Mawgablog

I was just reading about this series of essays on Edge.org, about new technology or ideas that would ‘change the game’ in the near future. I’m a sucker for futurology, so I thought I’d take a look. Much of it is the usual science stuff that generally permeates crystal ball gazing – we’ll snip and tuck DNA so we’ll live to 120; we’ll plant radio receivers in the mind so we can transmit thought, superconnectivity through broadband and all that kind of thing.

I’ve developed a problem with this sort of assessment. It stems from a few thoughts I harbour about human nature. We’re baser than we think, though we do have the capacity for real kindness and community mindedness. Not only do we have it somewhere deep within us, it’s also generally nurtured by our societies, I think; we’re encouraged to knife each other a lot more than I wish we did. Or certainly a lot more than you’d think we would be if you watched Star Trek back in the 1970s. Then, the future was all about working together, hope and reconciliation. Then, we’d never have thought that in the early 1990s, we’d have coined a phrase like ‘ethnic cleansing’, for instance.

No. We have a strange social physics, perhaps, if I can dredge my memory for a morsel of Newtonian physics: for all our progress as humans there is an equal and opposite reaction. Who would have thought in an age of instant knowledge – the Internet – unscientific theories like Intelligent Design or trenchant religious fundamentalism would have so much traction? At least the Cold War was about ideology/philosophy and science, destructive as it was.

Moreover, when I was growing up, my father worked a division of the World Health Organization, and among its many tasks was the eradication of smallpox worldwide – to make the virus extinct. It managed that task in 1979/80. But lo and behold, along came AIDS, as if from nowhere, rendering that achievement irrelevant.

So, for all progress, I fear some terrible equal, opposite repercussion. And just as the communication age assisted various peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe, it has also enabled terrorism in the West.

Hence, I meshed with Brian Eno’s contribution. He discussed the end of optimism. In order for things to work properly, you assume the best in people – that when a light turns red, people will stop, that people who work tills will be by and large honest, that people who offer care to the elderly really have the best wishes of the elderly at heart.

He raises this point: what if we look out at the world and we just see it as disaster waiting to happen: it’s overcrowded, it’s warming up, it’s become uninhabitable, for example. He posited that we might begin to band together in ever more tightly knit groups, serving that tiny group’s best interests, to the detriment of everybody else.

To quote him: “Any kind of social or global mobility is seen as a threat and harshly resisted. Freeloaders and brigands and pirates and cheats will take control. Survivalism rules. Might will be right.
“This is a dark thought, but one to keep an eye on. Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren’t susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.”

One thing that was heartening about the Obama win was that it was the reverse of the malaise that’s creeping over us all. It’s the opposite of Mugabe-ism, of fundamentalism, of an I-get-mine-you – get-yours-ism that sometimes appears like a slow-moving pestilence to be choking our optimism.

The other thought was, the mobile phone. Mathematician Keith Devlin discussed it as a key technology of the future. It got me thinking about an article I read somewhere about how in Somalia, lawless land of piracy and potentially ‘the new Afghanistan’, the mobile phone industry flourishes. All the warlords understand the importance of the industry and so tend to leave the masts alone and allow companies to operate services. Unlike landlines and computers, mobile phones are simple and straightforward, they have great reach for far less infrastructural outlay, and they really do connect people with each other in a way that is dependent on them doing what humans do best: they talk. It’s hard to say exactly what that could mean for people in the furthest recesses of the globe, and it is very much a technology with us now, but the mobile phone – and by extension, wireless technology – are certainly ones to watch. There is evidence that the mobile phone is changing the face of farming in poorer regions of the world: witness the Guardian and The Times.

So, there will be miracle and wonder in future, but imagining it as science in a vacuum, or that it is yet to be invented technology available only to those who live in the richest countries that will have the most profound effect on us all, “change the game”, is to me, something of a mistaken notion.