Feb 20, 2008
Technological To-Do List
A panel of eighteen apparently maverick thinkers was charged with coming up with a to-do list for the twenty-first century by the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The maverick panel includes such notables as former director of the National Institutes of Health Bernadine Healy, Google co-founder Larry Page, geneticist and businessman Craig Venter, Nobel Chemistry Laureate Mario Molina, climate change expert Rob Socolow, and ‘futurist’ Ray Kurzweil.
I am sure some of these sci-celebs are mavericks in their own way, but if that’s the case why do some entries on their list of 14 technological challenges for our age read like the section headings from a college student essay or worse still a beauty pageant winner’s wishlist?
- Engineering better medicines
- Advancing health informatics
- Providing access to clean water
- Providing energy from fusion
- Making solar energy economical
- Restoring and improving urban infrastructure
- Enhancing virtual reality
- Reverse engineering the brain
- Exploring natural frontiers
- Advancing personalized learning
- Developing carbon sequestration methods
- Managing the nitrogen cycle
- Securing cyberspace
- Preventing nuclear terror
Okay, don’t get me wrong, world peace and universal wellness are noble aims and avoiding nuclear terror should be a priority. Moreover, even beginning to approach some of these problems will take a maverick or two, and many will probably remain intractable well beyond the twenty-first century. Despite advances in functional MRI, I don’t think we’re that close to reverse engineering the brain, for instance. We are really not going to come close to “managing” the nitrogen cycle any time soon either; we cannot yet make perfectly accurate weather or climate forecasts let alone find ways to control the global flux of atmospheric gases.
Another worrying property of the list is that in some sense a few of the entries are redundant. If we have access to solar power, why would we need fusion power? Even if we get to grips with fusion, building fusion reactor power stations is going to be incredibly expensive and difficult to do at least compared to the solar option. Some people would argue that CO2 is not an issue and others would suggest that the threat of nuclear terrorism is not what the scaremongers would have us believe, so maybe those list entries are also redundant.
Socolow admits in an interview that the challenge of coming up with 14 must-do technological developments was “crazy”. “We came up with broad categories of the challenges that lie ahead and within those categories identified specific initiatives,” he says.
The panel didn’t actually rank the 14 challenges in any particular order. It was obviously a tough call to decide whether advancing health informatics is any more or less important than advancing personalized learning. However, preventing nuclear terror should come well above reverse engineering the brain and perhaps even above engineering better medicines, surely?
Likewise, enhancing virtual
reality
and exploring
natural frontiers will
allow humanity
to advanceenhancing virtual reality and exploring natural frontiers will allow humanity to advance way beyond the claustrophobic confines of our current mindset, but if millions of people are without clean water, then we might as well be in the dark ages.
Apparently, the panel released its report in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), so I suspect it was more than a little tongue in cheek in some respects, especially given some of the personal reports I’ve heard from fellow science journalists about the quality (or lack thereof) of this year’s meeting.
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Michael said,
February 20, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Yeah, I thought that this was a fairly poor list. The terms are overly vague. They might impress a non-scientist, but I didn’t find this list interesting at all. Engineering better medicines? What does that mean? Isn’t that what science has been doing for the last 100 years. Why make an entry that is so vague and meaningless. Are they trying to rally scientists to do something they are already doing anyway? What purpose does this list serve other than to highlight stuff that scientists are working toward anyway.
David Bradley said,
February 21, 2008 at 7:38 am
I guess what I really ought to have done with this post is come up with my own list (more on that later), like you say, “engineering better medicine” says nothing, we’ve been engineering better medicines ever since the first herbalists scraped the bark from the willow tree and made a brew some time several centuries in the past.
db
James Alexander said,
March 4, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Comment for comment,
Indeed David, It would be most enlightening to read your Technological- to do List.
You have a good start with “Solar vs. Nuclear Fusion”
I am glad you reminded us of “the nitrogen cycle” -mostly air, reported as getting hotter. Your link to Socolow allows us to get his a rough skeleton of the fertilisers -water pollution (in the intensive farming model over the last few decades). At current rates of population growth some consider this model to have reached it’s limit and no longer a viable responds to human requirements.
It could be amusing to compare Socolow’s 4 main categories (well presented on the whole via your link on Sciencebase with Dale Carnegie’s list of Human Desires (from around the time of the great depression 1929) The first four are given here.
1 Health & the preservation of life.
2.Food
3. Sleep
4.Money & the things money can by
“Better to be rich and in good health than poor & in ill heath!” Shultz’s “Charlie Brown”
To your remark on Virtual Reality & Exploring Natural Frontiers -your made a point alluded to in my above comments on real world problems. Let’s add another black mark aimed at the games version of virtual reality and its influence fragile minds (not differentiating the real world of common human perception from virtual-digital world.(I trust engineers “safely engineering for safety are not in this category. ). It is perhaps not too much to expect that this highly lucrative activity contribute to objective study in these fields.
On CO2, scepticism, I repeat, as on my blog, I simply cannot follow the sceptics down this lengthy path, at least on engineering policy-of course I not single individual nor country can properly address the magnitude of GHG mitigation required estimates. CO2 is a focal point, it could be Cost too(Stern). There is a special which I’m sure you know. (Coal Page40-43). Faced with a local finding of the reported biggest reserve in Europe(EU) I first shuddered, wrote a poem in my then got involved in this possibly “depressing” topic, Coal, Combustion, CO2… My sceptical nature made me check rapidly what others were saying. On the whole even in company websites no major discrepancy was found to contradict Nature’s German correspondent’s article. Capture & Sequestration is a must by common accord for this most abundant fossil fuel. Now speed with which “the industrial-financial system can swing into full play is shatteringly slow - Commentators at -The Institute of Material, Mining & Minerals (IOM3) often refer to the efficiency of development (Research to Market),in wartime compared with the luxurious pace enjoyed by our post WW2 generations.
As you pointed out, the original Tech-to-do- list you presented (for want of the original report) does appear very wishy-washy indeed.
David Bradley said,
March 4, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Thanks for you detailed comment James. Friend of the Sciencebase blog Jenny Oliver posted her own Tech to do list over on SciScoop in case you’re interested. I’m going to defer to that for the timebeing
db
ETF said,
March 24, 2008 at 11:08 am
Did it really take “mavericks” to produce a list of the most banal and obvious technological goals imaginable? Here is my take on the matter. Nothing in physics entails that consciousness should exist at all, and, notwithstanding the whining of deflationists who develop urinary urgency when they suspect that physics as currently understood is not a complete description of reality, it simply is not. Miguel Alcubbiere’s work on superluminal travel, and the subsequent work that brought the energy requirements of performing such a feat down to a reasonable level, should give us the balls to set our sights a bit higher than vapid groaners like “engineering better medicines.” Here’s my list:
1. Infinite energy supply, whether from vacuum energy, zero-point, or anything else. A lot depends on inexhaustable energy.
2. Solve the problem of collecting or producing “exotic matter” (e.g., with negative mass). This is the major hurdle blocking us from superluminal (faster than light) travel.
3. Determine the molecular mechanisms underlying senescence and defeat them (e.g., immortality).
4. Develop noninvasive methods for direct stimulation of the nucleus accumbuns and the ventral tegmental area so that states of sublime bliss and the highest consciousness will be everyone’s birthright, and people will live aesthetic rather than acquisitive lives.
5. Feed everyone, for god’s sake, instead of having families sleeping on steam grates while 1% of Americans control 40% of the Earth’s resources. This necessarily involves developing consciousness to a point where it can generate more emotions than greed and envy.
6. Drastically reduce the population, learn to stop casually wiping out whatever is in our way, use technology to make Earth become heaven.
7. Educate all persons so that they are civilized and cultured, instead of turning our great universities into fancy vocational schools to crush spirits and grind out “human resources.”
8. Stop preaching facile baloney about the brain being a computer, and figure out what consciousness actually is.
9. Increase our skill at genetic engineering, and use it so that there will be no more people facing a lifetime of loneliness because no one wants to touch them.
10. Using both scalp electrodes and deep brain electrodes, summate the brain activity of groups of people, and use this data computationally to produce a new kind of music.
11. Develop robots that will cheerfully handle all of the tedium that the great cultures of the past relied upon slaves to do. End wage slavery in favor of lives of creative expression.
12. Stop the cycle of people eating swill from MacDonalds from the moment they’re born, then spending the rest of their lives going to doctors and hospitals and having GERD.
13. Create neural interfaces (”skullcaps”) to computers so that typing becomes a useless skill and fades away.
14. Discover if there is an interstellar community, and if so, join it. Read that again.
Come on. If “enhancing virtual reality” and “securing cyberspace” are our loftiest dreams, we should be extinct.
David Bradley said,
March 24, 2008 at 11:56 am
ETF, that was my exact thought, mavericks? Pah! Thanks for your list. Anyone else want to submit their tech-to-do list? We could start one of those blog memes…
db