The Telegraph provides a quick survey of some leading scientists’ thoughts about the future, as we move “from being passive observers of nature to its choreographers.” As with most predictions about the course of technological change, the forecasts split fairly neatly between the utopian and the dystopian. The divide is captured well in the vision of nanotechnology presented by a professor at the US Joint Special Operations University:
On the battlefield, nanobots are going to do a lot of things; they can seek and destroy specific targets, for instance. You’ve heard about the ‘surgeon” that you can inject into your bloodstream – well, they can go in there to repair a clogged blood vessel, or they might be able to go in and punch holes in the blood vessels to destroy an adversary. The embryonic stages are here today, and a lot of work is being done.
An Oxford professor elaborates:
With an advanced form of nanotechnology, it would be possible to build different kinds of weapons systems for which it’s very difficult to see how an effective defence would be possible. In my view, the advanced form of nanotechnology is arguably the greatest existential risk humanity is likely to confront in this century.
The prospect of gaining greater control over our biological and genetic destiny produces similarly divided predictions. Ray Kurzweil foresees an end to disease, as we “reprogram biology away from cancer, away from heart disease, to really overcome the major diseases that kill us.” But Francis Collins wonders whether only an elite will be able to afford to turn themselves into the new supermen:
Suppose we develop – by our understanding of how the genome works and therefore how the body works – an approach that would improve memory; what’s wrong with that? Well, it raises the question of who decides what’s an improvement, and is that something that is going to be available to all or will it be another example of separating between people who have resources and people who don’t?
Adds Eliezer Yudkowsky, of the Singularity Institute: “We have a choice in how we create artificial intelligence. And you’ve got to be very sure that a created mind is never going to want to self-improve and that it’s never going to want to do anything that destroys intelligent life. You’ve got to treat that gun as if it’s loaded.”
Our ability to fiddle with nature comes at a time when we are increasingly removed from nature. That seems to be particularly true of children. “It seems obvious,” writes Leonie Maistre, “that children need nature but it is fast becoming evident that children, who are the treasure of any society and its future, are being starved of it and all that nature has to offer.” Peter Fimrite, of the San Francisco Chronicle reports on how nature is, for many kids, being disintermediated by digital media:
The notion of going on a hike, camping, fishing or backpacking is foreign to a growing number of young people in cities and suburbs around the nation, according to several polls and studies. State and national parks, it seems, are good places for old folks to go, but the consensus among the younger set is that hiking boots aren’t cool. Besides, images of nature can be downloaded these days.
It isn’t just national forests and wilderness areas that young people are avoiding, according to the experts. Kids these days aren’t digging holes, building tree houses, catching frogs or lizards, frolicking by the creek or even throwing dirt clods. “Nature is increasingly an abstraction you watch on a nature channel,” said Richard Louv, the author of the book “Last Child in the Woods,” an account of how children are slowly disconnecting from the natural world. “That abstract relationship with nature is replacing the kinship with nature that America grew up with.”
It seems unlikely that people who’s conception of “nature” is almost entirely abstract will have many qualms about pulling the loaded gun’s trigger. It’s just another mashup.
Future of science: ‘We will have the power of the gods’
Yes, and we are all made of stars.
Has there ever been a futurist who thought that the future will be much the same as the past – with just incremental changes? Or who thought that change over the next ten years would be on the same scale as that of the last ten?
The most terrifying thing for me about the nanotechnology+weapon scenario is that they’re invisible to the human senses. It’s bad enough when you can confront your attacker, but when it’s completely invisible and unknown until it’s too late, that’s much worse.
This is why poison gas, germs, mines, and even snipers seem somehow worse ways to die. They are the unseen.
Modern warfare has steadily involved in that direction. Stealth technology, data acquisition from satellites and silent drones, and combat tactics that mean you’re dead before you ever knew the enemy was present are all part and parcel.
With nanotechnology, one starts to wonder why people are in the wars at all, except to be killed. Let the robots kill each other.
The loss of ongoing and early romps in nature might deprive a generation of children the possibility of beholding nature’s beauty. Without such the sensory development is stunted and the joys associated with any number of archetypal experiences in and with nature are at risk of being lost!
What is it that drives us to create beautiful things?
The manifestation of beauty derived out of nature’s secret laws might otherwise be hidden from us forever. Goethe.
Alan
“Nature is increasingly an abstraction you watch on a nature channel”
After growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, I moved away in my early twenties to the central California coast, and it had a profound impact on how I saw the world and what I valued most. The beauty of the natural world wasn’t an abstraction any more; it surrounded me, and it’s clear to me now that city dwellers’ consciousness and habits are strongly shaped by their environment. This must affect many things, especially the consumer/mass media society that largely serves to distract people from the shortcomings of their communities.
Alas, my town is turning into a shopper’s paradise, with big-box stores, national chains and refugees from L.A. who bring their city habits with them and are never seen in the county’s most beautiful places.
“Nature” is overrated. You’re putting forth a very romantic, idealized conception, of intellectual myth. I like flush toilets, not having to hunter/gather food, and being freed from worrying about predators. Human civilization is very much about getting away from nature, and that’s a good thing.
We already have profound inequality. In the US, it’s quite possible for a poor kid to die for lack of a routine medical treatment that wouldn’t be a problem for the elite – or sometimes even the middle class. But I don’t see how this inequality is going to be changed by connection with “nature”.
Again, predator-prey is very much a part of “nature”, something whichi is typically ignored in stock romanticism as the above.
I identify myself as a life scientist with a strong physical science background. Most futurists, especially singularitarians, tend to come from a physical sciences background for whatever reason, and their opinions usually leave me chuckling. Technology rocks. Like Seth, I quite like flush toilets myself, and look forward to the days of implantabable diagnostics. However, the sheer naivette of many opinions about how we can control nature is astonishing. No romance here. Nature is complicated, and we are not even close to figuring out that complexity. We have a lot of work ahead of us before we reach a stage where we can even think about controlling our bodies artificially. I have a lot of respect for Kurzweil, but I do think that he does not share the same for biology, which is not quite as logical as machines.
Seth I am astounded by your antagonistic response. Nature, Intellectual myth? You push the dialog to such an extreme point, “hunter/gather food,” that it somewhat difficult to take your comments seriously.
Regardless of the fact that human civilization is about getting away from nature it’s also about balance, especially for the children during the early maturation process. When younger inner city children believe that milk comes from a one pint carton it’s not too difficult to understand that a vital connect with nature has been lost!
I will resist taking you to task other than to request some temperance in your attitude as I find your tone off-putting and on the verge of being disrespectful.
Alan
Alan, no offense meant, it comes out of my strong desire for what I call “technology-positive social criticism”. Nick punctures the hype of tech hucksters very well. But there’s a temptation to lapse into reactionaryism, that technology makes us somehow unnatural, less than human.
This post plays off a strain in intellectual tradition that naively conceives of Nature as some sort of benign force, the trees ‘n the flowers. In fact, Nature is full of things which want to eat you (in varying degrees), a good portion of which must be fought off if you are to live anything like an, err, natural lifespan. Knowing food doesn’t come from the supermarket is good. But I doubt “connection with nature” is intended to mean personally killing a small animal and then eating it for dinner, which is pretty much the most natural activity of a predator species (of which humans are).
If anything, any intellectual who advocated the real “kinship with nature that America grew up with” – meaning, for rural areas, trapping and hunting using small arms – would probably get a lot of flack for the gun aspects, and that eating meat you’ve killed yourself is really frowned on these days.
Seth your apology is accepted and very much appreciated. I have been trapping some rogue squirrels in my back garden, inner city Chicago, and doing away with them. It was suggested by a friend that once barbecued they are a tasty morsel but I declined.
I was attempting to express some of the subtler points of the importance between the humankind’s relationship to the natural world and the development of the sense of beauty among other things.
Technology is no less benign than nature. The rush to put younger children in close and constant contact with technology can be problematic if balance is not found. Technology is insidious as much as it’s beguiling because it can work back upon the younger child in so many harmful ways.
Technology and nature are akin to a Faustian, Mephistopheles like deal, it can be tricky.
Suffice it to say I am the biggest adherent and user of technology and all the related challenges with those who are attempting to control it.. I also support the Second Amendment
Regards Seth, Alan
Seth,
I like flush toilets, too, and I’d prefer not to be eaten by a grizzly bear. As for the hunter-gatherer stuff, I’m not so sure. Some argue that the hunter-gatherers actually had it pretty good. Anyway, as Alan said, it’s about balance. Learning to respect and admire nature, through direct contact with it, doesn’t mean romanticizing nature. In fact, the people who romanticize nature in the way you suggest usually do so from well-furnished and well-heated rooms.
Nick
Nick, the romanticization is key in this sentence:
“Our ability to fiddle with nature comes at a time when we are increasingly removed from nature”
The flaw in the above is that it conflates two meaning of the word nature, between roughly “essence” (It’s my nature) and “living pre-technology” (a state of nature). I don’t think living pre-technology tells us about where to apply technology.
Regarding nanotech, if there’s a cheap nanotech-repairer, I’m sure there’ll be a nanotech-landmine. Step on one, it’ll release a bunch of nanobots which slice you open from the inside. But war is very much part of nature.
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
–william shakespeare
The issue that worries me, and is spoken of here, is that people are becoming too detached from nature, and also society in general.
It worries me that for many people MySpace and Facebook are how they socialize now, which in my philosophical opinion leads to people becoming detached from the “real” world.
People used to harp about the nuclear genie being out of the bottle. That is only the small picture. The big picture is the technology genie that has been turned lose. When one ponders the effects on how society changes a society, it should start scaring you just a tad bit.
Again, my philosophical opinion, not my scientific one.
This is a picture of a bacteriophage, a virus that infects bacteria:
Bacteriophage nanobot.
Looks like a little robot doesn’t it? Its about 100nm – the size theorized for most of the killer nanobots. These are are called complex viruses because they have complicated “machinery” to infect bacterial cells. As you can see nature has been experimenting on the nano scale for billions of years. When we get a cold we are really being infected by nature’s own nanobots, but we have evolved immune systems to protect us. As depressing as the scenarios of global war is with nanobots, there is always hope that vaccines to these machines can be developed. The prototype is in your body now inside your bone marrow.