An Optimistic Forecast: Innovating our way out of Disaster

This is Part Two of a five part series on "The Future as I See for Humanity: Three Scenarios the Next Fifty to One Hundred Years." You can also read Part One: Background and Bibliography.

Given the number and magnitude of problems we are facing in the world today, any sober look at the global future is bound to produce a certain amount of anxiety. We're on the cusp of Peak Oil --Singularity and along with Peak Oil, Peak Everything since the cheap energy of oil is the glue that holds our current economic system together. We have a chronically expanding human population on its way to experimentally testing the carrying capacity of the world, and a host of environmental problems from providing for so many people.

To top it all off, our economic system is making disturbing creaking-cracking noises, and there's just not as much money to throw at problems as there used to be.

These are no longer “What kind of world are we going to pass on to our children?” questions. These are “Is there going to be a world to pass along to our children?”questions. These are “Are we witnessing the twilight of our civilization?” questions. These questions should change the way the think, the way we act, and the way we believe.

Yet oddly enough, most people seem to go about their daily business as though nothing is wrong. Are we ignorant of the daunting challenges ahead of us, or are we simply fatalists? Have we reached some kind of zen-state of detachment from these pressing issues?

Our collective mental state is guarded by two important things. First, as dire as these problems are, they are mostly invisible, and as of yet have not drastically reduced our standard of living. Second, we have a carefully cultivated faith in our capacity to produce new and better technologies that will solve any problems we run into as a society. When we hear about a new problem, most of us subconsciously write it to an anonymous team of scientists out there, whose job it is to solve the problem.

But is this faith warranted? Or are we demanding more of our systems of innovation than they can reasonably produce?

Ultimately, we don't know the answer to this question, and we can't know the answer to this question. Our technological progress is based on the independent work of thousands of thinkers, researchers, and engineers, all hoping to make creative breakthroughs that can potentially change the course of history. The outcome of such a complex, dynamic, and decentralized system is notoriously difficult to predict.

However, it is possible to outline the kinds of philosophical and practical boundaries our innovative machinery will have to overcome in solving the problems facing contemporary society. Then, assuming that our innovators can and will overcome these challenges, we can get some sense of what the technology of the future might look like, and how it might impact our culture and lives.

Philosophical Hurdles to Innovation

When we talk about innovation and new technology, we need to keep in mind that technology doesn't emerge magically in response to either investment or market forces. Nor is it an automatic, autonomous force of progress. It takes a significant investment of time, energy, and resources to move an idea into action. Nor is there any guarantee that all ideas can be acted on. Some ideas that sound quite good on paper turn out to be impractical or impossible in practice.

As population expands, nations develop and resource demands increase correspondingly, we will need new technology to more effectively use what resources we have, and we will need to discover new resources to use. This will of course create a lot of incentive for scientific research and development. But this incentive itself won't produce the technology. Research money may be mismanaged and disappear into bureaucratic machinery, there may not be enough scientists and engineers to do the work we need done, we may run into unforeseen problems in development or implementation, or we may simply fail to come up with new technology in time to solve our problems.

Though the incentive and necessity for new technology will continue to grow, there are going to be natural limits or ceilings on how quickly new technologies can be developed and deployed that no amount of external force can overcome. We can't make a baby in one month by using nine women.

Thomas Malthus explored a similar phenomenon in the early nineteenth century. He observed that, despite advances in technology, living standards seemed to remain basically constant. The reason for this, he surmised, was that population grows exponentially, while the maximum rate of increase for food production was linear. Thus, the more people, the less food to go around – even though clever new farming techniques were being continually developed.

If we are going to continue to make social and technological progress, we must somehow keep the development and propagation of problems beneath the rate at which we can create solutions. This will require an accurate sense of our development capacity, and effective manual mitigation of problems as new technology matures.

We must also keep in mind the fact that new technology does not only solve problems. It also creates them. Consider the two tons of ewaste produced annually by the United States, or food price increases driven by ethanol production. Indeed, most of the problems we are currently attempting to solve are unintended consequences of earlier technological advances.

It is counterintuitive to try to predict potential drawbacks of new technology, but as we use more and more of the earth's bounty, our margin of error gets smaller, as new problems complicate existing problems that have not yet been solved. This discipline will thus by necessity become an important part of scientific development into the future.

Practical Hurdles for Innovation

The most immediate problem for our innovators is energy creation. Our need for energy is accelerating, while our traditional sources of gathering it are reaching their maximum output. Over the next few decades, we will need massive infrastructure development in renewable power sources. Given the underdevelopment and inefficiency of much of the current generation of renewable technology, the first wave of power will likely be primarily nuclear. Down the road, however, we may replace nuclear energy with things like kitegens and space-based solar power.

We will also need to redesign our transportation infrastructure for a post-cheap oil future. Small electric vehicles are a good option, but these will place additional strain on an energy infrastructure in transition. We will also likely expand our train networks for both people moving and commercial use, and develop more public transportation options.

Of course, oil isn't the only thing we are running out of. Industrial minerals are also foreseeably finite, and energy shortage will compound the difficulties in extraction. In the short term, will need to make significant advances in recycling and resource reclamation technologies. In the long term, we will shift to using more abundant resources in all of our devices, rather than depending on rare materials..

Our food production systems will also need an overhaul. In the face of global climate change, soil depletion, water shortages, and continued population growth, new non-fossil fuel agricultural solutions will be needed in order to maintain food security. In the short term, this probably means we will be eating food that is both genetically modified and organically grown.

These challenges are daunting, but theoretically they can be solved without serious disruptions to our systems, expectations, and standard of living.

Prospects and Problems in Technotopia

Having mitigated these immediate challenges, our long-term technological future will be determined by advances in nanotechnology, biotechnology, information sciences, and cognitive science. Developments in these fields will open up interesting new dimensions for human evolution, but will pose challenging new existential and ethical questions.

When we begin to genetically modify ourselves, indefinitely extend our life span, and create direct interface between brain and computer, how will that change how we understand ourselves and the world? Are we comfortable with fundamentally and voluntarily altering what it means to be human?

Some futurists speak of the Singularity, a moment in time when we have built computers with creative intelligence that far exceed human capacities by any measure. At this point, scientific advancement will accelerate beyond anything we can currently imagine. Beyond the Singularity, it is meaningless to create any kind of forecast, as the entire meaning of history will be deeply altered.

What we are contemplating is a different kind of apocalypse. The end of humanity comes, not through death, but through our own designs, as we offer up our minds, bodies, spirits, and species to an integration into a bigger whole. We will have created a New Heavens and a New Earth. These are difficult things to wrap our minds around. But they may be in our destiny, and they may be nearer than we think.

However, our vision of the future must not distract from the tasks immediately at hand. Singularity advocates often speak in terms of human destiny, intimating that this acceleration of technological development is inevitable and already unfolding, and strangely disconnected to any of the physical realities of the earth.

While contemplating how our technologies change us and may change us in the future may be a worthy exercise, we must remember that the first problems we are going to face are the physical limitations on our resources. Our solutions to these problems are far from complete.