"WHAT
ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT?" |
|
REBECCA GOLDSTEIN
Philosopher, Harvard University; Author, Betraying Spinoza

We
Have the Capacity to Understand One Another
Sharp
polarities between clashing points of view are wreaking all
sorts of havoc in the world right now. Perhaps for many of
us the divide that cuts closest to the quick is that between
science, reason, and logic, on the one hand, and sectarianism,
faith, and religion, on the other. My optimism is anchored
to one aspect of human nature: We have the capacity to understand
one another. Evolution has bequeathed us a sketchy folk psychology, just as it has a sketchy folk physics. We come equipped with the understanding that we are engaged with others who manifest propositional attitudes—beliefs, desires, regrets, dreads, hopes: the whole gamut. We come equipped, too, with skills for discovering what those propositional attitudes of others might be.
Since at least the 1940s social psychologists have been studying our capacity to attribute mental states to others. In one early important experiment (Heider & Simmel 1944), almost every single subject, when shown a short movie consisting of geometrical shapes moving on a screen, attributed propositional attitudes to the shapes. Subsequent research has strengthened the view that our capacity for mental attribution is universal and nearly reflexive—in short, an aspect of human nature.
Our folk physics—involving ideas about space and time, about objects and forces—can be extended and deepened, refined and corrected by that sophisticated enterprise we call science. So, too, can our primitive folk psychology be expanded and refined. We can even come to understand those whose propositional attitudes diverge significantly from our own. We humans may never be able to know what it's like to be a bat, but Daniel Dennett could, in principle, know what it's like to be a believer, to hold that life has meaning only if it conforms to some larger-than-life purpose, say, or to be the victim of a dread of death so overwhelming that comfort is gained only from denying the reality of mortality altogether. And so, too, Pope Benedictus XVI could, in principle, understand the propositional attitudes of a proponent of naturalism, determined to trim his ontology to the entities required only by science because of a higher-order desire never to be duped into believing something which is false and, therefore, committed to the highest standards of empirical evidence. (Not all propositional-attitude bearers share this higher-order desire not to be duped, which can come as a shock to many in the scientific community. )
Quite obviously, to understand the propositional attitudes of another is not to endorse them; it isn't the same as wanting them for one's own, although that can, of course, occur—as when, as occasionally happens, we learn from one another. Still, to come to know better the propositional attitudes of others, grasping what the world is like for them, can be intrinsically interesting. It can also be useful—in fact, often essential to survival and reproduction. (A seducer will get nowhere without at least a rudimentary grasp of the propositional attitudes of the seducee. ) It is also implicated in widening the circle of sympathy that promotes the outward dissemination of ethical attitudes.
And of course the most effective means for changing someone's mind usually involves grasping the mind he already has.
Just
as science improves on our primitive folk physics, we have an
enterprise that extends the primitive skills of folk psychology,
refining them into a means of arriving at a complex and shared
knowledge of what it's like to have propositional attitudes and
representational structures quite different from one's own. This
enterprise is the narrative arts. What gives me any optimism
at all in this dark season of dangerous divides is that there
is a trend among contemporary novelists to turn their artistic
attention to the divisive themes of the day. Given
the nature of the literary enterprise—what it is that novels
do—this effort to develop narrative techniques for taking
the full human measure of such divides can only contribute to
deepening our understanding of what lies behind what seem like
irreconcilable differences—and which often are just that:
irreconcilable. We are not, ever, going to become an attitudinally
homogenous species. Someone who desires, above all, not
to be duped into believing something false will not be turned
into someone who, say, wants his beliefs, above all, to affirm
his affinity with his community, nor vice versa. Still, it's
instructive for both to make their way into the other's
mind. There's even a slight chance that someone's
mind might be changed in the process. But the deepening of understanding
isn't measured solely by changes of that sort.
So, at the end of the day, I am tethering my optimism to the work of our contemporary novelists—which is probably another way of saying that I'm pretty darned pessimistic. |
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB
Epistemologist of Randomness and Applied Statistician;
Author, Fooled By Randomness

The
Birth of Stochastic Science
I
have seen in Richard Dawkins' work many references to
the difficulty people have, when looking at an animal, in accepting
that it is not the product of a top-down design, but the result
of a random process — more exactly the upper bound of a
random process, in which (roughly, and only roughly) the most
successful mutations tend to make it. Yet my problem is
that when those who accept the evolutionary argument look at
a computer, at a laser beam, at a successful drug, at a surgical
technique, at the spread of a language, at the growth of a city,
or at an commercial enterprise, they tend to fall for the belief
that its discovery or establishment partook of some grand design.
And, in hindsight, some "explanation" will be given
as to why it happened: there was a plot — it could not have
been an accident.
Alas, we are victims of the narrative fallacy — even in
scientific research (but while we learned how to manage it in
religion, and to some degree in finance, we do not seem to be
aware of its prevalence in research). The pattern-seeking, causality
producing machine in us blinds us with illusions of order in
spite of our horrifying past forecast errors. I hold that
not only discoveries are also largely the result of a random
process, but that their randomness is even less tractable than,
and not as simple as, biological evolution. While nature might
produce milder form of stochasticity, the environment for manmade
discoveries is governed by a far, far more severe, wilder form
of processes, those called "fat tailed".
Against what one might expect, this makes me extremely optimistic about
the future in several selective research-oriented domains, those in
which there is an asymmetry in outcomes favoring the positive
over the negative — like evolution. These domains thrive
on randomness. The higher the uncertainty in such environments,
the rosier the future — since we only select what works
and discard the rest. With unplanned discoveries, you pick what's
best; as with a financial option, you do not have any obligation
to take what you do not like. Rigorous reasoning applies less
to the planning than to the selection of what works. I also call
these discoveries positive "Black Swans": you can't
predict them but you know where they can come from and you know
how they will affect you. My optimism in these domains comes
from both the continuous increase in the rate of trial and error
and the increase in uncertainty and general unpredictability.
I am convinced that the future of America is rosier than people
claim — I've been hearing about its imminent decline
ever since I started reading. Take the following puzzle. Whenever
you hear or read a snotty European presenting his stereotypes
about Americans, he will often describe them as "uncultured", "unintellectual" and "poor
in math" because, unlike his peers, they are not into equation
drills and the constructions middlebrows people call "high
culture". Yet the person making these statements will be
likely to be addicted to his Ipod, wearing t-shirts and blue
jeans, and using Microsoft Word to
jot down his "cultural" statements on his (Intel) PC,
with some Google searches on
the Internet here and there interrupting his composition.
Well, it so happened that the U.S. is currently far, far more
tinkering an environment than that of these nations of museum
goers and equation solvers — in
spite of the perceived weakness of the educational system, which allows
the bottom-up uncertainty-driven trial-and-error system to govern
it, whether in technology or in business.
It fosters entrepreneurs
and creators, not exam takers, bureaucrats or, worse, deluded
economists. So the perceived weakness of the American pupil in
conventional and theoretical studies is where it very strength
lies — it produces "doers", Black Swan hunting,
dream-chasing entrepreneurs, or others with a tolerance for risk-taking
which attracts aggressive tinkering foreigners. And globalization
allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things,
the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas, that is, the
scalable and fat-tailed part of the products, and, increasingly,
by exporting jobs, separate the less scalable and more linear
components and assign them to someone in more mathematical and "cultural" states
happy to be paid by the hour and work on other people's
ideas. (I hold, against the current Adam Smith-style discourse
in economics, that the American undirected free-enterprise works
because it aggressively allows to capture the randomness of the
environment — "cheap options"— not
much because of competition and certainly less because of material
incentives. Neither the followers of Adam Smith, nor to some
extent, those of Karl Marx, seem to be conscious about the role
of wild randomness. They are too bathed in enlightenment-style
causation and cannot separate skills and payoffs.)
The world is giving us more "cheap options", and
options benefit principally from uncertainty. So I am particularly
optimistic about medical cures. To the dismay of many planners,
there is an acceleration of the random element in medicine putting
the impact of discoveries in a class of Mandelbrotian power-law
style payoffs. It is compounded by another effect: exposure to
serendipity. People are starting to realize that a considerable
component of the gravy in medical discoveries is coming from
the "fringes", people finding what they are not exactly
looking for. It is not just that hypertension drugs lead
to Viagra, angiogenesis drugs lead to the treatment of macular
degeneration, tuberculosis drugs treat depression and Parkinson's
disease, etc., but that even discoveries that we claim to come
from research are themselves highly accidental, the result of
tinkering narrated ex post and dressed
up as design. The high rate of failure should be sufficiently
convincing of the lack of effectiveness of design.
But if the success rate is very low, the more we search, the
more likely we are to find things "by accident",
outside the original plan — or the more an unspecified original "plan" is
likely to succeed. Looking at the swelling pipeline, something
tells me that the discovery of cures, or near-cures for unspecified
diseases is about to happen — except that I do not know
which one, nor do I know where it is coming from. More technically,
I see the sign of fractal randomness in these payoffs from the
fact that results are more linear to the number of investments
than they are to quantities invested — thus favoring the
multiplication of small bets.
All the while institutional science is largely driven by causal
certainties, or the illusion of the ability to grasp these certainties;
stochastic tinkering does not have easy acceptance. Yet we are
increasingly learning to practice it without knowing — thanks
to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment
bankers, and aggressive venture capitalists brought together
by the free-market system. I am also optimistic that the academy
is losing its power and ability to put knowledge in straightjackets
and more out-of-the-box knowledge will be generated Wiki-style.
But what I am saying is not totally new. Accepting that technological
improvement is an undirected (and unpredictable) stochastic process
was the agenda of an almost unknown branch of Hellenic medicine
in the second century Mediterranean Near East called the "empirics".
Its best known practitioners were Menodotus of Nicomedia and
my hero of heroes Sextus Empiricus. They advocated theory-free
opinion-free trial-and-error, literally stochastic medicine.
Their voices were drowned by the theoretically driven Galenic,
and later Arab-Aristotelian medicine that prevailed until recently.
This idea applies to so many other technological domains. The
only bad news is that we can't really tell where the good
news are going to be about, except that we can locate it in specific
locations, those with a high number of trials. More tinkering
equals more Black Swans. Go look for the tinkerers. |
JARED DIAMOND
Biologist;
Geographer, UCLA; Author, Collapse

Good
Choices Sometimes Prevail
I
am cautiously optimistic about the state of the world, because:
1. Big businesses sometimes conclude that what is good for
the long-term future of humanity is also good for their bottom
line (cf. Wal-Mart's recent decision to shift their seafood
purchases entirely to certified sustainable fisheries within
the next three to five years). 2. Voters in democracy sometimes
make good choices and avoid bad choices (cf. some recent elections
in a major First World country). |
JOHN
HORGAN
Director, the Center for Science Writings, Stevens Institute
of Technology; Author, Rational Mysticism

War
Will End
I'm
optimistic that one day war—large-scale, organized, group
violence—will end once and for all.
Many
people find my optimism naive, if not delusional. Last semester,
I taught a class called "War and Human Nature," and
my students polled classmates on the following question: "Do
you think humanity will ever stop fighting wars once and for
all time?" Of the 205 respondents, 185 replied "No";
20 said "Yes" or "Maybe. " Several of the "optimists" added
comments like "Yes, war will end when the human race will
end," and "Yes, because in the future the human species
will unite to fight alien species. "
Recent
scholarship on warfare seems, at first glance, to support this
fatalism. Just a few decades ago, many scholars believed in the "myth
of the peaceful savage," which depicts war as a byproduct
of modern civilization that did not exist in pre-state societies. In his book Constant Battles, the anthropologist Steven
LeBlanc debunks this myth, pointing out that the vast majority
of primitive, pre-state societies engaged in at least occasional
warfare. Mortality rates from violence in some societies reached
as high as fifty percent.
But
these grim statistics yield a surprisingly upbeat message: Things
are getting better! Hard as it may be to believe, humanity has
become much less violent than it used to be. In fact civilization,
far from creating the problem of warfare, is apparently helping
us to solve it. In War Before Civilization, the anthropologist
Lawrence Keeley estimates that in the blood-soaked 20th century
100 million men, women, and children died from war-related causes,
including disease and famine. The total would have been 2 billion,
Keeley notes, if our rates of violence had been as high as in
the average primitive society.
Moreover,
conventional war between the armies of two or more nations is
becoming rare. Three years have passed since the last international
war. (Israel's incursion into Lebanon last summer doesn't count,
because the Lebanese army did not fight. ) This is "the longest
episode of interstate peace in more than half a century," the
scholars Charles Kurzman and Neil Englehart point out in their
recent essay "Welcome to World Peace. " Although they
are dominating the headlines, civil wars have also declined since
peaking in the early 1990s. We are dealing now with guerilla
wars, insurgencies, terrorism—or what the political scientist
John Mueller calls the "remnants of war. "
These
statistics do not provide much solace to the victims of war's "remnants" in
Iraq, Darfur, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Colombia and other troubled
regions. But they show that we are moving in the right direction. Other recent events offer more grounds for optimism. As recently
as the late 1980s, we still faced the threat of a global nuclear
holocaust. Then, incredibly, the Soviet Union dissolved and the
Cold War ended peacefully. Apartheid also ended in South Africa
without significant violence, and human rights have advanced
elsewhere around the world.
The
first, crucial step toward ending war is to believe that we can
do it. We should also recognize that war is over-determined—stemming
from many different possible causes—and so peace must be
over-determined too. In their final papers, most of my students
wisely advocated pursuing not a single, silver-bullet solution
to the problem of war but multiple approaches. Their proposals
included supporting democracy in other countries, bolstering
the U.N. 's peacekeeping efforts, fighting poverty and improving
education, restricting or eliminating arms sales, inculcating
tolerance for other cultures in children, giving women more of
a role in government.
"Achieving
peace on a global level will not be easy," one student wrote, "but things already seem
to be moving in the right direction. Humanity's best shot at
ending war is now. "
His
optimism fuels my optimism. |
SUSAN
BLACKMORE
Psychologist and Skeptic; Author, Consciousness:
An Introduction

Our
Civilisation Will Survive the Coming Climate Catastrophe
I
am optimistic that our civilisation will survive the coming
climate catastrophe.
A
few years ago I was less so. I thought that the climate might
just continue heating up until humans could no longer live on
earth at all. Since then, watching the rapidly advancing climate
science from outside, I now think it possible that the climate
will shift into a new stable state. This may not be ideal for
humanity, and billions of people may die through drought and
starvation, but if there are at least some areas where people
can still survive, then our culture will continue evolving during
and beyond this crisis point.
Such
crisis points may be a regular feature of any planet where life
evolves. Imagine that a planet forms and cools, chemical reactions
begin, and at some point a self-replicating molecule appears,
producing lots of copies that compete to survive. More complex
molecules outperform simpler ones, groups with membranes outperform
isolated replicators and, with more variation and more materials
to use, the process speeds up until complex organisms appear. This beautifully inevitable process may have happened zillions
of times all over the universe—or maybe very few times. All we know for sure is that something like this happened on
our planet and this first evolutionary step produced the DNA
replication mechanism and an abundance of life.
A
second step then becomes possible. That is, the organisms find
new ways of copying information. This creates a second replicator
and starts another evolutionary process, building on the first. This happened on earth when just one species, humans, became
able to imitate each others' behaviour with sufficiently high
fidelity to create a new replicator, memes. These memes (the
behaviours, habits, and skills that were copied) evolved slowly
at first and then faster and faster, creating our languages,
social institutions, and complex culture.
I
think this step to a second replicator is intrinsically very
dangerous. The new replicator is like a parasite that uses its
host's resources to get itself copied. As with any parasite,
the balance can tip either way. The parasite may kill its host
and itself die in the process, or both may pull through and coevolve
to become symbiotic. We have no idea whether there were failures
on other planets, or failures on earth before we humans began
to imitate. Perhaps the Neanderthals, or other hominids, tried
the experiment and failed—their memes were too destructive. Perhaps completely different species tried it and failed. All
we know for sure is that we pulled through and coevolved along
with our memes so that now we cannot live without them. A human
without language or culture is hardly human at all.
But
then a third step becomes possible—and it is another dangerous
one. As memetic evolution accelerates, new and more efficient
ways of copying and storing memes are invented, and the original,
biological meme machines are left behind. Their messy, inaccurate
copying, and their largely analogue memes, are no match for the
more accurate and prolific copying of the new meme machines;
printing presses, factories, fax machines, tape recorders and
eventually digital systems that not only copy and store memes
but recombine and select them as well.
That
is the stage we have reached now on earth. The artificial systems
we have built still depend on us, and would perish with us if
we all died, but they are evolving far faster than we are, and
are taking up the planet's resources in the process.
Some
people still maintain the fantasy that we humans are in charge
and can still control the memes we have let loose. Yet it must
be increasingly obvious that we can't; that they are in the driving
seat, not us. They are sucking up the planet's resources increasingly
fast and, being selfish replicators, they have no foresight and
don't care in the least what happens to us or the planet; they
can't, they are just replicating information. So we are hovering
at this second danger point right now.
Perhaps
this critical point has been reached on countless planets and
none pulled through—perhaps acquiring new replicators is
so dangerous that memes (or their equivalents) always wipe out
the original replicator that spawned them, explaining why we
have not yet heard from any other intelligent beings out there. Or perhaps it is possible to for an intelligent species to work
out what has happened, repair the damage and live in harmony
with the creatures it unwittingly gave rise to.
I
think it is, and I am optimistic that we will. |
LEO
CHALUPA
Ophthalmologist
and Neurobiologist, University of California,
Davis

We
Will Lead Healthy and Productive Lives Well Past Our Tenth
Decade
I
am optimistic that by the middle of this century, it will not
be uncommon for people to lead healthy and productive lives
well past their tenth decade. This means that the high school
kids of today who believe they will be forever young might
well have their fantasy fulfilled, albeit in modified form. My optimism is based on three factors.
First,
there is a clear trend for life spans in developed countries
to be getting progressively longer; so-called senior citizens
are now engaging in activities previously reserved for those
yet to reach what was once considered middle age. The current
mantra that today's 60 is the 35 of previous generations
is more than just advertising hype. The reasons for this are
complex, but certainly the psychological state of the today's
seniors — their refusal to simply accept old age — is
a prime contributor.
The
other two factors fueling my optimism stem from recent advances
in biomedical sciences that offer not just hope, but a virtual
guarantee, that we'll soon be living longer and better
lives. What are those recent advances? They come from two major
research fronts.
There
are some very exciting results showing that manipulations of
basic cellular functions can prolong longevity. The literature
on this topic is too extensive to summarize here, but one example
will suffice. A molecule produced by a variety of plants called
resveratrol (think red wine) has been found to significantly
improve the lifespan of many different organisms, as much as
by 59%, and this even occurs in obese animals! The significance
of the latter point is that until recently it was thought
that the only way to increase longevity is by going on a strict
starvation diet, but now it seems that you can eat your cake
and expand your lifespan!
The
other relevant scientific breakthroughs come from neurobiology,
my field of expertise. We used to think that with age there
is a progressive deterioration in brain cell structure and
function. But that widespread assumption has proved wrong.
New nerve cells have been found to be generated in the brains
of old animals, and we're learning more and more how
this amazing property of the aged brain can be manipulated.
Low levels of regular exercise, for instance, have been found
to significantly enhance neurogenesis in the hippocampus, a
brain structure that deals with memory. Moreover, a recent
study from my laboratory showed that certain nerve cells
in the eyes of old mice are capable of growing new processes.
We have also found such growth of nerve cells in the eyes of
old people. And then there is the tremendous promise of stem
cell research that is still in its infancy for replacing damaged
or dysfunctional body organs.
Taken
together, the implications of these and many other findings
in the biomedical sciences are clear. We will be able to regenerate
parts of the brain that have been worn out or damaged during
the course of a lifetime, providing renewed capabilities to
those who are currently considered old folks. So better start
thinking what you'll be doing with all those extra years of
life. |
SAM
HARRIS
Neuroscience Researcher; Author, The
End of Faith
We
Are Making Moral Progress
No
one has ever mistaken me for an optimist. And yet, when I consider
what is perhaps the most pristine source of pessimism—the
moral development of our species—I find reasons for hope. Despite our perennial mischief, I believe that we have made unmistakable
progress in our morality. Our powers of empathy appear to be
growing. We seem to be more likely now than at any point in our
history to act for the benefit of humanity as a whole.
Of course, the 20th century delivered some unprecedented horrors. But those of us living in the developed world are becoming increasingly
alarmed by our capacity to do one another harm. We are less tolerant
of "collateral damage" in war—undoubtedly because
we now see images of it—and we are less comfortable with
ideologies that demonize whole groups of human beings, justifying
their abuse or outright destruction.
Taking a somewhat provincial example: racism in the United States
has unquestionably diminished. If you doubt this, consider the
following Los Angeles Times editorial, written in 1910,
in response Jack Johnson's successful heavyweight title defense
against Jim Jeffries, the so-called "Great White Hope":
A
Word to the Black Man:
Do not point your nose too high
Do not swell your chest too much
Do not boast too loudly
Do not be puffed up
Let not your ambition be inordinate
Or take a wrong direction
Remember you have done nothing at all
You are just the same member of society you were last week
You are on no higher plane
Deserve no new consideration
And will get none
No man will think a bit higher of you
Because your complexion is the same
Of that of the victor at Reno
A
modern reader could be forgiven for thinking that this dollop
of racist hatred was printed by the Ku Klux Klan. Rather, it
represented the measured opinion of one of the most prominent
newspapers in the United States. Is it conceivable that our mainstream
media will once again give voice to such racism? I think it far
more likely that we will proceed along our current path: racism
will continue to lose its subscribers; the history of slavery
in the United States will become even more flabbergasting to
contemplate; and future generations will marvel at the ways we,
too, failed in our commitment to the common good. We will embarrass
our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is
moral progress.
I
am bolstered in my optimism by the belief that morality is a
genuine sphere of human inquiry, not a mere product of culture. Morality, rightly construed, relates to questions of human and
animal suffering. This is why we don't have moral obligations
toward inanimate objects (and why we will have such
obligations toward conscious computers, if we ever invent them). To ask whether a given action is right or wrong is really to
ask whether it will tend to create greater well-being, or greater
suffering, for oneself and others. And there seems little doubt
that there are right and wrong answers here. This is not to say
that there will always be a single right answer to every
moral question, but there will be a range of appropriate answers,
as well as answers that are clearly wrong. Asking whether or
not an action is good or bad may be like asking whether a given
substance is "healthy" or "unhealthy" to
eat: there are, of course, many foods that are appropriate to
eat, but there is also a biologically important (and objective)
distinction between food and poison.
I believe that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions
in the same way that there are right and wrong answers to questions
about biology. This commits me to what philosophers often call "moral
realism"—as opposed to anti-realism, pragmatism, relativism,
post-modernism, or any other view that places morality entirely
in the eye of the beholder. It is often thought that moral realism
fails because it requires that moral truths exist independent of
minds (it doesn't). Indeed, this worry partly explains humanity's
enduring attachment to religion: for many people believe that unless
we keep our moral intuitions pegged to the gold-standard of God's
law, we cannot say that anyone is ever right or wrong in objective
terms.
Consider the phenomenon of "honor-killing": throughout
much of the Muslim world at this moment, women are thought to "dishonor" their
families by refusing to enter into an arranged marriage, seeking
a divorce, committing adultery—or even by getting raped. Women in these situations are often murdered by their fathers,
husbands, or brothers, sometimes with the collaboration of other
women. Is honor-killing wrong? I have no doubt that it is. But
is it really wrong?
There
seems to be no question that we are wired in such a way that
love is more conducive to happiness than hate, fear, and shame
are. If this is true, honor-killing would be wrong even if a
majority of human beings agreed that it was right. It would be
wrong because this practice (along with the intentions that give
rise to it) reliably diminishes human happiness: it creates immense
suffering for women and girls; it conditions men to feel that
their personal dignity is predicated upon something that it need
not be predicated upon; it deranges the relationships between
men and women, making them far less loving and compassionate
(and therefore a lesser source of happiness) than they might
otherwise be. While these are claims about human subjectivity,
they are also, at bottom, objective claims about the
real foundations of human happiness.
All of this implies, of course, that morality is a potential branch
of scientific inquiry—not merely that science will one day
describe our moral judgments at the level of the brain, but that
science may one day be able to tell us what is good (that
is, it will tell us which psychological intentions and social practices
are truly conducive to the deepest happiness).
Because
I believe that moral truths transcend the contingencies of culture,
I think that human beings will eventually converge in their moral
judgments. I am painfully aware, however, that we are living
in a world where Muslims riot by the hundreds of thousands over
cartoons, where Catholics oppose condom use in villages decimated
by AIDS, and where the only "moral" judgment that seems
guaranteed to unite the better part of humanity at this moment
is that homosexuality is wrong. Which is to say that
I am here celebrating our moral progress while being convinced
that billions of my neighbors are profoundly confused about good
and evil.
I may be a bigger optimist than I thought. |
RAY KURZWEIL
Inventor and Technologist; Author, The Singularity Is Near: When
Humans Transcend Biology

I'm
Confident About Energy, the Environment, Longevity, and Wealth;
I'm Optimistic (But Not Necessarily Confident)
Of the Avoidance Of Existential Downsides; And I'm
Hopeful (But Not Necessarily Optimistic) About a Repeat Of 9-11
(Or Worse)
Optimism
exists on a continuum in-between confidence and hope. Let
me take these in order.
I am confident that
the acceleration and expanding purview of information technology
will solve the problems with which we are now preoccupied within
twenty years.
Consider
energy. We are awash in energy (10,000 times more
than we need to meet all of our needs falls on the Earth) but we
are not very good at capturing it, but that will change with full
nanotechnology based assembly of macro objects at the nano scale
controlled by massively parallel information processes, which will
be feasible within twenty years. Even though our energy needs
are projected to triple within 20 years, we'll capture that
.0003 of the sunlight needed to meet all of our energy needs with
no use of fossil fuels using extremely inexpensive, highly efficient,
lightweight, nano engineered solar panels, and store the energy
in highly distributed (and, therefore, safe) nanotechnology-based
fuel cells. Solar power is now providing one part in a thousand
of our energy needs but that percentage is doubling every two years,
which means multiplying by a thousand in 20 years. Almost
all of the discussions I've seen about energy and its consequences
such as global warming fail to consider the ability of future nanotechnology
based solutions to solve this problem. This development will
be motivated not just by concern for the environment, but by the
$2 trillion we spend annually on energy. This is already
a major area of venture funding.
Consider
health. As of just recently, we now have the tools to reprogram
biology. This is also at an early stage but is
progressing through the same exponential growth of information
technology, which we see in every aspect of biological progress.
The amount of genetic data we have sequenced has doubled every
year and the price per base pair has come down commensurately.
The first genome cost a billion dollars, NIH is now starting
a project to collect a million genomes at a thousand dollars
a piece. We can turn genes off with RNA interference, add new
genes (to adults) with new reliable forms of gene therapy, and
turn on and off proteins and enzyme at critical stages of disease
progression. We are gaining the means to model, simulate, and
reprogram disease and aging processes as information processes.
These technologies will be a thousand times more powerful than
they are today in ten years, and it will be a very different
world in terms of our ability to turn off disease and aging.
Consider
prosperity. The inherent 50 percent deflation rate
inherent in information technology and its growing purview is causing
the decline of poverty. The poverty rate in Asia, according
to the World Bank, declined by 50 percent over the past ten years
due to information technology, and will decline at current rates
by 90 percent in the next ten years. All areas of the world
are being affected, including Africa which is now undergoing a
rapid invasion of the Internet. Even Sub Saharan Africa had
a 5% growth rate last year.
Okay, so what am I optimistic, but not necessarily confident,
about?
All
of these technologies have existential downsides. We
are already living with enough thermonuclear weapons to destroy
all mammalian life on this planet, which incidentally are still
on a hair trigger. Remember these? They're still
there, and they represent an existential threat.
We
have a new existential threat which is the ability of a destructively
minded group or individual to reprogram a biological virus to
be more deadly, more communicable, or (most daunting of all)
more stealthy (that is, having a longer incubation period so
that the early spread is not detected). The good news is that
we do have the tools to set up a rapid response system, like
the one we have for software viruses. It took us five years
to sequence HIV, but we can now sequence a virus in a day or
two. RNA
interference can turn viruses off since viruses are genes albeit
pathological ones. Bill Joy and I have proposed setting up
a rapid response system that could detect a new virus, sequence
it, design an RNAi medication (or a safe antigen-based vaccine)
and gear up production in a matter of days. The methods exist,
but a working rapid response system does not yet exist. We
need to put one in place quickly.
So
I'm optimistic that we will make it through without suffering
an existential catastrophe. It would be helpful if we gave
the two existential threats I discuss above a higher priority.
And, finally, what am I hopeful, but not necessarily
optimistic, about?
Who
would have thought right after September 11, 2001 that we would
go five years without another destructive incident at that or
greater scale? That seemed very unlikely at the time, but despite
all the subsequent turmoil in the world, it happened. I
am hopeful that this will continue. |
MATT
RIDLEY
Science Writer; Founding chairman of the International
Centre for Life; Author, Francis Crick:
Discoverer of the Genetic Code

The Future
The future.
That's what I'm optimistic about. The historian Macaulay said,
in 1830: 'We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error
who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we
have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us and
with just as much apparent reason.' The eternal, enduring pessimism
of human beings about the future does real harm by persuading people,
especially the young, to retreat from adventure and enterprise
into anomie. Sure, the world has problems: AIDS, Islamofascism,
carbon dioxide. But I bet we can solve them as we have solved others,
such as smallpox, the population explosion and the high price of
whale oil. |
DOUGLAS
RUSHKOFF
Media
Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Get
Back in the Box : Innovation from the Inside Out

Human Beings Are Different
Now that we've gotten false notions of "god" out of the way, we come up against the question from which He insulated us: if human beings are not the "chosen" species, then are we at least capable of transcending nature, from which we emerge?
Our
most natural inclination should be to kill each other, one way
or another. From plankton to pachyderms, the myth of nature as
a sustainable and loving collaborative is about as absurd as
that of a Creator Being. Unless we prove different from every
other species, we will continue to compete with the rest of the
planet for a disproportionate share of its resources — and
with one another for the spoils of this ongoing war. That's just
life.
I'm optimistic that human beings can be different than the species from which we evolved, and that the endless comparisons between human culture and other species are, ultimately, specious. I hope that just because sponge colonies will fight endlessly with those of a different color need not mean that humans are destined to do the same thing.
I'm
optimistic that, having been liberated from the myth of intrinsic
meaning, human beings will gain the capacity to make meaning,
instead. And that this unique ability will give us the opportunity
to disobey biology's commands. |
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