This Will Change Everything

John Brockman

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061960673
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Biologie

" This Will Change Everything offers seemingly radical but actually feasible ideas with the potential to change the world."—Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel

Editor John Brockman continues in the same vein as his popular compilations What Are You Optimistic About and What Have You Changed Your Mind About with This Will Change Every thing. Brockman asks 150 intellectual superstars "what game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" Their fascinating responses are collected here, from bestselling author of Atonement Ian McEwan to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek to electronic music pioneer Brian Eno to writer, actor, director, and activist Alan Alda.

ENERGY AND ECONOMICS: THE ROAD TO CIVILIZATION 1.0

MICHAEL SHERMER

MICHAEL SHERMER is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and the author of The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics.

This year finds us at a crisis tipping point, both economically and environmentally. If ever we needed to look to the past to save our future, it is now. In particular, we need to do two things: (1) Stop the implosion of the economy and enable markets to function once again both freely and fairly, and (2) make the transition from nonrenewable fossil fuels as the primary source of our energy to renewable energy sources that will allow us to flourish into the future. Failure to make these transformations will doom us to the endless tribal political machinations and economic conflicts that have plagued civilization for millennia. We need to make the transition to Civilization 1.0. Let me explain.

In a 1964 article on searching for extraterrestrial civilizations, the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev suggested using radio telescopes to detect energy signals from other solar systems in which there might be civilizations of three levels of advancement: Type I can harness all of the energy of its home planet, Type II can harvest all of the power of its sun, and Type III can master all of the energy from its galaxy.

Based on our energy efficiency at the time, in 1973 the astronomer Carl Sagan estimated that Earth represented a Type 0.7 civilization, on a Type 0 to Type 1 scale. (Later assessments have put us at 0.72.) As the Kardashevian scale is logarithmic, where any increase in power consumption requires a huge leap in power production, fossil fuels won’t get us to Civilization 1.0. Renewable sources, such as solar, wind, and geothermal, are a good start. Coupled to nuclear power—perhaps even nuclear fusion, instead of the fission reactors we have now—they could eventually get us there.

We are close. Taking a Janus-faced look to the past in order to see the future, let’s quickly review the history of humanity on its climb to become a Civilization 1.0:

• Type 0.1: Fluid groups of hominids living in Africa. Technology consists of primitive stone tools. Intragroup conflicts are resolved through dominance hierarchy, and intergroup violence is common.
• Type 0.2: Bands of roaming hunter-gatherers that form kinship groups with a mostly horizontal political system and an egalitarian economy.
• Type 0.3: Tribes of individuals linked through kinship but with a more settled and agrarian lifestyle. The beginnings of a political hierarchy and a primitive economic division of labor.
• Type 0.4: Chiefdoms consisting of a coalition of tribes into a single hierarchical political unit with a dominant leader at the top, and with the beginnings of significant economic inequalities and a division of labor in which lower-class members provide food and other products consumed by nonproducing upper-class members.
• Type 0.5: The state as a political coalition with jurisdiction over a well-defined territory and its inhabitants, with a mercantile economy that seeks a favorable balance of trade in a zero-sum game against other states.
• Type 0.6: Empires extend control over peoples who are not culturally, ethnically, or geographically within their normal jurisdiction, with a goal of economic dominance over rival empires.
• Type 0.7: Democracies that divide power among several institutions, which are run by elected officials voted for by some citizens. The beginnings of a market economy.
• Type 0.8: Liberal democracies that give the vote to all citizens. Markets that begin to embrace a nonzero, winwin economic game through free trade with other states.
• Type 0.9: Democratic capitalism, the blending of liberal democracy and free markets, now spreading across the globe through democratic movements in developing nations and broad trading blocs such as the European Union.
• Type 1.0: Globalism that includes worldwide wireless Internet access, with all knowledge digitized and available to everyone. A global economy with free markets in which anyone can trade with anyone else without interference from states or governments. A planet where all states are democracies in which everyone has the franchise.

Looking from this past toward the future, we can see that the forces at work that could prevent us from reaching Civilization 1.0 are primarily political and economic, not technological. The resistance by nondemocratic states to turning power over to the people is considerable, especially in theocracies whose leaders would prefer we all revert to Type 0.4 chiefdoms. The opposition to a global economy is substantial, even in the industrialized West, where economic tribalism still dominates the thinking of most people.

The game-changing scientific idea is the combination of energy and economics—the development of renewable energy sources made cheap and available to everyone, everywhere on the planet, by allowing anyone to trade in these game-changing technologies with anyone else. That will change everything.

UNDOING BABYLON

DANIEL L. EVERETT

DANIEL L. EVERETT is chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and professor of linguistics and anthropology at Illinois State University and the author of Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazon Jungle.

“We should really not be studying sentences; we should not be studying language—we should be studying people.”

—VICTOR YNGVE

Communication is the key to cooperation. Although cross-cultural communication for the masses requires translation techniques that exceed our current capabilities, the groundwork of this technology has already been laid, and many of us will live to see a revolution in automatic translation that will change everything about cooperation and communication across the world.

This goal was conceived in the late 1940s in a famous memorandum by Rockefeller Foundation scientist Warren Weaver, in which he suggested the possibility of machine translation and tied its likelihood to four proposals, still controversial today: that there was a common logic to languages; that there were likely to be language universals; that immediate context could be understood and linked to translation of individual sentences; and that cryptographic methods developed in World War II would apply to language translation. Weaver’s proposals got off the ground financially in the early 1950s as the U.S. military invested heavily in linguistics and machine translation across the United States, with particular emphasis on the research of the team headed by Victor Yngve at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Research Laboratory of Electronics—a team that included the young Noam Chomsky.

Yngve, like Weaver, wanted to contribute to international understanding by applying the methods of computational linguistics, the then-incipient field he helped found, to communication, especially machine translation. Early innovators in this area also included Claude Shannon at Bell Labs and Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, who preceded Yngve at MIT before returning to Israel. Shannon was arguably the inventor of the concept of information as an entity that could be scientifically studied, and Bar-Hillel was the first person to work full-time on machine translation, beginning the program that Yngve inherited at MIT.

This project was challenged early on, however, by the work of Chomsky, from within Yngve’s own lab. Chomsky’s conclusions about different grammar types and their relative generative power convinced people that grammars of natural languages were not amenable to machine-translation efforts as they were practiced at the time, leading to a slowdown in and reduction of enthusiasm for computationally based translation.

As we have subsequently learned, however, the principal problem faced in machine translation is not the formalization of grammar per se, but the inability of any formalization known, including Chomsky’s, to integrate context and culture (semantics and pragmatics, in particular) into a model of language appropriate for translation. Without this integration, mechanical translation from one language to another is not possible.

Still, mechanical procedures able to translate most contents from any source language into accurate, idiomatically natural constructions of any target language seem less utopian to us now, because of major breakthroughs that have led to several programs in machine translation (for example, the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University). I believe we will see within our lifetime the convergence of developments in artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, statistical grammar theories, and the emerging field of computational anthropology (informatic-based analysis and modeling of cultural values) that will facilitate powerful new forms of machine translation to match the dreams of early pioneers of computation.

The conceptual breakthroughs necessary for universal machine translation will also require contributions from construction grammars—models that view language as a set of conventional signs (varieties of the idea that the building blocks of grammar are not rules or formal constraints, but conventional phrase and word forms that combine cultural values and grammatical principles) instead of as a list of formal properties. These breakthroughs will have to look at differences in the encoding of language and culture across communities rather than trying to find a “universal grammar” that unites all languages.

At least some of the steps are easy enough to imagine. First, we come up with a standard format for writing statistically based construction grammars of any language, a format that displays the connections between constructions, culture, and local context (such as the other likely words in the sentence, or other likely sentences in the paragraph, in which the construction appears). This format might be as simple as a flowchart or a list. Second, we develop a method for encoding context and values. For example, what are the values associated with words; what are the values associated with certain idioms; what are the values associated with the ways in which ideas are expressed? This last can be seen in the notion of sentence complexity, for example, as in (among others) the Amazon Pirahãs’ rejection of recursive structures in syntax because they violate principles of information rate and new versus old information in utterances that are very important in Pirahã culture. Third, we establish lists of cultural values and most common contexts and how these link to individual constructions. Automating the procedure for discovering or enumerating these links will take us to the threshold of automatic translation in the original sense.

Information and its exchange form the soul of human cultures. So just imagine the possible change in our perceptions of “others” when we are able to type in a story and have it automatically and idiomatically translated with 100 percent accuracy into any language for which we have a grammar of constructions. Imagine speaking into a microphone and having your words come out in the language of your audience, heard and understood naturally. Imagine being able to take a course in any language, from any university in the world, over the Internet or in person, without having to first learn the language of the instructor.

These will always be unreachable goals to some degree. It seems unlikely, for example, that all grammars and cultures are even capable of expressing everything from all languages. However, we are developing tools that will dramatically narrow the gaps and help us decide where and how we can communicate particular ideas cross-culturally. Success at machine translation might not end all the world’s sociocultural or political tensions, but it won’t hurt. One struggles to think of a greater contribution to world cooperation than progress to universal communication, enabling all and sundry to communicate with nearly all and sundry. Babel means “the gate of god.” In the Bible, it is about the origin of world competition and suspicion. As humans approached the entrance to divine power by means of their universal cooperation via universal communication, so the biblical story goes, language diversity was introduced to destroy our unity and deprive us of our full potential.

But automated, near-universal translation is coming. And it will change everything.

SOUL TRAVEL FOR SELFLESS BEINGS

THOMAS METZINGER

THOMAS METZINGER is a professor of philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz and the author of The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self.

John Brockman points out that new technology leads not only to new ways of perceiving ourselves, but also to a process he calls “re-creating ourselves.” Could this become true in an even deeper and more radical way than through gene technology? The answer is yes.

It is entirely plausible that we may one day directly control virtual models of our own bodies directly with our brain. In 2007, I first experienced taking control of a computer-generated whole-body model of myself. It took place in a virtual-reality lab, where my physical motions were filmed by eighteen cameras picking up signals from sensors attached to my body. Over the past two years, research groups in Switzerland, England, Germany, and Sweden have demonstrated how, in a passive condition, subjects can consciously identify with the content of a computer-generated virtual-body representation, fully relocating the phenomenal sense of self into an artificial, visual model of their body.

In 2008, in another experiment, we saw that a monkey on a treadmill could control the real-time walking patterns of a humanoid robot via a brain-machine interface directly implanted into the monkey’s brain. The synchronized robot was in Japan, while the poor monkey was located thousands of miles away, in the United States. Even after it stopped walking, the monkey was able to sustain the locomotion of the synchronized robot for a few more minutes, just by using the visual feedback transmitted from Japan plus its own “thoughts” (whatever those may have been).

Now imagine two further steps.

First, we manage to selectively block the high-bandwidth “interoceptive” input into the human self–model—all the gut feelings and the incessant flow of inner body perceptions that anchor the conscious self in the physical body. After all, we already have selective motor control for an artificial body-model and robust phenomenal self-identification via touch and sight. By blocking the internal self-perception of the body, we could be able to suspend the persistent causal link to the physical body.

Second, we develop richer and more complex avatars, virtual agents emulating not only the proprioceptive feedback generated by situated movement, but also certain abstract aspects of ongoing global control itself—new tools, as Brockman would call them. Then suddenly it happens that the functional core process initiating the complex control loop connecting physical and virtual body jumps from the biological brain into the avatar.

I don’t believe this will happen tomorrow. I also don’t believe that it will change everything. But it will change a lot.

INSIDE OUT: THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF EVERYTHING

TOR NØRRETRANDERS

TOR NØRRETRANDERS is a writer and lecturer on popular science and the author of The Generous Man: How Helping Others Is the Sexiest Thing You Can Do.

Understanding that the outside world is really inside us and the inside world is really outside us will change everything, both inside and outside. Why?

“There is no out there out there,” physicist John Wheeler said, in his attempt to explain quantum physics. All we know is how we correlate with the world. We do not really know what the world is really like, uncorrelated with us. When we seem to experience an external world that is out there independent of us, it is something we dream up.

Modern neurobiology has reached the exact same conclusion. The visual world—what we see—is an illusion, but a very sophisticated one. There are no colors, no tones, no constancy in the “real” world; it is all something we make up. We do so for good reasons and with great survival value. Because colors, tones, and constancy are expressions of how we correlate with the world.

The merging of the epistemological lesson from quantum mechanics with the epistemological lesson from neurobiology attests to a very simple fact: What we perceive as being outside us is a fancy and elega...