2007 : WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT?

Long-Term Trends Toward Honesty to Others and Self

What goes up comes down, what goes around comes around, for each action there is a reaction, and so on. Life is intrinsically self-correcting at almost all its levels, including evolutionary, physiological, historical and genetic. This permits a limited optimism. Wickedness and stupidity are ultimately self-destructive and self-limiting, so we need not trouble ourselves that any particular trend in that direction will go on indefinitely.

On the other hand, the principle of self-correction also applies to love, friendship and high intellectual powers. No movement in these directions can proceed long without setting up counter-pressures against their further spread.

In short, we should neither be too despondent nor too elated at the trajectory of current events. Sooner or later — and usually sooner — they will be reversed.

Two questions arise.

Are there long-term trends we could feel optimistic about? Thirty years of work on the evolutionary trajectory of cooperative strategies suggest long-term trends (under a broad range of conditions) toward greater cooperation, contingent on ever more sophisticated discrimination. It seems likely that when similar models are produced for varying degrees of deceit and self-deception, long-term trends toward honesty to others and self will (at least under some conditions) be favored.

Is there any reason to believe that we will survive long enough to enjoy any of these long-term trends?

This is far less certain. Evolution does not plan for contingencies that have not yet occurred and the vast majority of species go extinct. There is no reason to expect humans are exempt from these rules. The good news is that there is presently no chance that we could extinguish all of life — the bacterial "slimosphere" alone extends some ten miles into the earth — and as yet we can only make life truly miserable for the vast majority of people, not extinguish human life entirely. I would expect this state of affairs to continue indefinitely. The feeling that everything may be fine if only we survive the next 50 to 500 years may become a regular part of our psychology.

Benjamin Franklin: I wish it were possible... to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they might be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But... in all probability, we live in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science, to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection.
—Letter to Jacques Dubourg, April 1773

Eternal life may come within our reach once we understand enough about how our knowledge and mental processes are embodied in our brains. For then we should be able to duplicate that information — and then into more robust machinery. This might be possible late in this century, in view of how much we are learning about how human brains work — and the growth of computer capacities.

However, this could have been possible long ago if the progress of science had not succumbed to the spread of monotheistic religions. For as early as 250 BCE, Archimedes was well on the way toward modern physics and calculus. So in an alternate version of history (in which the pursuit of science did not decline) just a few more centuries could have allowed the likes of Newton, Maxwell, Gauss, and Pasteur to anticipate our present state of knowledge about physics, mathematics, and biology. Thenperhaps by 300 AD we could have learned so much about the mechanics of minds that citizens could decide on the lengths of their lives.

I'm sure that not all scholars would agree that religion retarded the progress of science. However, the above scenario seems to suggest that Pascal was wrong when he concluded that only faith could offer salvation. For if science had not lost those millennia, we might be already be able to transfer our minds into our machines. If so, then you could rightly complain that religions have deprived you of the option of having an afterlife!

Do we really want to lengthen our lives?

Woody Allen: I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

In discussing this prospect with various groups, I was surprised to find that the idea of extending one's lifetime to thousands of years was often seen as a dismal suggestion. The response to my several informal polls included such objections as these: "Why would anyone want to live for a thousand hundred years? What if you outlived all your friends? What would you do with all that time? Wouldn't one's life become terribly boring?"

What can one conclude from this? Perhaps some of those persons lived with a sense that they did not deserve to live so long. Perhaps others did not regard themselves as having worthy long term goals. In any case, I find it worrisome that so many of our citizens are resigned to die. A planetful of people who feel that they do not have much to lose: surely this could be dangerous. (I neglected to ask the religious ones why perpetual heaven would be less boring.)

However, my scientist friends showed few such concerns: "There are countless things that I want to find out, and so many problems I want to solve, that I could use many centuries." I'll grant that religious beliefs can bring mental relief and emotional peace—but I question whether these, alone, should be seen as commendable long-term goals.

The quality of extended lives

Anatole France: The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.

Certainly, immortality would seem unattractive if it meant endless infirmity, debility, and dependency upon others—but here we'll assume a state of perfect health. A somewhat sounder concern might be that the old ones should die to make room for young ones with newer ideas. However, this leaves out the likelihood that are many important ideas that no human person could reach in, say, less than a few hundred well focused years. If so, then a limited lifespan might deprive us of great oceans of wisdom that no one can grasp.

In any case, such objections are shortsighted because, once we embody our minds in machines, we'll find ways to expand their capacities. You'll be able to edit your former mind, or merge it with parts of other minds — or develop completely new ways to think. Furthermore, our future technologies will no longer constrain us to think at the crawling pace of "real time." The events in our computers already proceed a millions times faster than those in our brain. To such beings, a minute might seem as long as a human year.

How could we download a human mind?

Today we are only beginning to understand the machinery of our human brains, but we already have many different theories about how those organs embody the processes that we call our minds. We often hear arguments about which of those different theories are right — but those often are the wrong questions to ask, because we know that every brain has hundreds of different specialized regions that work in different ways. I have suggested a dozen different ways in which our brains might represent our skill and memories. It could be many years before we know which structures and functions we'll need to reproduce.

(No such copies can yet be made today, so if you want immortality, your only present option is to have your brain preserved by a Cryonics company. However, improving this field still needs further research — but there is not enough funding for this today — although the same research is also needed for advancing the field of transplanting organs.)

Some writers have even suggested that, to make a working copy of a mind, one might have to include many small details about the connections among all the cells of a brain; if so, it would require an immense amount of machinery to simulate all those cells' chemistry. However, I suspect we'll need far less than that, because our nervous systems must have evolved to be insensitive to lower-level details; otherwise, our brains would rarely work.

Fortunately, we won't need to solve all those problems at once. For long before we are able to make complete "backups" of our personalities, this field of research will produce a great flood of ideas for adding new features and accessories to our existing brains. Then this may lead, through smaller steps, to replacing all parts of our bodies and brains — and thus repairing all the defects and flaws that make presently our lives so brief. And the more we learn about how our brains work, the more ways we will find to provide them with new abilities that never evolved in biology.

The Human Epigenome Project

There are maps, and then there are maps. We're embarking on a kind of mapmaking that will usher in new ways of understanding ourselves-a map that can explain why identical twins are not truly identical, so that one succumbs to schizophrenia while the other remains cognitively intact; why what your mom ate can save or sabotage your health (as well as that of your children and your children's children); and how our genetic fates can be tuned by such simple universals as love or vitamins.

It's The Human Epigenome Project (HEP). It's the next step after the Human Genome Project, which in itself was as audacious as the Apollo space program or the Manhattan Project, mapping 25,000 genes and the 3 billion pairs of bases in our DNA. And yet, what The Human Genome Project mapped is like land without borders, roads without names, a map without movement. Genes are silent unless activated. To have them is not necessarily to be under their influence.

"Land lies in water, it is shadowed green," begins Elizabeth Bishop's classic early poem, "The Map." The double helix lies in the epigenome like land lies in water. The epigenome is a flute playing a tune that charms the snake-coiled snake that is the code of life-and the snake spirals upward in response. A long bundle of biochemical markers all along the genome, the epigenome responds to environmental signals and then switches genes off or on, upregulates or downregulates their activity. And in that change lies a great part of our destiny.

In 2003, in a widely discussed experiment, scientist Randy Jirtle of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, showed that he could change the activity of a mouse's genes by giving supplements to its mom prior to, or during, very early pregnancy. A mouse with yellow fur, whose offspring would normally also be yellow, will give birth to brown-furred babies if fed a diet supplemented with vitamin B12, folic acid, betaine and choline. Even the offspring of the mom's offspring will be born with brown fur. The genes themselves have not changed at all, but their expression has, and that lasts for at least two generations. And a fungicide used on fruits led to sperm abnormalities in rats-abnormalities passed down at least four generations. This gives us insight into nature's ways: apparently she figures any change in the food supply will last a while, and isn't just a seasonal fling.

Then, in 2004, Moshe Szyf, Michael Meaney and their colleagues at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, showed that love can work in a similar way. If mothers don't lick, groom and nurse their babies enough, a molecular tag known as a methyl group-a tiny molecule made of three hydrogen atoms bound to a single carbon atom-is added to a gene that helps regulate an animal's response to stress. In pups that aren't nurtured properly, the methyl group downregulates the genes' activity for life. The pups have higher levels of stress hormones and are more afraid to explore new environments. What is nature saying? If a mom didn't attend to her newborn much, it's probably because the environment was hostile and stressful. Better to be vigilant and cautious, even afraid. Later, Meany and his colleagues showed that a common food supplement could do exactly the same thing to the genes of well-licked and nurtured rats. Once the pups were three months old, researchers injected a common amino acid, L-methionine, into their brains. This methylated the same gene, downregulated it, and turned the rats into anxious wallflowers.

Last June, the European Human Epigenome Project published its first findings on the methylation profiles, or epigenetics, of three chromosomes. The push to map the epigenome is on. In the last few weeks alone I've seen very different epigenetic stories coming across the science wires. From the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston came the news that breastfeeding protects children who are genetically susceptible to repeated ear infections because of common variants in their genes. The tendency toward ear infections runs in families, and researchers found the culprit in two gene variants that increase inflammatory signaling molecules in the immune system. Remarkably, breast milk seemed to permanently quiet the genes, so that even later in childhood, long after the children had stopped breastfeeding, they were protected from recurrent infections.

In research from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and the Instituto Nacional de Cancerologia, Mexico, epigenetic drugs are now being studied in breast, ovarian and cervical cancer. These drugs affect genes that, when reactivated, help regulate cell proliferation, cell death, cell differentiation, and drug resistance. They're cheaper than designer-name cancer drugs, and might help increase survival rates.

Even water fleas are joining the epigenetic act. In a December study from the University of California at Berkeley expression of genes in water fleas changed in response to common contaminants. Water fleas are regularly used to monitor freshwater toxicity, usually with a "kill 'em and count 'em" approach. Researchers found that copper, cadmium and zinc decreased expression of genes involved in digestion and infection. Screening like this might help industry assess and avoid particularly toxic contaminants.

Epigenetics offers us a different kind of map. One where we can zoom in and zoom out. A map of many colors, with street signs so we can navigate, routes that we can choose, destinations that we can change. Maybe the gene isn't selfish. Maybe it's actually sensitive. "More delicate than the historian's are the mapmaker's colors." So concludes Elizabeth Bishop's poem, and the epigenome may prove to be one of the more beautiful, delicate, subtle maps of all time.

Emergent Democracy and Global Voices

I am optimistic that open networks will continue to grow and become available to more and more people. I am optimistic that computers will continue to become cheaper and more available. I am optimistic that the hardware and software will become more open, transparent and free. I am optimistic that the ability to for people to create, share and remix their works will provide a voice to the vast majority of people.

I believe that the Internet, open source and a global culture of discourse and sharing will become the pillar of democracy for the 21st century. Whereas those in power—as well as terrorists who are not—have used broadcast technology and the mass media of the 20th century against the free world, I am optimistic that Internet will enable the collective voice of the people and that voice will be a voice of reason and good will.

The Limits of Democracy

Some historians think the idea of democracy arose in the Greek soldier-sailors of the 7th to 4th centuries BC who manned the trireme warships. Up to sixty men—a deme—rowed these daunting three-tiered ships. Their effectiveness in battle depended upon precise and coordinated teamwork; the phrase 'pulling together' may have its origin in the triremes. Deme-ocracy arose when the rower-fighters realized that the same kind of coordinated pulling together that powered the boat could be used to influence which battles their masters had them fight and the conditions of their service. Herodotus records that up to forty triremes were used when Samos invaded the Egyptians—a lot of voting oarsmen. Modern democracies owe a debt to the actions of these wretched fellows whose fates were gambled by rulers who did not always have the rowers' best interests at heart.

In spite of this, and two and a half thousand years on, I am optimistic that the world is glimpsing the limits of democracy. I speak of democracy in its wider manifestations, and not just as government. The common idea of democracy—that everyone has a 'right' to be heard—naturally flourishes among the smallest collections of people that can organise themselves into a group. To survive, these groups compete for what they see as their share of the pie. Look no further than the ultra-democracies of some Western European nations, deadlocked coalition governments legitimized from systems of proportional representation that reward small special interest demes. Look to the intolerance that arises when this or that group asserts rights over this or that groups' rights. Look to 'focus groups'. Look to a state of numerical populism in which the most votes or text messages or viewers is what is to be delivered, crowned or sold. In the artist Paul Klee's words "democracy with its semi-civilization sincerely cherishes junk". Strong words perhaps, but there is that old saying about decision making by committee.

The British playwright Dennis Potter in a public speech not long before his death defended the BBC—a decidedly undemocratic and state-owned institution—for its very lack of populism. To Potter the role of the BBC was to decide for the rest of us the standards of what should be deemed good art, drama, history and reporting, and to challenge us intellectually and aesthetically. A dangerous state of affairs? Elitism? Maybe. But I am optimistic that people are recognising that democracy simplistically applied, without an eye on the larger Project, can easily descend into an ochlocracy ruled by the groups that shout the loudest. Even by the middle of the 19th century Disraeli was saying "the world is wearied of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians".

A hopeful sign: some nations and especially some American states are researching new low carbon-footprint technologies and voluntarily committing to what will be burdensome and expensive climate-change targets. In most cases they are doing so without any democratic mandate. They realize that there may be larger and longer term stakes to play for than the 'right' to behave as one pleases or to have what one wants. Maybe you know of other examples.

Humanity's Coming Enlightenment

I am optimistic about humanity's coming enlightenment.

In particular, I am optimistic about humanity's prospects for starting exemplary new collaboratively-developed knowledge resources. When we hit upon the correct models for collaborative knowledge-collection online, there will be a jaw-dropping, unprecedented, paradigm-shifting explosion in the availability of high-quality free knowledge.

Over the last few years I have received an increasing amount of mail from researchers who want to build dynamic, efficient, and enormous new knowledge resources that follow the wiki model. I believe researchers are drawn to the wiki model because they naturally love several ideas suggested by the model: working closely with large numbers of their colleagues spread over the world; updating shared knowledge on the fly and avoiding costly duplication of labor; presenting knowledge systematically and in all its glorious complexity; and providing clear and compelling free access to important knowledge of their fields to a world that, in many cases, desperately needs such access. These features make the wiki model exciting.

Researchers—scholars, scientists, professionals of all sorts, and indeed, all folks who love books—are, as I say, drawn to the wiki model of strong collaboration in growing numbers. It's an accident of history that methods of strong collaboration online began among programmers and then spread into use by a completely egalitarian community, Wikipedia, and its many imitators. The next step in the evolution, which we are now witnessing on many fronts at once, is the adoption of wikis, and similarly dynamic and efficient "Web 2.0" methods of strong collaboration, by knowledge workers, or (as in the case of my new project, the Citizendium) huge open communities that are gently guided by experts.

I think the most fantastic knowledge resources of the near future will not be encyclopedias or textbooks. They will be brand new sorts of resources, never before possible because they require the participation of thousands, or even millions, of users. What—for example—can that quantity of people do with millions of free books at their fingertips?

Assuming as I do that expert-guided but public participatory free knowledge projects are feasible, and that—after becoming convinced of their tremendous value—millions of intellectuals from around the world will begin spending significant amounts of time developing them together, my considered view is that we are approaching a kind of intellectual revolution:

• The time spent in library, reference, and literature research will be shortened by orders of magnitude, as increasingly detailed indexes and various kinds of maps of the literature are made available, as brilliant new search methods become available for the entire contents of enormous libraries, and as literature reviews (and similar resources) at all levels of specialization are constantly updated.

• Indeed, due to these coming sea changes in the way the results of research are accessed, we might well see new and more efficient methods of presenting novel research to the world than the traditional peer-reviewed research paper. (I suggest nothing in particular here, but as a general point it seems not unlikely.)

• In many fields, especially in the humanities and social sciences, what today appears to be "cutting edge" thinking will be placed into an easily-accessible historical context. It will appear as so much scholarship properly does appear: old ideas warmed-over. I think the embarrassing ease of access to historical precursors and related work will lead scholars in these fields to focus on hard study, consolidation, systematization, and maybe even teaching. Actually, I don't think that. That would be too optimistic.

• There will be—as is already becoming the case—a newly global research community that has a presence coextensive with the Internet itself. This, even more than the advent of the Internet itself, has the potential to bring scholars from developing nations around the globe into the world of research as nothing ever has before. A well-educated, well-plugged-in intelligentsia from every uncensored place on the map could have many remarkable effects.

• Perhaps more important than any of the above, the ease with which information is accessed by teachers and students will require a complete and long overdue rethinking of the methods of education. What happens to education in a world in which not only *some questionable* information is available pretty quickly (as is now the case via Google and Wikipedia), but in which the most "officially" reliable information is available practically instantly to everyone? What would teachers do with their students if class were held every day in the middle of the largest library in the world?

Those are my expectations, and to have such expectations is of course to be very optimistic.

I should add that it seems the management of these information resources will have tremendous power, due to the tremendous value of their resources. So I hope that these managing bodies or persons will use their power according to the love of free speech, Western democratic republican principles of governance, and the rule of law.

Attempts to Dictate Our Tastes, Our Preferences, Our Culture, Our Media, Our Political Policies, Or Moral Choices Are Bound In the End to Fail

At first, my suggestion may sound rather pessimistic, but what I am optimistic about is that ultimately monopolies fail. By which I mean, attempts to dominate our tastes, our preferences, our culture, our media, our political policies, or moral choices. Restless creatures that we are, we seek out variety and difference, opportunities to extend the scope of our thinking and to exercise discrimination and taste. This may make us hard to satisfy, but, ultimately, it is this lack of satisfaction that leads to progress and spells the end of hegemonies in ideology, religion, or science.

John Stuart Mill wondered whether each of us would rather be the pig satisfied or Socrates dissatisfied, and at times it may seem as though a lot of people have chosen the former. But that is only in the short term. Long term, we have no choice but to be dissatisfied when things are constant and unchanging. The satiety of our appetites, the endless repetition of the same thoughts and feelings, will, eventually, in all but pathological cases, lead us to move on in mind and seek fresh inputs. To begin with, people may readily sacrifice their freedom for comfort, but increasingly the absence of change, the monotony of surroundings and routines will lead to acute discomfort and the search for something new. That is why I am optimistic that people who are fed a constant diet of the same ideas, the same foods, the same TV programmes, the same religious or political dogmas will eventually come to consider other possibilities, will switch off, change allegiance, and think differently for themselves. It may take time; after all, some people’s threshold for boredom is higher than others. But change and a moving on will be inevitable. The lesson is already being learned in the corporate world where monopolies try to cope with this by diversifying their range of services. Their chance of survival will depend on how cynically or sincerely they respond to this restless aspect of the human mind. We are used to hearing how bad the diet of television or Hollywood movies is, and how people have come to expect less and less. But I think the opposite is true. People are increasingly switching off and staying away from the familiar and undemanding shows and films that lazy television executives and film producers offer. Instead, space has opened up for intelligent and entertaining programmes and for independent film-making. It is here, at the creative end of the culture, that big popular success is to be found. In similar vein, the increasingly global market has led to a firmer appreciation of the interestingly local ones. And I am optimistic that people, through boredom and the need for something new, will seek out better, not worse experiences.

Human cognition depends on change and movement in order to function. Evolution has built us this way. Try staring at a blank wall for several seconds without blinking and you will find the image eventually bleaching until you can see nothing. The eye’s visual workings respond to movement and change. So too do the other parts of our cognitive systems. Feed them the same inputs successively and they cease to produce very much worth having as output. Like the shark in water, we need to keep moving or, cognitively, we die.

Science, too, represents the greatest advert for our unquiet natures. For as soon as a theory or school becomes the established orthodoxy, creative minds begin to explore the possibility that we must begin from completely different starting assumptions, and seek novel interpretations of the data. Without this constant movement to resist acceptance and stasis we would not have the advances or excitements that fundamental science can provide. That said, we must not overlook the role that luck plays in great discoveries either. But even with a lucky finding we must be capable or recognising and seizing on it if we are to develop insight for large-scale revisions to our thinking. The possibility to revise, rework, and reconsider depends on this sometimes uncomfortable fact about our natures and our need to search for something fresh.

So far, I have been stressing the positive aspect of the restless mind but there is a paradox in our nature and our restless search for change. For unless we countenance change for change’s sake, or the relativist doctrine that anything goes (—and I don’t) how do we preserve the very best of our thinking, select better quality experiences, and maintain our purposes, directions and values?  How do we avoid losing sight of older wisdom while rushing towards something new? It is here, perhaps, that our need for variation and discrimination serves us best. For the quick and gimmicky, the superficially appealing but weakest objects of our thinking or targets of desire will also be the least substantial and have an essential blandness that can tire us quickly. Besides, the more experience we have, the larger the background against which to compare and judge the worth or quality of what is newly encountered, and to decide if it will be ultimately rewarding. Certainly, people can be fickle or stubborn, but they are seldom fickle or stubborn for long. They will seek out better, according to what they are presently capable of responding to, and they will be dissatisfied by something not worthy of the attention they are capable of. For this reason attempts to dictate their tastes, cultural goods, ideologies or ideas are bound in the end to fail, and about that, and despite of many dark forces around us, I am optimistic.

Research in Biology and Medicine Will Provide the First Effective Treatments for Many Diseases

I am optimistic that during this new century research in biology and medicine will provide the first effective treatments for many diseases, although we cannot predict when they will become available and in some cases it may take several decades.

A greater number of new treatments may well be developed than was introduced during the twentieth century. I make this judgment not only on the basis of a simple extrapolation from developments in the past, but also on a consideration of the new understanding that is being established at present and of the revolutionary techniques that are emerging. Consider as examples the potential value of the genome mapping projects, stem cells and the techniques to assess many thousand small molecules for their ability to have desired effects upon human cells in laboratory test systems. All of this is underpinned by rapidly advancing molecular biology providing essential understanding of the mechanisms that regulate cell function.

Entirely new opportunities are being provided by the mapping of the genomes of people, other mammals and a variety of infectious agents that cause human diseases such as malaria. Although we now know the entire genetic sequence of a small number of people and have new estimates of the number of genes in the human genome, we have a great deal to learn about the role of specific gene products and the mechanisms that ensure appropriate functioning of the genes. Those actively involved in this aspect of research believe that this stage in the development of human genetics will be far more demanding and take far longer than the mere mechanical reading of the sequence. However, it will in the end be very rewarding.

It has been appreciated for sometime that some human diseases result directly from differences in DNA sequence, but despite considerable research efforts only a small number of causative mutations have been identified. Modern, rapid sequencing techniques will greatly facilitate these analyses in the future. However, it is likely that in a far greater number of cases sequence differences make people comparatively vulnerable to disease, but are not directly causative of that disease. These associations will only be revealed by large-scale studies in which the genomes of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people are determined while also monitoring the incidence of diseases in that population. This may make it possible to provide accurate warnings to people that they are vulnerable to specific diseases, while also offering advice on life style and medication to reduce that risk.

In time information of this kind may also greatly increase the accuracy of selection of appropriate medication for particular patients. At present an adverse response to medicines is a major cause of death or the need for hospital treatment, even if the medicine is appropriately prescribed and taken. This is because of differences between people in the response to drugs. It is probably fanciful to think of tailoring medications for each person, because this implies a full knowledge for every person of their likely response to and metabolism of every compound that might be considered as a medicine. However, it does seem likely that understanding of these mechanisms will lead to improved design and selection of new compounds.

A great deal has been made of the potential use of stem cells or their derivatives to replace those lost in degenerative diseases that reflect the death or malfunctioning of specific cell populations. Diseases that are considered suitable for treatment in this way include Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases, juvenile diabetes, spinal cord injury, liver damage resulting from hepatitis or solvent abuse. In their haste to consider this use of stem cells, the potential benefit of using such cells for drug discovery and toxicology studies is overlooked. Drug assessment will be markedly more accurate as cells become available that are representative of the critical tissues of a variety of different people.

In some cases, the cells will be genetically identical to those of patients with an overt inherited condition. There are a number of potential sources of such cells, but at present the most likely seem to be embryo stem cells because they are known to have two key characteristics. They have the ability to form all of the different tissues of an adult and they are able to multiply almost indefinitely in the laboratory. In practice this means that researchers will have the opportunity to study genetically identical cell populations again and again over a period of years and to examine their response to potential drugs. 

This is not known to be the case for any cells taken from adults. The gene sequence known to be associated with a specific disease may be introduced into existing cell lines to create a population of cells that would be expected to exhibit the characteristics of the disease. Alternatively, it may be possible to use somatic cell nuclear transfer from a patient with an inherited disease to obtain embryo stem cell lines having that characteristic even if the causative mutation is not known.

In some cases similar research may be provide an understanding of the molecular mechanisms that regulate the function of stem cells in a tissue. In time, this may make it possible to stimulate the replacement of damaged or lost cells from endogenous stem cell populations in the patient. There would be many practical advantages in being able to use this drug-based approach to cell therapy. The alternative will be to produce cells of the required type from embryo stem cells, in sufficient number that they can replace the lost cells. When they have reached the appropriate stage of their maturation these must then be inserted into the damaged tissues in such a way that they are able to integrate fully into that tissue and restore normal function. While it is likely that each approach to cell therapy will be used for some diseases, there are clearly many potential benefits to a drug based therapy.

I am optimistic that research has the potential to provide these new opportunities, and many more not described. However, I am concerned that society tends to be frightened by innovations while taking for granted the treatments that are available. We would make the most rapid progress if we recognized that it was earlier research that led to the present treatments and if we were excited by the challenges and opportunities that will arise from new research.

The Energy Challenge

A few years ago, I wrote a short book entitled Our Final Century? I guessed that, taking all risks into account, there was only a 50 percent chance that civilisation would get through to 2100 without a disastrous setback. This seemed to me a far from cheerful conclusion. However, I was surprised by the way my colleagues reacted to the book: many thought a catastrophe was even more likely than I did, and regarded me as an optimist. I stand by this optimism.

There are indeed powerful grounds for being a techno-optimist. . For most people in most nations, there's never been a better time to be alive. The innovations that will drive economic advance —information technology, biotech and nanotech—can boost the developing as well as the developed world. We're becoming embedded in a cyberspace that can link anyone, anywhere, to all the world's information and culture—and to every other person on the planet. Creativity in science and the arts is open to hugely more than in the past. 21st century technologies will offer lifestyles that are environmentally benign—involving lower demands on energy or resources than what we'd consider a good life today. And we could readily raise the funds - were there the political will—to lift the world's two billion most deprived people from their extreme poverty.

Later in this century, mind-enhancing drugs, genetics, and 'cyberg' techniques may change human beings themselves. That's something qualitatively new in recorded history—and it will pose novel ethical conundrums. Our species could be transformed and diversified (here on Earth and perhaps beyond) within just a few centuries.

The benefits of earlier technology weren't achieved without taking risks—we owe modern aviation, and modern surgery, to many martyrs. But, though plane crashes, boiler explosions and the like were horrible, there was a limit to just how horrible —a limit to their scale. In our ever more interconnected world, where technology empowers us more than ever, we're vulnerable to scary new risks—events of such catastrophic global consequences that it's imprudent to ignore them even if their probabililty seems low.

One set of risks stems from humanity's collective impact. Our actions are transforming, even ravaging, the entire biosphere —perhaps irreversibly—through global warming and loss of biodiversity. Remedial action may come too late to prevent 'runaway' climatic or environmental devastation.

But we also face vulnerabilities of a quite different kind, stemming from unintended consequences (or intended misuse) of ever more empowering bio and cyber technology. The global village will have its village idiots.

The risks are real. But, by making the right collective choices we can alleviate all these hazards.

Among such choices, my number-one priority would be much-expanded R and D into a whole raft of techniques for storing energy and generating it by 'clean' or low-carbon methods. The stakes are high—the world spends nearly 3 trillion dollars per year on energy and its infrastructure. This effort can engage not just those in privileged technical envonments in advanced countries, but a far wider talent pool Even if we discount climate change completely, the quest for clean energy is worthwhile on grounds of energy security, diversity and efficiency.

This goal deserve a priority and commitment from governments akin to that accorded to the Manhattan project or the Apollo moon landing. It should appeal to the idealistic young—indeed I can't think of anything that could do more to attract the brightest and best of them into science than a strongly proclaimed commitment, from all technologically-developed nations, to take a lead in providing clean and sustainable energy for the developing and the developed world.

Reforming Scientific and Medical Publishing Via the Internet

I am optimistic that the ascendance of open access postings of articles to the internet will transform scientific and medical publishing; and that a number of profound problems—some particular to medical publishing—will be assuaged as a result.

Currently, it can be impossible to gauge the true balance of risks and benefits of medical treatments from a reading of the literature. Frighteningly, this is true too for those doctors who ground their clinical decisions upon a reading of it. I will review some aspects of the problem; and then relay grounds for possible optimism.

First, as is probably true in all fields, bias occurs in favor of existing orthodoxy. This is arguably more troubling in medicine since the orthodoxy is in turn influenced, as has been learned, by the profusion of articles favorable to their products that are ghostwritten by the pharmaceutical industry, or by the for-profit MECCs (Medical Education and Communication Companies) that industry hires for this purpose. These companies in turn pay physicians and pharmacists—including favorably disposed "thought leaders" whom they seek to succor —to be the listed authors, extinguishing any appearance of connection to industry for the favorable views propounded. This provides the appearance that many independent parties are in agreement in their favorable representations of the evidence. Crisply said, advertising is published as though it were science.

These problems are exacerbated by bias arising from direct conflict of interest. Conflict of interest is endemic in medical research; and articles about a class of drug have been shown to be dramatically more likely to be favorable when authored by persons with ties to industry than when authored by persons without such conflicts. Conflicts for authors thus appear to foster submission of industry-favorable articles. Conflicts for reviewers may also foster rejection of industry-unfavorable ones. (As elsewhere, reviewers are drawn from the pool of authors.) Moreover, reviewers are seldom tasked to disclose conflicts, and they remain anonymous, precluding repercussions for biased reviews.

These factors are aggravated, possibly dwarfed, by pharmaceutical company influence on medical publishing—further aligning medical publishing with medical advertising. Medical journals are not the independent arbiters of article quality one might wish. They are businesses and derive their revenue from pharmaceutical company advertising, and from sales to industry of glossy reprints of industry-favorable articles, at inflated prices. For some medical journals, profits reportedly number in the millions, providing high stakes.

At least three former Editors in Chief of major US and British medical journals have penned books decrying the inimical impact of industry influence on medicine. One has to ask why, in medical journals, advertising is accepted (just because it is available for the taking); and whether the journal's bottom line is a proper consideration in dictating what is published, in settings where lives are on the line.

So, whence the optimism? One means to propel optimism is to suggest a tactic that might enable its fruition. Briefly, I suggest that papers be published on the Internet, reviews be submitted by named reviewers; and that others rate (and review) the reviews. Both papers and reviewers receive ratings that are updated on an ongoing basis. While this won't protect against biased submissions, it will protect against biased rejections—and at least enable a voice for original or contrary perspectives.

It is probable that more bad science will be released. However the system provides a means for improving poor quality work; and avoiding having to view what remains substandard.

More importantly, more good science may be published—and perhaps, more great science. As Nobelist Sydney Brenner (who famously authored an article entitled "Moron peer review") has observed, many of his co-Nobelists' prize winning work was initially rejected through the review process.

Transformative work by its nature may defy conventional wisdom. One might be drawn to wonder: is there other work that would have revolutionized science and merited a Prize, that languishes unpublished? And that does so because authors at some point ceased to persevere in submission efforts after some number of rejections, or finally deemed the effort to publish futile?

Hark back to the many great discoveries of which we have heard that were initially ridiculed: H. pylori as a contributor to ulcers; handwashing as a means to reduce puerperal fever; the sun as the center around which the earth revolves, to name a few. What might this imply for the possibility that major discoveries may be pilloried into nonpublication by peer review? There is no means to estimate the fraction of Nobel-caliber efforts that achieve publication, as the denominator remains unknowable.

Indeed, the benefits of a new, Internet-based approach may be particularly great for the most important work: work that challenges existing orthodoxy; work that defines a new field and fits no existing journal; work that crosses boundaries to other disciplines—with their own often arbitrary conventions and in-groups; or that demands knowledge from two or more disciplines; science that is ahead of its time, that entails many advances at once or that founds new work on an understanding of relevant material that others do not yet have. Or, too, work that runs counter to vested interest groups—particularly but hardly exclusively in the arena of medicine, where the potent impact of industry influence on information has been the subject of increasing alarm—and where disparities between literature and truth may cost patients' lives.

An instance from mathematics supports the premise that current convention, requiring articles to be published in peer-reviewed journal venues, may inhibit promulgation of at least some of the very most important work. The Poincaré conjecture—a holy grail in mathematics—was recently proved by a Russian mathematician who posted his work on the Internet but refused the bother of submitting his work to a journal. Other cases can be adduced favoring the proposition that some among persons capable of propelling major advances—which often entails rejecting conventions in science—are also constitutionally inclined to reject the conventions, petty obstacles and distractions that attend the current model of scientific publishing. And perhaps they do so with justifiable contempt.

Surely many will defend the current system—not least those who fare well within it, and who benefit disproportionately from it. And surely there will be problems to overcome in the new system. Orthodoxy, in-groups, and interest groups will continue to influence the literature. Those who serve these masters will likely submit negative reviews of articles (and of reviewers) who do not toe the respective party lines. But at least now the contrarian positions will achieve release, reviewers can be held accountable for biased reviews, and unacknowledged conflicts can be exposed in instances when others know of them.

In short, I am optimistic that online publishing, with a review-the-reviewer system akin to that proposed here, will provide more voice and venue for science that may now have the highest need—and the lowest prospect—of being aired.

Bullish on Cosmology

I am optimistic that there will be a historic breakthrough in our understanding of the universe in the next five years that will be remembered as one of the most significant of the millennium. I would also give better-than-even odds that there will be more than one discovery of this magnitude.

My optimism is sparked by a remarkable coincidence: the simultaneous maturing of several unrelated technologies, each of which could open a new window on the cosmos. Historically, every new technology is a harbinger of great discovery. Consider, then, that at least a handful of major advances will occur within just five years:

• Directly detecting of dark matter:

After decades of gradual progress, physicists will finally build the first detectors sensitive enough to detect dark matter particles directly, if they consist of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), as many physicists suspect. 

• Discovering the nature of dark energy:

Although their names sound similar, the only quality dark matter and dark energy have in common is that they are both invisible. Dark matter consists of massive particles that gravitationally attract one another and clump into clouds that seed the formation of galaxies.

Dark energy is gravitationally self-repulsive, so it tends to smooth itself out. When it is the dominant form of energy, as it is today, dark energy causes the expansion of the universe to speed up.The composition of dark energy is one of the great mysteries of science, with profound implications for both fundamental physics and cosmology. 

Over the next five years, arrays of novel wide-field telescopes will be constructed that are programmed to rapidly scan large fractions of the sky to search for astronomical phenomena that vary rapidly with time. The arrays will be used to search for distant supernovae (exploding stars), whose brightness and colors can be used to judge the distance and recessional speed of their host galaxies. From these measurements, astronomers can measure precisely the accelerated expansion of the universe, a primary means of distinguishing different theories of dark energy.

At the same time, in the laboratory, physicists will be trying to detect changes in the gravitational force when masses are placed at close proximity or tiny changes in the strength of the electromagnetic force with time, other effects predicted by some theories of dark energy. These measurements will significantly narrow the candidates for dark energy, perhaps identifying a unique possibility.

• Exploring the big bang and the origin of the large-scale structure of the universe:

The conventional wisdom is that the universe sprang into existence 14 billion years ago in a big bang and that a period of exponentially rapid inflationary expansion accounts for its large-scale structure. However, the last decade has seen the emergence of alternative possibilities, such as the cyclic model of the universe. 

In the cyclic model, the big bang is not the beginning but, rather, an event that has been repeating every trillion years, extending far into the past. Borrowing ideas from string theory, the cyclic model proposes that each bang is a collision between our three-dimensional world and another three-dimensional world along an extra spatial dimension. Each bang creates new hot matter and radiation that begins a new perio of expansion, cooling, galaxy formation and life, but space and time exist before and after the bang.

The large-scale structure of the universe and the pattern of galaxies are set by events that occurred about a cycle ago, before the bang, just as events occurring today are setting the structure for the cycle to come. Although the inflationary and cyclic pictures predict distributions of galaxies, matter and radiation that are indistinguishable, their predictions for the production of gravitational waves in the early universe are exponentially different.

Gravitational waves are ripples in space produced during inflation or near the beginning of a new cycle that propagate through the universe and distort space like undulations traveling through jello. These cosmic gravitational waves are too weak to be detected directly, but experimental cosmologists throughout the world are mounting ground- and balloon-based experiments to search for their imprint on the polarization pattern of cosmic microwave background radiation produced in the first 380,000 years after the bang. 

The results will not only affect our view of our cosmic origin, but our future as well. The conventional big bang inflationary theory predicts our universe is headed towards the cold oblivion of eternal expansion—a whimper—but the cyclic model predicts a new hot big bang.

• Direct detecting gravitational waves:

The first window on the universe using something other than electromagnetic waves could be open within the next five years. After decades of developments, the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory), with one detector in Livingston, Louisiana, and one in Hanford, Washington, has a plausible chance of directly detecting gravitational waves, beginning a new era in astronomy. 

The observatory is designed to detect stronger gravitational waves than those produced in the early universe, such as waves generated by the violent collision of neutron stars and black holes in our own galaxy. However, this frontier is so fresh and unexplored that there could well be unanticipated cosmic sources of strong gravitational waves to be discovered that could cause us to reassess our understanding of the universe. 

• Breakthroughs in fundamental physics and direct production of dark matter: 

The Large Hadron Collider at the Center for European Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, is set to begin operation this year. This facility consists of a powerful particle accelerator that will reproduce collisions of the type that occurred within the first pico-second after the big bang, carrying the investigation of fundamental physics over an important energy threshold where new phenomena are anticipated. For example, physicists hope to discover a spectrum of new "supersymmetric" particles, confirming a key prediction of string theory, and also WIMPs that may comprise the dark matter.  

The impact will  be profound.  As we enter 2007, we understand the composition of less than five percent of the universe; we do not understand how space, time, matter and energy were created; and we cannot predict where the universe is headed. In the next five years, we may witness the historic resolution of one or more of these issues. I have my personal bet on what the individual outcomes will be; but the only prediction I will reveal here is that, with the opening of so many new windows on the cosmos, we are sure to discover something unanticipated and astonishing.

With The Right Sort Of Priorities And Human Engineering (Whatever That Phrase Means), We Can Be Biased Towards Making Us/Them Dichotomies Far More Benign

A truly discouraging thing to me is how easily humans see the world as dichotomized between Us and Them. This comes through in all sorts of ways —social anthropology, lord of the flies, prison experiments, linguistics (all those cultures where the word for the members of that culture translates into "People," thus making a contrast with the non-people living in the next valley).

As a neurobiologist, I'm particularly impressed with and discouraged by one finding relevant to this. There's a part of the brain called the amygdala that has lots to do with fear and anxiety and aggression. Functional brain imaging studies of humans show that the amygdala becomes metabolically active when we look at a scary face (even when the face is flashed up so quickly that we aren't consciously aware of seeing it). And some recent work—solid, done by top people, independently replicated — suggests that the amygdala can become activated when we view the face of someone from another race. The Them as scary, and the Them being someone whose skin color is real different from our own.

Damn, that's an upsetting finding.

But right on the heels of those studies are follow-ups showing that the picture is more complicated. The "Other skin color = scared activated amygdala = the Other" can be modified by experience. "Experience," can be how diverse of a world you grew up in. More diversity, and the amygdala is likely to become activated in that circumstance. And also, "experience," can be whether, shortly before your amygdala is put through the brain imaging paces, you are subtly biased to think about people categorically or as individuals. If you're cued towards individuating, your amygdala doesn't light up.

Thus, it seems quite plausible to me that we are hard-wired towards making Us/Them distinctions and not being all that nice to the Them. But what is anything but hard-wired is who counts as an Us and as a Them —we are so easily manipulated into changing those categories.

So, I'm optimistic that with the right sort of priorities and human engineering (whatever that phrase means), we can be biased towards making Us/Them dichotomies far more benign than they tend to be now. Say, by making all of us collectively feel like an Us with Them being the space aliens that may attack us some day. Or making the Them to be mean, shitty, intolerant people without compassion.

But, I'm sure not optimistic that we'll soon be having political, religious or cultural leaders likely to move us effectively in that direction. Just to deflate that optimism.

Interpersonal Communication Will Become More Profound; Rationality Will Become Ever More Romantic

An extravagant optimism ought to suggest new precipices of fulfillment that surpass mere responses to the many problems we already know about.

One extravagant idea is that the nature of communication itself might transform in the future as much as it did when language appeared. This is not easy to imagine, but here's one approach to thinking about it: I've been fascinated by the potential for "Post-symbolic Communication" for many years. This new style of interpersonal connection could become possible once large numbers of people become virtuosos at improvising what goes on in Virtual Reality.

We are virtuosos at spoken language. Adults speak with what seems like no effort at all, even though everyday chats might be the most complicated phenomena ever observed. I see no reason why new virtuosities in communication could not appear in the future, though it's hard to specify a timeframe.

Suppose you're enjoying an advanced future implementation of Virtual Reality and you can cause spontaneously designed things to appear and act and interact with the ease of sentences pouring forth during an ordinary conversation today.

Whether this is accomplished by measuring what your body does from the outside or by interacting via interior states of your brain is nothing more than an instrumentation question. Either way, we already have some clues about how the human organism might be able to improvise the content of a Virtual World.

Some of the most interesting data from VR research thus far involve Homuncular Flexibility. It turns out that the human brain can learn to control radically different bodies with remarkable ease. That means that people might eventually learn to spontaneously change what's going on in a virtual world by becoming parts of it.

That aspect of the brain which is optimized to control the many degrees of freedom of body motion is also well suited to controlling the many degrees of freedom of a superlative programming and design environment of the future. It is likely, by the way, that the tongue would turn out to be just as important in this type of communication as it is in language, for it is the richest output device of the human body. (I have already done some work on through-the-cheek tongue measurement to test this idea.)

Why bother? It's a reasonable hunch. Words have done so much for people- so alternatives to them with overlapping but distinct functions ought to lead to new ways of thinking and connecting.

An alternative to abstraction might arise — the possibility of expression through a fluid and capable concreteness. Instead of the word "house" you could conjure up a particular house. How do you even know it's a house without using the word? Instead of falling back on whatever the word "house" means, you might toss around a virtual bucket that turns out to be very large on the inside- and contains a multitude of house prototypes. In one sense this "fuzzy" collection is more precise than the word, in another, less so. It is different.

If all this sounds a little too fantastic or obscure, here's another approach to the same idea using more familiar reference points. Imagine a means of expression that is a cross between the three great new art forms of the 20th century: jazz improvisation, computer programming, and cinema. Suppose you could improvise anything that could be seen in a movie with the speed and facility of a jazz improviser. What would that mean for the sense of connection between you and someone you love?

There's a little book by James P. Carse with a wonderful title, Finite and Infinite Games. Some of the passages are bit too New Agey for me, but the core idea, expressed in the title, is clear and useful. A finite game is like a single game of baseball, with an end. An infinite game is like the overall phenomenon of baseball, which has no end. It is always a frontier.

So many utopian ideas are about Finite Games: End disease, solve global warming, get people to be more rational, reduce violence, and so on. As wonderful as all those achievements would (will!) be, there is something missing from them. Finite Game optimism suggests a circumscribed utopia, without frontier or mystery. The result isn't sufficiently inspiring for me- and apparently it doesn't quite grab the imaginations of a lot of other people who are endlessly fascinated by dubious religious and political utopias. The problem is heightened at the moment because there's a trope floating around in the sciences, probably unfounded, that we have already seen the outline of all the science we'll ever know, and we're just in the process of filling in the details.

The most valuable optimisms are Infinite Games, and imagining that new innovations as profound as language will come about in the future of human interaction is an example of one.

Eudaemonia: The Third form Of Happiness

Capitalism has become more aligned with the forces of good ( i.e. philanthropy) than greed. As the polarization of wealth peaked over the past decade the press and public became obsessed with "greed is good" meme in the 80s, and the "rules don't apply to the rich" 90s (think Enron, Worldcom, dotcom). However, the real story was brewing and we read it first on Edge and witnessed it in Ted Turner's gift to the UN.

The most successful businesspeople in the world have decided to put their brains and bank accounts toward fixing the world, leaving politics and politicians on the sidelines. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Richard Branson, John Doerr, and Pierre Omidyar — among many others — are demonstrating that the true goal of winning is giving. The brass ring has moved from private aviation and mega-yachts, to making a mega-pledge at Bill Clinton's annual summit.

Edge's ongoing discussions on happiness are clearly documenting (contributing to?) the trend. As psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman noted in his 2004 Edge feature, "Eudaemonia, The Good Life": "The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There's no shortcut to that. That's what life is about."

The Strong Possibility That We've Got Everything Horribly Wrong

The thing I'm most optimistic about is the strong possibility that we've got everything horribly wrong. All of it. Badly.

Once, when I was a young child, I accompanied my father on a car journey around some twisty back lanes in England. Dad wasn't familiar with the area, so I helpfully took the map from him and navigated. Things seemed to be going pretty well for the first half hour, until we found ourselves staring helplessly at a field gate that should have been a major road junction. It turned out that I'd been navigating from entirely the wrong page of the map, and it was sheer coincidence that enough landmarks had matched my expectations for me to believe we were on track.

I learned a lesson from this. Science sometimes learns these lessons too. Thomas Kuhn put it much better than me when he introduced the concept of a paradigm shift. Sometimes we manage to convince ourselves that we have a handle on what is going on, when in fact we're just turning a blind eye to a mass of contradictory information. We discard it or ignore it (or can't get funded to look at it) because we don't understand it. It seems to make no sense, and it can take us a while before we realize that the problem doesn't lie with the facts but with our assumptions.

Paradigm shifts are wonderful things. Suddenly the mists clear, the sun comes out and we exclaim a collective "aha!" as everything begins to make sense. What makes me so optimistic about science right now is that there are plenty of these "aha" moments waiting in the wings, ready to burst energetically onto the stage. We've got so much completely wrong, but we're starting to look at the world in radically new ways – dynamical, nonlinear, self-organizing ways – and I think a lot of our standing ideas and assumptions about the world are about to turn inside-out, just as our much older, religious ideas did during the Enlightenment.

My guesses for prime candidates would include quantum theory and our understanding of matter, but those aren't my field and it's not my place to judge them. My field is artificial intelligence, but I'm sad to say that this subject started on the wrong page of the map many years ago and most of us haven't woken up to it yet. We keep our eyes firmly on the route and try not to look to left or right for fear of what we might see. In a way, Alan Turing was responsible for the error, since his first big idea in AI (that something vaguely reminiscent of human thought could be automated) turned out to be such a stonkingly good one, for other reasons entirely, that it eclipsed his later, more promising ideas about connectionist systems and self-organization. Since then, the digital computer has dominated the AI paradigm, through failure after dismal failure.

My great white hope for AI lies in neuroscience. The only working intelligent machine we know of is the brain, and it seems to me that almost everything we think we understand about the brain is wrong. We know an enormous amount about it now and just about none of it makes the slightest bit of sense. That's a good sign, I think. It shows us we've been looking at the wrong page of the map.

Let me try to illustrate this with a thought experiment: Suppose I give you a very complex system to study – not a brain but something equally perplexing. You discover quite quickly that one part of the system is composed of an array of elements, of three types. These elements emit signals that vary rapidly in intensity, so you name these the alpha, beta and gamma elements, and set out eagerly to study them. Placing a sensor onto examples of each type you find that their actual signal patterns are distressingly random and unpredictable, but with effort you discover that there are statistical regularities in their behaviour: beta and gamma elements are slightly more active than alpha elements; when betas are active, gammas in the same region tend to be suppressed; if one element changes in activity, its neighbours tend to change soon after; gammas at the top of the array are more active than those at the bottom, and so on. Eventually you amass an awful lot of information about these elements, but still none of it makes sense. You're baffled.

So allow me to reveal that the system you've been studying is a television set, and the alpha, beta and gamma elements are the red, green and blue phosphor dots on the screen. Does the evidence start to fit together now? Skies are blue and tend to be at the top, while fields are green and tend to be at the bottom; objects tend to move coherently across the picture. If you know what the entire TV image represents at any one moment, you'll be able to make valid predictions about which elements are likely to light up next. By looking at the entire array of dots at once, in the context of a good system-level theory of what's actually happening, all those seemingly random signals suddenly make sense. "Aha!"

The single-electrode recordings of the equivalent elements in the brain have largely been replaced by system-wide recordings made by fMRI now, but at the moment we still don't know what any of it means because we have the wrong model in our heads. We need an "aha" moment akin to learning that the phosphor dots above belong to a TV set, upon which images of natural scenes are being projected. Once we know what the fundamental operating principles are, everything will start to make sense very quickly. Painstaking deduction won't reveal this to us; I think it will be the result of a lucky hunch. But the circumstances are in place for that inductive leap to happen soon, and I find that tremendously exciting.

Isaac Newton once claimed that he'd done no more than stand on the shoulders of giants. He was being far too modest. It might be more accurate to say that he stayed down at child height, running between the giants' legs and exploring things in his own sweet way. That's what we Third Culturists are all about, and it's such a combination of artful playfulness and pan-disciplinary sources of analogy and inspiration that will turn our understanding of the world inside-out. I'm very optimistic about that.

The End Of The 'Natural'

I am optimistic that the human race will continue to find ways of enhancing its own modes of thought, reason, and feeling. As flexible adaptive agents we are wide open to a surprising variety of transformative bodily and mental tricks and ploys, ranging from the use of software, sports regimes and meditational practice, to drug therapies, gene therapies, and direct brain-machine interfaces.

I am optimistic that, stimulated by this explosion of transformative opportunities, we will soon come to regard our selves as constantly negotiable collection of resources, easily able to straddle and criss-cross the boundaries between biology and artifact. In this hybrid vision of our own humanity I see increased potentials not just for repair but for empowerment, expansion, recreation, and growth. For some, this very same hybrid vision may raise specters of coercion, monstering and subjugation. For clearly, not all change is for the better, and hybridization (however naturally it may come to us) is neutral rather than an intrinsic good. But there is cause for (cautious) optimism.

First, there is nothing new about human enhancement. Ever since the dawn of language and self-conscious thought, the human species has been engaged in a unique 'natural experiment' in progressive niche construction. We engineer our own learning environments so as to create artificial developmental cocoons that impact our acquired capacities of thought and reason. Those enhanced minds then design new cognitive niches that train new generations of minds, and so on, in an empowering spiral of co-evolving complexity. The result is that, as Herbert Simon is reputed to have said, 'most human intelligence is artificial intelligence anyway'. New and emerging technologies of human cognitive enhancement are just one more step along this ancient path.

Second, the biological brain is itself populated by a vast number of hidden 'zombie processes' that underpin the skills and capacities upon which successful behavior depends. There are, for example, a plethora of such unconscious processes involved in activities from grasping an object all the way to the flashes of insight that characterize much daily skilful problem-solving. Technology and drug based enhancements add, to that standard mix, still more processes whose basic operating principles are not available for conscious inspection and control. The patient using a brain-computer interface to control a wheelchair will not typically know just how it all works, or be able to reconfigure the interface or software at will. But in this respect too, the new equipment is simply on a par with much of the old.

Finally, empirical science is at last beginning systematically to address the sources and wellsprings of human happiness and human flourishing, and the findings of these studies must themselves be taken as important data points for the design and marketing of (putative) technologies of enhancement.

In sum, I am optimistic that we will soon see the end of those over-used, and mostly ad hoc, appeals to the 'natural'. May we all have a thoroughly unnatural New Year.

Cities — Global Population Shrinkage And Economic Growth

Proviso: If climate change shifts from gradual to "abrupt" during the next 20 years, that bad news will obliterate the good news I otherwise expect in the realms of global population shrinkage and economic growth.

Cities have always been wealth creators. Cities have always been population sinks. This year, 2007, is the crossover point from a world predominantly rural to a world predominantly urban.

The rate of urbanization is currently about 1.3 million new city dwellers a week, 70 million a year, still apparently accelerating. The world was 3% urban in 1800, 14% urban in 1900, 50% urban this year, and probably headed in the next few decades to around 80% urban, which has been the stabilization point for developed countries since the mid-20th-century.

Almost all the rush to the cities is occurring in the developing world (though the countryside continues to empty out in developed nations). The developing world is where the greatest poverty is, and where the highest birthrates have driven world population past 6.5 billion.

Hence my optimism. Cities cure poverty. Cities also drive birthrates down almost the instant people move to town. Women liberated by the move to a city drop their birthrate right on through the replacement rate of 2.1 children/woman. No one expected this, but that's how it worked out. As a result, there will be another billion or two people in the world total by midcentury, but then the total will head down--- perhaps rapidly enough to be a problem, as it already is in Russia and Japan.

Poverty in the megacities (over 10 million) and hypercities (over 20 million) of the developing world will be highly visible as the disaster it is. (It was worse out in the bush, only not as visible there. That's why people leave.) But the poor who were trapped in rural poverty create their own opportunity once they're in town by creating their own cities--- the "squatter cities" where one billion people now live. They recapitulate the creation of cities past by generating a seething informal economy in which everyone works. The dense slums, if they don't get bulldozed, eventually become part of the city proper and part of the formal economy. It takes decades.

Globalization and urbanization accentuate each other. Medical care that couldn't reach the villages can reach slum dwellers. The newly liberated women in the slums create and lead CBOs (community based organizations, some linked with national and global NGOs) to handle everything from child care to micro-finance. If the city has some multinational corporations closely surveiled by do-gooders back home, their pay rates and work conditions will raise the standard throughout the city.

The sudden urbanization is a grassroots phenomenon, driven by the resourcefulness and ambition of billions of poor people busy getting out of poverty as fast as they can. Some nations help the process (China is exemplary), some hinder it (Zimbabwe is exemplary), none can stop it.

Skeuomorphism

I am optimistic about skeuomorphism. Odd, perhaps, but true.

In a small wire tidy on my desk I have several corks. But they are not cork. The word cork comes from the Latin for oak, quercus, a sub-species of which has the spongy bark that is so useful for sealing wine in bottles. In the 1980s, demand for high quality cork began to outstrip supply. As low grade cork often taints (or 'corks') wine, substitutes were sought. My corks are synthetic. One is cork-coloured and slightly variegated to make it appear traditional; like real corks in the German Riesling tradition, it is stamped in black with a vine tendril motif. Another is less convincingly mottled, and is mid-yellow in colour with the name of the vintner, Gianni Vescovo, printed in bold black. Both these corks are skeuomorphs—objects that preserve formal vestiges of the constraints of an original no longer strictly necessary in the new material. First generation skeuomorphs are close mimics, even fakes.

Second generation skeuomorphs, like the Vescovo cork, abandon any serious attempt at deception. Its mottling, and the fact that it is still a functional cork, rather than a metal screw-top closure (equally efficient for the modest young wine it briefly protected) is a comforting nod to the history of wine. At the same time it signals a new, more consistent, freedom from contamination. As synthetic corks became more familiar, new and more baroque forms arose. These third generation skeuomorphs are fun: a bright purple cork that stoppered an Australian red suggests a grape colour, while a black cork has a hi-tech look that draws symbolic attention to the new techniques of low-temperature fermentation in stainless steel. This black cork is still mottled, but in an exaggerated and unconvincing manner—a self-conscious and playful back-reference both to real corks and to earlier skeuomorphic examples. One could not conceive of the black cork without a process of skeuomorphic familiarization, through first and second generation examples. Put the black cork next in sequence with a real cork, and the dissonance would be too great.

I see much of the history of technology as an unplanned trajectory in which emergent skeuomorphic qualities often turn out to have been critical. Corks are a relatively trivial example in an extraordinary history of skeuomorphism, impossible to review here, but which encompasses critical turns in material development from prehistoric flint, via the discovery of metals and alloys, to complex compound objects, of which computers are a modern manifestation.

My optimism about skeuomorphs arises, as optimism often does, from former pessimism. I grew up with Alan Turing's unsettling vision of a future machine indistinguishable from a human in its reactions. Ray Kurzweil's provocative prediction of the impending 'singularity'—the point when computer intelligence would start to leave humans gasping in its intellectual wake—added to my fears. I actually began to worry that efforts to enculture my children with Shakespeare and Darwin, and even with spiritual and moral values, might be rendered peremptorily redundant by cold robotic Übermenschen.

I have recently become quite relaxed about all this, but not because I doubt for a moment that computers are rapidly becoming very smart indeed, and will become smarter, in some directions, than we can easily imagine. Computers explicitly reproduce aspects of the human brain. Yet their eventual power will probably not be in simulation or deception. There will never be a perfect Turing machine, except under conditions so artificial and in contexts so circumscribed as to be rather ridiculous. Instead, by surpassing us in some areas, computers will relieve our brains and bodies of repetitive effort. But it will not be mimicry of our brain function that will be important. If they behave as other skeuomorphs before them, it will be computers' currently unimagined emergent qualities that we will come to value most,  enhancing and complementing our humanity rather than competing with and superseding it.

In like fashion, the synthetic corks have taken the pressure off the oak groves, securing their future and with it those genuine champagne moments. Happy New Year!

The Human Nervous System Has Come Alive

Ten years ago, half of humanity had never made a phone call and only 20% of humanity had regular access to communications.  Today 70% of humanity can place a telephone call or, more likely, send an SMS message… to the Secretary General of the United Nations, or to most anyone else.   For the first time the majority of humanity is connected and has a voice.

Adults in Western culture fail to appreciate the momentous nature of this change because our mindsets are tied to lumbering legacy technologies like PCs and laptops.  But in most countries, and for virtually all youth, the way to maintain your social network and run your business is by cell phone. 

Digital connections allow public services to be transformed.  In much of Africa, health workers survey the spread of disease, advise expectant mothers, and coordinate health services by digital messaging over cell phones.  In tests, the digital system is both ten times faster than the old paper system—allowing health workers to nip epidemics in the bud—and ten times cheaper, despite the fact that phones cost more than paper. 

Governance is also being transformed.   Not only have the heads of governments been brought down by SMS-organized protests, but multilateral organizations such as the WTO have been brought to account as well.  More subtle, but perhaps even more important, the traceable nature of digital transactions means that banking and government services offered by cell phone are more transparent and accountable than the older systems.   An example of this capability in action is that governments such as India claim that the vast majority of captured terrorists have been identified through cell phone transactions. 

Perhaps most importantly connection means improved efficiency and greater wealth. In some parts of Africa and south Asia, banking is done by moving around the money in cell phone accounts and people pay for vegetables and taxi rides by SMS.  Because remanufactured cell phones cost $10 in the developing world and incoming messages are free, every stratum of society is connected.  Day laborers, for instance, no longer hang around a street corner waiting to be picked for work.  Instead, job offers arrive by SMS from a computerized clearing house.  The International Telecommunications Union estimates that in the poorest countries each additional cell phone installed adds $3000 to the GDP, primarily due to the increased efficiency of business processes.

My conclusion is that is that the human race finally has a working nervous system, and that the poor and disenfranchised are for the first time beginning to make themselves heard and felt.  To accelerate this process, we have established the Program for Developmental Entrepreneurship at MIT (web.mit.edu/de), which helps form, fund, and scale in-country efforts that leverage these new capabilities.  The possibilities opened up by humanity's new nervous system are unprecedented, and reason for great optimism.

The Attention Of The World's Rich Will Turn To Solving The Problems Of The Poor

Many of the venture capitalists I know are turning to environmental and energy investments; the more adventurous ones are looking at health care (not just drugs), low-end PCs, products for the masses. They are funding training schools in India — for-profit — rather than just donating to legacy universities in the US. The watch-word is "sustainability:" In plain English, that means making a profit so that more profit-seeking investors will enter and enlarge the market.

They will have a variety of motivations, ranging from altruism and the desire to solve problems, to a need for recognition or sheer belief in the profitability of doing so, but the result will be cause for optimism all the same. Millions of investors and entrepreneurs will apply their resources and talents to improving products, distribution systems, training and education and health-care facilities targeted at the billions of people at the bottom of the pyramid. In our fluid world of competition and fast-spreading information, some people will still get rich by being first and smartest, but most will get rich by implementing well and serving broader markets. For the first time in history, power is really moving to the masses, not as a power block, but as a market.

Of course, all those billions of people will also be producers...and a broader spread of education and productivity tools — ranging from water pumps to cell phones and PCs — will enable them to join the world economy as productive people.

Yes, this is an optimistic view and it won't all be simple, but the forces — from human dignity to human greed — are aligned. You asked for the optimistic view....and optimism will help make it happen!

The Zombie Concept Of Identity

I'm optimistic about what I call the zombie concept of identity: I think it is losing its grip on the thoughts of scientists, lay people and their political leaders.

The zombie concept of identity is the intuition that people do things because of their membership in a collective identity or affiliation. It's a fundamental confusion that starts with a perhaps statistically valid idea (if you define your terms well, you can speak of "American behavior'' or "Muslim behavior'' or "Italian behavior'')—and then makes the absurd assumption that all Americans or Muslims or Italians are bound to behave as you expect, by virtue of their membership in the category (a category that, often, you created).

I think it's fair to say that scientists have shown that people are not identity zombies. Much work has been done (some by people on Edge, like Mahzarin Banaji and Scott Atran) that shows how the connections between identity and behavior are never so simple. It's clear that all of us have many overlapping identities (American, middle-aged person, Episcopalian, Republican, soccer mom can be attached to one person in a single morning); it's what we're doing, and who we're doing it with, that seems to determine which of these identities comes to the fore at a given time.

Even as these ideas have become familiar in anthropology, social psychology and other disciplines, they didn't seem to make it into the everyday discourse with which people talk about terrorism, immigration, social change etc. That has had a number of bad effects. Leaders who think that people become terrorists because they're Muslims, or that new immigrants will be hostile to a society because they're immigrants, are making decisions that are bad for their nations, perhaps even unsafe.

Lately, though, I see signs that people realize the limits of the zombie identity. Pop culture is rich in stories and images that remind people of overlapping identity. More importantly, political rhetoric is giving way to realism about human psychology.

One example: The anthropologist David Kilcullen was quoted in a recent New Yorker explaining that jihadists are pulled into terrorism by their circle of friends and their social networks — that "there are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what's happening. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not 'Islamic behavior'''.

The significance here is that Kilcullen is not, currently, an academic. He's an official of the US State Department. My hunch is that people in charge of fighting democracy's enemies will increasingly have to deal with identity as it is, even as popular culture is ever richer in reminders that people have a lot of overlapping affiliations.

So I have more than a little hope that in 10 years' time, people who take seriously the zombie concept of identity will be looked upon as we look upon people who believe in witchcraft. That will mean that popular discourse is closer to science than it used to be.

And I think there may be a kind of feedback loop that will be good for science: As daily talk becomes more comfortable with the idea that people have multiple identities whose management is a complex psychological phenomenon, there will be more research on the central questions: What makes a particular identity convincing? What makes it come to the fore in a given context?

Those are the issues that link society, mind and body and I think when we have more competing theories about how them, we'll be closer to understanding why people are they way they are. I'm optimistic that this will happen.

That doesn't mean that I think scientists, or anyone else, will stop saying things like "you know, I was raised Catholic'' or "I'm a typical Jewish mother'' to explain human behavior. Galileo died five centuries ago, but we still say "what a nice sunrise.'' But in the same way that we know that really, it's the earth that moves relative to the sun, I think we will arrive in the next few years at a better understanding of what collective identity means and how it is made.

Copying Is What Bits Are For

I'm optimistic that the risks of anti-copying technology and the copyright wars are starting to move to the mainstream. Daily newspapers are reporting on the risks from Zune's DRM; governments and librarians are starting to question the fairy tales from the entertainment industry. The British government is poised to be the first government in history to reject a proposal to extend copyright. A Canadian MP lost her seat last year because she'd sold out the country to a bunch of entertainment dinosaurs. Four European nations opened inquiries into the competition and consumer protection issues raised by iTunes DRM. The latest WIPO treaty looks like it has died, killed by activist involvement.

Sure, the US-Russia Free Trade Agreement restores the totalitarian practice of licensing presses (Uncle Sam, bringer of liberty!) and plunges Russia back into the pre-Samizdat era. Sure, the RIAA is continuing to terrorize American families by reducing 700 of them to poverty every month. But most people, confronted with the choice between HD-DVD DRM and Blu-Ray DRM are choosing none of the above.

There is no such thing as a copy-proof bit. There aren't even copy-resistant bits. Copying is what bits are for. They will never, ever get any harder to copy.

The copyright wars are a form of contemporary Lysenkoism, a farce wherein we all pretend that copy-proof bits are a reasonable thing to expect from technology. Stalin's Lysenkoism starved millions when the ideologically correct wheat failed to grow and anyone who pointed this out was sent to dissident prison. Entertainment industry Lysenkoism is ruining lives, undermining free speech and privacy and due process, destroying foreign democracies and keeping poor countries poor.

It's about time we wised up to it—and we are.

That makes me optimistic.

The Human Response To Vast Change Will Involve Strange Bounces

I am an optimist because I have a hunch Mark Twain was right when he portrayed Huckleberry Finn as an archetype of human nature.

In the pivotal moment of "his" novel, Huckleberry Finn considers struggling no longer against the great challenges arrayed against him. He thinks about how society would shame him if it "would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom":

"That's just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide, it ain't no disgrace. That was my fix exactly."

Huck decides right then and there to abandon a life of sin, avoid eternal damnation and for once do the right thing by society's lights. He decides to squeal, to write a letter to Jim's owner telling her how to recapture her slave.

Then he gets to thinking about human nature:

"I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking – thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time: in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

"It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

" 'All right, then, I'll go to hell' — and tore it up.

"It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog."

This line of rampant and pugnacious human perversity surfaces in our best stories again and again.

In "Casablanca," Rick is ensconced in a cozy world of thieves, swindlers, gamblers, drunks, parasites, refugees, soldiers of fortune, genially corrupt French police and terrifying Nazis. Rick's cynicism is his pride; he sticks his neck out for nobody.  His only interest is in seeing his Café Américain flourish. And then, of course, of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Ilsa walks into his. The rest of the film concerns him betraying his own cauterized heart in service of a higher purpose. As Rick says, "It's still a story without an ending."
The most phenomenally successful film series of the recent era – the "Star Wars," "Harry Potter," "Matrix" and "Lord of the Rings" movies – are all driven by a faith in human cussedness, from Han Solo's grudging heroism to little people with furry feet vanquishing the combined forces of Darkness.

If the ageless way humans process information is by telling stories, what does our belief in this recurring story say?

It is an instinct that the human response to vast change will involve strange bounces.

This assessment of our species displays a faith that even in the face of unprecedented threats, the ragged human convoy of divergent perceptions, piqued honor, posturing, insecurity and humor will wend its way to glory.

The Best Is Yet To Come

If I had lived in the year 1007, and had been asked what I looked forward to for my descendants in the next millennium, I might have imagined many wonderful possibilities. But I would not — because I could not — have imagined the music of Mozart, the painting of Rothko, the sonnets of Shakespeare, the novels of Dostoyevsky. . . It means I would have failed to see one of the best reasons of all for being optimistic: which is, the power of human artistic genius to astonish us again and again. I will not make the same mistake twice. So let me say straight out, in 2007 I hope and expect that the best is yet to come: that greater works of art than any the world has ever seen will be created by human beings not far ahead of us — works of presently unimaginable aesthetic and moral force. And, mind you, it will not require genetic modification, computer hybridization, high-tech brain enhancement or whatever — it will simply require that we continue to be the kind of people that we are.

The Final Scientific Enlightenment

I am optimistic that the physicists of our species will complete Einstein's dream and discover the final theory of everything before superior creatures, evolved on another world, make contact and tell us the answer. I am optimistic that, although the theory of everything will bring fundamental physics to a convincing closure, the enterprise of physics itself will continue to flourish, just as biology went on growing after Darwin solved its deep problem. I am optimistic that the two theories together will furnish a totally satisfying naturalistic explanation for the existence of the universe and everything that's in it including ourselves. And I am optimistic that this final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue deathblow to religion and other juvenile superstitions.

AI Will Arise

I often attack the original "we can program it" direction of the field of Artificial Intelligence, but am still optimistic that our primitive electromechanical and computing machines will one day become intelligent enough to treat as living creatures.

I have a predictive sketch for how intelligent machines might arrive. My definition of a robot is any device—controlled by software—interacting with the physical world. An economically viable robot is such a system that earns a consistent return on investment (ROI). The ATM, the ink-jet printer, and the disk drive are today's omnipresent robots, they just don't appear as the robots of science fiction.

I see three streams which can come together in the future to allow the emergence of intelligent human-like robots.

The first stream is the lowly "web bot." Moving beyond "Eliza's" in text chat rooms, these animated humans often exist on web pages, attracting customers, helping them navigate, or selling. Another class of virtual humans are employed as extras in video games and movies. These software puppets will enter a positive feedback loop as they are programmed to exploit human psychological weaknesses. In other words, when a virtual human becomes an effective sales machine for, say, life insurance or securities, they will have achieved the ROI.

The second stream is animatronics. The word, coined by Disney, is about making mechatronic puppets which entertain us, i.e. Chuck E Cheese and Big Mouth Billy Bass. But animatronics is fairly expensive, and mainly used as Hollywood props in big-budget movies. The toy industry is capable of delivering inexpensive animatronics, from Chatty Cathy, Teddy Ruxpin and Furby to Robosapien and Pleo, but each one of these robot toys is a standalone success derived from cheap manufacturing and mass marketing, rather than the result of an ever-more capable practice. Nevertheless, I expect that eventually some kind of animatronic toy platform, like the animated Chimp and Elvis heads from Wowwee, will eventually "catch," and profits will drive efficiency until humanoid puppets are reasonably priced.

These two streams will then become symbiotic, where the best salesbot software running on inexpensive humanoid animatronics can start to displace human salespeople from car showrooms and furniture stores. But, these saledroids will still be empty puppets unless inhabited by low wage workers over broadband.

The third line has to identify and attack the core problem of AI, that sentient life forms are several orders of magnitude more complex than the most complicated systems designed and built by humans: Our Software. Building software using best engineering practices always bogs down between ten and one hundred million lines of code, before it becomes unmanageable by human corporations. Assume that a sentient animal mind would take tens of billions of lines of code, just like bodies are made of tens of billions of living cells cooperating to form a whole. In order to understand how nature could design systems of far greater complexity than human engineers, we must focus not on simulating human cognitive faculties, nor on trying to understand the brain, but on the process which can design such minds and brains.

Through work on evolutionary and co-evolutionary machine learning, we have identified missing principles of evolutionary theory as implemented computationally. We've developed systems which surpass human designs of sorting networks and cellular automata rules, shown how co-evolving robot bodies and brains could be automatically manufactured, and developed new incentive structures which can motivate a community of learners to become each other's teachers.

The third stream, sentience, I believe won't be programmed directly, but will be a result of successfully replicating how evolution has achieved an open-ended self-organizing process on a computationally universal substrate. Once sentience is achieved, it will happily reside, and earn a living selling used cars, in the aforementioned electronic puppets.

Technology in Education

There's a lot in science and technology to be optimistic about, as evidenced by the numerous responses to the question, but I'll focus on the role of technology in education.

Before I entered college, I had never been enrolled in a school. Some of my education was provided by books, magazines, museums, and the like, but I feel the most useful was provided by technology. I was in the first generation to grow up with the Web as a fact of life, and made use of online references and search engines every day to research topics in which I'd become interested. From early childhood, many of my questions were answered by a mix of university websites, ad-supported niche reference works, and charitable individuals sharing their own personal knowledge with the world. Today, Wikipedia alone provides peer-reviewed, freely contributed articles on over 1.5 million subjects, and Google indexed 25 billion items in 2005 (it no longer publishes the count). Almost any piece of knowledge known to man can now be located on the Web at the touch of a button.

New means of communication can also aid education. When I was 7, I emailed a science consultant whenever I had a question that I couldn't find a ready answer for on the Web — questions such as "Why don't the passengers in the Concorde hear a sonic boom?", and "Where can I find the Bohr model of every chemical element?" In 1999, during the week of my 8th birthday, I used email to first contact the author of a book I really liked (When Things Start to Think), who happened to be Neil Gershenfeld, now my faculty advisor. I probably wouldn't have bothered to write a formal letter, so if email didn't exist, my educational trajectory would have been entirely different. I was also mentored from many miles away by Ray Kurzweil, in a series of conversations enabled by email; this was another major influence on my life.

Computing is also a creative tool: it can be used to write essays (like this one), produce works of art (I've sold fractal-based art at local festivals), and write computer programs. Programming fascinated me from a very early age, but it wouldn't have kept my interest long if I didn't have access to a computer. I think that my experiences in programming may have been the most influential in my intellectual development: problem-solving and critical thinking are rewarded, math skills are enforced, and I even wrote programs to help teach me things, like an arithmetic drill I wrote in LOGO at age 5. I was also greatly aided throughout my college education in computer science by my earlier self-guided learning of many of the same concepts. Whereas I was taught 8 programming languages in college, I've learned over twice as many others on my own, and those were some of my most valuable and (so far) useful learning experiences.

Seymour Papert's constructionist theory best explains my personal experience with education: "Constructionism is built on the assumption that children will do best by finding ('fishing') for themselves the specific knowledge they need. Organized or informal education can help most by making sure they are supported morally, psychologically, materially, and intellectually in their efforts."

From this point of view, what holds back the education of children in the developing world isn't so much a lack of school-houses or qualified teachers, but a lack of access to technology and communications. Without the Internet, there's no good place for these children to "fish" for knowledge — the local elders probably don't have a Periodic Table of Elements on the hut wall.

But I'm optimistic because the unstoppable force of Nicholas Negroponte's charisma is now squarely facing off against this problem. He's convinced a dream team of technical, educational, and political leaders to spend lots of money and time working on it. His One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project shows no signs of failing, despite many reports to the contrary, and it's moving at a breakneck pace towards a future, not more than a decade or two off, when every child in the world - developing and developed — really does have a laptop. Imagining the possibilities is a start, but it seems like the OLPC team, driven by the constructionist theories, has developed a host of innovative hardware and software that really do promise to bring a useful and creative education to the world.

I'm optimistic because my lab, the Center for Bits and Atoms, with the aid of the NSF and other global organizations, is deploying "Fab Labs" — Fabrication Laboratories - all around the world, from Boston to the Midwest to rural India and a village north of the Arctic Circle. Fab Labs bring something that even the developed world lacks broad access to: cheap, easy fabrication of physical objects and custom electronics. With a set of inventory, machines and computers that totals roughly US$50,000, those who enter the lab can make wooden furniture, high-gain antennas, and even ~$10 "thinner clients" (terminals that connect over a variety of communications media to ~$1200 servers that support hundreds of users). These types of objects can be and are developed by local inventors, produced by oneself or in a "micro-VC" community business, and cost very little. Fab Labs are also another huge enabling factor for constructionist education; making things is one of the most useful and creative sorts of education.

Media artist Toshio Iwai, who was Artist-in-Residence at San Francisco's Exploratorium and wrote the video game Electroplankton, told a story that his mother took away all his toys when he was a small child and told him that he could only play with toys he made himself. Iwai credits that moment as a turning point in his life: from passive to active, consumer to creator. I'm optimistic that in the future, education will not take place in centralized Houses of Learning, places where students listen to lectures and then answer questions about them; that education will take place at construction sites, in art studios, in computing centers: places where useful and creative things are done. I'm optimistic that it will be a more useful and creative education that will produce more useful and creative people that will contribute, in turn, to a more useful and creative society.

The Joys Of Failing Enterprises

The good news where I come from, as a prisoner here in the American media business, is all about entropy. The massive and ridiculous systems that we've built to control and market expression and culture, with their dissipations of so many people's energy, are deteriorating and coming apart. Everyday the media—a much more vexing monolith than religion and God—takes another transforming step from consolidation and uniformity toward uncertainty and chaos. This is not just because new technologies are revolutionizing production and distribution—though that's no small part of this creative destruction—but as much because of the inevitable disorder and randomness of closed systems. What's optimistic is that so many strategists and consultants and bureaucrats and moguls have not been able to maintain control and have been shown to be as clueless as everybody else (this is true, come to think of it, not just at Time Warner and Viacom, but at the Pentagon). Breakdown can be a positive development.

Neuroscience Will Change Society

Some time ago I believed that a book could radically change society. I guess my belief was an extreme form of optimism. One of the books I thought could change society was Anti-Oedipus, the book that was written some thirty years ago by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychiatrist Felix Guattari. At some point, I can't even figure out when, I must have lost my belief in the power of books in changing society. But, the good news is that my belief is coming back. It is coming back in a slightly different form. What I am optimistic about is that neuroscience research will make our society a better one.

I spent the last 20 years doing neuroscience research. To make a long story short, a concept that emerges from recent neuroscience research is that humans are "wired for empathy". We have cells in our brains that make us understand each other in a simple, unmediated, automatic manner. But, if our neurobiology makes us wired for empathy, why is our world so full of atrocities?

The explanation for this apparent paradox is probably as follows. The neurobiological mechanisms that make us wired for empathy work at a pre-reflective, automatic, implicit level. Our societies are built on deliberate, reflective, explicit discourse. The two different levels of implicit and explicit mental processes rarely intersect; indeed there is evidence that they can often dissociate. This is probably why the massive belief systems—from religious to political ones—that operate at the deliberate, reflective level are able to divide us in such a powerful way even though our neurobiology should bring us together.

The good news is that the awareness of neurobiological mechanisms that make us wired for empathy is entering the public discourse through the activities of the third culture. This awareness won't go away and will seep through the reflective level of our mental processes. Indeed, people seem to have an intuitive understanding of how neural mechanisms for empathy work. It seems that people 'recognize' how their brain works, when they are told about it. People can finally articulate what they already 'knew' at a pre-reflective level. My optimism is that this explicit level of understanding of our empathic nature will at some point dissolve the massive belief systems that dominate our societies and that threaten to destroy us.

A Knowable Gaian Mind

There will be an amazing new discovery in physics on a par with the discovery of radio waves or the discovery of nuclear reactions. This new discovery will involve a fuller understanding of the level of reality that lies "below" the haze of quantum mechanics—suppose we call this new level the domain of the subdimensions.

Endless free energy will flow from the subdimensions. And, by using subdimensional shortcuts akin to what is now called quantum entanglement, we'll become able to send information over great distances with no energy cost. In effect the whole world can become linked like a wireless network, simply by tapping into the subdimensional channel.

This universal telepathy will not be limited to humans; it will extend to animals, plants, and even ordinary objects. Via the subdimensions you'll be able to see every object in the world. Conversely, every object in the world will be in some limited sense conscious, in that it will be aware of all the other objects in the world.

A useful corollary is that any piece of brute matter will be a computer just as it is. That is, once we can reach into the inner self of an object, we'll become able to program the behavior of things like rocks or log—without our having to attach any kind of microprocessor as an intermediary.

Humans will communicate at a vastly enhanced level. Presently I communicate an idea by broadcasting a string of words that serves as a program for reconstructing one of my thoughts. Once we enjoy subdimensional telepathy, I can simply send you a link to the location of some particular idea in my head.

Machines will fade away and, in particular, digital computers will be no more. The emerging interactions of Earth's telepathically communicating beings will become a real and knowable Gaian mind. And then we will become aware of the other higher minds in our cosmos.

Humankind Is Particularly Good At Muddling

I am a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist. History is on my side for the cause of today’s fashionable pessimism lies much deeper than the unpleasant surprises of the last half-decade. In fact, both our pessimism and the rise of fundamentalisms that so bedevil global society at the moment share a common source—the year 2000 and the roll-over into this century. The approach of each New Year inevitably, predictably, causes us to look back and wonder what lies ahead.  It is no coincidence that you pose the annual Edge Question in December and not July.

Moreover, contemplation of the New Year amplifies our predispositions; pessimists become more certain that things are falling apart, while optimists see greater hope than ever. Opinion inevitably clusters at the extremes. This tendency is amplified by the number of zeros in the year to come. Decade ends affect the zeitgeist for a year or two, while century endings reverberate for 10 years or more, as demonstrated by the impact of the Fin de siècle a hundred years ago.

We have less experience with millennium roll-overs, but we are learning fast.  With perfect hindsight, the influence of the approaching millennium can be seen throughout the 1990s and even earlier. Millennial anxieties contributed in no small part to the rise of religious fundamentalism, while millennially-inflated hopes encouraged the touchingly innocent optimism overlaid atop the internet revolution and emergent globalization.

Inevitably, the greatest impact of our calendric angst occurs after the triggering date has passed. The year 2000 is still affects—perhaps even dominates—the zeitgeist today. Eschatologically-obsessed believers like Muqtada al-Sadr stand astride events in Iraq, convinced by the calendar that the Madhi redeemer will finally reveal himself. Closer to home, an astonishingly large population of Americans are equally convinced that the Apocalypse will arrive at any moment, and there is little doubt that fundamentalist apocalyptic beliefs directly affect US policy. There also is no shortage of millennially-inspired optimists (some whose answers are on this site) confident that the wonder machines of science and technology will allow us to live forever, power our devices with puffs of hydrogen, banish terrorism, and usher in a new age of human understanding and world peace.

I am a short-term pessimist because the Millennium is still clouding our collective thinking and may yet inspire the addled few to try something truly stupid, like an act of mega-terror or a nuclear exchange between nations. But I am a long-term optimist because the influence of the Millennium is already beginning to fade. We will return to our moderate senses as the current uncertainties settle into a comprehensible new order. I am an unshakable optimist because in its broadest strokes, the future will be what the future has always been, a mix of challenges, marvels and endless surprise. We will do what we have always done and muddle our collective way through. Humankind is particularly good at muddling, and that is what makes me most optimistic of all.

The Ever Awaited Super-Collider

Because ~3.5 Billion CHF [and I don't know exactly how many FTEs for how many years of how many experts and indeed in many disciplines of science, construction and technology] later [and yes we can debate the exact number, however as Jack Sandweiss taught me, "big" money for science is just a perception really] we are getting there. Where "there" is the ever awaited super-collider. A machine that attracts the imagination and intellectual focus of physicists and people at large alike. Being built under the Jura on the border of Switzerland and France the Large Hadron Collider is a serious reason of optimism for experimental science. It is the first time that the human exploration and technology will offer reproducible "hand-made" 14 TeV collisions of protons with protons. The physics of such interactions, the analysis of the data from the debris of these collisions [the highest energy such] are to be seen in the coming year.

And checking the LHC dashboard is an index of this optimism. In 2007-2008 we shall be bringing up and running the LHC and its experiments (CMS,ATLAS, LHCb,ALICE to name the largest ones) and analyzing the first data.

I, my colleagues, and you, have at least one unique reason to be optimistic.

The 22nd Century

I am optimistic about many things, especially the future. Just last week I met a number of people from the 22nd century, and they were delightful.

We smiled and giggled together a lot but none of them seemed to speak a word of English. Even their Japanese was not so great just yet. But demographic analysis tell us that many of those little girls I saw in Kyoto will end up as citizens of the next century.

I am optimistic that even if none of the people I just met do so, then at least someone who is already alive will be the first person to make their permanent home off-Earth. And next century my new young acquaintances will go to sleep at night on Earth knowing that humankind has spread itself out into the solar system. Some people will have done it for wealth. Others, driven by our evolutionarily selected urges, will have done it to once again mediate risks across our gene pool by spreading out to different environmental niches. But the wonder of it all is that those now old, but sprightly, women in Kyoto will be able to revel in the romance of the human spirit, always questing to learn, understand, explore, and be.

Is this really going to happen this century? Really.

Government space programs in China, Europe, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States, have all in recent months talked about their plans for the moon during the first quarter of this century. There is a new government-backed space race, less agitated than the last, but more likely to produce sustainable technologies.

And then there are the billionaires and billionaire-lites. Richard Branson has teamed with aircraft design maverick Burt Rutan (who won the Ansari X Prize with SpaceShipOne funded by billionaire Paul Allen) to develop the world's first space airline, Virgin Galactic. They plan on putting 500 people per year into suborbital space. There are other suboribital and orbital space competitors (and collaborators), including Rocketplane Kistler, Space Adventures, and Benson Space Company, all driven by charismatic individuals. PayPal principal Elon Musk, through his company SpaceX, has developed the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 vehicles and had his first launch, with a backlog of paying customers. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is less public about his plans, but his company Blue Origins has been getting FAA licenses for low altitude tests of a vertical take off and landing system at his Texas ranch. And there is no shortage of other high tech billionaires who have expressed interest in space ventures, and may well be investing in some not yet announced. And while all these efforts are building hardware for launches from Earth there are starting to be serious discussions of start ups for companies which will provide higher order services, including shipping asteroids to new orbits to deliver rocket fuel to paying customers. These are the first little nano-steps of solar system engineering towards the ultimate of a Dyson sphere of mankind's very own.

In the current activities there are obvious analogies with heavier than air flight in the early twentieth century, and look where that, with the help of a couple of world wars, got us in that century. There is no longer a mono or duo culture for access to space and planetary bodies—certainly a reason to be optimistic about this second wave of access to space. If this wave does eventually sputter like the last we still have plenty of time for a third wave during the lifetimes of my Kyoto friends. The key drivers will turn out to be either military or economic or, most likely, both. Just as in 1907 the economics of heavier than air flight were not obvious, we are still struggling in 2007 with the economics of this new endeavor. But that too will come and will be the ultimate driver.

By the beginning of the twenty second century mankind will have significantly raised the probability of its long term survival by spreading its genetic material beyond Earth. That genetic material may be significantly modified from the current model but that is another and different story. The point is that we will have spread ourselves to more than one little tiny ball in our solar system, and will continue to step to other systems and throughout the galaxy over subsequent centuries.

As for the coming events of this century there may not be a Gion but there will be bars on Mars and over time they will gather their own histories and legends as stories are told and re-told. And, just perhaps, one of my peek-a-boo playmates will be one of the great actors in the derring-dos and swashbuckling courage under pressure that will surely be part of the coming adventures.

The Creation As Well As Consumption of Scientific Knowledge Will Be Potentially Accessible To Anyone

I'm optimistic about the prospects for science to become a much more broadly participatory activity rather than today's largely spectator sport.

Success as a scientist is certainly limited by interest and ability, but it also requires access to the accumulated body of scientific knowledge and to the means to practice it. I've found the former to be much more widely distributed than the latter; until recently, becoming a successful scientist usually required becoming a member of an elite technical institution.

It's considered axiomatic that smart people like to surround themselves with smart people. But the reality at a place like MIT is that we're all so time-stressed and multi-tasked we rarely have time to do anything unscheduled; many of my closest collaborations are with people who are far away. Two technological changes now provide an opportunity to revisit the boundary between being on and off of a campus.

The first is research on digital fabrication that is leading to much more accessible means for making and measuring things. With $50k in infrastructure, a fab lab can now do experimental work in the field that would have been hard to do at MIT when I first arrived there. And the second is the emergence of broadband videoconferencing and software for project and knowledge management that can make remote collaborations as convenient as local ones.

Together, these are leading to the emergence of technical training and research projects that are fundamentally distributed rather than based on remote or centralized access to scarce resources. Instead of scientific careers being gated by room in classes, and headcount numbers, and limited lab space, and editorial fashions, and overhead rates, they can be bounded by a much more interesting resource, the availability of ideas.

I expect that scientific productivity will always be very non-uniformly distributed, with disproportionate contributions from a small number of remarkable people, but the sample size for finding and fostering those people can be improved by a few billion or so. There's a grand feedback loop ready to be closed, between the content and organization of scientific invention. Many of today's most compelling new questions are still tackled with old institutional models; it's ironic that religion has had its Reformation but that the role of a research university would be recognizable to a medieval monk. The future that I'm optimistic about is one in which the creation as well as consumption of scientific knowledge is potentially accessible to anyone.

Evidence

As schoolchildren, we learn that different weights fall at the same speed. This simple and readily tested observation, first published by Galileo, refuted Aristotle, who claimed that heavy things fall faster. As Galileo put it in Two New Sciences "I greatly doubt that Aristotle ever tested by experiment whether it be true..." We are left to wonder how people could have believed what they were told, and for two millennia at that, without ever checking? Surely the power of evidence over authority is obvious.

Except it isn't. Even today, evidence has barely begun to upend authority; the world is still more in thrall to Aristotle than Galileo. As a simple example, the time-honored advice for those suffering from bad backs has been bed rest. Only recently, though, have we discovered bed rest isn't the best treatment, and isn't even particularly good compared to moderate activity. How did this discovery come about? A researcher in the field of Evidence-based Medicine surveyed multiple databases of trials and results for patients with back pain. (It tells us something about medicine's current form that we even need a term like Evidence-based Medicine.) And why did it take so long to look at the evidence? Same reason it took so long to question Aristotle: some doctor in the distant past reasoned that bed rest would be a good idea, and it became the authoritative and little-questioned view.

In school, the embrace of evidence is often taught as if it were a one-time revolution that has now been internalized by society. It hasn't. The idea of evidence is consistently radical: Take nothing on faith. No authority is infallible. If you figure out a good way to test something, you can contradict hallowed figures with impunity.

Evidence will continue to improve society, but slowly — this is long-view optimism. The use of evidence dragged the curious mind from the confusion of alchemy into the precision of chemistry in the historical blink of an eye, but its progress past the hard sciences has been considerably slower. Even accepting that evidence should shape our views is inconsistent with much human behavior. Everything from the belief in supernatural beings to deference to elders pushes against the idea that a single person, if he or she comes to understand the evidence, should be allowed to upend a millennium of cherished human belief.

It is only in the last hundred years that evidence has even begun spreading from the hard sciences into other parts of human life. Previous platitudes about the unpredictability or universal plasticity of human behavior are giving way to areas of inquiry with names like Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Behavioral Economics. (That we need a label like Behavioral Economics says as much about economics as Evidence-based Medicine does about medicine.) As reliance on evidence spreads, it takes with it an understanding of how it works. Apologists for religion often bolster their claims by noting that it is impossible to disprove the existence of supernatural beings. This argument assumes that their listeners don't understand how evidence works — it makes sense to believe in things for which there is evidence, and no sense to believe in things for which there is none. As evidence moves out of the lab and into everywhere else, rhetorical tricks like that are going to be progressively less effective. There will still be fundamentalists, of course — probably more of them, as improved evidence requires a heightened ability to shield the mind — but the oxymoronic middle ground of 'religious but reasonable' will become progressively harder to occupy.

This isn't just about religion, though. Most of the really important parts of our lives ·who we love and how, how we live and why, why we lie and when — have yet to yield their secrets to real evidence. We will see a gradual spread of things like evidence-based politics and law — what is the evidence that this expenditure, or that proposed bill, will have the predicted result? The expectation that evidence can answer questions about the structure of society will discomfit every form of government that relies on sacrosanct beliefs. Theocracy and communism are different in many ways, but they share the same central bug — they are based on some set of assertions that must remain beyond question.

Social science is expanding because we are better about gathering data and about understanding it. We have gone from a drought to a flood of data about personal and social behavior in the last generation. We will learn more about the human condition in the next two decades years than we did in the last two millennia, and we will then begin to apply what we learn, everywhere. Evidence-based treaties. Evidence-based teaching. Evidence-based industrial design. Evidence-based parenting.

There will always be some questions we can't answer, but they will be closer in spirit to "Who put the bomp in the bomp-bah-bomp-bah-bomp?" than to "Why do fools fall in love?" There is an astonishing amount of work going on on that latter question right now, and there's a reasonable chance we'll have a really good answer, to it and to thousands of other questions once thought to be beyond study or explanation, in the coming years.

The Future Of Science

I am optimistic about the future of science. After all, science as Mankind’s systematic endeavour of understanding Nature is only a few hundred years old. To believe that we have discovered the essentials of understanding Nature in such a short time is a sign of either arrogance or lack of fantasy. So far science is guided by the, in my eyes fallacious, Cartesian cut between res cogitans and res extensa. It is wrong to believe that the world out there exists independent of our observation. But it is equally wrong to believe that it exists only because of our observation.  We have to and we will find a completely new way of looking at the world which will fully transcend our present materialistic paradigm. After all, we have learned in quantum physics that all concepts of material existence evaporate. In the end we are left with probability fields, probabilities of the results of observations. I am convinced that in science we have just started to scratch the surface. Our understanding of the world will be radically different from the understanding we have today.

I am optimistic about the future of religion. We will learn to shed the unessential dogmas, rules, definitions, prejudices which have been collected by the religions over centuries and millennia. We will learn that they have been created out of feelings of insecurity, out of an innate need of mankind to define and understand even the undefinable and ununderstandable. I am convinced that in all major religions we will discover the essentials of what it means to be human in this world. We will succeed in convincing church leaders and religious leaders to be more audacious and to open up to other views of the world and to rely less on what they perceive to be their own access to truth.

The present battle between science and religion will some day be seen as a battle between two positions where neither one is justified even from their own perspective. Science will never be able to prove that God does not exist and religion will learn that its essence is far deeper than ephemeral questions like whether we were created by evolution or not. I believe that some day we will arrive at a coherent view of the world which will transcend both what today we call science and what today we call religion.

I am optimistic about the future of technology. Here too we have hardly scratched the surface. With quantum information technology, mankind for the first time is entering a field of technology which, by all we know today, has not been used by Nature in evolution. I am convinced that most of the technology of the future will be of that kind. New ideas will be created and new technologies will be invented which only could come into existence because we invented them. There is no other road to making them happen.

I believe in the future of mankind. As long as there are children, as long as there are people who look up to the night sky in sheer wonder, as long as there is music, and poetry, and the Mona Lisa, and old monasteries, and young artists, and fledgling scientists and all the other expressions of mankind’s creativity, I will remain optimistic.

The Rise of Usability

I am optimistic that the values and principles of good user interface design will increasingly be practiced by technology designers and expected by technology users.

The design of a computer user interface can influence whether the outcome of an election is fair, a patient receives the right medicine, or a helicopter pilot makes a safe landing. Perhaps even more importantly, when technology is designed to mesh well with how people think and how they want to live, then it enhances and enriches their lives. Poorly designed interfaces that treat people inhumanely can contribute to the feelings of apprehension that people often associate with our technology-saturated world.

Good interface design is currently more of a practice than a science, although the field of human-computer interaction makes use of results from cognitive science and relevant branches of psychology where applicable. The rise of the World Wide Web has accelerated advances in and understanding of usability, for main two reasons. First, before the web, most complex computer interfaces were visible only to those who could afford to purchase the expensive software packages. Most users would not see more than one design for a given application. The web, in yet another example of its leveling effect, allows nearly everyone to see nearly every interface. Thus designers can learn rapidly from what others have done, and users can see if one web site's experience is substandard compared to others. Second, the default setting for web pages and browsers allows designers to freely see the source code behind each web page, and thus learn from one another how to code the best designs. The rise of the web has increased consumer demand and awareness of good design, and in my observation has increased the perceived value of user interface design within computer science departments.

Unfortunately, misguided views about usability still cause significant damage in today's world. In the 2000 U.S. elections, poor ballot design led thousands of voters in Palm Beach, Florida to vote for the wrong candidate, thus turning the tide of the entire presidential election. At the time, some observers made the ignorant claim that voters who could not understand the Palm Beach butterfly ballot were not bright enough to vote. I wonder if people who made such claims have never made the frustrating "mistake" of trying to pull open a door that requires pushing. Usability experts see this kind of problem as an error in the design of the door, rather than a problem with the person trying to leave the room.

It appears that some Florida election officials did not learn the lessons of the 2000 election. In the Sarasota County, Florida election of 2006, evidence suggests that poor design of an electronic ballot led to massive under voting. One in seven voters did not mark any choice in a hotly contested congressional race that was decided by fewer than 400 votes. Usability mistakes similar to those in Palm Beach were repeated in Sarasota. But it is unfair to expect election officials to be experts in usability and information design; rather what is lacking is a general recognition that an understanding of how people think and use technology is integral to ballot design and fair elections. Just as computer experts design and maintain the e-voting machines, usability experts should assess all ballot designs before they are released to the public. And in the future we may well see automated usability checkers, akin to grammar checkers in word processors, for applications such as ballot design.

Ballot design is just one example for which interface design matters. There is ample evidence that good design reduces errors and increases enjoyment of the use of technology. Fortunately, an appreciation of the importance of good design for human use of technology is experiencing an increasingly widening scope.

A New, Environmentally Sustainable Worldview

Given the current array of critical environmental woes—global warming, habitat loss, and species extinctions, among others—one might assume that there is little room for optimism.  Nevertheless, I am optimistic, albeit cautiously so, about a profound shift in human attitudes toward the environment. 

The current worldview in the Western world is a reductionist perspective that has been dominant for over 300 years.  Founded by scientists such as Descartes, Newton, Galileo, and Bacon, reductionism regards the natural world as a series of machines best understood by ever-more detailed examination of constituent parts.  This mechanistic approach has generated a plethora of scientific breakthroughs—quantum theory, genetics, high-speed computers, and the germ theory of disease, to name a few—with each intoxicating success fueling ever-more intense investigation of nature's components.  Yet it has also fostered a fundamental division between humans and the natural world, with the former envisioned as dominating the latter.

Moreover, the Cartesian perspective on nature has proven to have severe limitations within science.  In particular, because of a myopic focus on the parts, little attention has been given to connections and relationships, let alone wholes.  In response to this perceived gap in understanding, many disciplines have recently turned to a 'systems' approach that often unites once separate disciplines.  Thus, there has been an ever-growing emphasis on interdisciplinary research, with, for example, geobiology and biocomplexity becoming legitimate fields of study.  Simultaneously, many educators have begun to direct their efforts toward revealing the "web of life," including the myriad connections that link the living and non-living aspects of nature. 

The underlying themes of the outdated, mechanistic perspective are isolation and permanence, with objects perceived as relatively permanent and distinct from one another.  In contrast, the new worldview celebrates the opposite concepts: connections and change.  And once again there is a firm grounding in science, which has demonstrated that natural systems are inextricably interconnected and continually undergoing change (particularly if one's perspective includes deep time). 

Thanks in part to a global economy and the World Wide Web, the mantra of this new movement—"It is all connected"—has even made its way into the popular media.  At a slow but increasing pace, people are becoming aware that their everyday decisions can have far-reaching, even global, effects.  Surely there is hope and optimism to be found in the many recent movements toward sustainability, even if most of these efforts remain on a small scale. 

Nevertheless, any optimism with regard to a growing environmental consciousness must be tempered with a double dose of reality.  First, environmental changes are occurring at rates that are entirely unknown in human experience.  To give just one case in point, the rate of species extinctions is about 1000 times greater than has been typical in earth history.  Indeed the current human-induced mass extinction is on track to obliterate on the order of one half of all species on earth by the close of this century, with unpredictable (and perhaps unimaginable) ecological consequences.  Thus, we have little time to make this transformational leap.  The next few decades will be pivotal. 

Second, the transition to a sustainable worldview will not occur simply through a sufficiently heightened fear of environmental collapse.  No, such a fundamental shift will require no less than a transformation of our educational system, not only K-12 but higher education as well.  We must equip parents and educators with the tools to be effective not only in communicating the science of natural systems, but also in fostering passion for nature ("biophilia", to use E. O. Wilson's term).  By necessity, this process will involve getting children outdoors early and often, so that they have a chance to forge bonds with nature.  First and foremost, education should be aimed at teaching children and adults how to live well in the world.  Ultimately, in order for this pressing venture to be successful, scientists must become directly involved, communicating science to a broad audience at unprecedented levels.  In other words, "Third Culture" must step up and take on a major role in this endeavor.

The Globalization Of Higher Education

Having just returned from a visit to universities in India with which Tufts has partnerships, I am optimistic about the future of higher education, in part because it is becoming more global.

National borders can no longer contain the most serious problems the world faces, be they economic, environmental, health-related, or political. Through education and research, universities play key roles in addressing these problems.

In order to take on these challenges, people must understand the world beyond their respective nations. This requires that universities provide curricular and travel opportunities to learn about other countries. It also requires that universities recruit a critical mass of students from abroad; the presence of international students contributes to the international education of all students, because learning from peers is as important as learning from a formal curriculum.

I am optimistic that colleges and universities around the world will take these challenges seriously and respond in enterprising ways to optimize the world's intellectual capital.

The U.S. is at the short end of a global knowledge asymmetry: on average, college students in the U.S. have less knowledge about other nations and cultures than their counterparts have about the U.S. Our colleges and universities are acting to compensate for this asymmetry by strengthening curricular offerings and active learning experiences that are internationally focused.

Amidst the discussion of the recent report of the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, little attention has been paid to the report's call for "greater emphasis on international education". The report correctly points out that "the need to produce a globally literate citizenry is critical to the nation's continued success in the global economy". However, higher education should equip us not only to seize the economic opportunities afforded by globalization, but also to navigate an increasingly interconnected, crowded and dangerous world. We fail to understand other cultures at our peril.

In partial recognition of this, earlier this year the Bush Administration launched the National Security Language Initiative (NSLI) to "dramatically increase the number of Americans learning critical need language skills", focusing on Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Farsi and other central Asian languages. While NSLI is a welcome initiative, the funding is exclusively for language instruction. Yet the ability to engage beyond national boundaries also requires cultural fluency. Cultural fluency involves knowledge of history, politics, religion, literature and the arts. It involves knowledge of gesture, nuance and context necessary to avoid misunderstanding. Fortunately, although the vision of NSLI is restricted to languages, colleges and universities are already creating more expansive programs for international learning.

For any nation, recruiting students from overseas evokes mixed feelings. As we seek to advance the globalization of higher education, we must dispel two myths about the influx of international students.

One is the brain drain myth, according to which the countries of origin are being robbed of talent. Take the case of the large numbers of graduate students recruited from India over the past three or so decades—mostly in science and engineering. The dire warnings about a brain drain have proven false. These expatriate Indians have helped fuel India's emerging economy by leveraging their American training and global experience. This group also has formed a bridge between India and the U.S. that is providing the two countries with new economic opportunities as well as a stable political relationship. We are all better off when talent is realized to its fullest—even if it crosses borders.

The global matching of talent with opportunity is not limited to science and Engineering. The great American conservatories of music are filled with students of Japanese, Chinese and Korean descent, as are the stages of our concert halls.

A second myth about the movement of students across borders is that the host country bears a net cost. If we continue with the example of American universities recruiting Indian graduate students in science and engineering, the truth is that the host nation is getting a bargain. Arguably the most selective science talent search in the world is the entrance examination for the undergraduate programs at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). American graduate programs in science and engineering—as well as American industry—have long relied on this selection process and have skimmed off the top of the IIT graduating classes in order to meet the U.S. economy's demand for scientists and engineers. The IIT is funded by the Indian government, so we in the U.S. are cashing in on scientific talent selected and trained at the expense of the Indian taxpayer, who in turn gets a return on this investment as mentioned above.

A similar story can be told about medical education. In some of the best private medical schools in India, medical education is subsidized by clinical revenue (from patients). Graduates from these programs (recruited to the U.S. to meet a growing demand for doctors, post-docs in the life sciences, and other health professionals) have had their training subsidized by healthcare consumers in India.

In an interesting twist on globalization, some Indians are going to China to study medicine because of the shortage of medical school seats in India. Medical education (particularly clinical training) in the U.S. is becoming prohibitively expensive—for students, medical schools and teaching hospitals—even as the demand for doctors and other healthcare professionals soars. Countries like India and China, with large numbers of patients and rapid growth in the hospital sector, are likely to become destinations for clinical training.

The American-born children of the Indian students who were recruited to graduate programs in the first wave several decades ago are now represented disproportionately in the student bodies of the top American colleges and universities. Experienced at negotiating between two cultures, this generation is contributing to the internationalization of the educational experience on campus. From Bollywood music to Bhangra dancing, our campuses are becoming incubators of cross-cultural knowledge.

Knowledge knows no national borders, and learning shouldn't either. Institutions of higher learning are taking the lead in reaching across nations to prepare global citizens and leaders for a world in which cultures are more interwoven than ever before.

Our Civilisation Will Survive the Coming Climate Catastrophe

I am optimistic that our civilisation will survive the coming climate catastrophe.

A few years ago I was less so. I thought that the climate might just continue heating up until humans could no longer live on earth at all. Since then, watching the rapidly advancing climate science from outside, I now think it possible that the climate will shift into a new stable state. This may not be ideal for humanity, and billions of people may die through drought and starvation, but if there are at least some areas where people can still survive, then our culture will continue evolving during and beyond this crisis point.

Such crisis points may be a regular feature of any planet where life evolves. Imagine that a planet forms and cools, chemical reactions begin, and at some point a self-replicating molecule appears, producing lots of copies that compete to survive. More complex molecules outperform simpler ones, groups with membranes outperform isolated replicators and, with more variation and more materials to use, the process speeds up until complex organisms appear. This beautifully inevitable process may have happened zillions of times all over the universe—or maybe very few times. All we know for sure is that something like this happened on our planet and this first evolutionary step produced the DNA replication mechanism and an abundance of life.

A second step then becomes possible. That is, the organisms find new ways of copying information. This creates a second replicator and starts another evolutionary process, building on the first. This happened on earth when just one species, humans, became able to imitate each others' behaviour with sufficiently high fidelity to create a new replicator, memes. These memes (the behaviours, habits, and skills that were copied) evolved slowly at first and then faster and faster, creating our languages, social institutions, and complex culture.

I think this step to a second replicator is intrinsically very dangerous. The new replicator is like a parasite that uses its host's resources to get itself copied. As with any parasite, the balance can tip either way. The parasite may kill its host and itself die in the process, or both may pull through and coevolve to become symbiotic. We have no idea whether there were failures on other planets, or failures on earth before we humans began to imitate. Perhaps the Neanderthals, or other hominids, tried the experiment and failed—their memes were too destructive. Perhaps completely different species tried it and failed. All we know for sure is that we pulled through and coevolved along with our memes so that now we cannot live without them. A human without language or culture is hardly human at all.

But then a third step becomes possible—and it is another dangerous one. As memetic evolution accelerates, new and more efficient ways of copying and storing memes are invented, and the original, biological meme machines are left behind. Their messy, inaccurate copying, and their largely analogue memes, are no match for the more accurate and prolific copying of the new meme machines; printing presses, factories, fax machines, tape recorders and eventually digital systems that not only copy and store memes but recombine and select them as well.

That is the stage we have reached now on earth. The artificial systems we have built still depend on us, and would perish with us if we all died, but they are evolving far faster than we are, and are taking up the planet's resources in the process.

Some people still maintain the fantasy that we humans are in charge and can still control the memes we have let loose. Yet it must be increasingly obvious that we can't; that they are in the driving seat, not us. They are sucking up the planet's resources increasingly fast and, being selfish replicators, they have no foresight and don't care in the least what happens to us or the planet; they can't, they are just replicating information. So we are hovering at this second danger point right now.

Perhaps this critical point has been reached on countless planets and none pulled through—perhaps acquiring new replicators is so dangerous that memes (or their equivalents) always wipe out the original replicator that spawned them, explaining why we have not yet heard from any other intelligent beings out there. Or perhaps it is possible to for an intelligent species to work out what has happened, repair the damage and live in harmony with the creatures it unwittingly gave rise to.

I think it is, and I am optimistic that we will.

The End of the Commoditization of Knowledge

Fifteen years ago I was asked to join the board of editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. In short order, I learned that these editors saw themselves as guardians of knowledge. They knew what was true and what was important and only knowledge that fit those criteria would be in their encyclopedia. I asked if the encyclopedia could be say, ten times bigger, economic issues aside, and they said  ‘no' the right information was already in there. I started to explain that the world as they knew it was going to change before their eyes and they would soon be toast, but they didn't understand.

I have had similar conversation with newspaper editors, librarians, heads of testing services, and with faculty at top universities. Like the Britannica folks, they see themselves as knowing what is true and what is not and what is important and what is not.

I am optimistic that this is soon all about to change.

What I mean by ‘this' is the era that we have lived in, ever since the invention of the book, but clearly including the era where knowledge was contained in scrolls. In this era, knowledge is a commodity, owned and guarded by the knowledge elite and doled out by them in various forms that they control, like books, and, newspapers, and television, and schools. They control who can get access to the knowledge (through admission to elite schools for example) and exactly what knowledge matters (through SATs but also through intellectual publications that true knowledge owners would be embarrassed to have failed to have read.)

We are beginning to see the change in all this now. If anyone can take Harvard's courses on line then one wonders why one has to go to Harvard. Elite universities have struggled with this new world, but eventually people will take whatever course they want from whomever they want and a real competition about quality will take place.

We no longer have only three TV networks, so more points of view are available, but the cost of running a TV station is still high and there are barriers to entry and there is still the idea that a TV station broadcasts all day even if it has nothing to say. Soon this too will disappear. You tube is just they beginning.

Today print media is being challenged by on line material, but it is still prestigious to publish a book and newspapers still exist. More importantly, schools still exist. But they are all going away soon. There is no need to buy knowledge when it available for free, as newspapers are learning. When everyone has a blog and a website, the question will be whose information is reliable and how to find it. No one will pay a dime. Knowledge will cease to be a commodity.

I consider this to be a very good thing. I believe that those who own and dispense knowledge have turned off at last one and maybe more generations of thinkers to believe that all the important ideas are known and it is sad that you just don't know them. Religions have operated on this principle of knowing what is in the sacred scrolls for a very long time. Schools have acted similarly. Soon no one will be able to claim they know what is true because people will be able  to create debates for themselves. Google has helped make this happen already but you ain't seen nothin' yet.

You may want to pay for the knowledge of someone who you believe to be very valuable to help you in doing something that you want to do, but that kind of knowledge will acquired ‘just in time,' sort of the way consultants operate today, but for everyone and there will be hundreds of thousand of choices.

More importantly the size of information will change. Today the size is a book or an article or a lecture or a course, But soon it will be a sound bite (or a paragraph.). Yes — those terrible sound bites which the owners of knowledge like to complain about. Nuggets of knowledge will win because they always have won. People used to have conversations, sound bite followed by sound bite, directed towards a mutual goal held by the conversationalists. This will soon be possible on line. You will able to start a conversation with (an electronic version of ) anyone who wants to offer this service. We will be able to get information in the size that we got it thousands of years ago — in a size that we can process and respond to. No more blank-eyed listeners as people ramble on. Information will find us and we will express our thoughts back. Knowledge will mostly be free and the owners of knowledge will need to go into another line of work. Knowledge will cease to be a controlled commodity.

We Will Lead Healthy and Productive Lives Well Past Our Tenth Decade

I am optimistic that by the middle of this century, it will not be uncommon for people to lead healthy and productive lives well past their tenth decade. This means that the high school kids of today who believe they will be forever young might well have their fantasy fulfilled, albeit in modified form. My optimism is based on three factors. 

First, there is a clear trend for life spans in developed countries to be getting progressively longer; so-called senior citizens are now engaging in activities previously reserved for those yet to reach what was once considered middle age. The current mantra that today's 60 is the 35 of previous generations is more than just advertising hype. The reasons for this are complex, but certainly the psychological state of the today's seniors — their refusal to simply accept old age — is a prime contributor.

The other two factors fueling my optimism stem from recent advances in biomedical sciences that offer not just hope, but a virtual guarantee, that we'll soon be living longer and better lives. What are those recent advances? They come from two major research fronts.

There are some very exciting results showing that manipulations of basic cellular functions can prolong longevity. The literature on this topic is too extensive to summarize here, but one example will suffice. A molecule produced by a variety of plants called resveratrol (think red wine) has been found to significantly improve the lifespan of many different organisms, as much as by 59%, and this even occurs in obese animals! The significance of the latter point is that until recently it was thought that the only way to increase longevity is by going on a strict starvation diet, but now it seems that you can eat your cake and expand your lifespan!

The other relevant scientific breakthroughs come from neurobiology, my field of expertise. We used to think that with age there is a progressive deterioration in brain cell structure and function. But that widespread assumption has proved wrong. New nerve cells have been found to be generated in the brains of old animals, and we're learning more and more how this amazing property of the aged brain can be manipulated. Low levels of regular exercise, for instance, have been found to significantly enhance neurogenesis in the hippocampus, a brain structure that deals with memory. Moreover, a recent study from my laboratory showed that certain nerve cells in the eyes of old mice are capable of growing new processes. We have also found such growth of nerve cells in the eyes of old people. And then there is the tremendous promise of stem cell research that is still in its infancy for replacing damaged or dysfunctional body organs. 

Taken together, the implications of these and many other findings in the biomedical sciences are clear. We will be able to regenerate parts of the brain that have been worn out or damaged during the course of a lifetime, providing renewed capabilities to those who are currently considered old folks. So better start thinking what you'll be doing with all those extra years of life.

Growing Older

I am very optimistic about growing older. I turned 60 this year and several decades ago I would have looked forward to a steady decline in all my physical and mental capabilities, leading into a long and messy death. The accelerating pace of biological and medical advances that are unfolding in front of us are heavily focused on reducing the infirmities of aging and curing or transforming the diseases of old age from fatal to chronic. It means that ninety really will be the new sixty and there is a good chance that I will be among the vigorous new centenarians of mid century, with most of my faculties working fairly well. Vision, hearing, memory, cognition, bone and muscle strength, skin tone, hair and of course sexual vigor will all be remediable in the near future. Alzheimer's may be curable and most cancers are likely to be treatable if not curable. And regenerative medicine may truly lead to real increase in youthfulness as new custom grown organs replace old less functional ones. And within a few decades we are likely to be able to slow aging itself, which could even lead to life beyond 120.

We Are Making Moral Progress

No one has ever mistaken me for an optimist. And yet, when I consider what is perhaps the most pristine source of pessimism—the moral development of our species—I find reasons for hope. Despite our perennial mischief, I believe that we have made unmistakable progress in our morality. Our powers of empathy appear to be growing. We seem to be more likely now than at any point in our history to act for the benefit of humanity as a whole.  
    
Of course, the 20th century delivered some unprecedented horrors. But those of us living in the developed world are becoming increasingly alarmed by our capacity to do one another harm. We are less tolerant of "collateral damage" in war—undoubtedly because we now see images of it—and we are less comfortable with ideologies that demonize whole groups of human beings, justifying their abuse or outright destruction.
     
Taking a somewhat provincial example: racism in the United States has unquestionably diminished. If you doubt this, consider the following Los Angeles Times editorial, written in 1910, in response Jack Johnson's successful heavyweight title defense against Jim Jeffries, the so-called "Great White Hope":

A Word to the Black Man:

Do not point your nose too high
Do not swell your chest too much
Do not boast too loudly
Do not be puffed up
Let not your ambition be inordinate
Or take a wrong direction
Remember you have done nothing at all
You are just the same member of society you were last week
You are on no higher plane
Deserve no new consideration
And will get none
No man will think a bit higher of you
Because your complexion is the same
Of that of the victor at Reno

A modern reader could be forgiven for thinking that this dollop of racist hatred was printed by the Ku Klux Klan. Rather, it represented the measured opinion of one of the most prominent newspapers in the United States. Is it conceivable that our mainstream media will once again give voice to such racism? I think it far more likely that we will proceed along our current path: racism will continue to lose its subscribers; the history of slavery in the United States will become even more flabbergasting to contemplate; and future generations will marvel at the ways we, too, failed in our commitment to the common good. We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.

I am bolstered in my optimism by the belief that morality is a genuine sphere of human inquiry, not a mere product of culture. Morality, rightly construed, relates to questions of human and animal suffering. This is why we don't have moral obligations toward inanimate objects (and why we will have such obligations toward conscious computers, if we ever invent them). To ask whether a given action is right or wrong is really to ask whether it will tend to create greater well-being, or greater suffering, for oneself and others. And there seems little doubt that there are right and wrong answers here. This is not to say that there will always be a single right answer to every moral question, but there will be a range of appropriate answers, as well as answers that are clearly wrong. Asking whether or not an action is good or bad may be like asking whether a given substance is "healthy" or "unhealthy" to eat: there are, of course, many foods that are appropriate to eat, but there is also a biologically important (and objective) distinction between food and poison.     
 
I believe that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions in the same way that there are right and wrong answers to questions about biology. This commits me to what philosophers often call "moral realism"—as opposed to anti-realism, pragmatism, relativism, post-modernism, or any other view that places morality entirely in the eye of the beholder. It is often thought that moral realism fails because it requires that moral truths exist independent of minds (it doesn't).  Indeed, this worry partly explains humanity's enduring attachment to religion: for many people believe that unless we keep our moral intuitions pegged to the gold-standard of God's law, we cannot say that anyone is ever right or wrong in objective terms. 
     
Consider the phenomenon of "honor-killing": throughout much of the Muslim world at this moment, women are thought to "dishonor" their families by refusing to enter into an arranged marriage, seeking a divorce, committing adultery—or even by getting raped. Women in these situations are often murdered by their fathers, husbands, or brothers, sometimes with the collaboration of other women. Is honor-killing wrong? I have no doubt that it is.  But is it really wrong?

There seems to be no question that we are wired in such a way that love is more conducive to happiness than hate, fear, and shame are. If this is true, honor-killing would be wrong even if a majority of human beings agreed that it was right. It would be wrong because this practice (along with the intentions that give rise to it) reliably diminishes human happiness: it creates immense suffering for women and girls; it conditions men to feel that their personal dignity is predicated upon something that it need not be predicated upon; it deranges the relationships between men and women, making them far less loving and compassionate (and therefore a lesser source of happiness) than they might otherwise be. While these are claims about human subjectivity, they are also, at bottom, objective claims about the real foundations of human happiness.   
   
All of this implies, of course, that morality is a potential branch of scientific inquiry—not merely that science will one day describe our moral judgments at the level of the brain, but that science may one day be able to tell us what is good (that is, it will tell us which psychological intentions and social practices are truly conducive to the deepest happiness).

Because I believe that moral truths transcend the contingencies of culture, I think that human beings will eventually converge in their moral judgments. I am painfully aware, however, that we are living in a world where Muslims riot by the hundreds of thousands over cartoons, where Catholics oppose condom use in villages decimated by AIDS, and where the only "moral" judgment that seems guaranteed to unite the better part of humanity at this moment is that homosexuality is wrong. Which is to say that I am here celebrating our moral progress while being convinced that billions of my neighbors are profoundly confused about good and evil.      
I may be a bigger optimist than I thought.

THE RETURN OF COMMERCIAL SAIL

I am optimistic about the return of commercial sail. Hybrid sail/electric vessels will proliferate by harvesting energy from the wind.

Two near-inexhaustible energy sources—sunlight and the angular momentum of the rotating earth—combine, via the atmosphere, to produce the energy flux we know as wind. We have two well-proven methods of capturing this energy: windmills and sailing ships. Windmills are real-estate limited, since most available land surface is already spoken for, and distribution-limited since wind-swept areas tend to be far from where large concentrations of people live. Sailing ships turn wind energy directly into long-distance transport, but the practice was abandoned in an era of cheap fuel. The prospects deserve a second look. It is possible to not only conserve, but even accumulate, fuel reserves by sailing around the world.

Modern sailing vessel design, so far, has been constrained by two imperatives: racing (for sport or against commercial competition) and ability to sail upwind. Under favorable conditions sails produce far more horsepower than is needed to drive a ship. At marginal sacrifice in speed, by running the auxiliary propulsion system in reverse, this energy can be stored for later use. Hybrid vessels, able to store large amounts of energy—in conventional batteries, in flywheels, or by disassociation of seawater—would be free to roam the world.

The trade winds constitute an enormous engine waiting to be put to use. When oil becomes expensive enough, we will.

I'm Confident About Energy, the Environment, Longevity, and Wealth; I'm Optimistic (But Not Necessarily Confident) Of the Avoidance Of Existential Downsides; And I'm Hopeful (But Not Necessarily Optimistic) About a Repeat Of 9-11 (Or Worse)

Optimism exists on a continuum in-between confidence and hope. Let me take these in order.

I am confident that the acceleration and expanding purview of information technology will solve the problems with which we are now preoccupied within twenty years. 

Consider energy. We are awash in energy (10,000 times more than we need to meet all of our needs falls on the Earth) but we are not very good at capturing it, but that will change with full nanotechnology based assembly of macro objects at the nano scale controlled by massively parallel information processes, which will be feasible within twenty years. Even though our energy needs are projected to triple within 20 years, we'll capture that .0003 of the sunlight needed to meet all of our energy needs with no use of fossil fuels using extremely inexpensive, highly efficient, lightweight, nano engineered solar panels, and store the energy in highly distributed (and, therefore, safe) nanotechnology-based fuel cells. Solar power is now providing one part in a thousand of our energy needs but that percentage is doubling every two years, which means multiplying by a thousand in 20 years. Almost all of the discussions I've seen about energy and its consequences such as global warming fail to consider the ability of future nanotechnology based solutions to solve this problem. This development will be motivated not just by concern for the environment, but by the $2 trillion we spend annually on energy.  This is already a major area of venture funding. 

Consider health. As of just recently, we now have the tools to reprogram biology. This is also at an early stage but is progressing through the same exponential growth of information technology, which we see in every aspect of biological progress. The amount of genetic data we have sequenced has doubled every year and the price per base pair has come down commensurately. The first genome cost a billion dollars, NIH is now starting a project to collect a million genomes at a thousand dollars a piece. We can turn genes off with RNA interference, add new genes (to adults) with new reliable forms of gene therapy, and turn on and off proteins and enzyme at critical stages of disease progression. We are gaining the means to model, simulate, and reprogram disease and aging processes as information processes. These technologies will be a thousand times more powerful than they are today in ten years, and it will be a very different world in terms of our ability to turn off disease and aging. 

Consider prosperity. The inherent 50 percent deflation rate inherent in information technology and its growing purview is causing the decline of poverty. The poverty rate in Asia, according to the World Bank, declined by 50 percent over the past ten years due to information technology, and will decline at current rates by 90 percent in the next ten years. All areas of the world are being affected, including Africa which is now undergoing a rapid invasion of the Internet. Even Sub Saharan Africa had a 5% growth rate last year. 

Okay, so what am I optimistic, but not necessarily confident, about?

All of these technologies have existential downsides. We are already living with enough thermonuclear weapons to destroy all mammalian life on this planet, which incidentally are still on a hair trigger. Remember these? They're still there, and they represent an existential threat.

We have a new existential threat which is the ability of a destructively minded group or individual to reprogram a biological virus to be more deadly, more communicable, or (most daunting of all) more stealthy (that is, having a longer incubation period so that the early spread is not detected). The good news is that we do have the tools to set up a rapid response system, like the one we have for software viruses. It took us five years to sequence HIV, but we can now sequence a virus in a day or two. RNA interference can turn viruses off since viruses are genes albeit pathological ones. Bill Joy and I have proposed setting up a rapid response system that could detect a new virus, sequence it, design an RNAi medication (or a safe antigen-based vaccine) and gear up production in a matter of days. The methods exist, but a working rapid response system does not yet exist. We need to put one in place quickly. 

So I'm optimistic that we will make it through without suffering an existential catastrophe. It would be helpful if we gave the two existential threats I discuss above a higher priority. 

And, finally, what am I hopeful, but not necessarily optimistic, about?

Who would have thought right after September 11, 2001 that we would go five years without another destructive incident at that or greater scale? That seemed very unlikely at the time, but despite all the subsequent turmoil in the world, it happened. I am hopeful that this will continue.

A Knowledge Driven Economy Allows Individuals to Lead Millions Out of Poverty In a Single Generation

Freedom to create, to work, to fundamentally alter is unprecedented. For better and worse, science and technology provide ever greater power. Individuals and small groups can leverage this power to set their own rules, make their own lives, establish their own boundaries. Paradoxically, this is leading to massive global networks and ever smaller countries.

Don't like your country or your neighbors? Had enough of the religious, nationalist, or ethnic fanatics nearby? Groups that like to speak obscure languages, that want to revise the heroes in the grammar school textbooks, or who advocate a different set of morals are increasingly able to do so. Borders and boundaries in both rich and poor countries are breeding like rabbits. In Europe there are demands for autonomy or outright separation in the former United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Italy...

It used to be the bright had to leave India, Pakistan, China, and Mexico to make a living, to lead and have a global impact. No more. There are ever more powerful enclaves and zip codes within countries where there is a concentration of smarts and entrepreneurship. If their neighbors let them, these groups and networks flourish. If not they separate or they leave.

As long as you can become and remain a part of the network, the power of place matters ever less. Who your parents were, where you were born, is irrelevant as long as you have access to and interest in education, technology, science, and networks. Every time you open a science magazine, research a new material or gene, map a brain, ocean, or piece of the universe there is a smorgasbord of opportunities to learn and build something new, to create, to accumulate enough prestige, wealth, or power to fundamentally change many lives.

A knowledge driven economy allows individuals to lead millions out of poverty in a single generation. Many within the biggest, China and India, as well as the smallest Singapore and Luxembourg can thrive. One no longer needs to take what the neighbor has to survive. One can thrive by building something complementary, by thinking up something better. Knowledge unlike land, oil wells, gold mines, is ever expanding. Someone's success depends ever less on taking what the other had. You can build and make your own.

Sometimes the real and cyber merge and cross over. Second lifers, inhabitants of a virtual world, are free to become whatever they wish, wherever they wish. Their creations and wealth are increasingly crossing boundaries into the real world of corporate planning, art, and dollars. This is just a foreshadowing of real world governance going forward as the digital becomes the dominant language and means of generating wealth on the planet.

Throughout the world, likely your grandpa's favorite sports team moved, his flag changed, and his job merged, moved, and morphed. All of this implies an accelerating set of shifts in allegiance and identity. Politicians and citizens who wish to preserve and protect the current country are well advised to pay attention to these trends as more have a choice and as ever more debate whether to become a more compact few. For the illegitimate or the slow, it will be harder to maintain boundaries and borders. There is little margin for error; each government and temporarily dominant party can screw up the whole. And the whole can be spit very fast. But you have any options. You can fight to preserve that you love or you can choose to build or inhabit an alternative space. Your choice.

The Return of the Discipline of Experiment Will Transform Our Knowledge of Fundamental Physics

In science as in politics it seems that Eldredge and Gould's metaphor of punctuated equilibrium holds. When progress happens, it happens fast and the whole culture vibrates with the excitement of it. We have had a bit too much equilibrium lately, of disappointed expectations following as a natural consequence of unwisely reduced ambitions. But I am optimistic that the next decades will see breakthroughs in key problems on which we now seem stuck. In physics, new experiments including the LHC, AUGER, GLAST, PLANCK, LIGO and others are likely to transform our knowledge of fundamental physics, and end the long period when theory sought to progress without the discipline of experiment. Very likely we will be surprised and humbled by what is seen, but this will be followed by rapid progress as new ideas are quickly invented to explain the surprising data.

How can I be optimistic without knowing what direction science will take? This is exactly the point. There are two kinds of optimism, the optimism of people who think they know the future and the optimism of people who believe the future will be more interesting and, if always imperfect, more wonderful than they can imagine. I am of the second kind. The first kind sometimes comes along with a belief that time and change are illusions, and that the world is evolving towards an eternal timeless state of perfection. This is the optimism of religious fundamentalists and orthodox Marxists, and one sees it reflected also in the cosmologies in which our evolving universe is just a transient fluctuation in an otherwise permanent state of thermal equilibrium. The opposite kind of optimism lies behind the evolutionary theorists who believe the world is so intricate that the simplest mechanism that could predict the future of life and the cosmos is the universe itself. If we are the first kind of optimist we seek to transcend the complexities of life to discover something eternal behind it, something like the imagined view of God. If we are the second, we seek to live and think within the swirl of life; we aim for comprehension and wisdom but have no illusions of transcendence or control.

Personal Genomics Will Arrive This Year, and With It a Revolutionary Wave Of Volunteerism and Self-Knowledge

A small but crucial set of human pursuits have experienced smooth exponential growth for many decades—sometimes so smooth as to be hidden and then revealed with a jolt. These growth industries involve information—reading and writing complex artifacts made of electronic and/or DNA parts. The iconic example is the personal computer, which though traceable back to 1962, became manifest in 1993 when free web browsers spawned millions of personal and commercial web pages within one year. I’m optimistic that something similar is happening to personal genomics this year. We are in free-fall from a stratospheric $3 billion generic genome sequence (which only an expert could love) down to a sea level price for our personal genomic data. Early-adopters are posing and positing how to exploit it, while surrounded by envious and oblivious bystanders. We can now pinpoint the 1% of our genomes which in concert with our environment influences the traits that make us different from one another. Ways to tease out that key 1%, coalesce with "next-generation" DNA reading technology popping up this year, to suddenly bring the street-price down to $3000—about as easy (or hard) to justify as buying some bleeding-edge electronic gadget at an early stage when only minimal software is ready.

I am optimistic that while society is not now ready, it will be this year. The inevitable initial concerns about techno-downsides, e.g. the "Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2005", are already morphing into concerns about how to make these new gifts useful and reliable.  Witness just this August, the US Senate began consideration of the "Genomics and Personalized Medicine Act of 2006". Momentum is thus building for millions of people to volunteer to have their genome data correlated with their physical-traits to benefit the billions who will hang back (due to inertia or uncertainty). These volunteers deserve up-to-the minute education in genetics, media, and privacy issues. They deserve protection, encouragement and maybe even rewards. Many current medical research studies do not encourage their human research subjects to fully fathom the potential identifiability of both their personal genome and physical traits data, nor to learn enough to access and appreciate their own data.  The cost of educating the subjects is far less than the other costs of such studies and yields benefits far beyond the immediate need for fully informed consent. In contrast, other studies like the Personal Genome Project, emphasize pre-education sufficient to choose among (1) opting-out of the study completely, (2) de-linking genomic and physical traits, (3) restricting linked data to qualified researchers, (4) allow peer-to-peer sharing, or (5) a fully open public database.  The subjects can redact specific items in their records at any point, realizing that items used to support conclusions in published work cannot be easily reversed. The excitement and dedication of these volunteers is already awesome.

I am optimistic that millions more will share. Millions already do share to benefit society (or whatever) in old and new social phenomena ranging from the Red Cross to Wikipedia, from MySpace/YouTube to SEC compensation disclosures. We wear ribbons and openly share personal experiences on topics that were once taboo, hidden from view, like depression, sexual orientation, and cancer. Rabbis' daily tasks now include genetic counseling. Our ability to track disease spread, not just HIV, bird flu, or bioterrorism, but even the common cold, will benefit from the new technologies and the new openness—leading to a bio-weather map. We will learn so much more about ourselves and how we interact with our environment and our fellow humans. We will be able to connect with other people who share our traits. I am optimistic that we will not be de-humanized (continuing the legacy of feudalism and industrial revolution), but we might be re-humanized, relieved of a few more ailments, to contemplate our place in the universe, and transcend out brutal past.

Sometime In the Twenty-First Century I Will Understand Twentieth-Century Physics

I am optimistic that sometime in the twenty-first century I will understand twentieth-century physics.

Not that I haven't tried before. Over years—decades, really—I have enlisted some of the finest minds of the era to help me grasp relativity, quantum mechanics and superstring theory: Richard Feynman, Sheldon Glashow, Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking, and even Einstein himself, whose 1916 book "Relativity: The Special and General Theory" was the prototype for all subsequent efforts to explain the universe in words rather than equations. It marked the earliest appearance of that ubiquitous character, the man on the train, a faceless stick figure glimpsed through a coach-car window as he zooms past at nearly the speed of light. Remarkably, we can observe him as he goes about his obsessive tasks: bouncing a Ping-pong ball on a table, or shining a flashlight at a mirror on the ceiling, or holding up a clock for us to compare to the identical one we just happen to hold. Many hours have I devoted to contemplating his inertial frame of reference and trying to reconcile it to my own, standing motionless on the platform. I have engaged him in my own thought experiments, even conjuring a gedanken companion who rides a train on the adjacent track. If they each pass my position at the same instant, traveling at three-quarters the speed of light in opposite directions, then their speed relative to each other is one and a half times the speed of …wait a second, that can't be right, can it?

What I'm up against here is a problem in translation; the laws of nature are written in equations, but I read only English. I have the same problem with anything written in French, of course, but I can accept a second-hand version of Proust more easily than Einstein or Heisenberg. My understanding of the world is not dependent on Proust, the way it is on the double-slit experiment.  Everything I know about the basic stuff of the universe—the very atoms I am made of myself, the gravity that glues me to my bed at night—I know second-hand, through the imperfect medium of language and metaphor. I don't even know what it means to "solve" an equation in relativity or quantum mechanics.  Here's an equation involving a man on a train that I can solve: If he leaves Chicago at 6 a.m. at 70 miles an hour, when will he pass someone who left St. Louis three hours earlier at 50 miles an hour? But when physicists "solve" an equation, what emerges isn't a quantity, it's a new law of nature. How do they do that?

That's what keeps me awake at night, reading. It is much too late for me to go back and learn enough math to meet Einstein on his own terms, much less Heisenberg or Hawking.  But I am sustained by optimism that someday I will transcend my own limitations, that I will achieve the conceptual breakthrough necessary to grasp relativity, quantum mechanics and the rest of it on a deep level. Someday I will understand not just the epiphenomena of physics, the trains and the slits and the cats in boxes, but their mathematical essence.  Their metaphysics.  I'm optimistic.  Really.

Human Beings Are Different

Now that we've gotten false notions of "god" out of the way, we come up against the question from which He insulated us: if human beings are not the "chosen" species, then are we at least capable of transcending nature, from which we emerge?

Our most natural inclination should be to kill each other, one way or another. From plankton to pachyderms, the myth of nature as a sustainable and loving collaborative is about as absurd as that of a Creator Being. Unless we prove different from every other species, we will continue to compete with the rest of the planet for a disproportionate share of its resources — and with one another for the spoils of this ongoing war. That's just life.

I'm optimistic that human beings can be different than the species from which we evolved, and that the endless comparisons between human culture and other species are, ultimately, specious. I hope that just because sponge colonies will fight endlessly with those of a different color need not mean that humans are destined to do the same thing.

I'm optimistic that, having been liberated from the myth of intrinsic meaning, human beings will gain the capacity to make meaning, instead. And that this unique ability will give us the opportunity to disobey biology's commands.

Humans Will Learn to Learn From Diversity

I am optimistic that humans might finally come to understand that they can learn from other humans who are not like them. The supposed 'curse' of the Tower of Babel, the diversity of languages and cultures, is perhaps our greatest hope for continued healthy occupancy of this rock we all share in our unforgiving universe. Sure, there are dangers in this diversity that have led to murder and suffering. Diversity can all too easily be interpreted as 'incomprehensibility, inferiority, wrong-headedness'. But I am optimistic that our species has grown tired of this view of diversity. And I am optimistic that groups we have heard very little from will motivate us all to learn new solutions to old problems in the coming years.

However we define the group to which we belong, ethnically, geographically, linguistically, or nationally, I believe that 2007 could be the year in which we come to embrace a symmetry of status between groups and a cross-pollination of ways of living and ways of thinking about the world. 

Let me say what I think it means for people groups to learn from one another and then why I am optimistic about it.

The world presents us all with similar problems at the level of biological and emotional need. We need shelter, food, companionship, affection, sex, and opportunities to develop our abilities, among other things. As humans we also have intellectual and social needs that go beyond other species. We need affirmation, we need respect, we need to feel good about our lives, we need to feel like we are useful, and we need to feel optimistic. And we need to know how to get more meaning out of the world around us. And, especially, we need to learn to love more and tolerate more. But how do we learn these things? Where can we go for new ideas for the problems we are still beset by in 2007? Anthropological linguistics can offer some suggestions. We can learn from the stories and values of smaller, overlooked groups, endangered peoples, and even extinct peoples that we have records of, about how to live more harmoniously in the world.

For example, when we look back to the now extinct cultures of the Narragansett Indians the Northeastern British colonies in the early 18th century and before, we learn about their tolerance of difference. When Increase Mather and his father Cotton Mather expulsed Roger Williams from the colony of Massachusetts in 1735, during a ferocious winter, Mather expected Williams to do the right thing and freeze to death. Williams had expressed views of tolerance and respect for others and against tenets of the church of Mather that Mather and Governor Winthrop found intolerable. But Williams was taken in by the Narragansett and spent the winter safely with them, learning about their language and their philosophy of tolerance, of which he was living proof. When Williams later wrote about these people, his writings influenced the thought of Thomas Jefferson and eventually the Narragansett philosophy seems to have influenced, though indirectly, the writings and thought of William James as he helped to develop American Pragmatism, perhaps the only uniquely American contribution to world philosophy — a philosophy that evaluates ideas by their usefulness, by their tolerance of diverse ideas, and by their rejection of the idea that any one group holds a monopoly on Truth.

We have spent most of our existence on this planet in an attempt to homogenize it. To remove uncomfortable differences. But I believe that we are growing weary of this. I believe that this year the hurt and pain that our species is inflecting on itself will surpass, for many of us at least, what we are willing to bear. We are going to look for other answers. And we are going to need to turn to humans who have mastered the art of contentment and peace and tolerance. These people are found in various parts of the world. Zen Buddhists are one example. But there are others.

My thirty years of work with the Pirahãs (pee-da-HANs) of the Amazon rain forest, for example, has taught me a great deal about their remarkable lack of concern about the future or the past and their pleasure in living one day at a time, without fear of an afterlife, with full tolerance for others' beliefs. The Pirahãs know that people die, that they suffer, that life is not easy, through their daily struggle to provide food for their families without being bitten by snakes or eaten by jaguars and from loved ones they bury young, dead from malaria and other diseases. But this doesn't dampen their joy of life, their love for other Pirahãs or their ability to look at death without fear and without need for the idea of heaven to get them through this life, to them the only life.

Religions have a concept of Truth that lacks tolerance, a Truth that wants to missionize the world to eliminate diversity of belief. Western history has shown what that leads to. But peoples like the Narragansett, the Pirahãs, Zen Buddhists, and many others offer alternatives to homogenizing and destroying the diversity of the world. They show us how different people can solve the same problems of life in ways that can avoid some of the by-products of the violent homogenization of Western history. I believe that the impact of the internet and of rapid dissemination of research in popular and professional forums, coupled with widespread disgust at some of the things that our traditional cultural values have produced, can be the basis for learning from other peoples.

What is there to learn? Let me give some examples from my own field research among Amazonian peoples.

Cooperation: I once thought it might be fun to teach the Pirahã people about Western games. So I organized a 'field day', with a tug of war, a foot race, and a sack race, among other things. In the foot race, one Pirahã fellow got out in front of everyone else. He then stopped and waited for all the others to catch up so they could cross together. The idea of winning was not only novel but unappealing. We cross the line together or I don't cross it. And the same went for the sack race. The tug of war contest was a joke — just guys keeping the slack out of the rope talking. The people loved it all, laughing and conversing all day and told me they had a good time. They taught me more than I ever taught them: you can have a great time and have everyone win. That is not a bad lesson. That is a fine lesson.

Pluralism: The Pirahãs, like the Narragansett and other American Indians, believe that you use your knowledge to serve yourself and to serve others in your community. There is no over-arching concept of Truth to which all members of society must conform.

Communalism: The Pirahãs seem to accept only knowledge that helps, not knowledge that coerces. Think of our English expression 'knowledge is power'. The concept as practiced in most industrial societies is really that 'knowledge is power for me so long as I have it and you don't'. But to many peoples like the Pirahãs, knowledge is something for us all to share. It is power to the people, not power to a person. The Pirahãs don't allow top secret conversations. Every member of their society knows what every other member is doing and how they are doing it. There is a communal mind. There is freedom and security in group knowledge.

Toleration: In Western society we associate tolerance with education — the more you learn, the more you tolerate. But there is little evidence for this thesis when we look at our society as a whole (where education is even compatible with religious fundamentalism, one of the worst dangers for the future of our species). Yet among some hunter-gatherer societies, toleration of physical, mental, and religious diversity can be much greater than our so-called pluralistic Western societies. Not everyone has to look alike, act alike, behave alike, or believe alike. In fact, they don't even have to pretend to do so.
           
In the 1960s there was a similar optimism among my fellow hippies, as many of my generation went into fields like anthropology, literature, and science to learn more about diverse facts and truths and to give us a cornucopia of coping lessons for life. We are ready now for a new 60s-like exploration of diversity and I am optimistic that we will do this. I am optimistic that we will learn the simple and useful truths of cooperation, pluralism, communalism, and toleration and that no one Idea or Truth should be the ring to bind us all.

We're Recognizing That the World Is a Wunderkammer

Several years ago, I became fascinated with cabinets of curiosity. The Renaissance predecessor to modern day museums, these cabinets, sometimes entire rooms, were filled with a mish-mash of objects, both natural and artificial, that embodied the wonder of the world. (The German term for these collections, wunderkammer, literally means "chamber of wonders.") Inside, you might find a mummy's hand, a "unicorn's horn," exotic seashells from distant lands, odd insects pinned and cataloged, and possibly even a two-headed lizard in a jar of formaldehyde. As Tradescant the Elder, one of the most notable cabinet keepers in history, requested in a letter to the Secretary of the English Navy in 1625, this was a quest for "Any thing that is strang."

Inspired by this celebration of science, art, and the strang(e), I picked up an old Chinese tea cabinet at a flea market and began to build my own wunderkammer. I quickly filled the shelves with items of the type I thought were "supposed" to be in any wunderkammer worth its weight in weirdness—antique medical instruments, a primitive eye gouging weapon from Rarotonga, a Balinese shadow puppet, a snake stuffed in a perpetual strike. Things became more interesting though once the collection process became more organic and I added items that genuinely spoke to my personal sense of the curious : a 1/1 millionth scale model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, fabricated by engineers Ken Goldberg and Karl Bohringer using techniques borrowed from microscale manufacturing; a vial of carbon nanotubes; a Houdini automaton's autograph; a resin model of a telerobotic insect outfitted with solar cells for wings.

Now, this small cabinet in the corner of my office serves as a constant reminder for me that the world is filled with wonder, and curiosity is something to be cultivated at every opportunity. Indeed, we're at our best when we're curious. And the beauty of curiosity is that we're all naturals. Curiosity is how babies learn. In fact, sparking someone's curiosity, at any age, seems to be perfect pedagogy. And, as the professor says in The Day The Earth Stood Still, "It isn't faith that makes good science...It's curiosity."

Now, I wouldn't dare suggest that there's a Renaissance revival afoot, but I'm optimistic that the pendulum is swinging at least slightly back toward the hey-day of natural history, citizen science, backyard astronomy, and other spirited intellectual pursuits. Several recent museum exhibitions have explored the cabinets of curiosity as an organizational principle, including one dedicated to the appropriately odd juxtaposition of art and cryptozoology. Even the wunderkammer aesthetic has bubbled up into popular consciousness.

Many blogs, including the one I co-edit, have been described as virtual cabinets of curiosity—storehouses of unusual links, odd memes, fringe culture, and weird news. Nearly every major city has at least one carefully-curated "Olde Curiosity Shoppe" selling strange objets d'art and natural oddities packaged as Victorian chic. In fact, I was recently struck by the obviously wunderkammer-inspired display of mounted insects and red coral on sale at a mainstream home decor store in the mall. And in the ultimate evidence of a trend, at least two coffee table books on the subject have been published in the last few years.

Most of all though, I'm heartened by the unbridled curiosity fueling today's passionate DIY movement. A growing number of ingenious individuals are hacking Priuses to boost the gas mileage, installing Linux on iPods to record high-quality audio, and building backyard weather balloons. On one hand, these makers are dissatisfied with off-the-shelf products. At a deeper level though, they're driven by a daring inquisitiveness about what lies "under the hood" of today's technology and how they can better what they buy, or build it from scratch. For these makers—in the tradition of crafters, tinkers, scientists, engineers, artisans, and hot rodders who came before—the process is the product. The fun is in the fix. No user serviceable parts inside? Says who.

I'm optimistic that in the coming few years, the DIY movement will reach not only widespread awareness but widespread participation. I'm optimistic that smart companies, instead of criminalizing hackers, will encourage these user-innovators and solicit their feedback to design better products. I'm optimistic that science education in the United States can be saved if students are given the opportunity to learn by doing, not just by reading about what someone else has done.

When I watch a screwdriver-wielding maker eagerly voiding another warranty, I see a spark of the same childlike curiosity that fills a baby's eyes as he first explores his world, optimistic that something wonderful lies ahead.

A Breakthrough In Understanding Intelligence Is Around The Corner

The clinically depressed often have a more realistic view of their problems than those who are optimistic. Without a biological drive for optimism it might be difficult to motivate humans to take on difficult problems and face long odds. What optimistic view of the future drives string theorists in physics working on theories that are probably hundreds of years ahead of their time? There is always the hope that a breakthrough is just around the corner.

In 1956 a small group of optimists met for a summer conference at Dartmouth, inspired by the recent invention of digital computers and breakthroughs in writing computer programs that could solve mathematical theorems and play games. Since mathematics was among the highest levels of human achievement, they thought that engineered intelligence was immanent. Last summer, 50 years later, another meeting was held at Dartmouth that brought together the founders of Artificial Intelligence and a new generation of researchers. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the pioneers from the first meeting were still optimistic and chided the younger generation for having given up the goal of achieving human level intelligence.

Problems that seem easy, like seeing, hearing and moving about, are much more difficult to program than theorem proving and chess. How could this be?  It took hundreds of millions of years to evolve efficient ways for animals to find food, avoid danger and interact with one another, but humans have been developing mathematics for only a few thousand years, probably using bits of our brains that were meant to do something altogether different. We vastly underestimated the complexity of our interactions with the world because we are unaware of the immense computation our brains perform to make seeing objects and turning doorknobs seem effortless.

The early pioneers of AI sought logical descriptions that were black or white and geometric models with a few parameters, but the world is high dimensional and comes in shades of gray. The new generation of researchers has made progress by focusing on specific problems in computer vision, planning, and other areas of AI. Intractable problems have yielded to probabilistic analysis of large databases using powerful statistical techniques. The first algorithms that could handle this complexity were neural networks with many thousands of parameters that learned to categorize input patterns from labeled examples. New machine learning algorithms have been discovered that can extract hidden statistical structure from large datasets without the need for any labels. Progress is accelerating now that the internet provides truly large datasets of text and images. Computational linguists, for example, have adopted statistical algorithms for parsing sentences and language translation, having found transformational grammars too impoverished.

One of the most impressive learning systems is TD-Gammon, a computer program that taught itself to play backgammon at the championship level. Built by Gerald Tesauro at IBM Yorktown Heights, TD-Gammon started out with little more than the board position and the rules of the game, and the only feedback was who won. TD-gammon solved the temporal credit assignment problem:  If after a long string of choices you win, how do you know which choices were responsible for the victory?  Unlike rule-based game programs, TD-Gammon discovered better ways to play positions on its own, and developed a surprisingly subtle sense of when to play safely and when to be aggressive. This captures some important aspects of human intelligence.

Neuroscientists have discovered that dopamine neurons, found in the brains of all vertebrates, are central to reward learning. The transient responses of dopamine neurons signal to the brain predictions for future reward, which are used to guide behavior and regulate synaptic plasticity. The dopamine responses have the same properties as the temporal difference learning algorithm used in TD-Gammon. Reinforcement learning was dismissed years ago as too weak a learner to handle the complexity of cognition. This belief needs to be re-evaluated in the light of the successes of TD-Gammon and learning algorithms in other areas of AI.

What would a biological theory of intelligence look like, based on internal brain states derived from experimental studies rather than introspection? I am optimistic that we are finally on the right track and that, before too long, an unexpected breakthrough will occur.

Death

I'm optimistic about death.  For the first time in the history of life on Earth, it is possible—not easy, but possible—for conscious animals like us to have a good death.  A good death is a great triumph, and something to be sought, accepted, and cherished.  Indeed, a good death should be recorded and broadcast as a moral example to us all.

What do I mean by a good death?  I do not mean opiate-fuelled euthanasia, or heroic self-sacrifice during flash-bang tactical ops, or a grudgingly tolerated end to a millennium of grasping longevity.  I do not mean a painless, clean, or even dignified death.  I mean a death that shows a gutsy, scientifically informed existential courage in the face of personal extinction.  I mean a death that shows the world that we secular humanists really mean it.

There is, of course, no way to escape the hardwired fears and reactions that motivate humans to avoid death.  Suffocate me, and I'll struggle.  Shoot me, and I'll scream.  The brain stem and amygdala will always do their job of struggling to preserve one's life at any cost. 

The question is how one's cortex faces death.  Does it collapse in mortal terror like a deflated soufflé?  Or does it face the end of individual consciousness with iron-clad confidence in the persistence of virtually identical consciousnesses in other human bodies?  My optimism is that in this millennium, well-informed individuals will have a realistic prospect of sustaining this second perspective right through the end of life, despite death's pain and panic.

When I die in 50 years, or next week, or whenever, here's what I hope I remember:

• My genes, proteins, neural networks, beliefs, and desires are practically identical to those sustaining the consciousness of 6 billion other humans, and countless other animals, whose experiences will continue when mine do not. 
• Since life must be common throughout the universe and resilient across time, such subjective experiences will continue not just on Earth in the short term, but across many worlds, for billions of years.
• There is no spooky personal after-life to fear or hope for, only this wondrous diversity of subjectivity that trillions of individuals get to partake in.
• The more science one knows, the more certain and comforting this knowledge is.

These life-lessons are, to me, the distilled wisdom of evolutionary psychology.

Many people resist this knowledge.  They listen only to the hair-trigger anxieties of the amygdala—which constantly whispers 'fear death, fear death'.  They construct pathetic ideologies of self-comfort to plug their ears against such mortal terror.  They nuzzle through reality's coarse pelt for a lost teat of supernatural succor.  I call them the Gutless, because they aren't bright enough or brave enough to understand their true place in the universe. A whole new branch of psychology called Terror Management Theory studies the Gutless and their death-denying delusions. 

A great ideological war is raging between the Godless—people like me, who trust life—and the Gutless—the talking heads of the extreme, religious right, who fear death, and fear the Godless, and fear ongoing life in the future when they no longer exist.  I'm also optimistic about the outcome of this war, because people respect guts and integrity.  People want moral role models who can show them how to live good lives and die good deaths.  People want to believe that they are participating in something vastly greater and more wonderful than their solipsism.  Science quenches that thirst far more effectively, in my experience, than any supernatural teat sought by the Gutless.

HAR1 ( Human Accelerated Region 1) As a New Tool Leading Us Toward a Deep Understanding of Human Nature

I am generally optimistic because our human heritage seems to have equipped us very well for dealing with challenges, from ice-ages and cave-bears to diseases and over-population. The whole species did cooperate to eliminate small-pox, and the women of Mexico did reduce their average family size from seven to two and a half in fifty years. Science has helped us to understand challenges and also to defeat them.

I am especially optimistic just now because of a seminal discovery that was made recently by comparing genomes of different species. David Haussler and his colleagues at UC Santa Cruz discovered a small patch of DNA which they call HAR1, short for Human Accelerated Region 1. This patch appears to be strictly conserved in the genomes of mouse, rat, chicken and chimpanzee, which means that it must have been performing an essential function that was unchanged for about three hundred million years from the last common ancestor of birds and mammals until today.

But the same patch appears grossly modified with eighteen mutations in the human genome, which means that it must have changed its function in the last six million years from the common ancestor of chimps and humans to modern humans. Somehow, that little patch of DNA expresses an essential difference between humans and other mammals. We know two other significant facts about HAR1. First, it does not code for a protein but codes for RNA. Second, the RNA for which it codes is active in the cortex of the human embryonic brain during the second trimester of pregnancy. It is likely that the rapid evolution of HAR1 has something to do with the rapid evolution of the human brain during the last six million years.

I am optimistic because I see the discovery of HAR1 as a seminal event in the history of science, marking the beginning of a new understanding of human evolution and human nature. I see it as a big step toward the fulfillment of the dream described in 1929 by Desmond Bernal, one of the pioneers of molecular biology, in his little book, "The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul". Bernal saw science as our best tool for defeating the three enemies. The World means floods and famines and climate changes. The Flesh means diseases and senile infirmities. The Devil means the dark irrational passions that lead otherwise rational beings into strife and destruction. I am optimistic because I see HAR1 as a new tool leading us toward a deep understanding of human nature and toward the ultimate defeat of our last enemy.

Optimism Needs To Have Bite So That Pioneering Work In Early Cancer Detection Is Championed and Funded

Thinking of myself as a perennial optimist, I was surprised how challenging this question turned out to be. I realise that it's because my optimism is an attitude, rather than founded on careful estimation, and therefore bears little scrutiny. A corollary of this is that my optimism makes little difference to what I manage to achieve in a typical day apart from, importantly, getting out of bed in the morning.

Turning to a dictionary I confirm that optimism is either "a doctrine that this world is the best possible world" or" an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcome" (both from Webster). An attitude, therefore, of questionable robustness, and idiotically dangerous in some circumstances. But amongst several similar definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary I also find something less loaded: "Hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something". This permits optimism also to be rational.

And, to get serious, if I look for one aspect of life where both rationality and hope are essential, and where both seem to be paying off, it's in the battle against cancer. I focus my optimism on what currently looks like a peripheral flank in that battle, but could — and I think eventually will — become a more central focus of attention. We should of course be delighted by the few instances of drugs that hit a cancer target, even when the target wasn't the one originally intended. But just as important to me is the prospect of the use of proteins or other markers that permit the early detection and identification of cancer, hugely increasing the prospects of survival.

An early-detection cancer diagnostic needs to show low rates of false positive and false negative outcomes, should be able to distinguish tumours needing therapy from those that will do no harm, and should be acceptable in term of cost and practicality. This combination is a very tall order.

But hope arises from the unprecedented sensitivities of mass spectrometers, of single-molecule detection and of DNA amplification, not to mention the power of high-throughput biological screening. These bring us the almost unimaginable prospect of successful discrimination of cancer or — even better — pre-cancer marker-molecules within the bloodstream. The recent discovery in mice of genetic pathways underlying progression from precursor to advanced stages of ovarian cancer is another milestone to sustain optimism.

Although the US National Institutes of Health has made early detection a priority, it remains relatively underfunded in most cancer agencies. It has big challenges of clinical validation ahead of it. At the policy level, health planners and drug companies will need to be sure of its societal cost-effectiveness.

These considerations, and the fact that diagnostics are less scientifically sexy than 'cures', can deter researchers from pursuing early detection studies. So it's precisely now that optimism needs to have bite, so that pioneering work in early cancer detection is championed and funded despite the daunting obstacles ahead.

Optimism...

I am optimistic about optimism. It has a bright future.

Not long ago, a few decades back, it became fashionable to be pessimistic. Gloomy predictions were sexy and sure signs of a progressive mind. Any true intellectual was sceptical about the survival of humanity.

There were good reasons for that. In the early 1980s we seemed to be a little stuck. A major nuclear exchange between superpowers was a very real threat, the environmental crisis was not recognised by the public (and much less by the politicians) and the world population just seemed to grow exponentially forever.

But the mood changed. A nuclear disarmament spiral started, most populations in industrialized countries became aware of the environment and demanded political action, the growth of the world population started to slow down.

Also, the internet and the web seemed to offer technologies for change and democratization. During the 1990s optimism boomed.

Boom! But then came the dot-com crash and 9/11. The liberating force of the internet was still there, even if hopeful and greedy investors didn't make money on it (but as we now know, it was released by the Open Source movement and phenomena like Web 2.0). Despite terrorism, the safety situation has not really changed in any quantitative sense.

Also, climate researchers have now reached agreement that the global warming is really here. The explanation is our own stupid and wasteful use of fossilized depots of energy in a world full of an energy flow from the Sun much, much larger than the what we need.

So it is time to be pessimistic again? No way! The environmental problems are much too serious to be left to the pessimists.

We need to make a change and do it right away. But we know what to do. We need a suite of high tech solutions that will enable us to plug into the good old resource base of humanity: Solar energy, recycled materials and a decentralized, peer-to-peer network to enable information flow.

We are about to make a very old niche in nature habitable for a huge human population through the use of hi tech solutions from the info, nano and bio toolboxes. We must awaken the enlightening spirit of reinventing everything, the future included.

We have to rethink the civilization we have developed since the introduction of agriculture in the last great climate crisis, at the end of the last Ice Age.

We have to create a Civilization 2.0 and we have to do it now. And the fine thing is that we have already started creating the technology and the dreams. Human beings have a talent for crisis management.

Without optimism, we would not be here. The rational evidence for giving up is always there, but we survived thanks to the the faith and the strength to go on and on, despite all warnings.

Pessimism is a self-falsifying prophecy. Optimism always wins. Until nobody is around to know that it did not.

Optimize optimism!

Human Intelligence Can Be Increased, and Can Be Increased Dramatically

I am optimistic that human intelligence can be increased, and can be increased dramatically in the near future. I see three avenues that will lead to this end.

First, the fruits of cognitive neuroscience and related fields have identified a host of distinct neural systems in the human brain. Different combinations of these systems are used in the service of accomplishing different tasks, and each system can be made more efficient by "targeted training." Such training involves having people perform tasks that are designed to exercise very specific abilities, which grow out of distinct neural networks. Just as a body builder can do curls to build up biceps and dips on parallel bars to build up triceps, we can design computer-game-like tasks that exercise specific parts of the brain—mental muscles, if you will. By exercising the right sets of systems, specific types of reasoning not only can be improved but—the holy grail of training studies—such improvement can generalize to new tasks that draw on those systems.

Second, people often grapple with problems in groups, be they formally designated teams or casual huddles around the water cooler. I am optimistic that understanding the nature of such group interactions will increase human intelligence. Just as a mechanical calculator can extend our mental capacities, other people help us extend our intelligence—both in a cognitive sense (as required to solve problems) and in an emotional sense (as required to detect and respond appropriately to emotions, ours and those of others). In this sense, other people can serve as "social prosthetic systems," as extensions of our own brains; a wooden leg can fill in for a missing limb, and others' brains can fill in for our cognitive and emotional limitations. To the extent that researchers come to understand how such social prosthetic systems arise and operate, they will understand how to increase human intelligence.

Third, the line between animate and inanimate information processing is becoming increasingly blurry as research in multiple fields proceeds apace. I expect that engineers will continue to press forward, designing increasingly powerful machines to help us extend our intelligence. For example, some people carry computers with them everywhere they go, and treat Google as an extension of their own knowledge bases. Or, in my case, my PDA extends my organizational ability enormously. We soon will have a wide variety of mechanical helpmates. The distinction between what goes on in the head and what relies on external devices is becoming more subtle and nuanced, and in so doing human intelligence is being extended.

Crucially, each of these three developments amplifies the effects of the others, producing synergies: As "brain exercises" enhance our personal intellectual abilities, we can learn how to make better use of mechanical aids and how to rely more effectively on other people. The confluence of all three types of developments will produce positive feedback loops, where the very act of interacting with others or working with smart devices will help us continue to develop our brains, and as our brains develop we will in turn be able to use increasingly sophisticated devices and rely on people in more complex and powerful ways.

With luck, such developments will produce news sorts of extended social links and highly integrated social networks, and a new kind of "smart society" will emerge. And, who knows, such a society may not only be smarter, but also wiser.

Good Choices Sometimes Prevail

I am cautiously optimistic about the state of the world, because: 1. Big businesses sometimes conclude that what is good for the long-term future of humanity is also good for their bottom line (cf. Wal-Mart's recent decision to shift their seafood purchases entirely to certified sustainable fisheries within the next three to five years). 2. Voters in democracy sometimes make good choices and avoid bad choices (cf. some recent elections in a major First World country).

What Lies Beyond Our Cosmic Horizon?

There is a limit to how far we can see into the universe. Our cosmic horizon is set by the distance traveled by light since the big bang. More distant objects cannot be observed, because their light has not yet reached the Earth. But of course the universe does not end at the horizon, and the question is what lies beyond. Is it more of the same — more galaxies, more stars, or could it be that remote parts of the universe are very different from what we see around here? I am optimistic that we will be able to answer this question and understand the structure of the universe as a whole, even though we can observe only a small part of it.

Until recently cosmologists made the simplest assumption — that the universe is homogeneous, i.e. looks everywhere more or less the same. (It was glorified under the name of "Cosmological Principle", but it was still only an assumption.) Now, recent developments in cosmology and particle physics have led to a drastic revision of this view and to a heated debate about the future of our science. According to the new worldview, most of the universe is in the state of explosive, accelerated expansion, called "inflation". In our local region, inflation ended 14 billion years ago, and the energy that drove the expansion went to ignite a hot fireball of elementary particles. This is what we call the big bang. Other big bangs constantly go off in remote parts of the universe, producing regions with diverse properties. Some of these regions are similar to ours, while others are very different.

The properties of any given region are determined by the quantities we call "constants of nature". These include particle masses, Newton's constant, which controls the strength of gravity, and so on.  We do not know why the constants in our region have their observed values. Some physicists believe that these values are unique and will eventually be derived from some fundamental theory. However, string theory, which is at present our best candidate for the fundamental theory of nature, suggests that the constants can take a wide range of possible values.  Regions of all possible types are then produced in the course of eternal inflation. This picture of the universe, or multiverse, as it is called, explains the long-standing mystery of why the constants of nature appear to be fine-tuned for the emergence of life. The reason is that life evolves only in those rare regions where the constants happen to yield suitable chemistry and physics. The values of the constants in our own region are then determined partly by chance and partly by how suitable they are for the evolution of life.

Many of my colleagues find this multiverse picture very alarming. Since all those regions with different values of the constants are beyond our horizon, how can we verify that they really exist? Is this science — to talk about things that can never be observed? In my view, it is science, and there are good reasons to be optimistic about the new picture. If the constants vary from one part of the universe to another, their local values cannot be predicted with certainty, but we can still make statistical predictions. We can try to predict what values of the constants are most likely to be observed. One such prediction, that the vacuum should have a small nonzero energy, has already been confirmed. We have only started along this path, and formidable challenges lie ahead. I believe, however, that what we are facing now is not the end of cosmology, as some people fear, but the beginning of a new era — the exploration of the multiverse.

War Will End

I'm optimistic that one day war—large-scale, organized, group violence—will end once and for all.

Many people find my optimism naive, if not delusional. Last semester, I taught a class called "War and Human Nature," and my students polled classmates on the following question: "Do you think humanity will ever stop fighting wars once and for all time?" Of the 205 respondents, 185 replied "No"; 20 said "Yes" or "Maybe. " Several of the "optimists" added comments like "Yes, war will end when the human race will end," and "Yes, because in the future the human species will unite to fight alien species. "

Recent scholarship on warfare seems, at first glance, to support this fatalism. Just a few decades ago, many scholars believed in the "myth of the peaceful savage," which depicts war as a byproduct of modern civilization that did not exist in pre-state societies. In his book Constant Battles, the anthropologist Steven LeBlanc debunks this myth, pointing out that the vast majority of primitive, pre-state societies engaged in at least occasional warfare. Mortality rates from violence in some societies reached as high as fifty percent.

But these grim statistics yield a surprisingly upbeat message: Things are getting better! Hard as it may be to believe, humanity has become much less violent than it used to be. In fact civilization, far from creating the problem of warfare, is apparently helping us to solve it. In War Before Civilization, the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley estimates that in the blood-soaked 20th century 100 million men, women, and children died from war-related causes, including disease and famine. The total would have been 2 billion, Keeley notes, if our rates of violence had been as high as in the average primitive society.

Moreover, conventional war between the armies of two or more nations is becoming rare. Three years have passed since the last international war. (Israel's incursion into Lebanon last summer doesn't count, because the Lebanese army did not fight. ) This is "the longest episode of interstate peace in more than half a century," the scholars Charles Kurzman and Neil Englehart point out in their recent essay "Welcome to World Peace. " Although they are dominating the headlines, civil wars have also declined since peaking in the early 1990s. We are dealing now with guerilla wars, insurgencies, terrorism—or what the political scientist John Mueller calls the "remnants of war. "

These statistics do not provide much solace to the victims of war's "remnants" in Iraq, Darfur, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Colombia and other troubled regions. But they show that we are moving in the right direction. Other recent events offer more grounds for optimism. As recently as the late 1980s, we still faced the threat of a global nuclear holocaust. Then, incredibly, the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War ended peacefully. Apartheid also ended in South Africa without significant violence, and human rights have advanced elsewhere around the world.

The first, crucial step toward ending war is to believe that we can do it. We should also recognize that war is over-determined—stemming from many different possible causes—and so peace must be over-determined too. In their final papers, most of my students wisely advocated pursuing not a single, silver-bullet solution to the problem of war but multiple approaches. Their proposals included supporting democracy in other countries, bolstering the U.N. 's peacekeeping efforts, fighting poverty and improving education, restricting or eliminating arms sales, inculcating tolerance for other cultures in children, giving women more of a role in government.

"Achieving peace on a global level will not be easy," one student wrote, "but things already seem to be moving in the right direction. Humanity's best shot at ending war is now. "

His optimism fuels my optimism.

A Second (and Better) Enlightenment

Like some other respondents, I'm not particularly optimistic at the moment. Human civilization, however, seems to proceed in cycles overall, and I believe that we are due—even if not quickly enough for my tastes—for a new positive cycle. Every Golden Age—the flowering of reason and good—has been followed by a withering, a decay, a rotting, a descent into superstition, prejudice, greed (pick your own favorite ill); somehow, though, the seeds of the next pinnacle begin their growth and ascent, seemingly finding nourishment in the detritus left by the past. A particular civilization may end, but new ones rise to take its place. I'm optimistic that the current nadir in which we find ourselves (e.g., a world mostly heedless of ongoing genocides, global warming, poverty, etc…) or toward which we see ourselves heading will lead to a renaissance, a new enlightenment…a profound, global shift in the world view for the better.

Science and The Decline of Magic

I am optimistic that science is winning out over magic and superstition. That may seem irrational, given the data from pollsters on what people believe. For example, a 2005 Pew Research Center poll found that 42 percent of Americans believe that "living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time." The situation is even worse when we examine other superstitions, such as these percentages of belief published in a 2002 National Science Foundation study:

ESP	60%
UFOs	30%
Astrology	40%
Lucky numbers	32%
Magnetic therapy	70%
Alternative medicine	88%

Nevertheless, I take the historian's long view, and compared to what people believed before the Scientific Revolution, there is much cause for optimism. Consider what people believed a mere four centuries ago, just as science began lighting candles in the dark. In 16th- and 17th-century England, for example, almost everyone believed in sorcery, werewolves, hobgoblins, witchcraft, astrology, black magic, demons, prayer, and providence. "A great many of us, when we be in trouble, or sickness, or lose anything, we run hither and thither to witches, or sorcerers, whom we call wise men…seeking aid and comfort at their hands," noted Bishop Latimer in 1552. Saints were worshiped. Liturgical books provided rituals for blessing cattle, crops, houses, tools, ships, wells, and kilns, not to mention the sick, sterile animals, and infertile couples. In his 1621 book, Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton explained, "Sorcerers are too common; cunning men, wizards, and white witches, as they call them, in every village, which, if they be sought unto, will help almost all infirmities of body and mind."

Just as alcohol and tobacco were essential anesthetics for the easing of pain and discomfort, superstition and magic were the basis for the mitigation of misfortune. As the great Oxford historian of the period, Keith Thomas, writes in his classic 1971 work Religion and the Decline of Magic, "No one denied the influence of the heavens upon the weather or disputed the relevance of astrology to medicine or agriculture. Before the seventeenth century, total skepticism about astrological doctrine was highly exceptional, whether in England or elsewhere." And it wasn't just astrology. "Religion, astrology and magic all purported to help men with their daily problems by teaching them how to avoid misfortune and how to account for it when it struck." With such sweeping power over nearly everyone, Thomas concludes, "If magic is to be defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effectives ones are not available, then we must recognize that no society will ever be free from it." The superstitious we will always have with us.

Nevertheless, the rise of science ineluctably attenuated this near universality of magical thinking by proffering natural explanations where before there were only supernatural ones. Before Darwin, design theory (in the form of William Paley's natural theology, which gave us the "watchmaker" argument) was the only game in town so everyone believed that life was designed by God. Today less than half believe that in America, the most religious nation of the developed democracies, and in most other parts of the world virtually everyone accepts evolution without qualification. That's progress.

The rise of science even led to a struggle to find evidence for superstitious beliefs that previously needed no propping up with facts. Consider the following comment from an early 17th-century book that shows how even then savvy observers grasped the full implications of denying the supernatural altogether: "Atheists abound in these days and witchcraft is called into question. If neither possession nor witchcraft (contrary to what has been so long generally and confidently affirmed), why should we think that there are devils? If no devils, no God."

Magic transitioned into empirical magic and formalized methods of ascertaining causality by connecting events in nature—the very basis of science. As science grew in importance, the analysis of portents was often done meticulously and quantitatively, albeit for purposes both natural and supernatural. As one diarist privately opined on the nature and meaning of comets: "I am not ignorant that such meteors proceed from natural causes, yet are frequently also the presages of imminent calamities."

Science arose out of magic, which it ultimately displaced. By the 18th century, astronomy replaced astrology, chemistry succeeded alchemy, probability theory dislodged belief in luck and fortune, city planning and social hygiene attenuated disease, and the grim vagaries of life became less grim, and less vague. As Francis Bacon concluded in his 1626 work, New Atlantis: "The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and the secret motions of things and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible."

Sic itur ad astra — Thus do we reach the stars.

The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique of Religion

I’m so optimistic that I expect to live to see the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion. I think that in about twenty-five years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena, so much so that in most quarters religion will no longer command the awe it does today. Of course many people–perhaps a majority of people in the world–will still cling to their religion with the sort of passion that can fuel violence and other intolerant and reprehensible behavior.  But the rest of the world will see this behavior for what it is, and learn to work around it until it subsides, as it surely will.  That’s the good news. The bad news is that we will need every morsel of this reasonable attitude to deal with such complex global problems as climate change, fresh water, and economic inequality in an effective way. It will be touch and go, and in my pessimistic moods I think Sir Martin Rees may be right: some disaffected religious (or political) group may unleash a biological or nuclear catastrophe that forecloses all our good efforts. But I do think we have the resources and the knowledge to forestall such calamities if we are vigilant.

Recall that only fifty years ago smoking was a high status activity and it was considered rude to ask somebody to stop smoking in one’s presence. Today  we’ve learned that we  shouldn’t make the mistake of trying to prohibit smoking altogether, and so we still have plenty of cigarettes and smokers, but we have certainly contained the noxious aspects within quite acceptable boundaries.  Smoking is no longer cool, and the day will come when religion is, first, a take-it-or-leave-it choice, and later: no longer cool–except in its socially valuable forms, where it will be one type of allegiance among many. Will those descendant institutions still be religions?  Or will religions have thereby morphed themselves into extinction?  It all depends on what you think the key or defining elements of religion are. Are dinosaurs extinct, or do their lineages live on as birds?

Why am I confident that this will happen?  Mainly because of the asymmetry in the information explosion.  With the worldwide spread of information technology (not just the internet, but cell phones and portable radios and television), it is no longer feasible for guardians of religious traditions to protect their young from exposure to the kinds of facts (and, yes, of course, misinformation and junk of every genre) that gently, irresistibly undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance. The religious fervor of today is a last, desperate attempt by our generation to block the eyes and ears of the coming generations, and it isn’t working. For every well-publicized victory–the inundation of the Bush administration with evangelicals, the growing number of home schoolers in the USA, the rise of radical Islam, the much exaggerated “rebound” of religion in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, to take the most obvious cases–there are many less dramatic defeats, as young people quietly walk away from the faith of their parents and grandparents.  That trend will continue, especially when young people come to know how many of their peers are making this low-profile choice.  Around the world, the category of “not religious” is growing faster than the Mormons, faster than the evangelicals, faster even than Islam, whose growth is due almost entirely to fecundity, not conversion, and is bound to level off soon.

Those who are secular can encourage their own children to drink from the well of knowledge wherever it leads them, confident that only a small percentage will rebel against their secular upbringing and turn to one religion or another.  Cults will rise and fall, as they do today and have done for millennia, but only those that can metamorphose into socially benign organizations will be able to flourish.  Many religions have already made the transition, quietly de-emphasizing the irrational elements in their heritages, abandoning the xenophobic and sexist prohibitions of their quite recent past, and turning their attention from doctrinal purity to moral effectiveness.  The fact that these adapting religions are scorned as former religions by the diehard purists shows how brittle the objects of their desperate allegiance have become.  As the world informs itself about these transitions, those who are devout in the old-fashioned way will have to work around the clock to provide attractions, distractions—and guilt trips—to hold the attention and allegiance of their children.  They will not succeed, and it will not be a painless transition. Families will be torn apart, and generations will accuse each other of disloyalty and worse: the young will be appalled by their discovery of the deliberate misrepresentations of their elders, and their elders will feel abandoned and betrayed by their descendants.  We must not underestimate the anguish that these cultural transformations will engender, and we should try to anticipate the main effects and be ready to provide relief and hope for those who are afflicted.

I think the main problem we face today is overreaction, making martyrs out of people who desperately want to become martyrs.  What it will take is patience, good information, and a steady demand for universal education about the world’s religions.  This will favor the evolution of avirulent forms of religion, which we can all welcome as continuing parts of our planet’s cultural heritage. Eventually the truth will set us free.

The Evolutionary Ability of Humankind To Do the Right Things

I am optimistic about the evolutionary ability of humankind to do the right things, even though it sometimes happens only after all possible mistakes are exhausted.

I am optimistic about technology and world leaders (in that order) discovering ways to combine energy savings and alternative sources of energy (in that order), so that our planet is saved, while we still have a reasonable standard of living.

I am optimistic about the irreversible trend of increasing the economic value of knowledge and decreasing the relative economic importance of raw materials, reducing the power of ruthless primitive dictators and increasing the rewards for education and talent.

I am optimistic about the emerging ability of the life sciences to use mathematics, computer science, physics, and engineering in order to understand biological mechanisms, detect and prevent medical problems and cure deadly diseases.

I am optimistic that more scientists will understand that public awareness and public understanding of science and technology are the only weapons against ignorance, faith healers, religious fanaticism, fortune tellers, superstitions and astrology, and that serious programs will emerge in order to enhance the contribution of the scientific community to this effort.

I am optimistic that, in the same way that Europe understood during the last Fifty years that education for all and settling disputes peacefully are good things, while killing people just because of their nationality or religion is bad, so will the Muslim world during the new century.

I am optimistic that we will soon understand that wise medical and genetic ethics mean that we should not absolutely forbid any technology and we should not absolutely allow any technology, but find ways to extract the good and eliminate the bad, from every new scientific development.

I am optimistic about the fact that an important fraction of the nations on this planet succeeded in refuting the extrapolations concerning a population explosion and I hope that the remaining nations will do likewise, for their own advancement and survival.

I am optimistic about the power of education to alleviate poverty and advance health and peace in the third world and I am hopeful that the affluent world will understand that its own survival on this planet depends on its own help to the rest of humanity in advancing its education.

I am not at all optimistic that any of the above will happen soon. All possible mistakes and wrong turns will probably be attempted. The weakest link is our chronic short sightedness, which is bad in the case of the general public and is much worse for its elected political leaders, who think in terms of months and years, not decades and certainly not centuries.

The tools for cultural production and distribution are in the pockets of 14 year olds

The tools for cultural production and distribution are in the pockets of 14 year olds. This does not guarantee that they will do the hard work of democratic self-governance: the tools that enable the free circulation of information and communication of opinion are necessary but not sufficient for the formation of public opinion. Ask yourself this question: Which kind of population seems more likely to become actively engaged in civic affairs — a population of passive consumers, sitting slackjawed in their darkened rooms, soaking in mass-manufactured culture that is broadcast by a few to an audience of many, or a world of creators who might be misinformed or ill-intentioned, but in any case are actively engaged in producing as well as consuming cultural products? Recent polls indicate that a majority of today's youth — the "digital natives" for whom laptops and wireless Internet connections are part of the environment, like electricity and running water — have created as well as consumed online content. I think this bodes well for the possibility that they will take the repair of the world into their own hands, instead of turning away from civic issues, or turning to nihilistic destruction.

The eager adoption of web publishing, digital video production and online video distribution, social networking services, instant messaging, multiplayer role-playing games, online communities, virtual worlds, and other Internet-based media by millions of young people around the world demonstrates the strength of their desire — unprompted by adults — to learn digital production and communication skills. Whatever else might be said of teenage bloggers, dorm-room video producers, or the millions who maintain pages on social network services like MySpace and Facebook, it cannot be said that they are passive media consumers. They seek, adopt, appropriate, and invent ways to participate in cultural production. While moral panics concentrate the attention of oldsters on lurid fantasies of sexual predation, young people are creating and mobilizing politically active publics online when circumstances arouse them to action. 25,000 Los Angeles high school students used MySpace to organize a walk-out from classes to join street demonstrations protesting proposed immigration legislation. Other young people have learned how to use the sophisticated graphic rendering engines of video games as tools for creating their own narratives; in France, disaffected youth, the ones whose riots are televised around the world, but whose voices are rarely heard, used this emerging "machinima" medium to create their own version of the events that triggered their anger (search for "The French Democracy" on video hosting sites). Not every popular YouTube video is a teenage girl in her room (or a bogus teenage girl in her room); increasingly, do-it-yourself video has been used to capture and broadcast police misconduct or express political opinions. Many of the activists who use Indymedia — ad-hoc alternative media organized around political demonstrations — are young.

My optimism about the potential of the generation of digital natives is neither technological determinism nor naive utopianism. Many-to-many communication enables but does not compel or guarantee widespread civic engagement by populations who never before had a chance to express their public voices. And while the grimmest lesson of the twentieth century is to mistrust absolutist utopians, I perceive the problem to be in the absolutism more than the utopia. Those who argued for the abolition of the age-old practice of human slavery were utopians.

Transparency is Inevitable

I live in a bowl-shaped valley on the edge of the Berkshire hills in New England. The prevailing winds come from the southwest. As it happens, a coal-burning electric plant sits in the dip next to the Holyoke Range at the southern edge of the valley, perfectly placed to fill the air with its unsavory mix of particulates — the plant is a dinosaur, one that due to various regulatory loopholes has been able to dodge costly upgrades that would make its emissions less toxic.

Nobody seems to mind. True, the head of pulmonary medicine at the local medical center bemoans the toll of the plants' particulates on the respiratory tracts of those who live in the valley, particularly its children. But those who operate the Mt. Tom power plant blithely buy carbon-pollution credits that let it avoid the expense of upgrading its scrubbers.

The indifference of those of us whose respiratory systems routinely become inflamed, I'm convinced, is due in large part to a failure in collective awareness. As we join the throngs in the waiting room of the local asthma specialist, we make no connection between our being there and that smokestack, nor between our own use of electricity and the rate at which that smokestack belches its toxins.

I'm optimistic that, one day, the people in my valley will make the connections between the source of our electric power and its role in the inflammations in our lungs — and more especially our children's lungs. More generally, I believe that inexorably the world of commerce will surface the invisible toll our collective habits of consumption wreak on our environment and our health.  

My optimism does not hinge on the promise of some new technological fix or scientific breakthrough. Rather my hope stems from the convergence of market forces with off-the-shelf possibilities from an oft-ignored field that has already reshaped our lives: information science.

"Ultimately, everybody will find out everything," as a saying at the Googleplex has it – Google's corporate headquarters harboring perhaps the world's densest aggregate of specialists in data mining and other applications of information science. Information science, the systematic organization and meta-knowing of all we know, has been steadily increasing the sheer quantity of what each of us can find out.

One branch of this science, medical informatics, has transformed medicine by making available in an instant to the physician treating a patient a vast array of background data on his condition, history, prognosis and best treatment.

One of the more hopeful applications of information science would be something we might call "consumer informatics," which would do something akin to what is being done for medicine, but for the marketplace: make visible the elusive links between what we buy and do and the impacts on our body and on nature of the processes that support these activities.

Take, for example, the hidden costs of a t-shirt. The book Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everday Things deconstructs ordinary products into the chemical impacts their manufacture has had. Chemical by-products of textile dyes include chlorine, chromium and formaldehyde; because cotton resists coloring, about a third of the dyes fail to adhere and so end up in wastewater.  There are correlations between high levels of dye run-off in groundwater and rates of leukemia in local children.

For that reason Bennett & Company, a supplier of clothes to companies like Victoria's Secret and Polo.com, has formed a partnership with the dye works that supplies its plants in China. The partnership allows the clothes manufacturer to ensure that the wastewater from the dyes it uses will go through a series of cleansing pools before returning to the water supply, rather than simply being dumped.

Here's the challenge for information science: quantify the environmental and health impacts of the standard processes used in manufacturing goods. Then tag a given product on a store shelf with the relative merits of the impacts it has had, so that consumers can weight its virtue into its value. Let us know which t-shirt has what consequences.

Some mechanics of that challenge may be less daunting than they seem at first glance.  For one, all large retailers now use an electronic tagging system for inventory control. This lets a store manager know the history of every item on its shelves, including the factory where it was made. One next step would be to document the manufacturing practices at that factory, and so to tag the item with its environmental/public health legacy. This, of course, would require the assist of industry insiders, failing cooperation from the company itself.

The global diamond industry offers a rough model via its Kimberly Process, which requires nations that export diamonds to document that the stones were not "blood diamonds," mined in a war zone. Imperfect as that system may be in practice, it stands as a demonstration that an industry can tag a specific item from its source as better or worse on a criterion of virtue.

Here market forces may assist, encouraging companies to provide such information in the interests of competitive advantage. Some marketers have long touted product virtues in marketing. For example, Cascade toilet paper claims manufacturing methods that use 80% less water than the industry average and use no chlorine; some energy providers offer an option to purchase electricity from renewable sources like wind power. That's a bare beginning, one which lets a company select the criterion for the virtue of a given product rather than having it be evaluated more objectively.
If companies themselves do not take such steps, there are alternatives. Already anyone can go into a store and, using a Palm Pilot to scan the bar code, be whisked to a website that could reveal information about that product's level of virtue, say in terms of toxic chemicals unleashed during its manufacture.

But for such a website to have both credibility and teeth demands a sustained collaboration between information science and engineers, chemists, physicists, environmental scientists, public health and other medical specialists — to name but a few disciplines — as well as manufacturers. The mass of data potentially would be immense; information science sorts out the signal from the noise, or re-organizes noise into signal.

That task may be daunting. But I feel optimistic that through a sustained effort in consumer informatics, we're heading to the day we will be able to vote with our wallets every time we go shopping.

Malthus was wrong

When I was growing up, the problem at the heart of every environmental question was human population growth. If there aren't many people around, what they do matters little. If there are lots, even careful living is likely to have bad environmental consequences. At that time, the Earth's population was about three billion. It has now doubled to six. Not, on the face of things, great grounds for optimism.

The population curves in the newspapers and television programmes of my youth went relentlessly upwards. That was because they had only one, exponential, term. A real population curve, however, is logistic, not exponential. It does not rise indefinitely. Eventually, it reaches an inflection point and starts to level off. That is because a second term in the form of lack of space, lack of resources, disease or direct conflict between individuals stabilises it by matching the birth and death rates. And that was the fate the environmentalists of the 1970s predicted for humanity.

Such pessimism, however, failed to take account of the demographic shift that all populations (so far) have undergone as they have enriched themselves. For the negative exponent is starting to show up, and its cause is not lack of space or resources, nor yet is it conflict or disease (even AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis make only a small difference in global terms). Instead, it is the thing that the doomsters feared most after population growth — economic growth.

As a quondam evolutionary biologist, I find the demographic transition in response to higher living standards hard to explain. On the face of things, better conditions should lead to larger families, not smaller ones. However, it is impossible to argue with the facts, and the facts are that the rate of population increase is dropping, and that the drop is correlated with increases in personal economic well-being.

Perhaps the answer lies in the old idea of r and K selection. Indeed, the terms r and K come from variables in two-term logistic equation that describes real population dynamics. K-selected species, people may remember from their college ecology classes, have few offspring but nurture them lovingly. Those that are r-selected have lots, but display a Devil-take-the-hindmost attitude to their issue's survival. The crucial point is that K-selected species live in safe, predictable environments, while r-selected ones live in unsafe, unpredictable ones. If the individuals of a species were able to shift opportunistically between r and K strategies in response to shifts in the environment, then something like the demographic transition in response to wealth might be the result.

None of this means that the eventual human population of, say, ten billion will be easy for the planet to support. But such support will not be impossible, particularly as it is also the case that economic growth in rich countries is less demanding of natural resources for each additional unit of output than is the case for growth in poor countries.

Malthus was wrong to observe that population increases geometrically while the resources available to support it increase arithmetically. It was an understandable mistake. It flies in the face of common sense that population growth will actually slow down in the face of better resources. But that is what happens, and it might yet save humanity from the fate predicted for it by the Club of Rome.

Systemic Flaws In the Reported World View

Paradoxically, one of the biggest reasons for being optimistic is that there are systemic flaws in the reported world view. Certain types of news — for example dramatic disasters and terrorist actions — are massively over-reported, others — such as scientific progress and meaningful statistical surveys of the state of the world — massively under-reported.

Although this leads to major problems such as distortion of rational public policy and a perpetual gnawing fear of apocalypse, it is also reason to be optimistic. Once you realize you're being inadvertently brainwashed to believe things are worse than they are, you can... with a little courage... step out into the sunshine.

How does the deception take place?

The problem starts with a deep human psychological response. We're wired to react more strongly to dramatic stories than to abstract facts. There are obvious historical and Darwinian reasons why this should be so. The news that an invader has just set fire to a hut in your village demands immediate response. The genes for equanimity in such circumstances got burned up long ago.

Although our village is now global, we still instinctively react the same way. Spectacle, death and gore. We lap it up. Layer on top of that a media economy that's driven by competition for attention and the problem is magnified. Over the years media owners have proven to their complete satisfaction that the stories that attract large audiences are the simple human dramas. Rottweiler Savages Baby is a bigger story than Poverty Percentage Falls even though the latter is a story about better lives for millions.

Today our media can source news from 190 countries and 6 billion people. Therefore you can be certain that every single day there will be word of spectacularly horrifying things happening somewhere. And should you get bored of reading about bombs, fires and wars, why not see them breaking live on cable 24/7 with ever more intimate pictures and emotional responses.

Meta-level reporting doesn't get much of a look-in.

So for example, the publication last year of a carefully researched Human Security Report received little attention. Despite the fact that it had concluded that the numbers of armed conflicts in the world had fallen 40% in little over a decade. And that the number of fatalities per conflict had also fallen. Think about that. The entire news agenda for a decade, received as endless tales of wars, massacres and bombings, actually missed the key point. Things are getting better. If you believe Robert Wright and his NonZero hypothesis, this is part of a very long-term and admittedly volatile trend in which cooperation eventually trumps conflict. Percentage of males estimated to have died in violence in hunter gatherer societies? Approximately 30%. Percentage of males who died in violence in the 20th century complete with two world wars and a couple of nukes? Approximately 1%. Trends for violent deaths so far in the 21st century? Falling. Sharply.

In fact, most meta-level reporting of trends show a world that is getting better. We live longer, in cleaner environments, are healthier, and have access to goods and experiences that kings of old could never have dreamed of. If that doesn't make us happier, we really have no one to blame except ourselves. Oh, and the media lackeys who continue to feed us the litany of woes that we subconsciously crave.

The Sunlight-Powered Future

I'm optimistic about…a pair of very big numbers. The first is 4.5 x 10ˆ20. That is the current world annual energy use, measured in joules. It is a truly huge number and not usually a cause for optimism as 70 per cent of that energy comes from burning fossil fuels.

Thankfully, the second number is even bigger: 3,000,000 x 10ˆ20 joules. That is the amount of clean, green energy that pours down on the Earth totally free of charge every year. The Sun is providing 7,000 times as much energy as we are using, which leaves plenty for developing China, India and everyone else. How can we not be optimistic? We don't have a long-term energy problem. Our only worries are whether we can find smart ways to use that sunlight efficiently and whether we can move quickly enough from the energy systems we are entrenched in now to the ones we should be using. Given the perils of climate change and dependence on foreign energy, the motivation is there.  

Can it be done? I'm lucky that as a writer I get to meet some of the world's brightest scientists each year, and I know that out there are plenty of radical new ideas for a future in which sunlight is turned straight into the forms of energy we need. Here are just three of my favourites out of scores of great ideas. First, reprogramming the genetic make-up of simple organisms so that they directly produce useable fuels (hydrogen, for example). That will be much more efficient than today's fashionable new bioethanol programs because they will cut out all the energy wasted in growing a crop, then harvesting it and then converting its sugars into  fuel. Second, self-organizing polymer solar cells. Silicon solar cells may be robust and efficient but they are inevitably small and need a lot of energy to make. Self-organizing polymer cells could be ink jetted onto plastics by the hectare, creating dirt cheap solar cells the size of advertising hoardings. Third, there's artificial photosynthesis. Nature uses a different trick from silicon solar cells to capture light energy, whipping away high-energy electrons from photo-pigments into a separate system in a few thousand millionths of a second. We are getting much closer to understanding how it's done, and even how to use the same principles in totally different nano-materials.

But what of the pessimist's view that we can are just too entrenched in our current energy systems to change? There is a world-wide boom in investment in green technology already under way. And there are many transition technologies coming into operation that enable practice runs for more radical genome reprogramming and creation of new nano-structures. Although the consensus view is that the sunlight-powered future won't be taking over until 2050, I'd place an optimistic bet that one of the many smart ideas being researched now will turn out to be an unforeseen winner much earlier.

Early Detection of Learning Disabilities or Difficulties

When, at John Brockman's urging, I don the hat of "scientific optimism," I think of the early detection of learning disabilities or difficulties, coupled with interventions that can ameliorate or even dissipate these difficulties. In the near future we will be able to use neural imaging techniques to determine which infants or toddlers are at risk of having problems in reading, writing, calculating, spelling, mastery spatial relations, mastering social relations, and the like. (We may even have genetic markers for these risk factors). And I believe that the more specific the detection of the disorder (i.e. which kind of reading problem, what sort of social deficit), the more likely that we can ultimately devise interventions that directly address a particular problem.

But as soon as I have unloaded this optimistic view, another less happy scenario immediately floods my consciousness. The same means of early detection can so easily be put to malevolent purposes. First of all, we won't just determine deficits that can be addressed, but also ones that cannot be addressed. Second, we run the risk of stigmatizing children from birth—"Oh, you are destined to be illiterate," or "you'll never be likeable, because of your social deficits." Moreover, we will be likely soon to turn not just to deficits, but to efforts to produce the perfect child—to enhance perfectly adequate capacities through genetic, neural, or pharmacological interventions. Not only does this seem to go against human nature and fate as we have known it; it will also privilege further those who are already privileged.

Thus, challenging the spirit of The Edge Annual Question, I think that to speak to science apart from its use and its users, its misuse and its misusers, is simply naïve. And so, I have to add some political remarks.

In recent years in the United States, we have seen ample examples of how science can be distorted for political purposes. In this context I recall a remark made to me several years ago, by John Gardner, the great American civic leader (no relation). Gardner said "There've never been so many young people in America involved in public service, community service, social entrepreneurship, and other efforts to promote the common good." But, Gardner added somberly, "This commitment won't add up unless these young people become involved in the political process. Because while they may be helping dozens or even hundreds of individuals, laws are being passed that harm thousands or millions of persons."

After the election of November 7, 2006, I feel a shade more optimistic about America. More young people are engaged in politics, and more idealistic youths are running or considering a run for office. America will be in better shape when the leaders and graduates of organizations like Teach for America or City Year meld their sense of public service with political involvement. And this realignment should benefit the rest of the world as well. And, most important for the Edge community, such individuals may be able to help ensure that science and technology—never good nor evil in themselves—will be put to benevolent purposes.

The End of ISMs

Racism, Sexism, Species-ism, Age-ism, Elitism, Fundamentalism, Atheism. These –isms, and others,  have fueled hatred, inspired war, justified torture, divided countries, prevented education, increased disparities in wealth, and destroyed civilizations.  For some, they represent ideas to die for. For others, they represent ideas to destroy.  Though the targets differ, there is a single underlying cause: a brain that evolved an unconscious capacity to seek differences between self and other, and once identified, seek to demote the other in the service of selfish gains. It is a capacity that is like a heat sensing missile, designed to seek and destroy. It achieves its ends by exceptionally clever tactics that involve an ever escalating arms race between demoting the other to the level of a pestilent parasite while raising the self and its accompanying brethren to the level of  virtuous saints. This is the bad news.

The good news is that science is uncovering some of the details of this destructive capacity, and may hold the key to an applied solution. My optimism: if we play our cards correctly, we may see the day when our instinctive prejudice toward the other will dissolve, gaining greater respect for differences, expanding our moral circle in the words of Peter Singer.  Here's the playbook, building on several recent ideas and scientific findings:

1. Decide what is fair by living under a veil of ignorance.

The late political philosopher John Rawls argued that every human being will default to a selfish position, a bias that grows out of survival instincts, and in current evolutionary parlance, the biasing of genetic kin. To avoid such biases and achieve impartiality, we must imagine a set of principles that would apply while ignorant of others' political affiliations, wealth, age, gender, and religious background. As a device, the veil of ignorance works wonders because it feeds into our selfishness. Let's say that I think university professors should obtain the highest salaries, while athletes should obtain the lowest.  I can only entertain this principle of income distribution if I would be satisfied in a world where I was the professional athlete making the lowest salary. The veil of ignorance guarantees impartiality. Teach it to your children, friends, colleagues, and enemies.

2. Recognize the universality of our moral intuitions.

Peel away the explicit rules of action handed down by such institutions as religion and government, and one finds a common moral code. Those with a religious background tend to believe that abortion is wrong and so too is euthanasia.  Atheists see life through a different lens. Remove the doctrinal rules and our intuitive moral psychology propels us ¾ our species that is ¾ to decide what is morally right or wrong based on general principles concerning the welfare of others and our own virtues.  If the Protestant and Catholic Irish can see past their religious beliefs, empathize with the other, recognize their shared underlying humanity and settle into peaceful co-existence, why not other warring factions?

3. Be vigilant of disgust!

The most virulent of human emotions is disgust. Although disgust was born out of an adaptive response to potential disease vectors ¾ starkly, things that are normally inside but are now outside such as vomit, blood, and feces ¾ it is a mischievous emotion, sneaking into other problems, alighting, wreaking havoc on group structure, and then spreading. Throughout the history of warfare, every warring group has tagged their enemy with qualities that are reminiscent of disease, filth, and parasites. The imagery is overwhelming, beautifully designed to trigger the rallying cry. Though the destruction of 6 million Jews by the Nazis was made possible by an extraordinary advertising campaign, it was made all the more possible by the carefully crafted manipulation of disgust: in the Nazis'  hands, the Jews were vermin, dirty, diseased, and thus, disgusting. Wouldn't we all be better off without disgust? What if we could remove this emotional card? 

Would we knock the sails out of our efforts to denigrate the other?  Intriguingly, there are some people who never experience disgust and don't recognize it in others, even though they experience and recognize all of the other familiar emotions ¾ sadness, happiness, fear, surprise, anger. These people are carriers of the genetic disorder Huntington's Chorea. Though they suffer from significant deterioration of the motor systems, they are disgust-free. So too are carriers that are pre symptomatic. Although we don't know whether patients with Huntington's are immune to the nefarious propaganda that might come their way should someone wish to foist their prejudices upon them, my hunch is that science will confirm this relationship. And if that is the case, perhaps modern molecular techniques will one day find a way to cure Huntington's, but along the way, work out a method to crank down or turn off our disgust response, while preserving our motor systems.

This is a playbook for today. It is not a final solution. It provides, I believe, a breadth of hope that someday we may see greater peace in this world, greater respect for the other.

The Decline of Violence

In 16th century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted on a stage and was slowly lowered into a fire. According to the historian Norman Davies, "the spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized."

As horrific as present-day events are, such sadism would be unthinkable today in most of the world. This is just one example of the most important and under appreciated trend in the history of our species: the decline of violence. Cruelty as popular entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, genocide for convenience, torture and mutilation as routine forms of punishment, execution for trivial crimes and misdemeanors, assassination as a means of political succession, pogroms as an outlet for frustration, and homicide as the major means of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. Yet today they are statistically rare in the West, less common elsewhere than they used to be, and widely condemned when they do occur.

Most people, sickened by the headlines and the bloody history of the twentieth century, find this claim incredible. Yet as far as I know, every systematic attempt to document the prevalence of violence over centuries and millennia (and, for that matter, the past fifty years), particularly in the West, has shown that the overall trend is downward (though of course with many zigzags). The most thorough is James Payne’s The History of Force; other studies include Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization, Martin Daly & Margo Wilson’s Homicide, Donald Horowitz’s The Deadly Ethnic Riot, Robert Wright’s Nonzero, Peter Singer’s The Expanding Circle, Stephen Leblanc’s Constant Battles, and surveys of the ethnographic and archeological record by Bruce Knauft and Philip Walker.

Anyone who doubts this by pointing to residues of force in America (capital punishment in Texas, Abu Ghraib, sex slavery in immigrant groups, and so on) misses two key points. One is that statistically, the prevalence of these practices is almost certainly a tiny fraction of what it was in centuries past. The other is that these practices are, to varying degrees, hidden, illegal, condemned, or at the very least (as in the case of capital punishment) intensely controversial. In the past, they were no big deal. Even the mass murders of the twentieth century in Europe, China, and the Soviet Union probably killed a smaller proportion of the population than a typical hunter-gatherer feud or biblical conquest. The world’s population has exploded, and wars and killings are scrutinized and documented, so we are more aware of violence, even when it may be statistically less extensive.

What went right? No one knows, possibly because we have been asking the wrong question—"Why is there war?" instead of “Why is there peace?" There have been some suggestions, all unproven. Perhaps the gradual perfecting of a democratic Leviathan—"a common power to keep [men] in awe"—has removed the incentive to do it to them before they do it to us. Payne suggests that it’s because for many people, life has become longer and less awful—when pain, tragedy, and early death are expected features of one’s own life, one feels fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. Wright points to technologies that enhance networks of reciprocity and trade, which make other people more valuable alive than dead. Singer attributes it to the inexorable logic of the golden rule: the more one knows and thinks, the harder it is to privilege one’s own interests over those of other sentient beings. Perhaps this is amplified by cosmopolitanism, in which history, journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the contingent nature of one’s own station, more palpable—the feeling that "there but for fortune go I."

My optimism lies in the hope that the decline of force over the centuries is a real phenomenon, that is the product of systematic forces that will continue to operate, and that we can identify those forces and perhaps concentrate and bottle them. 

Doubling Hearing Aid Functionality

I foresee a friendlier future for us 31 million Americans with hearing loss.  It's no news that cochlear implants, which were unavailable to my late-deafened mother, should spare me her fate.  But few people are aware that many more of us could benefit by doubling the functionality of our hearing aids.

We can dream of a future where hearing aids serve not only as sophisticated microphone amplifiers, but also as wireless loudspeakers that deliver clear, customized sound.  In theatres, auditoriums, worship centers, airport lounges, drive-up order stations, and home TV rooms, sound signals will be transmitted via in-the-ear loudspeakers, much like wi-fi transmissions to laptops.

Good news!  That future has arrived in the UK and much of Scandinavia, and now here in more than one hundred west Michigan facilities, and it is coming to several other American cities.  When people experience public address or TV sound via "hearing aid compatible assistive listening" (with their flick of a hearing aid switch) they typically respond with amazed joy.  What's more, they report increased satisfaction with their hearing aids.

It's a challenge to persuade a nation to exchange its current hearing assistive technology (which requires locating, checking out, and wearing conspicuous headsets) for a technology that many more people would actually use.  But the results of our west Michigan experiment, and another in 1000 California homes, supports my optimism.  Doubling hearing aid functionality will greatly increase hearing aid acceptance and use.

With on-the-horizon technology, we can also foresee music buffs with wireless ear bud loudspeakers.  When that day comes, having something in one's ear will become as mundane as glasses for the eyes, and millions of people with hearing loss will be enjoying fuller and more connected lives.