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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."
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
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
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.