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Sir Arthur Clarke Writes About the 21st Century
A.Cow writes "CNN has an article by Sir Arthur Clarke with his predictions (extrapolations, as he puts it) for the 21st century..." The article's subtitle: "Man lands on Mars, the elderly retire to the moon, humans are cloned.
Welcome to the brave new world."
Dec. 26, 2012
As the Mayan calendar ends the outer crust of the Earth, unbalanced by the immense weight of the polar ice caps, slips around the interior of the planet like a loose orange peel, leaving the former poles at the equator and some unfortunate equatorial regions at the new poles.
The violence of this upheaval sloshes the water out of the oceans, completely shaving the continents of plants, animals, topsoil and manmade structures. It also triggers a cataclysmic series of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions which serve to obliterate any remaining multicellular life.
Many aeons later everyone who ever lived on Earth is recreated from DNA by a benign superbeing who restores our memories and we all live happily ever after...
I mean come on, it's so obvious. ;^)
Interesting article, and I'd definitely subscribe to the already-expressed opinion that Sir Clarke has a somewhat optimistic timeline there.
However, my point (such as it is), is that I have a friend who's central tenet of Geek Society is that geeks exist to make the cyberpunk predictions of William Gibson come true.
Think about it:
I disagree with his hypothesis on the grounds of esthetics (geeks can't be this shallow, can they?), however as time goes on I find my position wavering: See developments since Gibson's novels in mobile communications, the web, e-commerce, encryption technology, and the comprehensive failure of society's control mechanisms (i.e. the legal system, business models, political reality) to keep up with all this technology.
Which raises the question here: since we're so obviously running out of things of Gibson's wish list, isn't it about time the geek community got behind another "visionary" and worked on THEIR wish-list instead?
And if so, why not Clarke? I'm all in favour of cheap power, space exploration, an and to war, poverty and famine.
(I just don't think it's doable, that's all. Certainly not in only 1 century)
henley
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I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Put too much sugar on your rice crispies again?
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I have recently revised by beliefs about cold fusion from the standard explanation:
"it's probably somewhere between gross measurement errors and downright hoax"
to the milder version of:
"there might actually be something there after all, but it's hard to tell with the current atmosphere"
Apparently, there are many scientists all over the world and even in U.S. national labs still quietly researching cold fusion, often under less controversial titles such as "New Hydrogen Energy". They hold conferences, show bubbling electrolysis cells and claim the thermal energy output significantly exceeds the electric input for weeks.
Are these people all completely incompetent in operating a calorimeter? Are they all charlatans spiking their samples with helium and other fusion byproducts? I'm finding it harder and harder to believe.
These scientists are attacked by their colleagues, publicly ridiculed and their careers are often in danger. I can easily find parallels to the case of Barbara McClintock who discovered in the 1930s that some genes actually "jump around" and switch places in the chromosomes. The idea was so at odds with the prevailing paradigm that she was ridiculed for decades until she finally received a Nobel prize in 1983.
I'm not claiming that the fact that someone is ridiculed by his peers is proof that he is correct, just that there are certain well-documented cases that the scientific community can be severely biased against theories which contradict common beliefs, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Sir Clarke may have the last laugh after all...
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Okay, I'm not a typical Christian, but I am a Christian. The Bible even says that God created all of these plants, FOR us, and they are ours to do with as we please.
Now, there's obviously a catch there, because by that logic, we should just cut down all the rainforests and use the wood for paneling inside our new Lincoln Town Cars. Obviously, we've got to use our brains, and use these things wisely.
So it goes for drugs, and yes, there is a strong tendancy in some drugs, to lead people to abuse - the kind of abuse that DOES hurt people, their families, the economy, the concept of "values", etc.
One of the big arguements that brought about prohibition was these newly empowered women's groups griping about how evil alchohol was driving their husbands out of the homes and causing them to spend all their time hanging out in bars with their buddies, getting drunk and renting hookers, etc. I think this would still be a problem today if we didn't have television.
So, personally, I don't have a problem with a puff on a joint now and then. But drugs can be harmful, and they're very dangerous. Now, that doesn't give anybody the right to pry into someone else's personal business and test their pee. But most of us just aren't able to responsibly handle recreational cocaine and heroin use.
Okay, so now that I've solved the drug problem, can we go to work on the flying cars? I mean come on, it's 3 months to go until the year 2000, and we still don't have flying cars! What's the matter with you people?
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I predict that within 20 years, advances in the fields of robotics and AI will make obsolete all assembly line level jobs. The work can be reduced to simple enough steps that someone is going to realize its just cheaper to mechanize the whole nine yards. The resulting reductions in cost will be so great that no business will be able to remain competitive without upgrading.
When this happens, there's going to be a whole lot of people without jobs, and a whole lot of heavy industry based economies that are going to hit the fan.
What the hell are these largely unskilled people gonna do? How are they going to support themselves? I can forsee two possible end results, neither of them pretty.
First, in wealthier, economically diverse countries, the non-working class will either be retrained by the government to do useful work (which I would imagine would be hard to find), or more likely supported on government welfare. In poorer countries, everything is just gonna go to hell.
The other possibility would be to reduce the population; simply remove the industrial working class by randomly sterilizing a large number of people.
Both of these possibilities scare the crap out of me.
"Violence never settled anything." -Ghengis Khan
I wrote the "the drug war is far from solved" rather than the "the drug problem is far from solved" intentionally. Obviously, the problem is not that there exists drugs from which the people gain pleasure, but that society thought that denial and draconian law was a solution.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
I'm an anarchist at heart, but in our current society I can buy people telling me not to something for others sake ("Don't drink and drive cause you might kill someone"), but not for my own ("Don't drink and drive cause you might kill yourself", "Don't do drugs cause they are bad for you").
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After about 2 generations of any living conditions, people forget how lucky they are and the focus on the real problem is lost. for example, we americans eat too unhealthy, but we loose sight that eating unhealthy is much better than starving, so its not really a problem.
Even if everyone is living the lifestyle that people enjoy in highly industrialized contries, very few people will realize what they have. We might be living in a utopia, but we will never know it. Its easy for someone in the past to think "wow no world hunger, it must be a perfect world". But the people living it won't think that way, they didn't live a life of starvation. There will be other 'major issues' like extending peoples lifespan and solving population problems to occupy the collective mind.
Gattaca was an interesting movie, but it missed the point in its all-American "You can do it if you only try" message. I wrote a review of it for a Swedish film site, where I compared the DNA prejudice in the movie to the Frenology (finding personal traits from the size of the brain) of the 1800s. I concluded however that the movie misses the point. The really frightening thing about DNA analysis is not that it makes prejudice based on DNA possible, prejudice is already deeply rooted in our society, but that that (unlike frenology which was just bullshit) prejudice based on genes would be right.
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it is wierd he didn't mention much Internet effect. Moore's + Metcalfe's + Gilder's Laws converging suggest that by 2025, any human on earth will have 100 times today's bandwidth enabling 64 zillion (8 billion squared) routes of duplex wireless communication between humans. Censor that! Today, e-commerce grows 35 times faster than the overall global economy. The web grows fastest in languages other than English. Soon, over half the web will be non-English. By 2012 or so, there will be more Chinese on this Internet than U.S.citizens on this planet. Increasingly, MT will get smarter, and will help us all translate, learn, and communicate.
Third Worlders will increasingly gain access to the info wealth of the world, as it more freely distributes. Don't forget Africa. Service contracts will migrate to lower bidders wherever. Taxation will morph into the nattiest of complex hairballs, and be increasingly ignored.
It means is geopolitics will change, much faster than anyone is prepared to deal with. Nations will still control atom trade, food, clothing, housing etc. (until the nano-factories arrive..) But in the Noosphere, encryption will enforce laws and define borders (for trade in bits). Virtual identities will allow multiple citizenships, (and more sanctuary from brute force violence.) Money will be electronic. Nation-State monopolized currencies will lose cache. Ask George Soros.. there will be major currency crisises. Private currencies will innovate faster and grow more useful, trustworthy and valuable. We'll be able to "vote with nano-bucks", supporting transglobal organizations and policies we agree with, ignoring those we don't.
Most important of all, economies built on "law of diminishing returns" and competition for scarce resources will be less productive than so-called "information" economies that grow abundantly "increasing returns" with network effects. The best way to compete will be to cooperate. Dominators like M$ will lose to Partners like Red Hat. Shareholder stock corps like Red Hat will lose to member-owned chaorgs like VISA. Ironically, Capitalism has sown the seeds of its own distruction, but that ain't to say the other "C" word will replace it. What's really dying, thank god, is central "command-and-control" authority.
Freedom ascends, but don't hold your breath for "the Declaration of Independence" to regulate it. As McLuhan says "the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village." Prediction: we'll see a Declaration of Interdependence, and soon.
I don't agree. That prejudice is bad has been said a thousand times over. If you want an example of a society where individuals are unfairly treated because of prejudice (and it doesn't really matter whether it is based on dna, frenology, race, or sex), you don't need sci-fi, you can just look around you in the world we live today.
However, down the road of technology the really frightening thing is that there will be prejudice will be justified and correct (and it doesn't really matter whether DNA analysis, some day there will be a technology that will). From a sci-fi point of view, such a society is a much more interesting discussion.
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I love how naive and optimistic Clarke seems to be in a world controlled by big business whose goal is never for the public good. Think of all the tech we have readily available now that will never be offered as a consumer good because the profit margin on X is greater than the margin on Y. Sure X is old and unsafe but who's going to stop us? The government? Heh, guess again.
Clarke makes this very sweet effort to assume everyone is just like he is, and not people so wrapped up in consumerism to really care about future advances not brought to their attention by some marketing team. If we, and by we I mean the public, wanted it we could make a very smart shift towards solar/wind power in a matter of months with only a slight loss in convienance. Some futurist could have easily predicted that a while ago, but market forces and apathy rule the earth.
There is probably 100 catastrophic lists for every utopian list produced, but that wouldn't be CNNewsworthy. As fantastic as this list is I don't blame Clarke, he is a writer, he writes fiction.
...something he always forgets when he makes these high-flown pronouncements on The Shape Of Things To Come. All right, so some of the points are valid and some of them are not. That's acceptable from science fiction, that's the way it's always been. It's when Asiaweek (and the clueless media in general) starts handing this stuff out as the Authorized Version of the future that it bothers me. And Clarke does have a bit of a bee in his bonnet about his predictions... recently "predicted" that the President of Sri Lanka (where he lives) would win the Nobel Peace prize in 2006 (or thereabouts). In a word, bollocks. I still like that qualifier, though - "optimism about the future is always desirable; it may help to create a self-fulfilling prophecy". Sly one, old Clarke is. :)
He's a bit biref on the AIs. Since they evolve so much faster, what do they do? Do we just get a new neighbour in cyberspace or do we end up with something like the Borg, or worse yet the AI cores in Simmon's 'Hyperion' series?
I hate to put down this great man, but I think that he is feeling the natural urge to speed things up, the hope that more and more things will happen while he still has a chance to see them.
His predictions are beginning to seem childishly naive, and at odds with the world as I see it completely. Granted, I'm cynical as hell, but look around you, do you see a world heading for a utopia in 50 years? Man kind has some major issues to face, and trying to rely on the belief that working cold fusion will be developed in three years is just sad. We won't have working warm fusion in three years people.
Who predicted HIV? Who predicted the ozone layer and greenhouse effect (anyone notice how these two problems are talked about so much less today then ten years ago - it isn't because the situation is any better today)? Who predicted that man kinds exploration of space would stop after reaching the moon, and almost die completely as soon as there were no longer two superpowers playing the largest-penis game?
The drug war is far from solved. Nor are the enviromental problems. Nor is world starvation. Nor is the emergence of new viruses. Nor is the fact that the economy is completly at odds with itself (the freedom of information, vs the appropriation of information). Nor is the fact that the China that Clarke predicts will soon be the worlds largest economy doesn't respect any human rights what so ever. Nor is the fact that the western nations are turning away refugees who earn less in a year then we do in a week from our borders because "we can't afford them". Nor is the fact that weapons of mass destruction will soon be trivial for a country, or even an organisation (and soon an individual) to develope.
Come to think of it, I don't give a fuck when we land on Mars or find life on Europa...
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I have to admit: I'd like to be so optimistic at his age. Extrapolating what happened to me during my 26 years on Earth, I don't think I will ever be. Sir Arthur Clarke is obviously both optimistic, though I think also a little self-ironic (e.g. cold fusion, AI, abolishion of all currencies, destroying nuclear weapons, life on Europa :-))) ). :-) ), I have no doubt that starving nations will have no ethical or medical problems with accepting genetically modified crops and animals. Of course, a lot of bad things will happen, those countries will be the laboratory white mouse for biotech companies, but finally either the modified crops will arrive in Europe and America, or those two continents will lose their economical advantages - genetically modified food, in a long time scale, means cheap and efficient production of food, complex organical molecules and so on.
I'd like to comment some of his biological predictions. First, I think that direct-input devices will arrive sooner, than he predicted, but their primary aim will be people who can't hear or see, and those devices will also be quite useful for constructing intelligent protheses. I don't believe in non-invasive devices, though, because they are improbable from physical and biological point of view (I don't want to get into neurological details).
Human cloning is, in my humble opinion, not an issue. As I mentioned in an earlier comment in the Bruce-Sterling discussion, this would be a large and expensive project, requiring the intellectual power of best specialists in this field. I don't think this could be realised in the next two or three decades. To repeat myself, you can't start a corporation called Transgeneta and start quietly cloning people without communication to the scientific society and huge financial reserves. Besides, although there might be some people interested in having a clone, they by far have not enough money to pay a decade of a ver expensive field of research. Practical uses of cloning humans are none.
There are two research fields in biology, which seem to be a little overseen by many authors: first is in vitro growing cultures of human tissue, and possibly human organs, the second gene therapy - which is nothing but modifying the genome of a grown-up person through viral particles, which can invade a cell and combine the cell genetic material with the tiny bit of DNA they carry.
I think that in twenty years in vitro cultivating of human organs will be possible, especially because of the large knowledge basis provided by the Human Genome Project or the alternative project from TIGR (whichever comes first). The other thing however can make you quite scared, when you think what could be done with the technology of gene-therapy. Imagine a biological weapon, that selectively damages the genome of people carrying a certain gene - you know, that means a chinese weapon that selectively kills americans or vice versa, because a mean genotype differs in many genetical loci. This could, of course, mean that atomical warefare will become obsolate.
Another thing that could happen to us carries the name of GATTACA (if you haven't seen that movie, you missed the most important sf movie since SO 2001). Quick genomical analysis will be possible in a few years: the first prototypes able to make a polymerase chain reaction in a few minutes are on the way. At the beginning, this will not allow to analyse completly your genome - but will be quite enough to provite a unique ID for every person, or even a good identification even if only samples of genomic material from the persons family are in the database.
Genetically modified food. Although it will be probably banned in high-tech countries (or even Poland
There is one more thing I want to mention, and that is this AI thing. So-called artificial life, in fact - programs evolving in a computer - already, as you know, exist (there was a paper by Richard Lenski in Nature Aug, 12th, fascinating stuff) - though I don't think anything like AI will arrive in the next ten years, sooner or later it is bound to happen.
Regards,
January
"But in the end it's sad to watch these predictions. A space hotel is more important than helping developing countries and getting food for everyone. Also first world people get to live on the moon while tens of thousands of children die of hunger and wars"
This is not even, nor right. In Clarke's article, developing countries help themselves (there are references to India, Singapore and China), and the "food for everyone" issue is covered by the cheap energy devices. No reference is made to war, even indirectly. I you want to blame him, do it on account on the wild foundations of the happy century he, well, extrapolates (commercial cold fusion in 2002 and quantum generators in 2010, indeed!).
And the space hotel project is private. If you deem other things more important, don't invest in it.
You seem to suppose that, once arrived to a certain point (_which_ point exactly?), progress must be stopped until everybody has reached it. And then, perhaps, resume it again.
This is ludicrous. Technological progress cannot be switched off and on at will; it is inextricably woven in the fabric of our civillization. New technologies are at first scarce and expensive luxuries. Some of them will succeed and become more common and cheap, until everyday life will be unconceivable without them; say inhouse plumbing (yes, I am aware that a large part of humankind hasn't got inhouse plumbing, or even outhouse plumbing; that part included the home village of some relatives of mine when I was a child). I can hear you 150 years ago: "Let's stop spending effort and resources in such arcane and useless things as electricity until everybody has a water pump at home".
AFAIK, it was F.A. von Hayek who made the argument (here crudely paraphrased) that the rich are the vanguard of the poor in the progress of society, and that in an equalitarian society an equivalent would have to be established, i.e., a selected group of persons who would test new goods before they could be produced in large quantities.
And he wasn't being cynical.
Nothing is as difficult as predicting. Especially predicting the future.
It just seems like Arthur is in a bit of hurry here. Human clones in less than 5 years? Oh, and cold fusion is just around the corner. It will be here before Windows 2003 :-)
Then there's the nuclear bomb going off in North Korea in 2009. Why North Korea? I mean, isn't the probablility bigger that some terrorist group or crazy dictator gets/makes one and smuggles it into US?
Oh, and life on both Europa and the Halley's Comet. Maybe they'll also be able to find that spacecraft behind the comet too? The one where you get by making a suicide. Elvis pilots it BTW.
As Arthur didn't want to mention all-too-possible disasters, let me try:
2002 Microsoft's stock collapses and hundreds of programmers leave the company to join other companies to develope for Linux.
2000-2020 A massive earth quake destroys Tokyo resulting in worldwide economical problems when the Japanese people pull their money back to rebuild the city.
But in the end it's sad to watch these predictions. A space hotel is more important than helping developing countries and getting food for everyone. Also first world people get to live on the moon while tens of thousands of children die of hunger and wars.
> Who predicted the ozone layer and greenhouse
> effect (anyone notice how these two problems
> are talked about so much less today then ten
> years ago - it isn't because the situation is
> any better today)?
The hole in the ozone layer isn't as much of a topic as it used to be, because we have already done what needed to be done. That is, developed and started using replacement for the chemichals that harmed the ozone layer. It is an environmental succes story.
The use of fossil fuels contribution to the greehouse effect is still a hot topic, at least here in Denmark. Mostly because it is used as an excuse for putting new taxes on the use of fossil fuel.
I grew up on Clarke and always loved his stuff, but his main weakness (still) is that he doesn't understand the human factor. If you want a SF writer to make some prediction for you, I'd go with Kim Stanley Robinson. He understands poltics, sociology, and how humans tick.
Clarke completely factors out the innate human tendency to resist totalizing social experiments put together by their governments (or corporations. For example, how would Clarke factor in the major defeat last week of Monsanto's genetically-modifed foods program? That was defeated by the direct action of Indian farmers who burned GM crops and English activist who destroyed fields with games of football.
What about social revolutions?
Clarke's predictions are alot of fun, but I'd like to see the other half of the picture!
Chuck0
Mid-Atlantic Infoshop
http://www.infoshop.org
For those curious as to what happened to Cold fusion, this article might be interesting...
http://www.caltech.edu/~goodstein/fusion.html
Also check out Cold Fusion Times at:
http://world.std.com/~mica/cft.html
Yes, he writes greats books and some decade ago he predicted the communications satelite, and is even foolishly called its inventor. But now, he is way way way off, think about this:
2002 The first commercial device producing clean, safe power by low-temperature nuclear reactions goes on the market, heralding the end of the Fossil-Fuel Age. Economic and geopolitical earthquakes follow, and, for their discovery of so-called "Cold Fusion" in 1989, Pons and Fleischmann receive the Nobel Prize for Physics.
Thats the way most 'next century' predictions go. They tell us what we want to hear. The world will continue to develop, but besides IT and advance science, it will be the same in a decade. Cloning, yes, it is posible, but that will not entirely change our way of live, as a cheap, portable and safe source of energy. The goverment wont put an end to fossil fuel car enginces, they are to common, to easy to use, to cheap and have a gigantic pressure group behind them. In 2010, we will still be driving cars, flying 747's, and dreaming about someday going cheaply to space. We wont have 'quantum energy generators' nor nuclear weapons be banished after a brief discussion. Megawatt hour? Worldwide currency? Nah! Say dollar, say Euro, which will be then the closest to a global currency for trading, but locally? Hmmmm. Ai in 2020? Oh, how much I would LOVE to see AI develop in my lifetime. This one, at least, IMHO, I see as possible.
As always, Mr. Clarke looking for a spotlight, telling us what we want to hear. Pseudoscience? Oh yes! Try to read this book. It is GREAT.
Why People Believe Weird Things : Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
How about this:
2040 The "Universal Replicator," based on nano-technology, is perfected: any object, however complex, can be created - given the necessary raw material and the appropriate information matrix. Diamonds or gourmet meals can, literally, be made from dirt. As a result, agriculture and industry are phased out, ending that recent invention in human history - work! There is an explosion in arts, entertainment and education. Hunter-gathering societies are deliberately recreated; huge areas of the planet, no longer needed for food production, are allowed to revert to their original state. Young people can now discharge their aggressive instincts by using cross-bows to stalk big game, which is robotic and frequently dangerous.
Wishful thinking!! Gaia! (not to mention something like this would spell the end for economy, the need to work, it would be 'heaven on earth' and ultimately, the end of humanity)
Now, what I DO believe is that the human race will 'evolve' thanks to technology. Nut we will be bastards, humans, all the way. There will still be dumb-asses, politicians, lawyers, criminals, thirdworldcountries, etc etc for a very long time.
2010 Lord Torvalds is voted in control of the DOJ mandated Microsoft Open Source tree.
2011 Mrs. Gates confirms the rumors that her husband Bill has always been insane, and is finaly getting profesional help.
2012 Linux kernel 5.5.4 is simultanoisly distoed to the worlds computers over 10Gps optical lines.
2013Dennis Richie recieves a nobel prize for his life long work in technology.
2014 CEO Steve Balmer gets pissed drunk at a frat party and blathers "Hi-Tech? fuuuuck,the OS is simple, a kid could write it!" (MS stock slides below $10 for the 5th time that year)
2015 CEO of WorldcomOL, Steve Chase, turns down a sell offer from Microsoft
2016 Microsoft is purchased by RedHatWorldcomOL ($4 a share). The source is used to training new programers how *not* to write code.
2017 Bill Gates (while serving his 20 years) is forced to actually try to use his products. He spends his later years sucking his thumb waiting for his micros~1 computer to reboot.