What Will Change Everything?

What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?

The Internet, television, antibiotics, automobiles, electricity, nuclear power, space travel, and cloning -- these inventions were born out of dreams, persistence, and imagination. What game-changing ideas can we expect to see in our lifetime?

As each year winds to a close, John Brockman, a literary agent representing some of the finest minds in science and technology and the founder of www.edge.org (a 501c3), poses a provocative question to an international community of physicists, psychologists, futurists, thought leaders and dreamers.

Brockman is a master convener, both online and in real life. This year's annual Edge question, What will change everything?, generated responses from Freeman Dyson, Danny Hillis, Martin Seligman, Craig Venter, and Juan Enriquez, to name a few. Here are a few highlights.

Venter imagines creating life from synthetic materials and expects that our view of life itself will be transformed.

Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek believes everything will continue to become smaller, faster, cooler, and cheaper -- with its implications of an Internet on steroids and exciting new designer materials.

Several neuroscientists wrote about everything from direct communication of feelings and thoughts from brain to brain to electrical brain stimulation for the treatment of mood disorders to cheap cryonic suspension of brains, to ways to control brain plasticity.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Verena Huber-Dyson see science evolving beyond analytical focus and including a sense of synthesis. Huber-Dyson envisions the end of fragmentation of knowledge.

George Dyson, science historian, author, kayak-designer and builder, looks toward the stars -- or here on earth, suggesting, "the detection of extraterrestrial life, extraterrestrial intelligence or extraterrestrial technology will change everything."

Discover Magazine editor in chief, Corey S. Powell, offers a list of possibilities from synthetic telepathy to genetically engineered kids.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people." Tap your greatness as we welcome 2009! Check out the responses to the Edge annual question.

I hope you'll take a moment to comment on the question yourself: What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?

Comments

[Kiba]

Advancements in a number of fields is progressing so rapidly--and actually accelerating--that the next few decades will bring changes so vast in scope that we can't even begin to imagine what it will be like. Neurological enhancement, genetic engineering, biotechnology, biomechanics, nanotechnology, longevity research, quantum computing, quantum field manipulation... the list goes on and on and on.

[mergina]

That comet on a collission course with our planet getting here sooner?

[Mickeleh]

I see that V.S. Ramachandran thinks the problem of "self" will be answered before the problem of "qualia."

What about the problem of a world made up of selves who have never even heard of the word "qualia"?

I suppose I could look up the word "qualia" but I refuse. Why should all these smarty-pants lord it over us with their fancy words, mysterious problems, and pointless predictions.

But, of course, I speak only for my "self." The qualianatics may have a different opinion.

[OtayPanky]

Most changes are small and incremental. Every once in a while we get a big 'un, like electricity.

But the truth is that NOTHING will change everything.

The fact that Aeschylus and Shakespeare still speak to us is proof enough that we still have the same ESSENTIAL problems we have always had. The world is still marked by impermanence, as the Buddha taught 2500 years ago. We still struggle with all the challenges of human egotism, both individually and corporately. We still live with uncertainty, suffer loss, yearn for peace and love, experience separation and alienation and all the other angst that the human heart is subject to.

This is not to trivialize the contributions of science - nor to avoid the call to (say) provide clean water to everyone in the world to prevent needless suffering.

But our capacity for inventiveness will never be a panacea for the root of our personal and social ills. And - our inventions remain a double-edged sword. What we have invented so far has brought us to the brink of planetary extinction.

[Linda Stone - Huffpost Blogger]

Great posts! Thanks. I usually write a response to Brockman's annual question and was offline during the submission period. My response would have been: Medicine has viewed the body primarily as a bag of chemicals and has applied chemical interventions - pharmaceuticals, when something is amiss. I believe, in our lifetimes, medicine will come to view the body as an electrical system -- we already view the heart and brain as electrical, and that we will move significantly toward physics-based medical interventions. Many of these interventions will be less invasive, more subtle and far more effective. Already, there is quite a bit of research underway in Russia, Germany and Israel, and interesting technologies are emerging.

[krocklin]

This is a bit naive.
However, I hope you are right about fewer pharmaceuticals being used in the future.
But there is always the profit motive and just plain resistance to a belief within science itself that "electrical" forces, to use your term, within the body are more necessary to understand and tap into other than "molecular" or "chemical" interventions.
Nineteenth century positivism, or mechanistic science, still prevails in the minds of most scientists and doctors.
Science has an effective propaganda system, and Medical Science has an even more effective one, and I am afraid you have swallowed the Kool Aide.
It is arguable that many of our high tech and pharmaceutical "advances" in medicine have done more good than harm. I would argue the latter.
Major diseases, especially cancer, are as rampant as ever and even on the increase. Yes life expectancy has increased - the main basis that mainstream medicine uses to argue its own efficacy - but that is only because of 1) the invention of the toilet and 2) better hygiene. Not medical treatment itself.
Anything that will make us healthier in the future will not be found in the realm of medical science in my opinion.
It will be instead, if it ocurrs at all, a cessation of many of the blindly held views utilized today in the practice of medicine. Primarily pills and high tech machines, lab tests and the like.

[woid]

I think — I hope — that we'll see a shift to renewable energy that will not only solve many of the geopolitical disasters of the moment, but that will produce a profound evolution in attitudes around the world, by ending the age of artificial scarcity.

We all know that there's really no energy "shortage" — only that we're trapped by the limitations of the sources we currently use. Similarly, there's really no food shortage worldwide — only our inability to get the food to the people who need it.

We've lived with the idea of "not enough to go around" for so long, it's easy to forget that things don't have to be this way. Unfortunately, our politics at home, and around the world, are based on the current setup. We speak about "power" (political, this time), as if it resides with only a few individuals, instead of with all of us. And we've gotten so used to this mindset, we can't see past it.

The coming of unlimited energy from renewable sources could change that kind of thinking, and not only about fuels. Once people are liberated from the assumption of scarcity as a way of life, we might — might — be liberated from the attitude that leads to most of our wars, and to the oppression of the people we've learned to think of as "have-nots."

[amandastories]

Wow. I went to the Annual Edge Question website. Some ideas conflicted: One scientist doesn't want government (ie the citizenry?) involved in use of personal genome information; another envisions the use of genetics for preventing violence. I'd prefer that we choose to eschew violence and the I'm-better­-than-you-­ism that leads to it.



Some articles met each other: Roger C. Shank postulated that the information that finds us will be more relevant than the information we find while Kevin Kelly asked about the web, "Are we searching it, or is it searching us?"



Being invited (thanks, Linda) to comment, I shall: An archeologist claims that the Amish, because of their aversion to new technology, "will never uncover the simplest new technological fix for the unfolding hazards of a dynamic universe" but the Amish may provide us with the information we need--an unvaccinated population--to test whether the pre-2002 mercury-preserved vaccines caused the new epidemic (1 in 86 kids) of autism. This could change everything, if everything changes when the kids who are now brain-damaged become adults. Removing mercury from brains that can't handle it could give us a new type of kid...kids who've been brain-damaged may have developed new ways of thinking and when they get the conventional way back (via chelation perhaps) they could become the Homo Evolutis (many pre-"handicapped") theorized by Juan Enriquez..



There is a lot to think about here. I hope other people will comment.