A better tomorrow - science and technology

I have on my bookshelves comics from the 1950s and '60s in which from time to time, there'd be fascinating articles about the future. How, for example, by the year 1985, it will be possible to fly from London to Sydney in two hours thanks to nuclear-powered space tugs. We would all be flying to work in personal heli-jets.

Futures are all too often predicted on the basis on the present; if over the past three decades leading up to 1957 have witnessed amazing progress in aerospace technology (from biplanes to space rockets), surely that tendency can only be upward? Few paused to ask whether we need to be in the office (Arthur C. Clarke famously did, in 1964, quite accurately predicting remote work by 2014. ). 

The history of human technological progress is full of cases where an individual or handful of individuals could bring about a departure from the established arc of development. One sudden discovery or invention dramatically changes human progress. Some you can see coming, others you can't until they've happened. Who could have predicted the impact the smartphone would have on our daily lives when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone in 2007?

Black-swan events - entirely unpredicted, with a high impact - are also lurking in our predestined future. One I've been considering for a while has been disclosure by governments that our planet is being visited by advanced non-human intelligence, ushering in new paradigms in physics, cosmology and spirituality.

Healthcare

Let's look at healthcare; the technology that's just around the corner is gene therapy; having unravelled the human genome, the ability to fix faulty genes will make the treatment of rare genetic conditions easier, but it will also give a more targeted response to common ones such as cancer. The need for proper clinical trials, which can last upwards of eight years, is the main reason why advances in medical science are not swiftly turned into commonplace medical interventions. Fixing what's gone wrong is the main goal of medicine - one that will become far more important in future will be fixing what's natural - the ageing process. Genetic technology extending the human lifespan will, I believe, be well advanced by 2050. A bit more science-fiction would be a pill or process that can raise IQ. The benefit for humanity to raise the IQ of the lowest quintile by ten points would be massive.

The built environment

The construction industry has been slow to adopt new technology. I see three major developments - the first being digitalisation of the whole process, from design to use, based on building information modelling (BIM) or at least an easy-and-cheap-to-use version of it, perhaps augmented by artificial intelligence. Developer, architect, contractor and end-user should all have access (via the cloud) to all relevant files pertaining to a given building including 3D models, energy-use forecasts, instructions, guarantees and maintenance schedules. The second is modular construction, with prefabricated units being mass-produced in factories and delivered to site for assembly. The third is carbon-neutral construction. The CO₂ emissions the come from making concrete is critical; if we can manage to turn methane into four atoms of pure hydrogen and one atom of pure carbon (as graphene) and mix the graphene (in tiny amounts) with cement, the resulting concrete becomes much stronger and therefore not as much as needed for the same structure. The 5bn tonnes of cement produced each year thus account for some 8% of the world’s anthropogenic CO₂. Yet if less than 0.1% by weight of graphene is added to the mixture, concrete ends up 30% stronger. And stronger concrete means less of it is needed, with a consequent reduction in CO₂.

Energy

Fossil fuels are on the way out, natural gas being the last to be extinguished. Renewables will - in time - take over completely. Hydrogen may yet take over, but there's a long way to go; nuclear fusion is always 30 years away. In the meanwhile, I have high hopes in perovskite - a translucent crystal with photovoltaic properties. A Polish company, Saule Technologies, has developed the technology to inkjet print perovskite onto thin plastic film, which can then be applied to any surface turning it into a solar panel. Imagine sticking this to existing buildings - the demand is potentially huge. Speaking to the firm yesterday, they say that there's already demand that would justify building 50 factories to make the stuff. Just one property developer has five million square metres of space onto which to put perovskite film - there's a need for square kilometres of perovskite film every year. Far lighter than silicon panels, perovskite film can be cut to shape, wrapped around objects, tinted different colours. Once the money gets behind it, perovskite will go mainstream very quickly.

IT

The cloud will advance, gobbling up petabytes of data as it goes, sucking in government services, personal data and corporate computing. It will become cheaper, more secure and more effective all the while. AI is set to work on the data and AGI (artificial general intelligence) will emerge into the mainstream. One threat to cloud security will be quantum computing, in particular its predicted ability to crack open any encryption. The battle for quantum supremacy (one of the last things my father wrote down before he died in October 2019) will shape up between the US and China; the outcome could be geopolitically decisive. Will we get from artificial intelligence to artificial consciousness? This to me is an existentially crucial question. Either consciousness is merely something that emerges from complexity, and once there's enough computing power to get close to the number of neuronal connections in the human brain, computers will become sentient. Or - consciousness is a property of living things - computers are not living things, so no matter how powerful, they will never achieve true sentience. 

Computers will, I believe, increasingly interact with human biology. Goggles will be coming soon; once we accept how they will change the way we look, our workspace will no longer be the keyboard and screen, but a virtual keyboard and virtual screen, mapped out with our gestures. The concept of 'transhumanism' - using technology to augment human performance - is nothing new. The invention of the shoe, for example, several millennia ago, allowed Homo sapiens to move faster over rougher terrain in pursuit of prey. Glasses came into common use in 14th century Italy. If you wear shoes and glasses, you are already 'transhuman' in the strict sense. Elon Musk's Neuralink Corporation is developing a brain-computer interface. Yet we are already interfacing with data; our smartphones augment our memory (who remembers phone numbers any more?), and instant access to Wikipedia settles many a pub argument over, for instance, how many machineguns a Hawker Hurricane Mk IIb had. Whether we end up having computer memory plugged into our brain remains to be seen!

Human geodiversity - more predictions here.

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