“Most prophets overestimate how much the world would be transformed by social and political change and underestimate the forces of technological change.”
I read this last night in the new “column of conjecture and speculation” by Stephen Dawson in the latest IPA Review (vol. 57). The quote is from late US physicist Gerard K. O’Neill.
And I wonder, what will power the world in 2100, from where will our drinking water come, and how will we be managing/not managing the rangelands of western Queensland and NSW?
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.
To expand a little, the column will be looking at likely (in my view, although some will consider them highly speculative) technological changes over the next decade or two, and the possible governmental policy responses to them. My view is that those responses will likely be either ineffective or bad for people, and will reflect an instinctive conservatism that fears change. But Pandora’s box isn’t easily closed. Over coming issues I will be covering such exciting areas as advances in material science, huge increases in human lifespan, genetic manipulation, space travel (particularly accelerating private involvement in this), electronic and mechanical enhancement of the human body and so on.
As an earth scientist, I have found from empiricism, predicting the future is a problematical task.
Unlike climate changers, whose predictions seem not to involve the present generation, since those predictions are in the remote future, mining has more immediate concerns.
One suspects that Ender and Ken Miles might have more authoritative opinions. So they might.
Thomas Friedman’s new book The World is Flat argues that the technology of the internet (and associated workflow software) brings the threat of cheap and well-educated workers in India and China to knowledge-industry jobs in the West suddenly much closer. He says (and this relates to O’Neill’s observation) if people accuse him of being a technological determinist, well, that’s just what he is.