back to the future

Above all, people want optimistic views of the future. Never more so than in problematic times. That explains why Kurzweil is such a fun read today. His promises are surely one's that we can all understand. We have been looking for immortality since the dawn of civilization. What better way to escape high gas prices, food shortages, pollution, and the threat of global warming? If we all lived forever then it wouldn't matter what evil things the future has in store for us. That is the beauty of virtual reality and video-games. When you die you get another life and you can try again.

As a futurist you don't want to disappoint your audience. You have to give them hope, otherwise what is the point of listening? But if you really want to sell books you have to have unbridled enthusiasm and predict exceptional things to come. It doesn't really matter if you are wrong, because the people who buy your books won't be around to witness it. Or if they are, and you were wrong (that is almost guaranteed by the way), they will have moved on to other things.

I personally remember going to a neural network meeting in the early 1980's. At that time energy was high, and the feeling that we had finally understood the brain was universal. Sure, there had been AI or artificial intelligence in the 60s, and it had failed rather miserably, but that was precisely the point. This time around we learned from our mistakes and knew better. And so a very prominent researcher who was starting a company predicted we would all have smart vacuum cleaners by the mid 1990's. Vacuum cleaners that were smart enough to know when the vacuuming needed to be done and take care of it too. At the time, the prediction was met with skepticism. Surely, the researchers in the audience thought, this problem would be solved much sooner than the mid-90s. By the mid-90's we would have smart machines that we could talk to.

Ok, so maybe we were off by a few decades, so what? Clearly, we are making progress. And if you chart the right mile-stones on the right axes, you will see that change is happening exponentially faster. Which means that pretty soon we will get to the singularity. That is a mystical word for hitting the time axis (you have to draw things the right way to see this of course). Now change will be instant. It will be a dramatic step change. Furthermore, this change will be for the better. It will be exponentially better.

Never mind that there a few problems with this approach. One is in the milestones. In essence, you can pick whatever milestones you like, and history has plenty to chose from. You decide whether the steam engine was a world changing event or not? Like the Wright brothers better? And what about the more distant past. Here some well-heeled beliefs are unquestionably wrong but so what? If they fit the chart, why let data get in the way of a good story?

There is one chart however that is based on rather solid data. It too shows very rapid growth and when you extrapolate it further it too will reach a singularity. It is a chart that concerns us all as it shows how many people there are on the planet. In some very real sense we are the data points for that graph. While there is some uncertainty as to the past data, it is of very little concern to us now. Because the curve remained largely flat for a long time. It started its upward growth very recently. And our data for that part of the curve is very good. Since all people are counted within the limits of accuracy, and since the time points are fixed, there is little picking and choosing here. Very little value judgments as to what is important and what is not. No argument as to whether this or that individual represents a breakthrough.

It is clear to everyone that growth of this nature cannot be sustained indefinitely. Somehow, somewhere it has to slow down. Even the most optimistic agriculture experts believe the planet can only sustain 10 billion people. We are past 6 now. Luckily enough, other "experts" predict we will level off at 9 billion around 2050. So why worry you say? Because those same agricultural experts believe the planet can only sustain 2.7 billion "Americans." In this context, Americans means people living at the standard of living (or standard of waste) that current Americans live at.

The bottom line is that even the wildly optimistic think we are in for some serious belt-tightening in the near future. Now that won't sell too many books unfortunately!