X-Message-Number: 30234
From: Mark Plus <>
Subject: The Edge Annual Question for 2008
Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 17:01:17 -0800

Namely, "What have you changed your mind about? Why?" 
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_index.html


Lots of good stuff, including Ed Regis's contribution which relates to my recent
posts on the non-futuristic 21st Century. I guess Regis has changed his mind 
about transhumanism since he wrote "Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman 
Condition" circa 1990. (You can find used hardcovers of that book for sale from 
Amazon vendors for a penny):

http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_2.html#regis

ED REGIS
Science Writer, Author, Nano

Predicting the Future


I used to think you could predict the future.  In "Profiles of the Future," 
Arthur C. Clarke made it seem so easy.  And so did all those other experts who 
confidently predicted the paperless office, the artificial intelligentsia who 
for decades predicted "human equivalence in ten years," the nanotechnology 
prophets who kept foreseeing major advances toward molecular manufacturing 
within fifteen years, and so on.  


Mostly, the predictions of science and technology types were wonderful: space 
colonies, flying cars in everyone's garage, the conquest (or even reversal) of 
aging.  (There were of course the doomsayers, too, such as the population-bomb 
theorists who said the world would run out of food by the turn of the century.)


But at last, after watching all those forecasts not come true, and in fact 
become falsified in a crashing, breathtaking manner, I began to question the 
entire business of making predictions.  I mean, if even Nobel prizewinning 
scientists such as Ernest Rutherford, who gave us essentially the modern concept
of the nuclear atom, could say, as he did in 1933, that "We cannot control 
atomic energy to an extent which would be of any value commercially, and I 
believe we are not likely ever to be able to do so," and be so spectacularly 
wrong about it, what hope was there for the rest of us?  


And then I finally decided that I knew the source of this incredible mismatch 
between confident forecast and actual result.  The universe is a complex system 
in which countless causal chains are acting and interacting independently and 
simultaneously (the ultimate nature of some of them unknown to science even 
today).  There are in fact so many causal sequences and forces at work, all of 
them running in parallel, and each of them often affecting the course of the 
others, that it is hopeless to try to specify in advance what's going to happen 
as they jointly work themselves out.  In the face of that complexity, it becomes
difficult if not impossible to know with any assurance the future state of the 
system except in those comparatively few cases in which the system is governed 
by ironclad laws of nature such as those that allow us to predict the  phases of
the moon, the tides, or the position of Jupiter in tomorrow night's sky.  
Otherwise, forget it.  


Further, it's an illusion to think that supercomputer modeling is up to the task
of truly reliable crystal-ball gazing.  It isn't.  Witness the epidemiologists 
who predicted that last year's influenza season would be severe (in fact it was 
mild); the professional hurricane-forecasters whose models told them that the 
last two hurricane seasons would be monsters (whereas instead they were wimps).
Certain systems in nature, it seems, are computationally irreducible 
phenomena, meaning that there is no way of knowing the outcome short of waiting 
for it to happen.  


Formerly, when I heard or read a prediction, I believed it.  Nowadays I just 
roll my eyes, shake my head, and turn the page. 
 

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