I wrote this article to explain why I’m such an optimist about science and technology and why I think that we are at a tipping point, a unique time in the history of our civilization, of solving the world’s remaining problems and build, more or less, a utopia. I think we could, technically, solve climate change as well as world hunger and I believe we have a good shot at immortality and traveling to other stars – all within the next generation.
That might sound too good to be true or even impossible. However, through science and technology (mostly) we’ve built a world that was once impossible to even imagine for cavemen so why should we now not push to build a world most cannot imagine possible? It turns out, the major obstacle to progress and building a better world lies not in our technical capabilities, but society itself: We are not aware of our potential and we don’t believe we can change the world. This is a long read, but I use some fun metaphors in-between, don’t worry.
Reflect on How We’ve Gone from Cavemen to Smartphone Users
I love to imagine how humans from 20,000 or even 2,000 years ago would react to a smartphone, or any modern technology for that matter. They would consider it magic, no doubt. Of course, we take the modern world completely for granted, because we live in it every day. A smartphone and the Internet are just as normal to us as traveling by plane or buying food at a supermarket instead of having to hunt for days.
Try to focus, really hard, and imagine the world from the point of view of a caveman knowing virtually nothing of what we know today. How likely would it be for them to ever create technologies like smartphones, cure most diseases and hundred fold their economic output? You can come to only one fair, unbiased conclusion: It would have been impossible. There were too many unknown unknowns, too many steps they would have had to take.
This thought experiment becomes even more interesting when you realize that we had to build billions of times the knowledge we had about the world since then, systematically through science (the relentless application of human common sense). We used that knowledge to unlock millions of key tools – technological innovations – that make life better. You see, all of our progress and incredible standards of living trace back to two words: Science and technology (S+T, as I call it, remember this).
After the agricultural revolution the most important thing for us was to pass on the knowledge of where, how and when we planted seeds. During the renaissance we realized that staying dumb and ignorant didn’t really advance us much for a millennium and a half. And finally, through the industrial revolution, we understood that turning our knowledge into technology was exponentially more useful than anything else humans could do with their time. Along the way there were many more key innovations, including the printing press and computers, but underlying all is the scientific method itself, the most important innovation of all, because it’s our best (and only accurate) way of building knowledge.
We’re Living Better Lives Now than Kings in the Past
So at least in the developed world we’ve eradicated many diseases, are never hungry (with few sad exceptions), can travel the world and at least most of us get the chance of fulfilling our dreams. If you don’t agree that our lives are immeasurably better nowadays and that modern technologies are not that impressive or important, try to imagine it the other way around. You have all these innovations taken from you piece-by-piece, beginning with your smartphone (which might not bother you at all for a week or so), then your kitchen, heaters, supermarkets, modern healthcare and so on. By no means do I claim that our lives are a hundred times better than in the stone age (that would be hard to measure), but I’m saying that at a marginal level, innovation by innovation, you will always feel that modern life is better and preferable.
Erase the words “science” and “technology” from our history and modern world and the next second you’d be sitting on the ground naked, cold and soon hungry or already eaten by something else. The people you now see walking in the streets would walk between trees wearing much more realistic looking fur coats and holding spears (even that’s technology, kind of) rather than hand bags or smartphones.
If you still imagine a primitive life as more stress-free and more in touch with nature etc., note how for hundreds of thousands of years life was a constant fight for survival, often not more than a few meals away from death. I wonder how many mothers, emaciated to their bones, held their dead babies in their arms while waiting for their men to return with food from a hunt. This might seem like an overly emotional example, but it was definitely real and that illustrates how much better we have it nowadays. You could be the most “zen” person on the planet, live in the most peaceful village with your best friends and family, as soon as you get really hungry or your child starves or dies of the flu, you’re going to want 2017’s S+T back.
This Is Still Not Enough: To Immortality and the Stars
Having put into perspective how much better off we are nowadays in ways our ancestors could not even imagine, I want to also put the future into perspective. While every day I try to appreciate how incredibly far we have come and how lucky we are to live, for the most part, absolutely amazing lives, I think we can and should build an even better world – a much, much better one. A utopia. Because why not?
This raises the question what a utopia is and what exactly to strive for, but I suppose once we get to the point where we don’t really know what to improve we could call it a utopia, but that’s for a different article to explore. In the meantime we have our hands full with problems like world hunger, climate change, and cancer. Beyond that, I’d like to see a world in which people no longer have to work, or at least not in jobs they hate.
Personally, my priority is to increase my lifespan indefinitely, because there are too many things I want to do and I doubt I will get bored even in a million years (yes, I’m serious). That could mean to live a thousand different lives, to travel to other stars and dimensions and to see what else the universe and life has to offer. But that’s just my opinion.
If your idea of a perfect life is to live in a hut in the woods, then I respect that too, but I’m sure you would still like the best possible health care and perhaps a form of universal basic income to support your dream life style. I’m absolutely convinced that automation (robots and artificial intelligence) will be the key technology to move us to such a world, but that is a controversial topic I shall cover in other articles as well.
Society: The Floodgates Holding Back Progress from Science and Technology
At this point you might be very skeptical of my talk of a utopia and you might think I’m a little crazy writing about immortality etc., but for the rest of this article my goal is to show you a different, convincing perspective. And perspective, i.e. our attitude and mindset, are really the key here, meaning that building a better world really comes down to people, to us.
You see, I firmly believe that, technically, we could feed and vaccinate every child in the world, solve climate change and so on. But I have much less faith in society (and even less so in politicians) as we would have to change our habits quite drastically. And that is exactly where the problem really lies. I think we do not recognize enough how much we could do. We don’t believe in ourselves, in our science and tech-savviness, despite our most-astounding track record of innovation over the past few thousand years.
So just like with every generation in the past that did not realize how close they actually were to another big breakthrough if they only had a clear vision and goal, I think we should not make that same old mistake again.
Since 1650 our scientific output (1) has grown exponentially while our technologies have also become exponentially better (smaller, faster etc.) – especially in the computer/digital field, which is arguably our single most important technology. The graphic below is a striking example of this trend: both are computers with comparable processing power, but almost 60 years apart.
Our potential to solve problems continues to increase while people’s belief in humanity’s abilities doesn’t grow accordingly. In fact, I think it’s rather stagnant. Our brains evolved to have an inherent negativity bias (2). For example, only 1% of people know that over the past 25 years poverty was reduced by 50%, while most people think it got worse (3). Saving six million children a year who die of preventable diseases seems an impossible task, yet since 1990 122 million children’s lives have been saved (3). Being pessimistic about or not believing in the possibility of making the world a better place is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Moreover, our brains adapted to a much less complex world than we live in today, especially exponential trends are impossible for us to comprehend. But key technologies develop in an exponential factor (see example of computer above).
The Techno-social Potential Divergence
I think it is also safe to say that the ratio between how difficult problems are to solve and how good we have become at solving them is greater than ever before, i.e. it should be easier for us to cure ageing or fly to alien worlds than it was for cavemen to build smartphones. So there is a divergence between what we could do technically and what we believe we can, or what we put our minds to. I call this the techno-social potential divergence, and it is showcased in this simple graphic below.
Hence, while it might seem that getting the technology right is the tricky part and that which most don’t believe in, it is in fact us humans that is the greatest obstacle and the most important key to building a better future. If put our minds to it, set the bar higher and put our progress into historic perspective, we always surprise ourselves with what we can do.
Think about how in 1969 humans landed on the moon. Forty-nine freaking years ago! After one man said we’re simply going to do it, within a decade, with a computer that was less powerful than a modern calculator. Of course, our scientific and technological progress might not continue infinitely, but my point holds true for the presence, the next generation and on what we need to do right now.
So let’s put the future into perspective.
We’ve Gone from Impossible to even Imagine to Hard, but Possible if We Do Imagine
At this point I would like to propose that this generation should put its mind to building a utopia – ending world hunger and poverty, climate change and ideally also conquering ageing and becoming a star-faring civilization. And while this might seem too ambitious to you, we have a few distinct advantages to making progress in the future as compared to the past.
While things used to be impossible to even imagine, now we have become very good at imagining the future, so we can build a much clearer vision and goals to shoot for. Our ancestors had no idea (or could not imagine) what the future could look like, while we make futuristic blockbuster movies about life in a hundred years (e.g. Star Trek).
If cavemen could have imagined better materials, like iron, and technologies like windmills and later steam engines, they would, of course, have unlocked these technologies much quicker. Rather, we humans had to stumble in the dark for thousands of years and wait for either random breakthroughs or the occasional rogue genius. This gives us a distinct advantage and means we can innovate much faster in that we have a specific direction to walk into rather than wasting time being lost all over the place. Our compass to walk into that direction is, again, science and technology, but we need to build a common vision first to even do the walking.
No world-champion athlete, billion-dollar company or distinguished businessman would ever become successful without a clear vision, direction and the determination to do it. You see what a powerful difference this makes? Of course, many of us truly care about the environment and there are thousands of scientists researching around the world, but (put into perspective) R&D investments are usually still only about 2% of GDP.
A Clearer Vision and Determination, but is it Possible?
Every scientist, medical researcher and engineer will tell you that what I proposed above to be a utopia is going to be very hard to accomplish. And I agree, but at the same time it is “not impossible”. And that is a critical point. We’ve made millions of things possible over thousands of years that were “impossible”, so “not impossible” is good enough for me. Things used to not even be possible in theory, like traveling at the speed of sound.
Just over 200 years ago, economic theorist Thomas Malthus said it was impossible to feed an exponentially growing population and forecasted that many people would have to die if the population grew. He didn’t consider exponential technological trends and couldn’t imagine what was possible.
In 1943, IBM president Watson famously said: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Therefore, amazing things have been happening even though they were considered theoretically impossible. Now, to build a space ship that can go a thousand times faster than current ones, is theoretically “not impossible”.
So in that sense, we are already in a better situation than sailors in the past for whom it was impossible, even in theory, to be able to travel a thousand times faster (which we now do: rockets). At least we now know what we don’t know and what we need to learn and we also know how to get there (i.e. which direction to walk in), which is to do more science.
Key Points Summarized
It was impossible and unimaginable for a caveman to build a smartphone, so we have proven the ‘impossible’ possible. A utopia is imaginable and at least not impossible. It’s more likely and easier for us to become a star-faring civilization than for cavemen to even imagine smartphones. So we are arguably more than half way from being hunters and gatherers to being a star-faring civilization – so we should make the final push now!
Our big advantage is that we are at a point where our capabilities are exponentially greater and solving problems has become easier than in the past, relatively speaking. By looking back on the incredible, mind-boggling journey of human progress, we learn how we got here: Through human ingenuity, creativity and knowledge to constantly innovate – institutionalized through science and technology – and hence to improve our lives. Not always, not for all, but generally we can say: More S+T = better lives. But only if society and politics understand that and are aligned on that common vision.
So we know what to do, we know how to do it and the direction of where we want to go (towards a utopia). By committing more strongly to these principles, our chances of building a better world would increase tremendously.
However, exactly there lies the problem: The big techno-social potential divergence. We don’t believe enough in (or know about) our scientific and technological potential and what’s even worse, we don’t believe in being able to change the world. So we have to change these two things about ourselves and with that some massive floodgates would open up to a pent-up reservoir of progress.
References:
Generation Utopia 