science

London Futurists Hangout On Air: Will science & technology save the world?

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The green revolution in agriculture has freed hundreds of millions around the world from the risk of starvation. The Internet is providing knowledge-on-tap to people as never before. Lifespans have doubled due to remarkable progress in medicine. New desalination techniques are poised to solve problems of shortage of fresh water. Our remaining resource problems can be solved by synthetic biology, nanoscale molecular manufacturing, and asteroid mining. The threat of climate change can be tamed by carbon capture and geoengineering. Although doomsayers are distracted by rolling news stories that highlight human failings in graphic terms, the big picture is that science and technology are changing the world into a much better place. Right?

Not every futurist is convinced by this techno-optimistic narrative. Here’s a forceful critique by renowned speaker, blogger, and interviewer, Nikola Danaylov:

I am tired of hearing that science and technology will save the world.

It is almost the same as saying “Jesus will save you!”

It evokes the very same passive quasi-religious hope that something or someone out there will magically solve all our problems, bring abundance in our lives, help us live forever and bring back the dead.

I am sorry to break this to you but science and technology will not save the world. Never have…

Our civilization is like an alcoholic with a failing liver – we hope we can 3d bio-print a new one just in time, while failing to acknowledge our self-destructive habits and our own responsibility, thereby failing to address the actual problem, rather than the symptom.

It’s like hoping to win the lottery – it’s not totally impossible, but it is almost certain we won’t. (And even if we do, then what? It will only provide more time, not necessarily a solution.)

And so we sit, and wait, and hope for science and technology to come save the world. And we are getting both fat and lazy as we are eating and driving ourselves to death. Both personally and collectively.

(You can read the full article at https://www.singularityweblog.com/technology-is-not-enough/.)

In this London Futurists online video conference, a number of futurists from around the world will be debating questions such as:

  • What are the risks of over-reliance on technology?
  • What are the risks of under-reliance on technology?
  • What goals should be set for the use of science and technology?
  • To what extent is it desirable to try to regulate the development and use of technology?
  • What are the most effective methods to steer the development of technology? Politics? Public advocacy? Or what?

Panelists

Nikola Danaylov – aka “Socrates”, host of the popular Singularity.FM podcast, and author of Conversations with the Future: 21 Visions for the 21st Century

Kim Solez, Director of the course “Technology and the Future of Medicine” at the University of Alberta

Jay Friedenberg, Psychology Professor, Manhattan College, and author of Humanity’s Future: How Technology Will Change Us

Seth Weisberg, Graduate Research Assistant, Department of Neuroscience, University of Texas at Austin, previously worked at the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Science at Florida Atlantic University

The discussion is hosted and moderated by David Wood, the Chair of London Futurists, and the author of Transcending Politics.

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Is science a heresy?

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It’s true that science and religion haven’t always rubbed along well together, and in fact Galileo Galilei was tried for heresy, but in this article I’m considering a broader issue, not just a religious one. I’m asking whether science is now an established part of mainstream cultural thinking or if it’s a subversive, radical activity that seeks to continually undermine the status quo.

Let’s do some dictionary work to start. Here’s what my copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary has to say:

Science: Systematic and formulated knowledge based mainly on observation, experiment and induction, or deductions from self-evident truths.

Heresy: Opinion contrary to the accepted doctrine on any subject.

So, at first glance, science doesn’t appear to be a heresy. It’s practically the opposite. Adjectives like ‘radical’ and ‘subversive’ don’t appear anywhere in its definition. It’s systematic and self-evident and consistent with the world we observe around us. Except that’s not my understanding of science at all.

While I agree that science consists of systematic and formulated knowledge, I don’t agree that it is based on induction or deduced from self-evident truths. I’m not even convinced that it’s derived from observation.

For instance, the sun is observed to rise in the east and set in the west. It should therefore be self-evident that the sun circles the Earth, as observed. Except it doesn’t.

Similarly, time marches forward at a steady, unvarying rate, as is completely obvious to everyone and confirmed by observation. Except it doesn’t.

Even simple physical laws like Newton’s first law of motion (a restatement of Galileo’s Law of Inertia) are completely at odds with everyday observations and experiments, not to mention the time-honoured theories of Aristotle. Until this outrageous proposal, it seemed obvious that moving objects tend to come to a state of rest unless a force acts on them. Equally, it seemed obvious that heavenly bodies like stars and planets were governed by different celestial laws, as befitted their eternal, unchanging nature. It took the genius of Galileo and Newton to realise that it’s the invisible force of friction that’s responsible for bringing objects to rest, that objects will move with constant velocity if no external force is present, and that the same set of laws that describe how apples fall from trees also apply to stars and comets.

This nicely illustrates how science really works. Galileo and Newton observed the world, certainly, and they derived inspiration from it. But they did not infer laws directly from their everyday observations. Their laws apparently contradicted those observations. Instead they imagined new, universal laws that were capable of describing a range of phenomena, including both everyday objects and celestial bodies. They invented (not discovered) a set of laws that could describe the motion of all things without exception.

What an arrogant thing to do! To overturn not just the ideas of Aristotle and the Church, but to deny ordinary everyday experience! And yet that is how all good science works.

The greatest scientists play the role of heretics, imagining shockingly unorthodox visions of reality, in gross contradiction to observation and derived not from self-evident truths but created by their own egotistical imaginations. The science invented in this manner can then be tested by experiment, but only if you know what to look for. If you’re not expecting time to slow down as your speed increases (as Einstein predicted in his Special Theory of Relativity), you can perform a million experiments and never observe the effect.

Theories and speculation dictate what we go looking for in the first place. Scientists don’t simply observe everything around them indiscriminately. Indeed, most experiments are designed carefully to screen out all the effects that aren’t relevant to a measurement.

The theory comes first, out of a scientist’s mind. Then, if confirmed by experiment, it becomes orthodox. Only afterwards does it appear to be self-evident and based on observation.

So, yes, I do think that science is a heresy. And I think that the role of scientists is to shun the cultural mainstream and to live on the intellectual fringe, pushing at boundaries and undermining commonly-held beliefs and assumptions. Fortunately, these days heretics are no longer burned at the stake.

One of the problems with the relationship between science and mainstream culture is that most people don’t understand this. Without a scientific background, how could they? And without an understanding of technology, how can people come to terms with the kinds of technologies that are discussed on this website?

Technology is undermining the status quo, just like science. It’s transforming society at a pace that’s growing exponentially. Again, most people underestimate the speed of change, and can’t perceive progress beyond the linear. Technology does not just challenge our understanding of what it means to be human. It changes what it means to be human. It’s probably the greatest heresy ever conceived.

 

About the author:

steve-morris-thumb111Steve Morris read Physics at University College, Oxford and graduated in 1989 with first class honours. He spent ten years working for the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell, Oxfordshire, before starting his own internet company. He now writes for technology review website S21 and blogs about science in his spare time.

Is Science The New Latin?!

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High Resolution Latin Text with planetSo the Pope (@Pontifex) is tweeting in Latin. And apparently without any hint of self-mocking irony. It hardly feels like a progressive move.

One of the big problems of Christianity in the Middle Ages was that most copies of the Bible were written in Latin. Although Biblical texts underpinned the prevailing belief system, only a tiny elite of educated people was able to read those texts. If you can’t access the source of your knowledge of the world, you can’t question it and you become enslaved by your beliefs instead of liberated by them.

This situation was transformed when the Bible was first translated into English (and other vernacular languages) and then printed and distributed throughout Europe. This revolution enabled ordinary folk to study and understand the original texts themselves. It was the gateway to the Enlightenment.

We have the same kind of problem now. In the modern era, science has replaced religion as the pivotal belief system of the age. It’s critical to our lives, and it informs nearly every debate, and yet still only a small elite truly has access to the source material underpinning modern science.

Scientific discoveries aren’t written in Latin, but they may as well be. They are written in highly academic jargon and are found mostly in specialist publications out of reach of the public. Most scientists aren’t natural communicators. The few who are, like Richard Dawkins or Carl Sagan can become like High Priests, interpreting science for an ignorant populace. The idea that only a small number of authoritative sources can be trusted for knowledge was exactly what the Enlightenment sought to overcome.

There is a real danger here of scientific idolatry. And idolatry can lead to witch-hunts, superstition and the suppression of free thought. In this environment, creationism and denialism thrive.

As with Christianity before it, science needs to be brought out into the open where it can be understood directly by the general public. That’s why everyone who understands science has a duty to help communicate it to others. To educate, inform and empower them. To explain scientific thinking and scientific limitations.

One day perhaps everyone will have the knowledge to understand the scientific explanation of the world for themselves, and not simply have it interpreted for them by others. Then we will have entered a new Age of Enlightenment.

 

About the Author:

Steve-Morris-thumb1

Steve Morris is dangerously enthusiastic about science and is currently teaching his 9 year old son nuclear physics. He writes about science & technology at S21 and on his blog.

Fact or Fantasy – Is Today’s Science A Hard Act For The Sci Fi Writer To Follow?

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On joining Singularity Weblog I signed up for the free e-book Accelerando.

Which I will not, after all,  be downloading!

It is in all probability an excellent example of its kind. So my rejection in no way a reflection of the quality of the book.

It is simply that I discovered it to be a novel and (unless dosed very heavily with humor a la Douglas Adams) I just don’t read Sci Fi any more.

You see, I am an old guy. Having had a great thirst for books of all kinds from my boyhood right through to my early thirties I eventually became bored with fiction in general and SF in particular.

All the while intrigued by works such as The Selfish Gene as well as the study of chemistry and the fun of fooling around with electronics, I became increasingly fascinated by the wonderful intricacies of natural processes.

Exquisite mechanisms that have only in the last two centuries become apparent to us by virtue of the enormous extension and expansion of our senses which the on-going exponential evolution of technology has provided. Such devices as the microscope, the telescope, a whole variety of spectrometers covering virtually all parts of the electromagnetic and acoustic spectra. These have extended our understandings and our imaginations beyond all bounds.

Until recent times, a human looking at a tiger or a tree or a rose would see just the tiger or the tree or the rose. Of course, these have their own superficial attributes which, in themselves have often inspired poetry.

But today, some (sadly, all too few) of us can sense an aura, an appreciation of the countless billion molecular interactions which comprise these wonderful entities. Just a seemingly plain inactive rock can be seen to have an intricate structure and to be a seething hive of activity at the atomic level.

When one has acquired the knack of using visualizations of this kind to appreciate such wonders, any of our fictional fabrications pale into insignificance by contrast.

Viewed in such a light, the very commonplace process of an egg developing into a fully formed hen or rooster becomes miraculous. Even such a detail as the exquisitely complex mechanism for the splicing of RNA and subsequent encoding of proteins provides enough magic to blow the mind. Much as, in the non- biological arena, do the bizarre machinations of non-linear optics.

I am not saying that science fiction has no value. The world needs speculative dreamers, for occasionally such reveries can provide valuable insights. I am simply saying, perhaps because my cup has been overfilled, that these days, I personally find it dull.

Also, now that our view of the “big picture” is becoming so comprehensive, science “fact” has far greater predictive power.

But for this to work properly, it is the “big picture”, derived from an interdisciplinary approach which must give guidance.

An overly tight focus, such as that exhibited by most IT gurus, can, and often does, skew projections. As does also, to an even greater extent, our very natural anthropocentricity.

About the Author:

Peter Kinnon was born in London(UK) but is now a long time resident of New Zealand. His primary discipline is chemistry but in recent decades he’s been self-employed with a manufacturing business, scientific consultancy and a laboratory equipment recycling operation.

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