What the Future Looks Like

Scientists Predict the Next Great Discoveries and Reveal How Today's Breakthroughs Are Already Shaping Our World

Jim Al-Khalili

• Publisher: The Experiment
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781615194711
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Essays on Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Get the sciencefacts, not science fiction, on the cutting-edge developments that are already changing the course of our future. Every day, scientists conduct pioneering experiments with the potential to transform how we live. Yet it isn't every day you hear from the scientists themselves! Now, award–winning author Jim Al–Khalili and his team of top-notch experts explain how today's earthshaking discoveries will shape our world tomorrow—and beyond. Pull back the curtain on:

• genomics
• robotics
• AI
• the "Internet of Things"
• synthetic biology
• transhumanism
• interstellar travel
• colonization of the solar system
• teleportation
• and much more

And find insight into big–picture questions such as: Will we find a cure to all diseases? The answer to climate change? And will bionics one day turn us into superheroes? The scientists in these pages are interested only in the truth—reality-based and speculation-free. The future they conjure is by turns tantalizing and sobering: There's plenty to look forward to, but also plenty to dread. And undoubtedly the best way to for us to face tomorrow's greatest challenges is to learn what the future looks like—today. Praise for What the Future Looks Like "A collection of mind-boggling essays that are just the thing for firing up your brain cells." — Saga Magazine "The predictions and impacts are global... [and] the book contains far more fascinating information than can be covered in this review." — Choice "This book is filled with essays from experts offering their informed opinions on what the science and technology of today will look like in the future, from smart materials to artificial intelligence to genetic editing." — Popular Science "Fun is an understatement. This is a great collection to get the summer book season started." — Forbes.com "The focus on sincere, factual presentation of current and future possibilities by leading experts is particularly welcome in this era of fake news and anti-science rhetoric." — Library Journal

1

Demographics

Philip Ball

The world changes because we do. Like most frequently overlooked truths, it’s obvious once you say it. The future will be different not simply because we will have invented new technologies but because we will have chosen which ones to invent and which ones to use—and which, thereby, we will permit to change us. Some of these technologies will surely solve a few long-standing problems as well as create some new ones; some will touch hardly at all the big challenges that the future threatens. At any rate, we won’t foresee the future simply by placing our present-day selves amid extrapolated versions of our natural and artificial environments. So: How will we live differently—and how differently will we live?

Mouths to feed

One of the biggest drivers of change today is population growth, which is possible only because of technological change. We could not sustain a planet of 71/2 billion without the changes in agriculture and food production that have taken place since the nineteenth century—in particular, the so-called Green Revolution that, in the middle decades of the twentieth century, combined the development of high-yielding crop strains with the availability of artificial fertilizers. Without those advances, billions would probably have starved.

But it is not clear that we can sustain a planet with more than 9 billion people on it, as is predicted for 2050, without substantial further innovations, particularly in food growth and production and water resources. Most of the population growth will be in Africa and Asia—in countries that lack economic and infrastructural resources to easily accommodate it.

There is no guarantee that agricultural productivity is going to increase in line with population. Climate change—which can increase soil erosion, desertification, and loss of biodiversity—is expected to decrease productivity in much of the world, including many of those regions where population growth will increase demand for food. Such changes are now coupled to the vicissitudes of the market through globalization; changing demand or priorities in one place (such as the cultivation of crops for biofuels) can have a significant impact on food production or provision elsewhere. This means that food security is going to remain high on the agenda of concerns about a sustainable future for the world. Already, a food price spike in 2008 triggered widespread social unrest and led to the fall of the government in Haiti, while increases in food prices in 2011 have been implicated in the “Arab Spring” uprisings in north Africa.

The outlook is no better for water. Three quarters of a billion people currently face water scarcity. This figure could rise to 3 billion by 2025, while freshwater reservoirs are already oversubscribed in arid regions ranging from the American Midwest to the North China Plain.

You could see all of this as a tale of woe, a forecast of disaster, civilizational breakdown and the end of days. Or you could regard it as a to-do list for the political and technological challenges ahead. But perhaps more than anything else, it’s a reminder of what matters in the future. Yes, personalized medicine and intelligent robots, asteroid mining and organ regeneration all sound very thrilling (or satisfyingly chilling, depending on your view)—and maybe they will be. But the age-old problems of humankind—How will we feed ourselves, and what will we drink?—will not be going away any time soon. Indeed, it may be these issues, more than any technological innovations in information, transportation, or medicine, that will dictate our patterns of personal and international interaction.

What we need, then, is a framework of sustainability. The word is used often enough without having really thought through what it would actually take to bring it about, or what it would look like once achieved. Some economists discount warnings of unmanageable population growth as alarmist, figuring that human innovation and ingenuity will sustain us much as they ever have. Others point out that the economic imperative for open-ended growth, driven by market forces and relegating undesirable issues such as pollution to the sidelines, is deluded and impossible in the long term. Both sides of the debate can marshal data, or at least narratives, to fit their view, but what tends to get overlooked is that science already has a framework—thermodynamics—that places strong restrictions on the options. Nothing happens—not food production, not the appearance of new ideas, not the metabolic maintenance of a society—without a cost in energy and the consequent generation of waste. To put it simply, there are no free lunches. Societies are complex ecosystems, but they are ecosystems like any other: webs of interaction, requiring energy, fighting entropic decay, adaptive but also vulnerable to fragilities. Creating a true science of sustainability is arguably the most important objective for the coming century; without it, not an awful lot else matters. There is nothing inevitable about our presence in the universe.

The changing face of us

Who, though, will “we” be?

A combination of increasing longevity and decreasing birth rates means that the population globally is becoming older on average. By 2050, the US population aged sixty-five and older is projected to more than double to around one in five Americans, and a third of the people in developing countries will be over sixty, which will, among other things, place greater strain on healthcare requirements and shift the proportion of the working population.

We must also ask “where will we be?” In the early twenty-first century the world population passed a significant marker when a 2007 United Nations report announced that more than half the people on the planet now live in cities. For most of humankind the future is an urban one.

There are now many megacities with populations of over ten million, most of which are in developing countries in Asia, Africa, and South America: Mumbai, Lagos, São Paulo, and Manila are examples. Nearly all the population growth forecast for the next two decades will be based in such cities, especially in developing countries, and by 2035 around 60 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas.

In the old tales, you set out into the wide world to seek your fortune; today you look for it in the city. Many people come to cities from the surrounding countryside in the hope of a better life, but they don’t necessarily find it. Many cities can’t cope with such an intake: for example, 150 million city dwellers now live with water shortages. In addition, many fast-growing cities in low-lying coastal areas will be at increasing risk of flooding as sea levels rise and extreme weather events become more common, as is forecast by climate change models.

You don’t need a crystal ball to predict a continuation of the waning global influence of the United States, nor to foresee the cloud hanging over the European unification project. But if you harbored any doubts, a glance at the changes in the world’s largest cities tells us something about where the action is likely to be in the years to come. In 1950 these were, in order of size: New York, Tokyo, London, Osaka, and Paris. In 2010 the top five had become: Tokyo, Delhi, Mexico City, Shanghai, and São Paulo. By 2030 the list is predicted to read: Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Beijing. To find the epicenters of the future, go east.

Of course, it is one thing for a city to be growing, quite another for it to be thriving, as is all too evident among the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. All the same, there seems little doubt based on current form that China and India will continue their growth into global superpowers. Over the next twenty years, China is expected to construct two or three hundred entirely new cities, many with populations exceeding a million. In fact, the equivalent of a city of about a million and a half people is added to the planet every week.

But what will a city of the future look like? An artist’s impression, all gleaming glass and chrome topped with greenery, can be very enticing—but also misleading, because there is no single future of the city. Some look likely to become more user-friendly, more green and vibrant. Others will sprawl in a morass of slums, perhaps punctuated in the middle by a glittering financial district, with disparities in wealth that will dwarf those of today. Can we even plan a successful city, or must they always grow “organically,” as influential urban theorists Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs have argued, if they are to be vibrant and thriving rather than soulless and sterile?

Some researchers believe we have little hope of answering such questions unless we develop a genuine “science of cities,” rather than relying on the often arbitrary, prescriptive, and politicized dreams of urban planners and architects. There are a few glimmers of such a nascent discipline, not least in the realization that some things apply to pretty much every city, regardless of size and character. Cities depend on economies of scale: the bigger they are, the less they require per capita in terms of infrastructure and energy use, the more average earnings increase, and the more they become innovation machines. But everything grows faster with scale, good and bad: bigger cities have higher rates of crime, theft, and infectious disease, and a faster pace of life generally, whether it is the rate at which businesses rise and fall or even the speed at which people walk. It seems you can’t have the advantages of cities without their drawbacks. So take your pick, if you’re lucky enough to have the choice.

The trend of migration to cities is a part of a much broader exodus across the planet. The United Nations estimates that currently over 200 million people have migrated from their home country to another, and around 740 million have relocated within their own country. Over the past several decades, a great deal of this movement involved migration from rural and mountainous areas to cities.

Why all this movement? In low-income countries most people relocate for economic reasons, looking for better employment opportunities, higher wages, or diversification of livelihood, especially if agriculture becomes unsustainable as a way of life. Some seek education, or move to be with other family members. Some wish to escape political or cultural persecution, war and conflict, as in Syria; some are forcibly relocated for sociopolitical reasons, as in the construction of Chinese dams. And some are compelled to flee from environmental hazards, such as floods, infertile agricultural land, or lack of water resources.

Climate change will inevitably increase migration in the years and decades to come, but that doesn’t mean it is meaningful to speak of “climate migrants.” Environmental change can interact with other drivers of migration in complex ways. Rural drought, added to the economic and political crisis in Zimbabwe, has led 1.5–2 million people to flee to an often hostile reception in South Africa since the turn of the millennium. What’s more, movements prompted by environmental change can blur the distinction often made in policy and legal circles between “migration” and “displacement”; the former is considered a choice, the latter an enforced necessity. It is not always clear when local conditions can be considered to have deteriorated sufficiently for migration to be involuntary rather than voluntary. At any rate, there can scarcely now be any question after the recent European experience that migration and immigration will be dominant political themes for years to come.

Identity technologies

All this burgeoning change might seem a far cry from life in rural Africa or amid the nomads of Mongolia—except perhaps for one factor. Thanks to telephone networks, they’re linked in.

Two out of every three people in the world now own a mobile phone (or at least, a phone plan), even in less developed countries in sub-Saharan Africa. These devices are mainly how we (tele)communicate today. Internet access doesn’t yet show quite the same spread: In developed countries, four out of five households have it, but this drops to well below one in ten for the least developed countries. Fears of a technological or digital divide are warranted, but it’s not a simple equation. That divide is, not surprisingly, also evident in the age demographic: in the US, more than 99 percent of people polled in 2016 between the ages of 16 and 24 said they had used the internet in the last three months, but only 39 percent of people over 75 had done so. And a recent poll in the US showed that while 41 percent of Americans aged sixty-five and older don’t use the internet, only 1 percent of those between eighteen and twenty-nine stayed offline.

Access tells only part of the story; mobile networks have also shifted patterns of use toward an “always on” mentality. The so-called Generation Z, who were born in the 1990s and have never known a time that lacked these facilities, is now reaching adulthood, and a 2011 survey of Britons aged 16 to 24 found that 45 percent felt happiest when they were online. Many businesses now expect employees to be constantly contactable by mobile phone and email; equally, domestic and personal matters can be managed from the work desk, breaking down the barrier between separate identities of work and home.

There are plenty of statistics like this, but exactly what they mean isn’t obvious. A straightforward extrapolation of current trends implies that three quarters of the world will have mobile phones by the end of the next decade. But the consequences of phone access for a farmer in Kenya or a Mongolian nomad are very different from those for a city trader in London.

The spread of information technologies and social media justifies their description as “transformative” and indeed “disruptive” technologies—but what will they transform and disrupt? It was exhilarating to imagine that the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 were “Twitter revolutions,” but the evidence for that has largely evaporated, and in any event that idea told us nothing about how they would unfold subsequently.

An increasingly “info-connected” world is just one facet of a trend toward greater interdependence affecting, and affected by, trade, travel, disease, censorship, privacy, and a great deal else. A heady stew, in other words, and no one can know how it will taste. Here are a few suggestions of what experience so far can teach us:

• Interconnectivity doesn’t mean inclusivity. On the contrary, it may produce a Balkanization of views that coarsens political discourse and supports or hardens extremist views. There is little sign that the internet or social media encourages broadmindedness and debate; in some ways they are set up to insulate us from dissent or challenge, for example, by offering to personalize news feeds. It used to take some effort to find Holocaust-denying pseudohistory; now it’s one click away. Just as information technologies may serve to amplify existing prejudices and misconceptions, so they amplify inequality. In business and trade, in arts and entertainment and fame, markets have become ever more inclined toward “winner takes all.” This, psychological studies show, is precisely what to expect from rating systems in which you can easily see what choices others are making.
• If a job can be done by a robot, it probably will be. Already there is a significant sector of the financial market in which all activity is carried out by automated trading algorithms. It happens faster than humans could possibly manage, it has its own rules, and we don’t yet really know what they are. This automation will expand into ever more sophisticated jobs, including in healthcare and education. There may be benefits, certainly: robot doctors never sleep, you might not need to wait weeks for an appointment, and the robot might know more about your health (from implanted monitors and genomic data) than a human doctor ever did. But automation will transform labor markets—and a clear lesson from history is that those who have no stake in a society’s productivity, rather than enjoying greater leisure, are deprived of economic power.
• Your greatest asset might not be your skills, knowledge, or even wealth, but your reputation—how you are rated by others on online forums, say. That means you will need to manage and curate that reputation well—or perhaps to employ someone else to do so, as companies already do.

These trends don’t clearly point in any single direction, and indeed many contain internal contradictions: lies are easier to expose, but are easier to spread, too. Most important, none of these changes is happening in a sociopolitical bubble: What they mean in China is not the same as what they mean in Sweden or Iran.

It’s safe, though, to draw one implication for our future selves: Identity is far less fixed, and far more multifaceted, than it used to be—or at least, than it was thought to be. We have multiple identities that surface in different situations, often overlapping and increasingly blurred but defining our views and choices in distinct ways. In particular, traditional social categories that defined identity, such as age, class, and nationality, are becoming less significant, as are distinctions between public and private identity. Old definitions of identity based on class, ethnicity, and political affiliation may cede to new divisions, marked, for example, by distinctions of urban/ rural or well/poorly educated.

If traditional attributes of individual identities become more fragmented over the coming decade, communities might be expected to become less cohesive. The result could be reduced social mobility and marginalization, creating dangers of segregation and extremism. On the other hand, hyperconnectivity can also produce or strengthen group identities in positive ways, offering new opportunities for community building. Will our increasingly connected lives and identities work for better or worse? Well, both—and ever more so.

The future of democracy and religion

Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man has become a favorite whipping boy of futurology: Look now and laugh at the idea that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, liberal democ...