to put together an SUV, a
sailboat, or a spacecraft, and they'd do it—automatically, and without
human aid or intervention. Further, they'd do it using cheap,
readily-available feedstock molecules as raw materials. . .
[W]hat if nanotechnology in the radical and grandiose sense actually
became possible? What if, indeed, it became an operational reality?
That would be a fundamentally transformative development, changing
forever how manufacturing is done and how the world works. Imagine all
of our material needs being produced at trivial cost, without human
labor, and with no waste. No more sweat shops, no more smoke-belching
factories, no more grinding workdays or long commutes.
Moving ahead to Page 5 of the answers, we have Aubrey de Grey offering the fascinating proposal that within our (extended) lifetimes, we could see The Unmasking of True Human Nature. He lists three main developments that, combined, may lead to this outcome: artificial intelligence, molecular manufacturing, and regenerative medicine.
The transformative technologies I have mentioned will, in my view,
probably all arrive within the next few decades—a timeframe that I
personally expect to see. And we will use them, directly or indirectly,
to address all the other slings and arrows that humanity is heir to:
biotechnology to combat aging will also combat infections, molecular
manufacturing to build unprecedentedly powerful machines will also be
able to perform geoengineering and prevent hurricanes and earthquakes
and global warming, and superintelligent computers will orchestrate
these and other technologies to protect us even from cosmic threats
such as asteroids—even, in relatively short order, nearby supernovae.
(Seriously.) Moreover, we will use these technologies to address any
irritations of which we are not yet even aware, but which grow on us as
today's burdens are lifted from our shoulders. . .
Humanity will at that point be in a state of complete satisfaction with
its condition: complete identity with its deepest goals. Human nature
will at last be revealed.
Finally, on Page 7, Eric Drexler says the answer is Knowledge Spreading:
I see great change flowing from the spread of knowledge of two
scientific facts -- one simple and obvious, the other complex and tangled
in myth. Both are crucial to understanding the climate change problem
and what we can do about it.
First, the simple scientific fact: Carbon stays in the atmosphere for a long time.
To many readers, this is nothing new, yet most who know this make a
simple mistake. They think of carbon as if it were sulfur, with
pollution levels that rise and fall with the rate of emission: Cap
sulfur emissions, and pollution levels stabilize; cut emissions in
half, cut the problem in half. But carbon is different. It stays aloft
for about a century, practically forever. It accumulates. Cap the rate
of emissions, and the levels keep rising; cut emissions in half, and
levels will still keep rising. Even deep cuts won't reduce the problem, but only the rate of growth of the problem.
In
the bland words of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "only
in the case of essentially complete elimination of emissions can the
atmospheric concentration of CO2 ultimately be stabilised at a constant
[far higher!] level." This heroic feat would require new technologies
and the replacement of today's installed infrastructure for power
generation, transportation, and manufacturing. This seems impossible.
In the real world, Asia is industrializing, most new power plants burn
coal, and emissions are accelerating, increasing the rate of increase of the problem.
The
second fact (complex and tangled in myth) is that this seemingly
impossible problem has a correctable cause: The human race is bad at
making things, but physics tells us that we can do much better.
This
will require new methods for manufacturing, methods that work with the
molecular building blocks of the stuff that makes up our world. In
outline (says physics-based analysis) nanoscale factory machinery
operating on well-understood principles could be used to convert simple
chemical compounds into beyond-state-of-the-art products, and do this
quickly, cleanly, inexpensively, and with a modest energy cost. If we
were better at making things, we could make those machines, and with
them we could make the products that would replace the infrastructure
that is causing the accelerating and seemingly irreversible problem of
climate change.
What sorts of products? Returning
to power generation, transportation, and manufacturing, picture roads
resurfaced with solar cells (a tough, black film), cars that run on
recyclable fuel (sleek, light, and efficient), and car-factories that
fit in a garage. We could make these easily, in quantity, if we were
good at making things.
Developing the required
molecular manufacturing capabilities will require hard but rewarding
work on a global scale, converting scientific knowledge into
engineering practice to make tools that we can use to make better
tools. The aim that physics suggests is a factory technology with
machines that assemble large products from parts made of smaller parts
(made of smaller parts, and so on) with molecules as the smallest
parts, and the smallest machines only a hundred times their size.
I encourage you to read (or at least skim) all of the answers, especially the three above from which I've posted some excerpts. And while you're at it, feel free to chime in here with your responses to the question: What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?
Mike Treder
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