A date for the Diary – Uncertain futures at Oxford Lit fest

Science and the Future – Uncertain Futures

2:00pm | Saturday 24 March

Tickets:	Duration:	Venue:
£47	Half Day	Merton College: TS Eliot Theatre

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 (looking forward to this – programme has just been confirmed. I’ll be pitching in for the last bit: are we safe? With Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Stott…)

Introduced by Dr Ian Goldin, director of the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford

For the second year the festival is devoting a whole afternoon to a series of panel discussions around a common scientific theme. The umbrella title for these themed afternoons is Science and the Future. The theme for 2012 is Uncertain Futures.

We still have much to learn about the nature of the Universe. And we continually set ourselves new questions about the impact that technology and social change will make on ourselves and on our environment. Through three panel discussions, this seminar will explore the question of how we deal with uncertainty in science.

The afternoon is chaired by science writer and author Georgina Ferry and has been developed in partnership with the University of Oxford’s Oxford Martin School, which supports 30 interdisciplinary research teams tackling global challenges, and with Science Oxford Live.

The programme is designed to offer a more in-depth review of key issues and the opportunity to meet and talk with speakers both over tea and at an evening drinks reception.

2.10 – 3.10pm
Into the unknown

As our tools for studying the Universe get bigger and more expensive, the questions that still need answering become ever more intractable. Will the latest experiments find the answers? Or will there just be more questions? And does it matter?

Professor Frank Close, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, author ofThe Infinity Puzzle, the story of the search for the elusive Higgs particle; Joanna Dunkley, lecturer in astrophysics, University of Oxford, researching the nature of dark matter and dark energy – without which the Universe would collapse, but which have never been seen; and William Hartston, chess columnist and writer of the Daily Express ‘Beachcomber’ column, and author of The Things Nobody Knows: 501 Mysteries of Life, the Universe and Everything.

3.10 – 3.45pm Tea

3.45 – 4.45pm
Working with Uncertainty

Quantum physics and climate prediction are two areas of science particularly burdened with uncertainty. But can we use our understanding of that uncertainty for practical ends?

John Gribbin, science writer and author of In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat andErwin Schrödinger and the Quantum Revolution, a new biography of one of the fathers of quantum theory; and Tim Palmer, Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, and co-director of the programme on modelling and predicting climate at the Oxford Martin School. A further speaker is to be confirmed.

5– 6pm
Are we safe (and do we need to be)?

Technology is changing our world at a breathless pace. How important is it to assess its risks accurately? And is there a place for risk in both artistic and scientific creativity?

Anders Sandberg, research fellow in the Future of Humanity Institute at the Oxford Martin School, working on social and ethical issues surrounding new technology; Jon Turney, author of The Rough Guide to the Future, shortlisted for the 2011 Royal Society Science Books Prize; and Rebecca Stott, novelist and teacher of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, author ofGhostwalk and The Coral Thief.

6.00 – 6.30pm Drinks reception.

Science and the Future is presented in partnership with the Oxford Martin School of the University of Oxford and Science Oxford

Afterthoughts on technology futures

Technology looms large on most futures discussions, and when I put together the Rough Guide I tried hard not to constantly have tech in the foreground – I hoped that this would give a clearer view of social, political, or economic questions.

But reading around since then I’ve got the feeling there is some unfinished business with technology. The tensions between various strands of futures talk often seem to come from views of technology (and/or nature). The recent essays in revisionist environmentalism by Stewart Brand or Mark Lynas put a lot of emphasis on technological development, engineering know-how, and pragmatic approaches to problem solving as our best hope for tackling current and near future crises, and Mark Stephenson’s Optimist’s Tour of the Future still more so.

Others, Ray Kurzweil being the most prominent, continue to forecast a technological singularity, in our lifetime – a forecast based on the inexorable working out of a law of accelerating returns.

Kurzweil’s vision is easy to doubt, in spite of all the exponential performance curves he compiles. Paul Allen, who knows a thing or two about technology, offers one recent, convincing critique here. But there are of course also plenty of critics of the pragmatic optimism of Brand or Lynas. Their distaste for what is usually seen as an unwarranted faith in technical fixes is one legacy of our long experience with technology now, and of its sometimes undesirable second and third order effects.

I lean toward the Brand/Lynas view, but mainly from a vague feeling that there is an astonishing range of technological possibilities in prospect, and a lot of R&D folk ready to work on them, given the incentive. It would be nice to have a better reason.

I flipped through Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology: What it is, how it evolves when it came out on 2009, but didn’t take much in. Having just read it properly, it seems his theory of how technology evolves, or develops by descent – which is brilliantly and clearly argued – might offer some support for a middle of the road optimism. He ends by stressing reasons to be ambivalent about tech, and certainly does not see it is a panacea. But his account of its development through human history does give reasons to expect a lot more technology, with a lot more uses.

His view is that all technologies develop from existing technologies, put together in new combinations. No need to summarise it again – he does it very well at the end of the book: “all technologies are combinations of elements; these elements are themselves technologies; all technologies use phenomena to some purpose…  technology is a programming of nature.”

He shows how those principles work themselves out through human history to allow a wider and wider range of principles – disclosed by science which is is both enabled by and enables technology – to be exploited for human purposes. There is human agency involved,  along with an element of bootstrapping. Indeed, if you bracket out the agency, technology appears to be self-evolving or creating – autopoietic in what was originally the biological sense.

The details are beautifully laid out in the book. Some implications. As there is more tech, the number of combinations increases, so the whole ensemble gathers more possibilities for extension into new areas of capability, and need. This is, in some degree, exponential, though not in the way Kurzeil charts. It is a simple combinatorial effect.

The order in which new combinations are tried is contingent, and that is one way the history of technology is path dependent. In fact, “indeterminacy increases as the collective develops”. Put those things together and you may conclude that technology will continue to develop faster and faster in future – as there are more technologists, too, then presumably more combinations are tried. They will not necessarily be a larger proportion of the possible combinations, though, as their number will increase a lot faster. That means, I think, that technological futures become harder to chart, even approximately.

But it also supports the general prediction that there will be many more, and perhaps more surprising technologies, in future. In one of his (carefully rationed) flights of language, Arthur says: “in its collective sense, technology is not merely a catalog of individual parts. It is a metabolic chemistry, an almost limitless collective of entities that interact to produce new entities – and further needs.”

He is careful not to equate this with progress, in any simple sense. But it does carry strong implication of a one-way path, I think. No back to nature or return to a simple life in this reading of history (which is fine by me). As he says, his theory gives “a sense of technology expanding into the future”. That is one of the reasons it’s going to be interesting.

 

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Afterthought to the afterthought. I guess the next thing to read in this area is Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants. My other key authors on technology are David Nye and Thomas Hughes. Who am I missing?

Science book prize shortlist and a review

Great to record that the Rough Guide to the Future has now made the shortlist for the Science Book Prize. (Details here). That’s good because 7 other titles fell away from the long list, so it’s pleasing to make the grade – and bragging rights extend for a few weeks as the winner is not revealed until Nov 17th. There will also be a jolly evening at the RS to applaud the winner (I’m putting my money on Alex Bellos) and there’s even a decent cheque.

And while recording nice things, here’s a link to my favourite review of the book so far – a generous (in both senses) and thoughtful reading of the tome. It’s by Tim Jones, a science communicator who you can follow on twitter as @phsyicus, and obviously a man of excellent taste and judgement…

ADD: come to think of it, I’ve been compiling nice things people have said to decorate a new book proposal, so here’s the full set of (carefully selected) comments I have found so far…

“A thought-provoking and refreshingly optimistic view of the future across the whole range of the sciences, with a highly original style of brief and multi-focused presentations, that sets it apart from conventional scientific writing.“ Judges’ comment, Royal Society Book Prize shortlist.

“Reading this book will definitely make you feel smarter and give you a good basic grounding on the issues that will confront humanity in the decades ahead.” (from Library Thing)

“Turney has clearly done his homework and deftly uses quotes, facts and asides to enliven the text” New Scientist

“as comprehensive an analysis of forecast data and topical opinion that you’re likely to find, and one I heartily recommend.” Communicatescience.com/

“really very good”. Alex Evans, www.globaldashboard.org/

“Erudite, pithy, and frequently funny. A tour de force.” Five star review on Amazon UK

“Jon Turney’s writing … is great, wonderfully readable and well crafted” www.popularscience.co.uk/

 

 “As a general introduction to thinking about the future—one which treats the domain of inquiry as a series of specific dimensions of the future, such as energy, population, food supply, water, health, and ecology/biodiversity—Turneyʼs book is the best I have ever encountered.” Centerforfutureconsciousness.com/

 “an excellent, compelling, accessible overview of futurology that rewards both skimming and deeper reading. Gathering together ideas from many disciplines and opinions from diverse perspectives, he offers a moderate, believable, but still thrilling exploration of what lies ahead.” Mike Treder, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Riot shock

This blog has been quiet for a while, but seems worth waking up momentarily if only because everyone else is commenting furiously on the England-wide riots. So I’m joining in.

My comment is oblique, and reprises a point made here before. Although Toffler’s Future Shock 40 years ago popularised a memorable phrase, sold millions, and seems to work for many people as a useful shorthand for disorientation in the face of accelerating change, I’m unconvinced.

This is due to advancing age combined with a historian’s temperament, I think. There seem to be two options as you grow older. Either you decide everything is getting worse, change is speeding up, the young are far worse behaved than they were in my day, and the world is going to hell in a handcart. Or, more simply, you conclude that there’s nothing new under the sun. I’ve gone for the latter option, obviously.

So the two dominant news stories of recent days can both reinforce a feeling that while some things do change, old verities remain. One is that, if you want to get the attention of ruling elites – for better or worse – taking to the streets, hurling stones, and setting fire to a few things works unbeatably well. Hard to think of a time when that wasn’t true, since cities were invented anyway. And the basic behaviour seems to accommodate very well to new contexts (wheelie bins are easy to set on fire, bottle banks provide a ready supply of ammunition) but stays the same.

Meanwhile, markets bounce around and central banks try to shore up debt ratings by pouring money in and making positive noises. The technological infrastructure has changed, and some of the markets are new, but is this really much different from trying to shore up confidence in banks in, say, 1900? No doubt it only dates from the establishment of mutual interdependence rooted in really big international flows of capital, and that has become more complex, but the underlying dynamic looks pretty similar to the lay observer. So does the fact that no-one seems to have any very convincing idea what to do about the uncertainty which follows, least of all one likely to be implemented. Economic theory has got more sophisticated, too, I guess, Is any of it any use? Seems not.

Look closer, and there are differences, of course. The way the riots spread does seem to have changed – though I suspect old-fashioned TV had as much to do with it as BBM messaging and twitter.

But the main impression is still of familiarity – with the phenomena, and with the instant reactions and search for explanations and solutions. I’ve not done the research, but I’d bet the solutions proffered would be familiar to a historian of these things, too.

And the common personal reactions to riots and market turmoil have an unarguably classic quality: lock the shutters, get a baseball bat, and buy gold.

So shock, yes. Future shock, not really .

(top pic: Detail from mural depicting 1831 Queen Square riot by Scott Barden, near Paintworks, Bath Road, Bristol, 2011. See www.scottbardenart.com. Located via Eugene Byrne http://eugenebyrne.wordpress.com/2011/04/30/bristol-and-riots/ )

Getting noticed

This blog hasn’t said much lately about the actual book which it sprang/limped wearily away from. But I’m not going to resist a couple of chances to note that some people think it’s quite good – in case either of my readers here haven’t bought it yet.

First, the Rough Guide to the Future has been longlisted for the Winton Royal Society Science Book Prize. That puts it in company with a daunting list of other rather fine tomes, but they don’t whittle it down to the last six for a few months so I can preen ’til then, at least…  It is last on the list, but that is alphabetical by author, honest.

Even more pleasing, if possible, as it is a single selection is that the Guide has been chosen by Prof. Rod Smith, incoming President of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers and all round splendid fellow as his “book of the year”. That means lucky visitors to the I. Mech. E. (and people who get visited) are given a copy, as are 100 odd new fellows. Lunch at the end of the year may be involved, too. They haven’t even asked for a discount on the book (as far as I know). So well impressed, as well as pleasantly surprised, by that one. Thanks to them, and to the Winton judges – Monica Ali et al – for noticing the book. All very encouraging. I might even write another, but it won’t be quite as ambitious/foolhardy as the Rough Guide, I think, at least not at the beginning.

Talking about science fiction

There’s a teeny bit of me on video in the British Library’s splendid new exhibition on science fiction, Out of This World. I (and others) answered a few more questions, at sound bite length, and the collated results – which evidently didn’t quite fit the finished show – have surfaced on the BL’s website. Like so:

We asked the questions you would have liked to ask! Six short videos featuring:

• Lauren Beukes: Author of Zoo City, and 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner
• Sumit Choudhury: Online Editor, New Scientist
• John Gribbin: Science journalist and science fiction author
• Alok Jha: Science correspondent, The Guardian
• Gwyneth Jones: Author of White Queen
• China Miéville: Author of The City & the City
• Jon Turney: Lecturer and author of The Rough Guide to the Future

Choose an image to play a video.

Choose an image to play a video.

“What work of science fiction has had most impact on you, and why?”
Launch video
Open video in your media player

“What fictional technology do you look forward to becoming reality?”
Launch video
Open video in your media player

“Who or what has had the most profound effect on the development of science fiction?”
Launch video
Open video in your media player

“What is your personal vision of utopia?”
Launch video
Open video in your media player

“What is it about science fiction that you personally find fascinating?”
Launch video
Open video in your media player

 ”If you could be a character from a science fiction story who would you be, and why?”
Launch video
Open video in your media player

Related articles

• Science fiction does not predict (unreliablefutures.wordpress.com)

Futurists’ thought for the day – Some glimmer of how the story ends…

Haven’t posted one of these in a while, but here’s one which may relate to tonight’s discussion at the British LIbrary. And in the wake of the Rapture deadline which passed at the weekend. who better to re-read than Marina Benjamin on Living at The End of the World.

She says the future gets interesting when we think of it as another place, not just another time:

This future, The Future, the real tomorrow, is a foreign land, a vast unconquered virgin territory that acts as a cypher for our wildest dreams of triumph and our darkest fears of defeat. Because it contains the unwritten chapters of the human story, we are unable to let it be, we are constantly prospecting and speculating, hoping to catch some glimmer of how the story ends…

We’ll all go together…

Approaching a couple of events in which I’ll be talking about attitudes to the future, not to mention the advent of the Rapture (due sometime this weekend – May 21 – I gather), I’m put in mind again of how difficult it is to recapture that time, not long ago, when people really did think the world was about to end.

There’s an eloquent brief evocation of this in Richard Hoggart’s fine book Promises to Keep, on which he reflects on life, age and ageing. One of the great changes he remarks on is the end of the Cold War, which had politics in its grip when he was raising his children. He writes:

The ever-present Soviet threat has, more or less, gone away…  Yet for more than four decades it hung above us; and for those bringing up children it could be felt as a constant threat. One wife of a professor, not in any way a congenital worrier, confessed that she never settled down to sleep without wondering whether her four children would survive to grow, marry and have children as she had. On some evenings, before driving to my adult class, I had time to bathe the children. Every time this happened it crossed my mind to wonder if I might see them again. For those, relatively few, who saw the film The War Game, the likely effects of a nuclear strike shown there, were as of something which might well happen any day. 

This threat, this fear, lasted then for almost half a century, and like a curse hung over those who recognised it.

At the same time, he emphasises that these night thoughts were only part of the mood. They (he, and I’m guessing this went for many people)  also hardly believed it would happen – and that everything would somehow turn out for the best – a belief which has in a way turned out to be true…   I still think there are things to try and understand about the effects of all this. Do people who lived through this period think that the thing to do with worst case scenarios is to learn to live with them? Does that have corrosive effects on the culture, or is it the only feasible response, or both? Does it have anything to do with our response to climate change now?  

 I don’t have answers, but the questions make studies of cold war culture more interesting to a 21st century person. The best one I’ve actually read is Margot Henriksen’s brilliant Dr Strangelove’s America: Society and culture in the atomic age, from 1997, but there have been lots more since. And this recent effort looks especially interesting. Now on order…

Meanwhile, a bit of Tom Lehrer evokes the mood I’m worrying away at here. The combination of gleefully apocalyptic rhyming and the uneasy, muted  laughter of the studio audience here still sends a shiver down my spine, at least.  

Related articles

• The crazies over at RaptureReady are convinced that the Rapture… (contrararian.tumblr.com)

Futures events May-June

A small cluster of futures-related events coming up which I’m looking forward to. I am variously chairing, “in conversation with” or empanelled with a strikingly interesting bunch of people in the next month and a bit. An enticing, if slightly daunting prospect.

First up is a three-way at the Arnolfini in Bristol, blurb as follows:

Creating a Future Without Destroying the Present

Diane Coyle, Mark Stevenson and Jon Turney

	20 May 2011, 19.30-21.00 Arnolfini, Bristol

How do we continue to live well and not damage the future? Is economic growth the problem, not the solution? Who is planning for the future and what kind of future will this be? Enlightenment economist, writer and blogger Diane Coyle, author of The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters, shows how we can be happy and prosperous now without cheating the future. She looks at the fundamental questions about the way the economy is organised and about the links between the economy and the kind of society we want and need, so that we can provide our children with a decent future. Mark Stevenson, in An Optimist’s Tour of the Future, tours the world to make sense of what’s in store for us all. He looks at the amazing work of scientists, robots that think, re-engineering of humans, science that will solve the energy crisis and the ideas of great visionaries. They discuss their work with Jon Turney, author ofThe Rough Guide to the Future.

Price: £7.00 / £5.00. Contact Arnolfini, Bristol on: 0117 917 2300, book online, or visit in person.

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Then come a couple of discussions at the British Library in London, opening a series linked to their fascinating science fiction exhibition, opening May 2oth.

The first, coincidentally, has some of the same people -

Who owns the Story of the Future? 

Tue 24 May 2011, 18.30 – 20.00

Conference Centre, British Library

Price: £7.50 / £5 concessions

 Book now for 24 May 2011, 18.30 – 20.00

Will the future be better or worse? – and does the story we are telling ourselves help or hinder us? Can we make the right choices, and deal with the grand challenges ahead or will our ambitions and lack of political will get in the way.Jon Turney (The Rough Guide to the Future) chairs a panel including economist Diane Coyle (The Economics Of Enough), technology and SF writerCory Doctorow and Mark Stevenson (An Optimists Tour of the Future)  STOP PRESS:  Now with added William Gibson!

Diane Coyle runs Enlightenment Economics, a consulting firm specialising in technology and globalization, and is the author of a number of books on economics, including The Soulful Science, Sex, Drugs and Economics, and The Weightless World. Her most recent book is The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as If the Future Matters. A BBC trustee and a visiting professor at the University of Manchester, she holds a PhD in economics from Harvard. www.enlightenmenteconomics.com

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger, the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of the bestselling Tor Teens/HarperCollins UK novel Little Brother. His latest novel isFor The Win, a young adult novel; his latest short story collection is With A Little Help.

Mark Stevenson divides his time between running agencies for science communications and cultural learning and performing and writing comedy. He lives in Telegraph Hill, south London. His first book is An Optimist’s Tour of the Future.

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The following night, we’re talking about revolution…

Compared to this, the Industrial Revolution was Nothing!

Wed 25 May 2011, 18.30 – 20.00

Conference Centre, British Library

Price: £7.50 / £5 concessions

 Book now for 25 May 2011, 18.30 – 20.00

Is the ‘ultimate reboot’ is coming as the Genetics, Nanotechnology and Robotics/AI revolutions intertwine and pick up speed? Are we heading toward a radically different society where our notions of old age, scarcity and our institutions have to be radically rethought? Or have we heard it all before?

Trying to shed light on these intriguing questions will be our speakers who include Richard Jones, University of Sheffield and author of Soft Machines;: Nanotechnology and Life and Anders Sandberg of the Future of Humanity Institute.

Chair Jon Turney.

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Finally, I’m joining a panel at the Cheltenham Science Festival on June 11

Human Extinction - will we survive beyond this century?

12noon – 1.30pm on Saturday 11 June at Cheltenham Town Hall

at Town Hall Unreserved

£8 (£7) Members – 10% off

BOOK NOW

Ecologists have suggested that the Earth is experiencing a mass extinction of species, but what about Homo sapiens? The survival of humankind has been challenged throughout history and, despite our ability to adapt to past changes, nothing is guaranteed. Zoologist Charles Godfray FRS, chemist Judith Howard FRS, palaeontologist Chris Stringer FRS, and author of The Rough Guide to the FutureJon Turney discuss past and present threats to humanity, the future challenges that we face, and whether we have the capacity to survive.

Cheerful, eh?

The last time I was at the science festival in Cheltenham (as opposed to the jazz festival), about ten years ago, I read poems from A Quark for Mister Mark in the Pillar room with Richard Dawkins and Lavinia Greenlaw, which was delightful. But the invitations prompted by the more recent book seem to be a little different…

Futurists’ thought for the day – Desmond Bernal

Maybe ought to label this thought for the month, in view of declining frequency, but what the heck -

Just re-read the close of Bernal’s The World the Flesh and the Devil (1929). As usual, the temptation is just to quote the entire book. But this observation stood out…

all, even the least religious, retain in their minds when they think of the future, an idea of the deus ex machina, of some transcendental, superhuman event which will, without their help, bring the universe to perfection or destruction. We want the future to be mysterious and full of supernatural power; and yet these very aspirations, so totally removed from the physical world, have built this material civilization and will go on building it into the future so long as there remains any relation between aspiration and action.

The whole essay, of course, remains quite astonishing.