US Edition It is not hard to think of examples of wide-eyed predictions that have proved somewhat wide of the mark. Personal jetpacks, holidays on the moon, the paperless office and the age of leisure all underline how futurologists are doomed to fail.
Any predictions should thus be taken with a heap of salt, but that does not mean crystal ball-gazing is worthless: on the contrary, even if it turns out to be bunk, it gives you an intriguing glimpse of current fads and fascinations.
A few weeks ago, a science festival in Genoa, Italy, gathered together some leading lights to discuss the one aspect of futurology that excites us all: cosa farà cambiare tutto — this will change everything.
The event was organised by John Brockman, a master convener, both online and in real life, and founder of the Edge Foundation, a kind of crucible for big new ideas.
With him were two leading lights of contemporary thought: Stewart Brand, the father of the Whole Earth Catalog, co-founder of a pioneering online community called The Well and of the Global Business Network; and Clay Shirky, web guru and author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.
Shirky meditated on how, during his formative years, it was thought that the decades to come would be dominated by nuclear power and the great adventure of space flight.
Decades later, it is now clear that those technologies may have dominated discussions of the day but their direct influence remained firmly with the technological elite. With the benefit of hindsight, his early years were the age of the transistor and birth control.
When it comes to the forces shaping our lives today, Shirky points to how coordinated voluntary participation is on the rise, thanks to online tools. With the help of the internet, people are now learning how to make use of the increasing amounts of free time that have been afforded to them since the 1940s for creative acts rather than consumptive ones.
At one end of the spectrum are people like Jacob Colker, who has combined volunteering, the internet and mobile phones to pioneer a new form of activism in which almost anyone with a smartphone can devote spare minutes to a useful charitable or scientific task. More than 40,000 volunteers have now signed up for “micro-volunteering” and he has just won a grant from Rolex to encourage millions more to volunteer.
At the other end of the spectrum is the Polymath project, launched by the Cambridge University mathematician Tim Gowers, to allow mathematicians to work together. A large number of mathematicians have already made rapid work of a thorny theorem, and work has begun on new problems.
Stewart Brand focused on climate change, a “century-sized problem that we cannot understand yet”. He argues that we must take mastery of climate as we once took mastery of fire, then of genetics (agriculture), then of communication (music, writing, maths, maps, images, printing, radio, computers).
Humanity now has to find ways to produce 13 terawatts of greenhouse-free energy to moderate global warming to a just-tolerable increase of 2C (3.6F). Improving the engineering of nuclear and solar won’t get us what we need; new science is required.
He adds that climate change is a global problem that cannot be fixed with global economics; it requires a new form of global governance too, to tackle a raft of giant issues.
In an earlier survey of world-changing ideas conducted by John Brockman of 110 leading scientists, artists and commentators, many other themes emerged. Among the raft of predictions, Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek believes everything will continue to become smaller, faster, cooler, and cheaper.
And John Gottman, founder of the Gottman Institute, revived the more heroic vision of space colonisation. Many were concerned with health.
Gregory Benford, a novelist and chairman of biotech company Genescient, believes he might live to 150 and that mitigating the diseases of old age will revolutionise society.
Sir Ian Wilmut, director of the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine, who led the project that cloned Dolly the sheep, predicted great leaps in medicine, with stem cell research improving life quality and expectancy.
Harvard psychologist Irene Pepperberg believes knowledge of exactly how the brain works will change everything. That will enable doctors to tackle diseases in which the brain stops working properly, from Alzheimer’s to Parkinson’s. She also believes it will be possible to understand and repair brains susceptible to addictions or criminality.
The possibility of “radiotelepathy” was raised by Freeman Dyson at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. Rather than transmitting feelings and thoughts from one brain to another by mystical means, he sees “a prosaic kind of telepathy induced by physical tools... We have only to invent two new technologies, first the direct conversion of neural signals into radio signals and vice versa, and second the placement of microscopic radio transmitters and receivers within the tissue of a living brain.”
Medicine will increasingly be personalised, according to Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University. Drugs will be prescribed according to the patient’s molecular background rather than by trial and error, to maximise their impact and minimise side effects.
He envisages the “ultimate empowerment of medical consumers, who will know their own disease risks and seek commensurate treatment, rather than relying on the hunches and folklore of a paternalistic family doctor”.
And life itself is likely to be customised for human use to an incredible extent. J Craig Venter, the genome and synthetic life pioneer who leads a big team at the J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, believes there will be a huge expansion of genetic engineering.
“We have now shown that DNA is absolutely the information-coded material of life by completely transforming one species into another simply by changing the DNA in the cell... Very soon we will be able to do the same experiment with the synthetic chromosome... to direct organisms to do processes that are desperately needed, like create renewable biofuels and recycle carbon dioxide.”
As such, the greatest current ideas might not only change the world, but help assure mankind a future on the planet.