A Real Brave New World

What will the future be like? Freeman Dyson is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Americas Princeton University, and he reckons that the future will be miraculous. But also, from time to time, exceedingly dangerous.

Imagined Worlds grew from lectures Dyson gave in Jerusalem in 1995, and deserves to be read for its elegance and sagacity.

Dyson says that science is his territory, but science fiction is the landscape of his dreams. He is reverential about H G Wells, maintaining that although Wells usually failed when attempting to predict the future, he succeeded when imagining future worlds, because he used his skills as a novelist to enlarge our vision and remind us of our responsibilities.

 

Fashionable scientific topics such as complexity and string theory, and fashionable environmental problems such as global warming and over-population, are passed by in silence in Imagined Worlds because Dyson says he has nothing fresh to say about them.

In discussions of human affairs, I turn for guidance not to sociology but to case studies and science fiction. For me, Wellss The Time Machine provides more insight into past and future worlds than any statistical analysis, because insight requires imagination.

Typical of the books attractions is the chapter on possible human development over timescales of 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years and beyond. Only after we have specified the timescale can we speak of future possibilities with some degree of clarity, says Dyson.

A decade, he reckons, marks the outer limit of political predictability. In 10 years, governments change, leaders rise and fall, empires collapse, wars and revolutions turn the world upside down. But economics and technology are more predictable. The main cause of economic tensions today, Dyson argues, is the unequal distribution of wealth and skills between rich and poor countries and between rich and poor groups of people within countries. He sees scant scope for reversing the trend towards greater inequality within a mere decade.

A decade is a typical timescale for a scientific revolution, and over the next 10 years humanity will start to see the fruits of the revolution in digital astronomy (giving us survey maps of the observable universe) and of the human genome project (precise digital mapping of genes and chromosomes). In 100 years, all of us, as individuals, will be dead. But because our species has evolved to survive on a timescale of hundreds of years, we have loyalties to family, tribe and institution that transcend our individual lives.

A 100 years marks the outer limit of technical predictability, says the professor, who thinks that over the next half-century the dominant technologies will be the present ones of petroleum, computers and biochemistry, together with the two newcomers: genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. In 100 years time, he says, those two newcomers will be mature and ready to be superseded by something else, perhaps by radio-telepathy.

Over the next century, ecological problems primarily human over-population and ecosystem destruction will intensify, and come to dominate political affairs. But new technologies may help with some problems, such as racial and religious animosities.

Space colonisation, says Dyson, may make it possible in the long run to alleviate the conflicts between discordant human ambitions on a shrinking planet ..I have no doubt that cheap space travel will sooner or later be developed.

On a timescale of 1,000 years, neither politics nor technology is predictable, China and Japan being the only major political units that have lasted that long. But the diversity of languages, cultures and religions is likely still to exist. And humanity is likely to undergo accelerated speciation division of one species into many as we expand our living space away from the earth. Our descendant species will become many, filling in all likelihood a variety of ecological niches in different physical environments. The reason human speciation will be accelerated, the professor says, is that whereas speciation in nature occurs over one million years or more, ours, pushed by genetic engineering, may be witnessed within a millennium or less.

Dyson finishes with a cautionary yet not unhopeful chapter on ethics and social justice. If technology continues along its present course, he concludes, ignoring the needs of the poor and showering benefits upon the rich, the poor will sooner or later rebel against the tyranny of technology and turn to irrational and violent remedies impoverishing rich and poor together, as such rebellions always have.

The trick will be to head things off at the pass. The future will not, ultimately, belong to scientists, but to moral philosophers.