The World in 2050 - Scientific American Looks Forward

Scientific American [June 2010] lays out 12 events that are somewhere on the scientific horizon and estimates their chances of happening by the year 2050 - that is, affecting the teenagers of today as they go into retirement. In rough order of likelihood, they are:

• Classed as Almost Certain
  The synthetic creation of life
  A Pacific earthquake
• Classed as Likely
  The cloning of a human - seen as extremely difficult but also probably inevitable.
  Machine self-awareness
  Polar meltdown
• Classed as 50:50
  The discovery of new dimensions as research develops out of the cutting edge of particle physics
  Room temperature super-conductors
  A deadly pandemic
• Regarded as Unlikely or Very Unlikely
  The discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence
  Nuclear holocaust
  An asteroid collision
  Fusion energy

Of course, future research is rarely reliable as anyone who has studied the predictions of, say, the 1960s will know but it is not a bad starting point. The most exciting on the list for popular culture are those that are probably the least likely. We can quickly dismiss these.

The Blockbuster Events

It is fair to think that the sheer scale of space makes the alien visit hypothesis unreasonable (at least on the timescale of any reader of this posting) while international institutional structures are probably now robust enough to deter the use of nuclear arsenals by superpowers.

If scientists tell me that limitless fusion energy is unlikely in the next forty years or even a century, I am not inclined to disbelieve them but the small print on the asteroid collision is not exactly comforting.

No extinction event perhaps but an expectation that at least one asteroid hit could devastate the equivalent of a small city within the next 200 years.

This leaves us with eight scientifically-related changes that could reasonably affect our children's futures with five of those as probable. What would the world look like if they all came to pass?

Bear in mind that we are not including here what may be called changes in social reality - shifts caused in philosophical or spiritual perspective, by economic reorganisation or scarcity or through the cultural effect of earlier era technologies that are only now being fully implemented, such as the internet.

One of the few insights of Marx that has stood the test of time is that culture and politics are based on the economic organisation of society and that the economic organisation of society is fundamentally material in nature.

This is an over-simplification of the situation but science is about the understanding of matter and so scientific discovery or observation really does flow back into society and politics over the long term.

The type case is Darwinism which became Social Darwinism and was then perverted into racial politics. The scientists, in fact, were right about evolution but the extension of the idea was untenable. This did not stop its exploitation by non-scientists in disastrous ways.

Missing Jigsaw Pieces

Looking forward forty years, the message of Scientific American is that perhaps things may not change quite so dramatically as we think but the rational and sceptical mind-set of the Editors may fail to take into account how humans actually use information in their petty struggles for power.

Unaccountably missing from the list is the slow-burn effect of the discoveries in neuro-science and the cognitive sciences which could go in either one of two ways - towards authoritarian attempts to nudge us into social compliance or into radical libertarian reform as the cutting edge between brain science and philosophy confirms the insights of the phenomenologists and the existentialists.

Nor is there any mention of nanotechnology which strikes this writer as potentially as revolutionary as the internet on how we conduct our lives. To be fair, this is not an 'event' as such but the implementation of technology (like robotics) that is established already in its basics.

Similarly, the internet may seem as if it is now in its mature state of implementation rather than of innovation but the social and cultural effects of easy mass communications still look set to effect a cultural revolution as powerful and as uncertain as that instigated by printing.

Finally, there is the attempt at the application of the soft sciences (from psychology through to anthropology and political science) to problems of war, peace, policing and order.

The arms race in this area between authority and the street may lead to many new social and cultural forms and compromises. If the Editors of SciAm are sceptical of the status of the 'soft sciences', then so are we but warriors may still believe in their pretensions despite the rest of us.

Material Progress

But let's stick to Scientific American's hard science agenda. What will 2050 look like? This is our expectation based on their assessments of the science.

1. The security industry will have long since passed the stage where they manufactured threats out of synthetic biology to build budgets. Biological engineering of safer and less polluting household products and environmental services will be entering its mature, productive phase.
2. Human cloning is not going to be tolerated in the developed world even if cases will emerge in in permissive jurisdictions because the first 'experiments' are likely to horrify as cruel and unnnatural but the drive to clone will be part of a much broader range of discoveries in human healthcare. These will improve life chances and longevity in the West but increase emotional pain at those who die young or in pain at home and abroad.
3. Self-replicating intelligent robotic agents (AI) are going to present interesting 'human' rights and philosophical challenges that are likely to become political by the end of the period - less because they 'walk among us' but because we will be getting to the point where they may soon do so.
4. Even if room temperature superconductors are unproven as tools, the technology of energy production, distribution and conservation is already being driven by political as much as by free market conditions towards major innovation. The mature fruits of this will be well in place by 2050 and will probably have reduced much of the energy-driven instabilities in international affairs - at least in the West.

So, from a basic lifestyle perspective, scientific progress continues and the developed world is likely to be a better place to live in for most people - in terms of the environment, pollutants, waste, healthcare, automation and energy management.

New Philosophies

Where problems arise is where you would expect them - in the ability of people to find meaning as new discoveries cause the ground to shift from under their feet and in the debate over how much to 'give' in order to 'get' security from local under-classes and from less well served emerging populations.

This latter is at the heart of decisions about welfare provision and international aid.

Discoveries in particle physics that defy common sense, especially if matched by neuro-scientific investigation into 'spirit', may create new and paradoxical shifts in culture. Although by definition unpredictable, the logic is one of 'more spirit, less religion'.

This, in itself, may help to end the fruitless nineteenth century war between science and religion to replace it with a new tension between advanced thought and those wedded to both institutional authority and a scientific positivism that has become surplus to requirements philosophically.

The danger is of a major disconnect between the world views of the well-educated and the less well-educated that may create serious cultural and political tensions within the developed world and between it and the emerging world.

One suspects that Eastern culture is more adaptable than Western in this respect.

Aid as Insurance

Periodic natural disasters (not necessarily the 'big one' in California) such as earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions are not going to destroy civilisation but they will encourage increased global co-operation, equivalent to welfare insurance, to deal with the effects.

The real beneficiary here should be the poorer countries in the world with a concomitant positive effect on mass production and improved organisation of cheap sustainable urban infrastructures and new development models.

However nothing will be achieved without a root-and-branch reform of the shamefully corrupted and mismanaged 'aid business' - UN organisations and NGOs have moved in recent decades from being well-meaning bumblers into inefficient sanctuaries for the over-paid global middle classes.

There is a similar issue arising with pandemic. H1N1 taught us two things - these things can come out of the blue and they incubate (assuming they are not a lab creation) in messy urban poverty.

The world is now in no state to deal with these issues because of the credit crunch but as recovery returns, the developed world is going to have to decide between globalisation and healthcare security.

The logic of the situation is that Western Governments will start finding the money to keep people at home in the emerging world and to start treating disease at source by treating the vectors of disease - poverty, overcrowding and insanitary conditions.

The contentious issue of climate change also has to be put in the pot. We are not quite sceptics but we are cautious given the hysterical claims of political activists. Still, the ice caps are melting and this means major adjustments in some countries and, awkwardly, improvements for others.

We already have issues of mass economic migration arising from dislocations caused by globalisation and (regionally) by war - to add dislocation caused by environmental degradation, both man-made and natural, suggests a time of troubles ahead.

2050 In The Round

Whether the planet as a whole will be cleaner and less polluted may be doubted simply because so many people in the world will still be working their way through development phases that involve large-scale traditional manufacturing requiring raw materials that will be harder to mine or extract.

However, assuming that there is no disaster involving a natural or engineered organism, the West and the advanced East (and the pockets of prosperity in the South) will be set to be less polluted and less wasteful.

A reasonable prediction is that the world, pandemics, localised disasters and asteroids notwithstanding, will be, on balance, a better balanced and more prosperous place in 2050 than in 2010.

But we should be under no illusions - the poor will still be with us at home and abroad and the capacity of the global community to deal with this will be only a little less limited than it is today.

From the tension between scientific advance within a culturally volatile developed world and a vast wider population beginning to taste the prospect if not the actuality of material progress will arise many of the insurgencies, violence and petty wars of the mid-twenty-first century.

The Crisis in British Policing

The accidental release of information about terrorist suspects that lead this week to the resignation of its Head of Counter-Terrorism is only one of a long series of incidents that have cast doubt on the competence of the Metropolitan Police.

At one level, it was a simple mistake (he showed inadvertently to camera a list of largely foreign-born terror suspects) that could have been made by any overworked executive in any industry.

Similar blunders, related to intelligence material and to loss of government data, have plagued Government. They have in common the human weakness of heavily worked staff unaware of the dangers presented by technological advances- whether that of a long range lens or a memory stick.

Government & Technology

Government has still not caught up with technology by creating the necessary protocols for the guarding of data, protocols that can also help hard-pressed officials keep their wits about them under constant pressure.

The gut instinct of Government is always to suppress technological access and to introduce draconian measures against 'receivers of information' where it can. This can result in daft legislation - for example, that on photography which has outraged amateur photographers and irritated tourists.

The stupidity of this legislation beggars belief. It ignores the fact that the activities of the police or security arrangements can be picked up simply by slyly pointing a mobile phone in the right direction. It is another ham-fisted 'sledgehammer to crack a nut' policy that brings Government into disrepute.

And it is this disrepute that we now have to worry about. The public is beginning to edge away from its assumption that the police are a good thing towards seeing it as a threat in itself. Worse, police forces outside London are being tarred by a very London brush.

The London Met & Heavy-Handedness

The Metropolitan Police are increasingly being seen like the 'federales' in a Mexican bandit movie, accumulating their counter-terrorist cash and treating the outlying country bumpkin police as mere agents for the new intelligence-based policing.

The police have struggled in some areas since the 1980s to recover, with some success, a damaging image in depressed areas of being, first, the bootboys of Thatcher in relation to the pit closures and, then, the street managers of the poll tax riots.

In general, the role of the police as protectors of political order has taken second place by far to a warmer image of the police as protectors of the community against both organised crime and petty criminals - assisted by the kindly vision on television of murders solved by Wexford and Alleyne.

In fact, this is naive. As elsewhere in the world, the police are the sensible alternative to the army in keeping the angry mob from following 'V' into Parliament. And if provincial forces get sucked into managing strikes and direct action, it is the Met that is at the heart of national internal security.

The Confidence Factor

This role of maintaining order depends on the public believing that the preservation of order is wholly in its interest - much as the banking system depends on the belief that the saver will always get his money back with interest.

The latter belief has been knocked a little, now it is the former that is under pressure. Resentment at perceived police excesses on the one side face off a frightened property-owning element who think a stronger police presence might require turning a blind eye to the occasional abuse.

There are many factors merging to create this sense of a resumption of the hostilities of the 1980s but with this difference. The real rage is emerging in the South of the country and its middle class element is wobbling between the two extremes in its interpretation of the current crisis.

The alliance of environmentalists and property owners over the extension of Heathrow is not an isolated instance of rebellion verging on direct action. Whether credible or not, many middle class people have been sold on the environmental damage from industry and want something done.

Quantum Revolt

Of course, bad feeling is one thing, direct action is another. But we have seen a quantum leap only yesterday in police action against protest. The typical arrest until now has been of up to 10 to 12 persons connected with terrorism or (say) animal rights extremism or republican terror.

Some of these are then whittled down so that a few stand trial and are incarcerated using new legislation that makes it much easier to criminalise 'strong dissent'. Yesterday, the police moved in on a direct action group and arrested well over a hundred in a raid.

This may be exceptional but it indicates that over a hundred, even excluding the police narks, were prepared to meet late at night to effect a direct action operation. If this becomes the 'norm', then an overstretched police will be dealing with a similar quantum leap in intelligence policing.

And then the next stage, if things get worse, could be mass arrests of a thousand or more by aggressive police dealing with street protests made more aggressive, in turn, by the events in London during the G20 Summit. At this level of intensity, a few deaths become almost inevitable.

Middle Class Revolt

Meanwhile, many middle class people were angry enough at the banking crash, the bail-outs and the prospect of high taxes and low spending to cheer on the protesters at the G20 Summit in spirit if not in body.

Police and Home Office behaviour in the run-up to the Summit is only explicable as an attempt to frighten the Home Counties middle classes from jumping on a train and joining a demonstration that was otherwise peaceful and was easily accessible from St. Albans and Tunbridge Wells.

What the authorities did not want and could not afford was a massive 250,000 plus protest against capitalism. This would easily have been more dangerous than the million against the War in Iraq.

From that perspective, the politically-driven police tactics at the G20 Summit were a success. Numbers at the demonstration were moderate. There was a stage-managed bit of token violence at the RBS branch office in the City that caught the tabloid eye and the police showed their fist to the 'crusties'.

It Goes Sour for the Government

And this is where technology and incompetence come in. The Government 'spin' should have demonstrated that dangerous anarchists had been kept from more damage to property and averted risk to life and limb. But it did not quite turn out that way despite the connivance of the tabloids.

Unfortunately for the police and the Government, there were a lot of mobile phones and independent cameras in the neighbourhood.

Social networks, notably Facebook, were soon full of accounts 'from the front' that suggested that the vast bulk of the demonstration had been peaceful and that the police had been provocative. Moreover, not only peaceful demonstrators but ordinary citizens had been pinioned into blocks for hours at a time.

The truth should have been crushed by the dominance of the print media, dominated in turn by spin doctors. But it is no longer the 1990s when such methods worked. What now happened was that mobile and other footage and evidence of harm circulated social networks that included journalists.

An Unwilling Martyr to Truth

The critical development was the death of Ian Tomlinson, a local news vendor, who died of a heart attack on the street during the riots. In fact, he had beaten to the ground, despite not being a protester, and the heart attack took place after that assault.

The police lied - or rather did not tell the full truth. But there he and it would have lain if social networks had not started to circulate witness statements and then a call for evidence. Whether this was directly responsible for the discovery, ironically by a fund manager, of incriminating footage is not known.

The Guardian to its credit published footage of Mr. Tomlinson being walloped and then how the matter was handled started to come out of the woodwork. There was no suppression of the facts now or their marginalisation amongst already disgruntled activists.

Credible accounts of police brutality were soon complemented by footage that showed some very aggressive policing against legitimate protest. Finally, a thumping great copper bearing down and walloping a small female protestor became another bit of samizdat film.

The System Takes a PR Hit

A short term PR victory for the police based on traditional media manipulation was replaced within a few days by the nightmare scenario of computer-literate middle classes, human rights groups and even opposition politicians expressing more than grave doubts about the boys in blue.

The anarchists had scored a PR coup of their own - getting the system frightened of what was really a rather small group of disconnected demonstrations, causing the system to over-react and then allowing informal and truly anarchic social networks to spread the message through new technologies.

But the dissent did not happen in a vacuum. Let us summarise what has been happening recently:

• the Government has been struggling to reverse a major economic crisis which it cannot entirely blame on 'global conditions';
• 'our' money has gone to bail-out financiers who have caused serious economic damage and yet have been allowed to keep the rewards of their greed;
• the general public has seen, in some cases, job losses and, in more extreme cases, financial collapse and loss of their homes while the middle classes on their own have seen massive falls in their net asset value;
• the public knows it is faced with higher taxes and lower spending on services because of what it sees as incompetent business and governmental management;
• the Government is not only struggling to cope but, equally important, is mired in petty scandals that cast serious doubts on its judgement.

Now, add to this:

• national planning is imposing major infrastructural projects like Heathrow that appear to benefit the business community rather than local communities;
• for seven years, draconian legislation affecting civil liberties and personal rights has been put in place without any demonstration of the serious incidents that justifies the loss of those rights;
• there is no popular support for the small wars, most notably Afghanistan, that place the country in the terrorist firing line;
• there is a cultural irritation both at the mass migration that came with the boom but which has left the migrants stranded and at a culture of political correctness that appears to diminish both individual responsibility and indigenous rights.

Ressentiment

All in all, the State is losing control of the agenda. An anarchistic resentment of its lack of competence is beginning to develop in response.

Until now, the primary concern has been the potential alienation of minorities and keeping a lid on the spread of endemic breakdown and disorder within the white working class, whose problems worsen but which are scarcely reported except in terms of moralising at some extremecase of family breakdown.

Take the Muslims - an island of brown in a sea of white despite what the fascists imply. The communications culture of the Home Office requires a tone of hysteria about terrorism based on the supply of dossier material, not always credible, to favoured media.

Insiders have not trusted this material for a decade but it has served to mobilise the respectable working class and the small business class into a periodic frenzy of fear at the 'enemy within'. But the repetition of half truths has equally created a profound distrust of police claims amongst the educated.

Muslim Frustration

Relations between the Government and the younger elements in the Pakistani community are now becoming very tense and not only because of the recent arrests which many are convinced are for ‘thought crimes’.

The association of the UK with American drone attacks on the North West Frontier appears to make the Government complicit in murder. Within the UK, most counter-terrorism efforts outside London are based in the West Midlands because this contains the largest concentration of Muslims.

Additional funding has created a unit of 400 dedicated officers and a plethora of ‘soft’ anti-radicalisation efforts in schools and amongst imams in the region, creating a new sub-class of Muslims and inter-faith workers who are bottom-feeding off the state’s patronage

The net result is a small class of favoured Muslims who speak for cohesion and inter-faith initiatives and a smaller group of angry activists who may or may not be seriously contemplating direct action. Between the two lie the vast mass of British-Pakistanis opposed to extremism but alienated by police action.

Where We Are ...

The tide is just beginning to turn against government policies that demonise all protestors instead of dealing with a tiny minority of trouble-makers effectively and that de-humanise the police through the use of masks and unnecessary body armour.

The inappropriate use of anti-terrorism laws, as well as the creation of other laws which are regarded as draconian and unnecessary, builds concern about what all this legislation is actually for.

There have been 1,450 terrorism related arrests between 2001 and 2008 in the UK. The question now arises how many of these people actually intended harm and how many were guilty of little more than expressing extreme sentiments.

On the upside, the rest of the country does not look like the quasi-militarised zone that now surrounds the political and bureaucratic classes in Central London. The suspicion, however, has to be that these classes are protecting themselves at public expense far more than they are protecting the nation.

Our view? The police, under political influence, are throwing away over two decades of growing respect and reform. London has damaged the country.

And why? Because of an hysterical panic over future blame for a rogue security incident and then naked fear of what might happen if direct action became a natural response to the unresponsiveness to the public of Parliament and Whitehall.

This is a very serious moment in British history. Recovery might make many of these fears irrelevant but the systematic degradation of public trust in the police is as dangerous to the nation as the earlier collapse in confidence in its banking system might have been to its economy.

www.tppr.co.uk

www.pendrywhite.com

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