In two years’ time, the annual growth of the web will be equivalent to all the documents ever written in human history. A few years later, that same amount of information is likely to be added in just a matter of days. As Ian Goldin and his colleagues from the James Martin 21st Century School in Oxford rattled through the vertiginous statistics at the World in 2050 event staged in London by Intelligence Squared, a couple of things became clear.
First, forget 2050: the future is here, which is to say that the pace of the technological development that we imagine lies in the future is with us now and changes our lives from year to year, sometimes from month to month. But perhaps more important is that we contemplate the problems of the future as never before: severe climate change, population explosion, the pressures on land, food, water and energy preoccupy us like no other generation in history.
Futurologists like to shock. During the World in 2050 evening, we were shown slides of a genetically “enhanced” rabbit that glows in the dark and film of a superior mouse that can run six kilometres without pausing for breath or sustenance; the average mouse manages just 200m before dropping exhausted. We heard of engineered body parts, brain implants, nanobots and drugs that will improve memory and mental powers — already academics and students are using the attention-deficit drug Ritalin to upgrade their concentration. There were graphs that demonstrated computing power and ageing population, the global threat of rapidly moving infections and what current levels of the C02 emissions will do to our world
Impressive yes, but in last week’s newspapers you will have found developments that are every bit as compelling — a partially successful Aids vaccine; an intelligent CCTV system that claims to interpret behaviour and help stamp out crime; robots that mark English examination papers; a scanner used by police to detect stolen cellphones; elderly patients to be fitted with microchip implants that will SMS a carer if they forget to take their pills; and the launch of digital advertising billboards equipped with cameras that read a car’s number plate as it passes, consult with the DVLA computer to establish the make of car and recommend the appropriate engine oil in the display.
We assumed most of these things were safely locked up in the future, but they’re very much part of the here and now. We live the future every day. It impinges on the present as only history once did and has a profound impact on the way people think of their own time and their own lives. We are enthralled by the experience but also unmoored by it, because the present — our time — is in some sense demoted to a period of mere overture before the enormous calamity of a few years’ time.
Ask 100 people how they feel about the future and I guarantee that 90% will reply they fear for the world and themselves. This was probably also true for past generations because we are superstitious beings and let fear rule our reason. But the sweep of modern history seems to tell a different story. Take the 200 years since 1809. Despite the particular worries of each generation — the wars, economic collapse famine and natural disaster — there has been a vast improvement in the quality of life over the two centuries. In terms of life expectancy, education and health, the experience and fulfillment available to millions of individuals, the period shows unremitting advance and yet the narrow focus of each generation dictates a much more pessimistic assessment.
The same improving trends can be found in the 20 years since I stood on the Berlin Wall and looked down with complete wonderment at the sight of the world changing on November 9 1989. The world wide web did not exist, cellphone technology was in its infancy and laptops were a rarity. The pleasure and benefits these inventions have given us are incalculable. Interestingly, much else has improved in those two decades. In the New Scientist‘s feature “Is the world getting better or worse?”, the magazine shows that life expectancy at birth has improved, along with statistics on maternal and infant mortality, extreme poverty, malnutrition, food supply, drinking water, education, GDP per capita and infectious diseases.
This all goes counter to what we think we know. Where we have done badly is predictably in the categories of conflict, military spending (up by 20% since 1992), displaced persons, CO2 emissions, deforestation, the ecological footprint and population. In my lifetime, the world’s population has risen from 2,5-billion to last Friday’s estimate of 6,787-billion, and during my children’s lifetimes it will probably rise to between 9,5 and 10-billion. The figures contain a complex story of falling fertility rates and an ageing population in Asia and Europe, which will bring their own problems, but the overall message is not at all good.
My particular nightmare is of millions of old people scratching in the soil of an over-heated planet that is robbed of bird song, fish, insects, rain forest and most large fauna; if I have a sharp criticism of the 2050 event it was its unwavering focus on the fortunes of one species — Homo sapiens. As Martin Rees writes in his excellent book, Our Final Century, mankind is presiding over a great extinction. “Species are dying out at one hundred or even one thousand times the normal rate,” he writes.
Quite apart from the damage we may well do ourselves by nuclear warfare or, as Rees and before him Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems have pointed out, by “the combination of genetics, nanotechnology and robotics, which may develop uncontrollably and take us over”, this wholesale destruction of creation seems to be one of the most melancholy certainties of our time and of the future.
Listening to the speakers from the 21st Century School, one becomes aware not just that the future is with us but that our institutions seem mostly inadequate to the challenge. The gap between our technical ingenuity and our political and moral capacities to deal with these problems is so large that most succumb to a fatal pessimism. This is wrong because reason, moral fortitude, leadership and science can save us and the world yet.
Watching President Obama, moving simultaneously on Iran, Palestine, missile defence, climate change, the global recession and his own healthcare programme, we see the galvanising effect of one man’s leadership. In the last few weeks, China and India have substantially altered their positions in the run-up to December’s climate change summit in Copenhagen, and that will, in turn, affect America’s stance.
There needs to be action nationally too. Britain must update its institutions so that there is formal, publicised, long-term advice, which will educate politicians and the public. Education is vital, not just about the menace of an overheated, overpopulated world, but about greed and the selfishness that is integral to current ideas of economic success.
Reform of our democracy and its creaking mechanisms is long overdue. People doubt whether democracy is capable of producing decisive action. They are wrong: democracy is not the problem; it is that we are working with a model of democracy founded before industrialisation when the world’s population was less than one billion. – guardian.co.uk