2013 : WHAT *SHOULD* WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?

Hardly a day passes when we do not hear of some major crisis in the world, one already unfolding or a new one just beginning and they never seem to end. We are now living in a world of perpetual crisis and the high anxiety it produces. Crises are not new. Human societies have experienced natural disasters, wars, famines, revolutions, political collapse, plagues, depressions and more. But two conditions are new. First, the actual interconnection of the worlds many systems often lead one crisis to cascade into the next like falling dominoes. Second, because of global communications and new media we are all far more aware of more of the crises then ever before.

One of the best examples of the first is the recent financial crisis that began in the sub prime mortgage market, when fear outweighed hope and cascaded through our banking system, our economy, triggering the Euro crisis, slowing growth in China and still continues in its impact as high unemployment persists. And it may be that the monetary measures we took to save the economy at the height of the crisis may yet trigger an inflationary crisis when growth starts to recover and capacity fails to catch up with new demand. So further crises on this path likely lie ahead.

The public's view of violence is a good example of the second new dynamic of heightened awareness. Steven Pinker has elegantly shown us that the real threat of violence in most of our lives has diminished dramatically. Yet most of believe because of the constant drumbeat of reporting on violence that the threat is far greater than it actually is. The absence of children playing on suburban streets is a sign of how scared parents are of the threat of kidnapping, which actually remains very small.

So if some of the issue is an actual increase in crises driven by interconnection and some merely a perceptual issue why should we be worried? The fact that we live in a world of high anxiety often leads us to do the wrong things. We take short term and local solutions rather than take a systemic and long term view. Does anyone believe that continuing financial innovation will not lead to another financial crisis in the near future? And yet the structural issues are not even being discussed. Our huge overreactions to 9-11 and to drug use have led to a perpetual security state from which we cannot return. Vast numbers of people are incarcerated at a huge cost for something that should not even be a crime. And we all pay the Bin Laden Tax when we put up with the costs and disruptions of airport security. And of course our political systems play into this with a vengeance, because they are notoriously poor at systemic and long term solutions and those perverse instincts are amped up by the public sense of perpetual crisis. There has been an inevitable loss of faith in institutions ability to get ahead of the curve and tamp down the trembling state of anxiety the world now seems to be unable to shake off.

There seems to be no way back from this sense of dangling on the precipice, ready to fall over, but not quite. We cannot disconnect the world's functional systems and we cannot disconnect our awareness from the world's information systems. This is our new reality: high anxiety driven by cascading crises, real and imagined. 

No-one really knows what we should be worried about. The smartest people around seem to generally think the answer is machine intelligence. They may be right, but other types of inhuman intelligence have an established track record well worth worrying about. Right now, I'm worried that so few smart people, whatever they are worried about, are doing anything to fight back against it.

In a pre-verbal tribe, most of the monkeys don't need to decide where they are going. They don't need to make their own decisions—because if they go off on their own, either the leader will kill them for rebelling, or a jaguar will kill them once they are separated from their pack. In such a situation, only pack leaders need to activate the messy symbolic intuitions that tell them what's out there and what needs to be done. As Abraham Maslow might say, only someone who sees themselves as a chief of their own, who has satisfied their need for esteem, is in a good position to self-actualize.

Maslow suggests that at one level of description a human consists of five programs. One escapes immediate danger, one seeks comfort and physical security, one finds a social context in which to be embedded, one builds esteem within that context, and one directs big-picture intentionality. As a general rule, when a given program reports satisfaction the next program is turned on and starts competing in its more subtle game. 

Some of those programs allocate attention to things that can be understood fairly rigorously, like a cart, a plow, or a sword. Other programs allocate attention to more complicated things, such as the long-term alliances and reproductive opportunities within a tribe. The former programs might involve situational awareness and detailed planning, while the latter programs might operate via subtle and tacit pattern detection and automatic obedience to crude heuristics. If so, the latter programs might be fairly easily hacked. They might also offer a less fertile ground for the emergence of a Universal Turing Machine. Mechanical metaphors of solidity and shape might constitute a good substrate for digital, and thus potentially abstract cognition, while social metaphors for continuous and vague properties like weirdness, gravitas and sexiness might constitute a poor foundation for universal cognition. These programs seem to have been disfavored by history's great scientific innovators, who tend to make statements like "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble..." or "What do you care what other people think", which sound like endorsements of physical over social cognition. 



These considerations lead me to worry about the consequences of assisting a population in satisfying its physiological needs but not its love, belonging and esteem needs. Such a population would be at risk for underdevelopment of the programs for satisfying physiological and safety needs. That would be harmful if these functions are the basis for precise thought in general. It might be argued that the correct solution to this problem is to hurry people through their love, belonging and esteem needs, but that approach incurs further hazards.



Dacher Keltner and other psychologists recently showed that higher socioeconomic class—essentially higher satisfaction of esteem needs—leads to increased unethical behavior, while other research suggests that external efforts to boost self-esteem tend to produce anti-social narcissism. Research of this type fits in well with Jonathan Haidt's theories on the authoritarian dimension of moral cognition. It may not be a coincidence that one of the world's most popular religions is literally named "submission". In general, authoritarian impulses have always advised rulers to keep their subjects' bellies full… and pressed firmly against the ground. Steven Pinker has compellingly established the success of modern society in bringing us unprecedented peace. People, who don't fear for their safety, but who despair of ever achieving love or belonging, are the most submissive.

When we say that someone is 'smart', we largely mean that they learn quickly. Under circumstances where most students reach a seventh grade reading level, the 'gifted' students absorb the full content of their schooling. According to New York City's three-time teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto, that curriculum consists primarily of six lessons, but it seems to me that these lessons can be summarized in one word, submission.

Robert Altmeyer's research shows that for a population of authoritarian submissives, authoritarian dominators are a survival necessity. Since those who learn their school lessons are too submissive to guide their own lives, our society is forced to throw huge wads of money at the rare intelligent authoritarian dominants it can find, from derivative start-up founders to sociopathic Fortune 500 CEOs. However, with their attention placed on esteem, their concrete reasoning underdeveloped and their school curriculum poorly absorbed, such leaders aren't well positioned to create value. They can create some, by imperfectly imitating established models, but can't build the abstract models needed to innovate seriously. For such innovations, we depend on the few self-actualizers we still get; people who aren't starving for esteem.  And that does not include the wealthy, the powerful, and the 'smart'; they learned their lessons well in school.

I am worried about who gets to be players in the science game—and who is left out. As I was growing up in New York, I was always pushed and rewarded for my involvement in jazz. In the realm of jazz performances, I found that fellow musicians, elders and contemporaries, while demanding excellence, remained inclusive—everyone was given a chance to solo and, if you were good enough, you could get called back up.

Unfortunately, with exception to a few enlightened individuals, professional inclusion has not been the collective experience of underrepresented groups (this goes beyond ethnicity and includes individuals who also "think" differently) in certain scientific disciplines. Given the population trends, some argue that for the U.S. to be competitive in STEM related fields, we'll need to extend the scientific enterprise to the increasing Latino and Black populations. I worry that while funding structures tend to address this issue at the K-12 and collegiate levels, there has been little serious discussion about diversifying, recruiting and indulging in inclusive practices to persons of color in the academy. Time and time again, research has shown that a lack of role models, especially to underrepresented groups, negatively impacts excellence and retention.

Our ability to take on the issue of inclusivity in the scientific enterprise goes beyond the usual discourse surrounding affirmative action. No exceptionally talented individual, regardless of their background, should feel like an opportunity was bestowed to them because of a policy, instead of due to genuine appreciation of that individual's unique qualities, presence and abilities. One challenge that the scientific community faces now is to go beyond tolerance of difference in order to genuinely appreciate difference, including those that make us feel uncomfortable, especially those who see the world and think differently from us.

I understand that the issue of racial inclusivity is sensitive and loaded with complicated sociological and political overtones. I do think it is an elephant in the room that needs to be dealt with by us as a scientific community. We need to be honest and open. If the demographics of the U.S. and the world at large will look different, do we care to prepare our academies at all levels to share their resources and influence with them? In the spirit of my friend Brian Eno's contribution, I have taken the challenge to bring up something that may make people uncomfortable—

because it is more productive to do so than to be polite. 

As the 21st Century proceeds, tasks facing our species will become increasingly complex. Many problems that in an earlier era might have been easily addressed by a single person will now require a sophisticated set of abilities contributed by different people. The individual contributions must be deeply complementary; the whole must be more than the sum of its parts.

This much seems obvious. But no part of contemporary formal education—at any point from kindergarten through post-graduate work—is designed to teach people how to interact effectively with other people when they participate in goal-oriented groups. When such a group functions well it synergizes the talents and abilities of its members. But at present, such synergy occurs because of a lucky combination of people—people who happen to have complementary skills and abilities that are relevant for the task at hand and happen to be able to interact effectively. It is not obvious how best to compose a group to facilitate such synergy. But most people don't seem aware that there's a problem here.

Consider a similar situation: Many people who interview applicants for jobs think that they are good at picking the "right" applicant. They think that they know how to pick appropriate employees based not just the content of the applicant's answers, but also on his or her nonverbal behavior while answering. But it has been repeatedly shown that interviewers who rely on intuition and "feeling" generally are not good at picking job applicants.

So, too, with selecting people to work together in goal-oriented groups. People have intuitions about how to assign individuals to groups and how to organize them, but decisions based on such intuitions are not necessarily any better than chance. Relying on the luck of the draw won't be very effective as task-oriented groups face increasingly complex challenges. We must overcome such intuitions. We need to realize that understanding how best to select the right people for the right group is a very hard problem, and understanding how they should interact most effectively in a group is itself a very hard problem.

To compose a group that will work effectively to tackle a complex problem, we need to know: (i) how to analyze the nature of tasks in order to identify which skills and abilities are necessary to address a particular task, (ii) how to identify such skills and abilities in individual people, and (iii) how different sorts of people can interact most effectively when working on a particular sort of task. Much research will be required to crack these problems (and such research is already underway), but the results of such research will not be widely used as long as people don't recognize the nature of the problems and why they are important.

Science can do better than intuition—but we first must understand that intuition isn't good enough. And this isn't intuitively obvious.  

The universe is relentlessly, catastrophically dangerous, on scales that menace not just communities, but civilizations and our species as well. A freakish chain of improbable accidents produced the bubble of conditions that was necessary for the rise of life, our species, and technological civilization. If we continue to drift obliviously inside this bubble, taking its continuation for granted, then inevitably—sooner or later—physical or human-triggered events will push us outside, and we will be snuffed like a candle in a hurricane.

We are menaced by gamma ray bursts (that scrub major regions of their galaxies free of life); nearby supernovae; asteroids and cometary impacts (which strike Jupiter every year or two); Yellowstone-like supereruptions (the Toba supereruption was a near extinction-event for humans), civilization-collapsing coronal mass ejections (which would take down the electrical grids and electronics underlying technological civilization in a way that they couldn't recover from, since their repair requires electricity supplied by the grid; this is just one example of the more general danger posed by the complex, fragile interdependence inherent in our current technology); and many other phenomena including those unknown to us. Here is one that no one talks about: The average G-type star shows a variability in energy output of around 4%. Our sun is a typical G-type star, yet its observed variability in our brief historical sample is only 1/40th of this. When or if the Sun returns to more typical variation in energy output, this will dwarf any other climate concerns.

The emergence of science as a not wholly superstitious and corrupt enterprise is slowly awakening our species to these external dangers. As the brilliant t-shirt says, an asteroid is nature's way of asking how your space program is doing. If we are lucky we might have time to build a robust, hardened planetary and extraplanetary hypercivilization able to surmount these challenges. Such a hypercivilization would have to be immeasurably richer and more scientifically advanced to prevent, say, the next Yellowstone supereruption or buffer a 2% drop in the Sun's energy output. (Indeed, ice ages are the real climate-based ecological disasters and civilization-enders—think Europe and North America under a mile of ice). Whether we know it or not, we are in a race to forge such a hypercivilization before these blows fall. If these threats seem too distant, low probability, or fantastical to belong to the "real" world, then let them serve as stand-ins for the much larger number of more immediately dire problems whose solutions also depend on rapid progress in science and technology.

This raises a second category of menaces—hidden, deadly, ever-adapting, already here—that worry me even more: the evolved monsters from the id that we all harbor (e.g., group identity, the appetite for prestige and power, etc.), together with their disguised offspring, the self-organizing collective delusions that we all participate in, and mistake for reality. (As the cognoscenti know, the technical term monsters from the id originated in Forbidden Planet.) We need to map and master these monsters and the dynamics through which they generate collective delusions if our societies are to avoid near-term, internally generated failure.

For example, cooperative scientific problem-solving is the most beautifully effective system for the production of reliable knowledge that the world has ever seen. But the monsters that haunt our collective intellectual enterprises typically turn us instead into idiots. Consider the cascade of collective cognitive pathologies produced in our intellectual coalitions by ingroup tribalism, self-interest, prestige-seeking, and moral one-upsmanship: It seems intuitive to expect that being smarter would lead people to have more accurate models of reality. On this view, intellectual elites therefore ought to have better beliefs, and should guide their societies with superior knowledge. Indeed, the enterprise of science is—as an ideal—specifically devoted to improving the accuracy of beliefs. We can pinpoint where this analysis goes awry, however, when we consider the multiple functions of holding beliefs. We take for granted that the function of a belief is to be coordinated with reality, so that when actions are based on that belief, they succeed. The more often beliefs are tested against reality, the more often accurate beliefs displace inaccurate ones (e.g., through feedback from experiments, engineering tests, markets, natural selection). However, there is a second kind of function to holding a belief that affects whether people consciously or unconsciously come to embrace it—the social payoffs from being coordinated or discoordinated with others' beliefs (Socrates' execution for "failing to acknowledge the gods the city acknowledges"). The mind is designed to balance these two functions: coordinating with reality, and coordinating with others. The larger the payoffs to social coordination, and the less commonly beliefs are tested against reality, then the more social demands will determine belief—that is, network fixation of belief will predominate. Physics and chip design will have a high degree of coordination with reality, while the social sciences and climatology will have less.

Because intellectuals are densely networked in self-selecting groups whose members' prestige is linked (for example, in disciplines, departments, theoretical schools, universities, foundations, media, political/moral movements, and other guilds), we incubate endless, self-serving elite superstitions, with baleful effects: Biofuel initiatives starve millions of the planet's poorest. Economies around the world still apply epically costly Keynesian remedies despite the decisive falsification of Keynesian theory by the post-war boom (government spending was cut by 2/3, 10 million veterans dumped into the labor force, while Samuelson predicted "the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced"). I personally have been astonished over the last four decades by the fierce resistance of the social sciences to abandoning the blank slate model in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is false. As Feynman pithily put it, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

Sciences can move at the speed of inference when individuals only need to consider logic and evidence. Yet sciences move glacially (Planck's "funeral by funeral") when the typical scientist, dependent for employment on a dense ingroup network, has to get the majority of her guild to acknowledge fundamental, embarrassing disciplinary errors. To get science systematically moving at the speed of inference—the key precondition to solving our other problems—we need to design our next generation scientific institutions to be more resistant to self-organizing collective delusions, by basing them on a fuller understanding of our evolved psychology.

At around 2PM on Tuesday, October 30, 1973, a New York radio station played a monologue by the comedian George Carlin, enumerating and exemplifying in rich detail the seven words ostensibly not allowed on the public airwaves. Soon after, the F.C.C. placed sanctions on the radio station for the broadcast, which it deemed to be "indecent" and "patently offensive." Five years later, the United States Supreme Court upheld its decision. In other words, the highest court in the land judged certain words to be so dangerous that even the constitutional right to free speech had to be set aside. But why?

The children, of course. It was to protect the children. According to the Supreme Court, the problem with Carlin's routine was that the obscene words, words describing sexual acts and excretory functions "may have a deeper and more lasting negative effect on a child than on an adult."

Many of us are afraid of exposing children to taboo language, based on this same notion—that somehow certain words can damage young minds. And the well-being of children—were it indeed on the line—would most certainly be a justifiable reason to limit freedom of speech. But the problem is that the Supreme Court's premise, that children can be harmed by selected taboo words, does not survive the test of careful empirical scrutiny. In fact, there are no words so terrible, so gruesomely obscene, that merely hearing them or speaking them poses any danger to young ears.

Taboo words carry no intrinsic threat of harm. Simply referring to body part or actions involving them harm a child. Indeed, the things taboo words refer to can be equally well identified using words deemed appropriate for medical settings or use around children. And there's nothing about the sound of the words themselves that causes insult to the child's auditory system. Near phonological neighbors to taboo words, words like "fit" and "shuck" do not contaminate the cochlea.

Indeed, which particular words are selected as forbidden is an arbitrary accident of history. Words that once would have earned the utterer a mouthful of soap, expressions like "Zounds!" or "That sucks!" hardly lead the modern maven to bat an ear. And conversely, words that today rank among the most obscene at one time were used commonly to refer to the most mundane things, like roosters and female dogs.

No, the only risk children run by hearing the four-letter words prohibited over the public airwaves is the small chance of broadening their vocabularies. And even this possibility is remote, as anyone can attest who has recently overheard the goings-on in an elementary school playground.

So when the Motion Picture Association of America forbids children from watching the South Park movie; when parents instruct children to put their hands over their ears in "earmuff" position; and indeed when the FCC levies fines on broadcasters, they aren't protecting children. But they are having an effect. Paradoxically, it's these actions we take to shield children from words, with censorship foremost among them, that gives specific words their power. And this makes perhaps the best argument that we shouldn't be afraid of exposing children to taboo words. Doing so is the best way to take away any perceived threat they pose. 

I'm worried that our technology is helping to bring the long, postwar consensus against fascism to an end. Greece was once the cradle of democracy, yet on live television there recently, a leader of the Golden Dawn fascist movement started beating a female MP who disagreed with his views—smashing her on one side of the head, then the other—and his poll ratings went up, not down.

The problem is that our latest technology works best with no one in control. Silicon Valley beats anything that more regulated economies can produce. But when the results are applied in banking, or management, the result for those in the middle and bottom of society often is chaos: jobs coming and going, seemingly at random.

Because of what fascism led to in the past, it's easy to forget how attractive it can be for most citizens in troubled times. With a good enemy to hate, atomized individuals get a warm sense of unity. And, although some gentle souls like to imagine, frowningly, that only an ill-educated minority will ever enjoy physical violence, that's not at all the case. Schoolchildren almost everywhere enjoy seeing a weaker child being tormented. Fears about our own weakness disappear when an enemy is mocked and punished—a reflex that radio shock jocks across America most skillfully manipulate.

This cry of the dispossessed—this desire for restoring order, this noble punishment of those who 'dare' to undermine us—will get a particular boost from medical technology. Medicine's getting better, but it's also getting more expensive. Extrapolate those trends.

There's every reason to think modifications of Botox will be longer-lasting, and avoid unmovable foreheads—but what if they cost 4,000 dollars a shot? The differences in physique noticeable between the wealthy and the poor at many shopping malls even now will only be exacerbated.

Gene therapy is likely to take that further, quite plausibly slowing aging by decades—but what if that costs several hundred thousand dollars? Many people in our cities' wealthiest neighborhoods would start using that. It's not hard to imagine popular leaders with no memory of World War II inspiring those outside the select high-income domains, those who are mocked beyond endurance by the existence of these near immortals in their midst, to pursue this all too human response to injustice.

But it's a response that will halt technologic innovation in its tracks, at precisely the time when we need it most.

How many calls to a typical U.S. fire department are actually about fires? Less than 20%. If fire departments aren't getting calls about fires, what are they mostly getting calls about? They are getting calls about medical emergencies, traffic accidents, and, yes, cats in trees, but they are rarely being called about fires. They are, in other words, organizations that, despite their name, deal with everything but fires. 

Why, then, are they called fire departments? Because of history. Cities used to be built out of pre-combustion materials—wood straight from the forest, for example—but they are now mostly built of post-combustion materials—steel, concrete, and other materials that have passed through flame. Fire departments were created when fighting fires was an urgent urban need, and now their name lives on, a reminder of their host cities' combustible past. 

Everywhere you look you see fire departments. Not, literally, fire departments, but organizations, technologies, institutions and countries that, like fire departments, are long beyond their "past due" date, or weirdly vestigial, and yet remain widespread and worryingly important. 

One of my favorite examples comes from the siting of cities. Many U.S. river cities are where they are because of portages, the carrying of boats and cargo around impassable rapids. This meant, many times, overnight stays, which led to hotels, entertainment, and, eventually, local industry, at first devoted to shipping, but then broader. Now, however, those portage cities are prisoners of history, sitting along rivers that no longer matter for their economy, meanwhile struggling with seasonal floods and complex geographies antithetical to development—all because a few early travelers using transportation technologies that no longer matter today had to portage around a few rapids. To put it plainly, if we rebooted right now most of these cities would be located almost anywhere else first.

This isn't just about cities, or fire departments. This is about history, paths, luck, and "installed base" effects. Think of incandescent bulbs. Or universities (or tenure). Paper money. The post office. These are all examples of organizations or technologies that persist, largely for historical reasons, not because they remain the best solution to the problem for which they were created. They are often obstacles to much better solutions.

It is obvious that this list will get longer in the near future. Perhaps multilane freeways join the list, right behind the internal combustion engine. Or increasingly costly and dysfunctional public markets. Malls as online commerce casualties. Or even venture capitalists in the age of Angellist and Kickstarter. How about geography-based citizenship. All of these seem vaguely ossified, like they are in the way, even if most people aren't noticing—yet.

But this is not a list-making game. This is not some Up With Technology exercise where we congratulate ourselves at how fast things are changing. This is the reverse. History increasingly traps us, creating paths—and endowments and costs, both in time and money—that must be traveled before we can change directions, however desirable those new directions might seem. History—the path by which we got here, and the endowments and effluvia it has left us—is an increasingly large weight on our progress. Our built environment is an installed base, like an ancient computer operating systems that holds back progress because compatibility gives such an immense advantage. 

Writer William Gibson once famously said that the "The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed". I worry more that the past is here—it's just so evenly distributed that we can't get to the future. 

There are two kinds of fools: one who says this is old and therefore good, and the other who says this is new and therefore better. The argument between the two is as old as humanity itself, but technology's relentless exponential advance has made the divide deeper and more contentious than ever. My greatest fear is that this divide will frustrate the sensible application of technological innovation in the service of solving humankind's greatest challenges.

The two camps forming this divide need a name, and "Druids" and "Engineers" will do. Druids argue that we must slow down and reverse the damage and disruption wrought by two centuries of industrialization. "Engineers" advocate the opposite: we can overcome our current problems only with the heroic application of technological innovation. Druids argue for a return to the past, Engineers urge us to flee into the future.

The Druid-Engineer divide can be seen in virtually every domain touched by technology. Druids urge a ban on GMOs, while Engineers impatiently argue for the creation of synthetic organisms. Environmental Druids seek what the late David Brower called "Earth National Park," while Engineers would take a page from Douglas Adam's planet-designing Magratheans in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, making better Earth by fixing all the broken bits. Transhumanists and singularitans are Engineers; the Animal Liberation Front and Ted Kaczynski are Druids. In politics, Libertarians are Engineers, while the Greens are Druids. Among religions, Christian fundamentalists are Druids and Scientologists are Engineers.

The gulf between Druid and Engineer makes C. P. Snow's Two Cultures seem like a mere crack in the sidewalk. The two camps do not merely hold different worldviews; they barely speak the same language. A recent attempt to sequester oceanic carbon by dumping iron dust in the Pacific off of British Columbia intrigued Engineers, but alarmed Druids who considered it an act of intentional pollution. Faced with uncertainty or crisis, engineers instinctively hit the gas; Druids prefer the brake.

The pervasiveness of the Druid-Engineer divide and the stubborn passions demonstrated by both sides reminds me of that old warrior-poet Archilochus and his hedgehog-fox distinction revived and elaborated upon by Isaiah Berlin. Experience conditions us towards being Engineers or Druids just as it turns us into hedgehogs or foxes. Engineers tend to be technologists steeped in physics and engineering. Druids are informed by anthropology, biology and the earth sciences. Engineers are optimists—anything can be fixed given enough brainpower, effort and money. Druids are pessimists—no matter how grand the construct, everything eventually rusts, decays and erodes to dust.

Perhaps the inclination is even deeper. Some years back, the five year-old daughter of a venture capitalist friend announced upon encountering an unfamiliar entree at the family table, "It's new and I don't like it." A Druid in the making, that became her motto all through primary school, and for all I know, it still is today.

We live in a time when the loneliest place in any debate is the middle, and the argument over technology's role in our future is no exception. The relentless onslaught of novelties technological and otherwise is tilting individuals and institutions alike towards becoming Engineers or Druids. It is a pressure we must resist, for to be either a Druid or an Engineer is to be a fool. Druids can't revive the past, and Engineers cannot build technologies that do not carry hidden trouble.

The solution is to claw our way back to the middle and a good place to start is by noting one's own Druid/Engineer inclinations. Unexamined inclinations amount to dangerous bias, but once known, the same inclination can become the basis for powerful intuition. What is your instinctive reaction to something new; is your default anticipation or rejection? Consider autonomous highway vehicles: Druids fear that robot cars are unsafe; Engineers wonder why humans are allowed to drive at all.

My worry is that collective minds change as a snail's pace while technology races along an exponential curve. I fear we will not rediscover the middle ground in time to save us from our myriad folly. My inner Engineer is certain a new planetary meme will arrive and bring everyone to their senses, but my gloomy Druid tells me that we will be lucky to muddle our way through without killing ourselves off or ushering in another dark age. I will be happy if both are a little right—and a little wrong.

We should worry that so much of our science and technology still uses just five main models of probability—even though there are more probability models than there are real numbers.

I call these lamplight probabilities. The adjective refers to the old joke about the drunk who keeps walking around a lamplight one night. A policeman sees the drunk and asks him what he is doing. He says that he is looking for his keys that he lost. The policeman asks him where he lost the keys. The drunk points off into the dark. The policeman then asks him why he keeps looking for the keys under the lamplight. The drunk says that he looks for the keys there because that is where the light is.

The five lamplight probabilities do explain a lot of the observed world. They have simple closed-form definitions. So they are easy to teach. Open any book on probability and there they are. We have proven lots of theorems about them. And they generalize to many other simple closed-form probabilities that also seem to explain a lot of the world and that find their way into real-world models that range from finance to communications to nuclear engineering.

But how accurate are they? How well do they match fact rather than just simplify the hard task of picking a good random model of the world?

Their use in practice seldom comes with a statistical hypothesis test that can give some objective measure of how well the assumption of a lamplight probability fits the data at hand. And each model has express technical conditions that the data must satisfy. Yet the data routinely violate these conditions in practice.

Everyone knows the first lamplight probability: the normal bell curve. Indeed most people think that the normal bell curve is the bell curve. But there are whole families of bell curves with thicker tails that explain a wide range of otherwise unlikely "rare" or "black swan" events depending on how thick the tails are. And that is still under the assumption that the bell is regular or symmetric. You just don't find these bell curves in most textbooks.

There is also a simple test for such thin-tailed "normality" in time-series data such as price histories or sampled human speech: All higher-order cumulants of the process must be zero. A cumulant is a special average of the process. Looking at the higher-order cumulants of an alleged normal process routinely leads to the same finding: They are not all zero. So the process cannot be normal. Yet under the lamplight we go ahead and assume the process is normal anyway—especially since so many other researchers do the same thing in similar circumstances.

That can lead to severely underestimating the occurrence of rare events such as loan defaults. That is just what happened in the financial engineering models of the recent financial panic when financial engineers found a way to impose the normal curve on complex correlated financial derivatives.

The second and third lamplight probabilities are the Poisson and exponential probability models. Poisson probabilities model random counting events such as the number of hits on an internet site or the number of cars that merge onto a freeway or the number of raindrops that hit a sidewalk. Exponential probabilities model how long it takes for the next Poisson event to happen. So they model how long it takes until the next customer walks through the door or until the next raindrop hits the pavement. This easily generalizes into how long you have to wait for the next ten internet hits or the next ten raindrops. Modern queuing theory rests on these two lamplight probabilities. It is all about waiting times for Poisson arrivals at queues. And so the internet itself rests on these two lamplight models.

But Poisson models have a big Achilles heel: Their averages must equal their variances (spreads about their means). This again routinely fails to hold in practice. Exponential models have a similar problem. Their variances must equal the square of their means. This is a fine relationship that also rarely holds exactly in practice. It holds only to some fuzzy degree in most cases. Whether the approximation is a good enough is a judgment call—and one that the lamplight makes a lot easier to make.

The fourth lamplight probability is the uniform probability model. Everyone also knows the uniform model because it is the special case where all outcomes are equally likely. It is just what the layman thinks of as doing something "at random" such as drawing straws or grabbing a numbered ping-pong ball from a bingo hopper. But straws come in varying lengths and thicknesses and so their draw probabilities may not be exactly equal. It gets harder and harder in practice to produce equally likely outcomes as the number of outcomes increase. It is even a theoretical fact that one cannot draw an integer at random from the set of integers because of the nature of infinity. So it helps to appeal to common practice under the lamplight and simply assume that the outcomes are all equally likely.

The fifth and final lamplight probability is the binomial probability model. It describes the canonical random metaphor of flipping a coin. The binomial model requires binary outcomes such as heads or tails and further requires independent trials or flips. The probability of getting heads must also stay the same from flip to flip. This seems simple enough. But it can be hard to accept that the next flip of a fair coin is just as likely to be heads as it is to be tails when the preceding three independent coin-flip outcomes have all been heads.

Even the initiated can scratch their heads at how the binomial behaves. Consider a fair penny. Fairness here means that the penny is equally likely to come up heads or tails when flipped (and hence the fourth lamplight probability describes this elementary outcome). So the probability of heads is ½. Now flip the penny several times. Then answer this question: Are you more likely to get three heads in six coin flips or are you more likely to get three heads in just five coin flips? The correct answer is neither. The probability of getting three heads in both cases is exactly 5/16. That is hardly intuitive but it comes straight out of counting up all the possible outcomes.

Lamplight probabilities have proven an especially tight restriction on modern Bayesian inference.

That is disappointing given both the explosion in modern Bayesian computing and the widespread view that learning itself is a form of using Bayes theorem to update one's belief given fresh data or evidence. Bayes theorem shows how to compute the probability of a logical converse. It shows how to adjust the probability of lung cancer given a biopsy if we know what the raw probability of lung cancer is and if we know the probability that we would observe such a biopsy in a patient if the patient in fact has lung cancer.

But almost all Bayesian models restrict these probabilities to not just the well-known lamplight probabilities. They further restrict them so that they satisfy a very restrictive "conjugacy" relationship. The result has put much of modern Bayesian computing into a straightjacket of its own design.

Conjugacy is tempting. Suppose the cancer probability is normal. Suppose also that the conditional probability of the biopsy given the cancer is normal. These two probabilities are conjugate. Then what looks like mathematical magic happens. The desired probability of lung cancer given the biopsy likelihood is itself a normal probability curve. And thus normal conjugates with normal to produce a new normal. That lets us take this new normal model as the current estimate of lung cancer and then repeat the process for a new biopsy.

The computer can grind away on hundreds or thousands of such data-based iterations and the result will always be a normal bell curve. But change either of the two input normal curves and in general the result will not be normal. That gives a perverse incentive to stay within the lamplight and keep assuming a thin-tailed normal curve to describe both the data and what we believe. The same thing happens when one tries to estimate the probability of heads for a biased coin using the binomial and a beta curve that generalizes the uniform. And a similar conjugacy relation holds between Poisson probabilities and exponentials and their generalizations to gamma probabilities. So that gives three basic conjugacy relations.

Most Bayesian applications assume some form of one of these three conjugacy relations—and almost always for ease of computation or to comply with common practice.

That is no way to run a revolution in probabilistic computing.

In an episode of the 1980s British TV series 'Tales of the Unexpected', an amateur botanist discovers that plants emit agonised screams when pruned, though at frequencies well beyond human hearing. So overcome is he with sympathy for this suffering vegetation, and so apparently bizarre his demands that a local doctor give medical attention to his trees, that he is quickly packed off to an asylum.

A preposterous flight of fancy from Roald Dahl's ever-fertile imagination? No doubt. But this conceit also raises a profoundly serious point: we have next to no idea which things in the world around us are conscious and which are not.

This might seem like an abstract philosophical issue, but on the contrary, consciousness is the substrate of all suffering and pleasure, and thus the mediator of everything truly important to us. If there were no subjective experience then there would be no such things as kindness, love or joy. However sublime our universe, it would be inconsequential without a consciousness to perceive it. True, in a world with no subjective experience there would also be no cruelty, pain or worrying (including that of the kind I am doing now). But this is precisely the point: how are we to maximise happiness and minimise suffering if we do not reliably know where and when they can exist?

Our usual rule of thumb for the presence of consciousness is to assess, based on superficial cues, how similar to ourselves something appears to be. Thus a dog is more conscious than a duck, which in turn is more conscious than a daffodil. But our intuitions about so many things—rom the motions of celestial objects to the likelihood of winning the lottery—are so often wrong that we are foolish to rely on them for something as important as the ultimate source of all joy and strife.

Famously, and ironically, the only thing of which we can be truly certain is the existence of our own subjective experience, and we see the physical world only through this dark glass. Yet the scientific method has proved a remarkable tool for clarifying our view and enabling us to develop an elaborate, apparently objective consensus about how the world works. Unfortunately, having provided us with an escape route from our own subjectivity, science leaves us almost completely impotent to probe the nature and origins of subjective experience itself. The truth is that we have no idea what things have consciousness, where it comes from, or even what it is. All we really know is how it feels.

That may sound like an odd statement to come from a former neuroscientist. It is certainly true that we understand an impressive amount about how the brain functions as a physical system, and also about the ways in which different brain states correspond to various reported subjective experiences. But this is a very long way from understanding consciousness well enough to be able to do what really matters: determine with reasonable certainty what does and does not possess it, and to what degree.

This is a fabulously hard task. Daniel Dennett's outstanding book, 'Consciousness Explained', for all its considerable eloquence and erudition, falls well short of the claim of its title. Indeed, we have tied ourselves in such intellectual knots over consciousness that it is hard to discern more than incremental progress since Descartes.

For an example of the difficulties involved, consider John Searle's celebrated Chinese Room thought experiment, which purports to show— contrary to Alan Turing's claims—that input-output characteristics alone are insufficient to determine the existence of a conscious mind. Intuitively this conclusion seems right: a sleeping person, immobile and inattentive, might nevertheless be experiencing vivid dreams. Conversely, I can drive a familiar route without forming any conscious record of the journey that took me to my destination. But the Chinese Room does nothing to prove this thesis, for it is a thought experiment and the trouble with thought experiments is that the researcher chooses not only the experimental conditions but also the results. This makes them useful for testing the internal consistency of ideas but almost useless for probing mysterious, apparently emergent phenomena like consciousness. (To see this, carry out the same thought experiment on the 3kg lump of electrophysiological goo called the human brain and if you're being consistent then you'll get the same result: there appears to be no conscious understanding anywhere inside.)

Over the last decade or two, neuroscientists have at last shed their qualms about investigating the mysterious and transcendent phenomenon of consciousness, with some interesting results. Our best guess these days is that consciousness arises when certain types and quantities of information are integrated in the brain in certain ways. But this is still very hand-wavy, not only because the parameters are so ill-defined, but also because we don't even know exactly what we mean by information. After all, every physical system contains 'information' of one sort or another, and 'computes' its own behaviour, so the brain is far from unique in this respect.

What's more, even if we understood exactly what kind of information has to be brought together in precisely what combinations and quantities to ignite a spark of consciousness, we'd still be in the dark as to whether this is an emergent or fundamental phenomenon, and why this physical universe even allows subjective experience to exist at all. Those mysteries remain as dark to us as the nature of existence itself.

Towards the end of 2012 doctors picked up the first message (via a brain scan) from a patient in a persistent vegetative state. But if input-output characteristics can't be trusted—and they probably can't—then we really have no way of confirming whether this represented a conscious act or an insensible physical response. Similarly, what of patients under anaesthetic? For all we know they may be suffering in agony during their operations even if they have no memory of it afterwards. And so on and on, from human embryos to birds, insects and, yes, even plants. Not to mention all those computers we're bringing into existence: might they have an inner life too?

It is possible that we are rare, fleeting specks of awareness in an unfeeling cosmic desert, the only witnesses to its wonder. It is also possible that we are living in a universal sea of sentience, surrounded by ecstasy and strife that is open to our influence. Sensible beings that we are, both possibilities should worry us.

As I enter the courtyard of the British Library, I pass under the long shadow cast by the bronze colossus of Newton. With measuring-compass in hand, he is fathoming the deepest laws of the universe. But the baleful inspiration for this monument dismays me. For he is the Newton of William Blake's famous print, depicting all that the artist abhorred in his construal of Newtonian science—desiccated rationality, soulless materialism. With thoughts of Blake, the tiger and its "fearful symmetry" come to mind. And the phrase suddenly brings into sharp perspective a nagging worry that I had not articulated. I finally pinpoint what it is that so dismays me about the dismissive views of science that I regularly encounter. It is their fearful asymmetry—the discrepancy between the objective status of the science and its denigration by a clamorous crowd of latter-day Blakes.

If you work on the science of human nature, in particular sex differences, that asymmetry will be all too familiar. There is a vocal constituency of educated people—some of them scientists, even biologists, social scientists, public intellectuals, journalists—people who respect science, biology, even human biology and who, at least ostensibly, take Darwinism to be true for all living things … as long as it doesn't venture into our evolved human nature.

To understand the resulting asymmetry and how worrying it is, consider first a crucial distinction between two 'worlds'.

One is the world of the objective content of ideas, in particular of science as a body of knowledge, of actual and possible scientific theories, their truth or falsity, their refutability, tests passed or failed, valid and invalid arguments, objections met or unanswered, crucial evidence deployed, progress achieved. Darwinian science has high status in this world of objective knowledge as perhaps "the single best idea anyone has ever had". And, probably uniquely in the history of science, it is unlikely to be superseded; biology will be forever Darwinian—for natural selection, it seems, is the only mechanism that can achieve design without a designer. And the Darwinian understanding of human nature is a straightforward implication of that core insight. The first serious attempt at a science of ourselves … and, what's more, it's most likely right.

The other world is the subjective one of mental states, the personal and the social—thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, feelings, emotions, hopes, ambitions.

Armed with this distinction, we can pin down exactly what the asymmetry is and why it is so worrying.

Generally, the public reception of a scientific theory concurs by and large with the judgement of the objective world of ideas. Not, however, in the case of the scientific understanding of our evolved human nature and, above all, male and female natures. If the arguments against the evolutionary science of human nature were conducted in the world of the objective content of ideas, there would be no contest; evolutionary theory would win hands down. But, as a sociological fact, in the public market-place it loses disastrously against its vociferous critics.

How? Because, in a complete reversal of the objective relationship between the science and these critics, all the asymmetries are reversed.

First, the burden of 'proof', the burden of argument, is transferred from the criticisms onto the science; it is Darwinism that's on trial. Meanwhile, anti-Darwinian attitudes don't have to defend themselves—they are accepted uncritically; the standards for judgement of these views involve all-too-ready credibility and suspensions of disbelief.

Second, adding insult to injury, a plethora of home-made alternatives is conjured up to fill the gap where the real science should be. This DIY-science includes: pseudo-methodological denunciations, where mere name-callings suffice—essentialist, reductivist, teleological, Panglossian (all very bad) and politically incorrect (very bad indeed); the immutable 'entanglement' of nature and nurture, which renders nature impenetrable—thereby freeing 'pure nurture' to be discussed at length; a cavalier disregard for hard-won empirical evidence—though with a penchant for bits of brains lighting up (no; I don't know either); the magical potency of 'stereotyping' (bad) and 'role models' (good); a logic-defying power to work miracles on tabula-rasa psychologies, as in 'socialisation' (bad) and 'empowerment' (good); made-up mechanisms, even though discredited—multi-tasking, self-esteem, stereotype threat; complaints of 'controversial' and 'tendentious' – which are true sociologically but false scientifically (a case of raising the dust and then complaining they cannot see). The science-free policy that this generates is epitomised by the 'women into science' lobby, which is posited on a 'bias and barriers' assumption and an a priori rejection of—yes, the science of sex differences.

This mish-mash is low on scientific merit. But it is not treated as opinion versus science. On the contrary, psychologically and sociologically, it has a voice far more influential and persuasive than its objective status warrants.

At least it does at present. But, taking the long, impartial view of human nature as a product of the workings of natural selection, a wider vista opens. And that impresses on us how privileged we are to live in a time of Enlightenment values—how rare, how local, how recent such values are in our two-million-year history—and how much they are the values in which the nature of our species will flourish. Darwin's contribution to our understanding of ourselves is emblematic of human progress, an apotheosis not only of science but of the wider cultural legacy that is Enlightenment thought. Blake might not have known better. But, understanding the distinction between the autonomous objectivity of the world of ideas and the very different status of the psychological and social, we can appreciate the true value of science. And, with that perspective in mind, I feel less worried about those fearful asymmetries.

Check the "most emailed list" of websites for periodicals ranging from the New York Times to FoxNews.com and you'll often see, sprinkled in with major world events and scandals, a story about a new scientific finding: "Red Wine Linked to Longevity" or "Climate Change Called into Question" or "Eating Dirt Is Good for You."

While the increasing attention given to science by the media is primarily a positive development—surely we want a scientifically-literate population, and research appearing only in obscure journals will not help to achieve this goal—we should be worried about the exploding trend in "science by (social) media" for at least two reasons.

First, it is not clear that the best science is the science that gets known best. In one study that examined media coverage of research presented at a major scientific conference, fully 25% that appeared in the media never appeared in a scientific journal. That's right: fully one quarter of the science that laypeople encountered was not solid enough to pass muster when reviewed by experts. This same trend was true for research that made the front page of major newspapers, the stories most likely to be read.

The problem is likely exacerbated by the rise of social media: even if we miss the initial coverage of some new scientific finding, we are now more likely to encounter it as a tweet, or a post on Facebook. Worse still, social media often encourages quick, superficial engagement. We see the title—"Red Wine Linked to Longevity"—without reading further to find out, for example, the amount of red wine that might have health benefits (one ounce a day? one gallon?) and for whom (everyone? only people with red hair?).

To be clear, I am not blaming media (social or otherwise) for this problem. It is not the job of journalists or laypeople to discern good from bad science. Even scientists in closely adjoining fields are often unable to discern good from bad science in that seemingly similar discipline. If anything, scientists themselves are contributing to the problem. One analysis of media coverage of scientific findings demonstrated that some 50% of news stories appeared to overemphasize the positive effects of some experimental intervention. The biggest predictor of the media engaging in this kind of "spin"? The presence of spin in summaries of the research written by scientists themselves.

Second, as the science that laypeople encounter is mediated more and more by the media, the biases of those media outlets—presumed and actual—will likely call into question the objectivity of the science that appears in those outlets, and of the scientists who conducted the research. Consider two hypothetical research findings: one suggesting that guns increase violent assaults ("guns bad"), and one suggesting that guns decrease violent assaults ("guns good.") Imagine each of these articles published in the New York Times or Fox News.

Would your opinion of the soundness of the underlying science be influenced by the publication outlet? My guess is that more people would be more likely to believe a "guns good" piece that appeared in the Times and a "guns bad" piece that appeared on Fox News—precisely because these pieces are at such odds with the general tenor of these publications. And considering the reverse shows the larger problem: readers may discount "guns good" research that appears on Fox News and "guns bad" research in the New York Times regardless of the actual quality of the underlying science.

In sum, the science that laypeople encounter will become increasingly unfiltered by scientific experts. And even when science has been vetted by experts, laypeople will increasingly make their own determination of the credibility of that science not by the quality of the research but by the media outlet in which that science appears.

In turn, this perceived credibility will determine laypeople's subsequent likelihood of passing that science along to others via social media. Together, this "science by (social) media" raises the curious possibility of a general public that reads more and more science while becoming less and less scientifically literate.

We should all be worried about the gaping psychological chasm separating humanity from nature. Indeed a strong argument can be made that bridging this divide deserves to be ranked amongst the most urgent 21st Century priorities. Yet so far the human-nature divide hasn't even made it to our cultural to-do list.

I worry that people will gradually stop the major long-term investments in research that are essential if we are to answer difficult (and often quite abstract) scientific questions. Important fundamental experimental science will always be at the edge of what is technologically feasible and moving forward requires commitment to advances. The applications are not obvious so there has to be an underlying belief that finding the answers to deep and significant questions about how the universe evolved, how we evolved, what we are made of, what space is made of, and how things work is important. The ability to find answers to these questions is one of the characteristics that makes human beings unique and gives meaning to our lives. Giving this up for short-term ends would ultimately be a tragedy.

In my specific field of particle physics, everyone is worried. I don't say that lightly. I've been to two conferences within the last week where the future was a major topic of discussion and I'm at another one where it's on the agenda. Many ideas are presented but my colleagues and I certainly worry whether experiments will happen.

At the moment, we have the Large Hadron Collider—the giant accelerator near Geneva that collides together protons at very high energies—to turn to for new experimental results. Last summer we learned that a Higgs boson exists. It was a major milestone of which the LHC engineers and experimenters can be proud. With this year's data, where the decays of many more Higgs bosons have been recorded, we will understand more about the particle's properties.

But we also want to know what lies beyond the Higgs particle—what is it that explains how the Higgs boson ended up with the mass that it has. The LHC also promises to answer this question when the LHC turns back on after shutting down for two years to upgrade to higher energy.

 But the energy gain will be less than a factor of two. I can fairly confidently say that I expect answers that imply new particles beyond the Higgs boson to exist. But I can't confidently state that I expect them to be less than a factor of two heavier than the energies we have already explored. This is very worrisome. Not finding anything, ironically, would be the best argument that the LHC energy was simply not quite high enough and more energy is necessary. But discoveries are what usually egg us on. Not finding anything would be very bad indeed.

In fact, the Superconducting Supercollider that was cancelled in the US would have had about three times the energy. It was designed with the ultimate physics goals in mind, which argued for a more powerful machine. The LHC—though designed to answer similar questions—was built in a pre-existing tunnel that constrained the maximum energy that could be achieved. If we had three times the energy, I'd be a lot less worried. But we don't.

So I am worried. I'm worried I won't know the answer to questions I care deeply about. Theoretical research (what I do) can of course be done more cheaply. A pencil and paper and even a computer are pretty cheap. But without experiments, or the hope of experiments, theoretical science can't truly advance either. Happily, advances wouldn't cease altogether as we would still get new results from astronomical observations and smaller scale experiments on Earth. And there would be many ideas to play around with But we wouldn't know which of them represent what is really going on in the world.

On top of that, the universe often has more imagination than we do. We need to know what the universe is telling us. Some of the best new ideas come from trying to explain mysterious phenomena. I hope the future presents us with some answers—but also more mysteries to explain.

China has been running the world's largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China's ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end.

When I learned about Chinese eugenics this summer, I was astonished that its population policies had received so little attention. China makes no secret of its eugenic ambitions, in either its cultural history or its government policies.

For generations, Chinese intellectuals have emphasized close ties between the state (guojia), the nation (minzu), the population (renkou), the Han race (zhongzu), and, more recently, the Chinese gene-pool (jiyinku). Traditional Chinese medicine focused on preventing birth defects, promoting maternal health and "fetal education" (taijiao) during pregnancy, and nourishing the father's semen (yangjing) and mother's blood (pingxue) to produce bright, healthy babies (see Frank Dikötter's book Imperfect Conceptions). Many scientists and reformers of Republican China (1912-1949) were ardent Darwinians and Galtonians. They worried about racial extinction (miezhong) and "the science of deformed fetuses" (jitaixue), and saw eugenics as a way to restore China's rightful place as the world's leading civilization after a century of humiliation by European colonialism. The Communist revolution kept these eugenic ideals from having much policy impact for a few decades though. Mao Zedong was too obsessed with promoting military and manufacturing power, and too terrified of peasant revolt, to interfere with traditional Chinese reproductive practices.

But then Deng Xiaoping took power after Mao's death. Deng had long understood that China would succeed only if the Communist Party shifted its attention from economic policy to population policy. He liberalized markets, but implemented the one-child policy —partly to curtail China's population explosion, but also to reduce dysgenic fertility among rural peasants. Throughout the 1980s, Chinese propaganda urges couples to have children "later, longer, fewer, better"—at a later age, with a longer interval between birth, resulting in fewer children of higher quality. With the 1995 Maternal and Infant Health Law (known as the Eugenic Law until Western opposition forced a name change), China forbade people carrying heritable mental or physical disorders from marrying, and promoted mass prenatal ultrasound testing for birth defects. Deng also encouraged assortative mating through promoting urbanization and higher education, so bright, hard-working young people could meet each other more easily, increasing the proportion of children who would be at the upper extremes of intelligence and conscientiousness.

One of Deng's legacies is China's current strategy of maximizing "Comprehensive National Power". This includes economic power (GDP, natural resources, energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, owning America's national debt), military power (cyberwarfare, anti-aircraft-carrier ballistic missiles, anti-satellite missiles), and 'soft power' (cultural prestige, the Beijing Olympics, tourism, Chinese films and contemporary art, Confucius Institutes, Shanghai's skyscrapers). But crucially, Comprehensive National Power also includes "biopower": creating the world's highest-quality human capital in terms of the Chinese population's genes, health, and education (see Governing China's Population by Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winkler).

Chinese biopower has ancient roots in the concept of "yousheng" ("good birth"—which has the same literal meaning as "eugenics"). For a thousand years, China has been ruled by a cognitive meritocracy selected through the highly competitive imperial exams. The brightest young men became the scholar-officials who ruled the masses, amassed wealth, attracted multiple wives, and had more children. The current "gaokao" exams for university admission, taken by more than 10 million young Chinese per year, are just the updated version of these imperial exams—the route to educational, occupation, financial, and marital success. With the relaxation of the one-child policy, wealthier couples can now pay a "social fostering fee" (shehui fuyangfei) to have an extra child, restoring China's traditional link between intelligence, education, wealth, and reproductive success.

Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more "next-generation" DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year. It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.

The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state. Given what I understand of evolutionary behavior genetics, I expect—and hope—that they will succeed. The welfare and happiness of the world's most populous country depends upon it.

My real worry is the Western response. The most likely response, given Euro-American ideological biases, would be a bioethical panic that leads to criticism of Chinese population policy with the same self-righteous hypocrisy that we have shown in criticizing various Chinese socio-cultural policies. But the global stakes are too high for us to act that stupidly and short-sightedly. A more mature response would be based on mutual civilizational respect, asking—what can we learn from what the Chinese are doing, how can we help them, and how can they help us to keep up as they create their brave new world? 

Many of the things I call to mind that have worried me have already been well notated by other contributors to this years Edge Question. But all such responses are, I believe, concerned with problematic aspects of this world or of current discourse that are, I would maintain, ultimately non-correctable through either direct thought or through direct action.

Time by itself, of course, will alter the parameters within which these problems are currently situated, and all of them will be absorbed or transcended by the new, evolving parameters which will eventually dissolve these threatening problems. Even if "The end of the world itself" is threatened, that too will lead to some "other" state—inconceivable perhaps—but even as a vague allusion we humans will dismiss it as beyond thought and "Not to be wished for". But that very understandable rejection arises from the same psychological base implied and evoked in the word— "worried!"—which is the lynch-pin, as I see it, of this year's Edge Question.

I realize one can say the 'Worried' therein can be thought of as a means of selecting and focusing upon a particular problem. But that very act of picking one problem out of the many available for consideration—that by itself constructs the very trap into which we all fall the minute we begin think about the sworld.

I further postuate we should in fact be "Worried" not just about a single selected problem, but about all possible problems. (Again—reference all the answers included in this year's Edge Question).

But again and most important—what does 'Worried' mean, other than the inevitable 'fall' into human consciousness that focuses the mind—producing inevitably—Science, Politics, and everything else The World As We Know It.

There seems no responsible alternative to this assumed "Fortunate and Productive Fall" into consciousness.

Indeed, is the only historical alternative the disreputable "blissed out" state of passivity and removal from the real world as known to us through our rigorously conditioned mechanisms)?

Perhaps—but perhaps not.

I reference not only suppressed mystical traditions, plus more acceptable philosophers such as Heidegger and phenomenologically oriented contemporaries—but first and foremost my early collegiate inspiration in art theory—Anton Ehrenzweig's great books The Hidden Order of Art and The Psycho-analysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing.

Ehrenzweig demonstrates how artists in many disciplines from many different historical periods operate not out of normal focused vision—but out of wide-angle un-focused perception. And thereafter soon discovered similar theses, hidden or not, in other "official" Western thought.

All of which may be interesting—But how does 'theory ' relate to real-world problems of the sort we should now be worried about? Well of course, de-focusing on obsessive worrisome problems often leads, in the end, to the sudden emergence of a solution where previous directed effort had often failed. (Eureka!—Poincare, etc.)

So what should we be worried about? Perhaps the failure to stop worrying—when that stopping can, (all by itself, after the proper 'preparing of the ground' with concentration and "worry") , lead to sudden vision.

It's tricky, Yes. And difficult. And sometimes a frightening risk—giving up everything we 'know'—when it's 'knowing' that itself gives rise to the uncontrollable virus of 'Worrying'. But I suggest that this year's posed question is itself a hidden trick. (That was not the intention I feel sure—but I do see it as a trick question for all half brilliant, half sleeping—human consciousness.)

We should be worried about science publishing. When I say science publishing, I am really thinking about the peer-reviewed life science and biomedical literature. We should be worried about it because it seems that the only publishable data in life science and biomedical literature are novel findings. I think that's a serious problem because one of the crucial aspects of science is reproducibility of results. The problem in life science is that if you replicate an experiment and its results, no one wants to publish your replication data. "We know that already", is the typical response. Even when your experiment is not really a replication, but it does resemble a previously published one, and your results aren't even exactly identical to previously published ones but they are close enough, unless you find a way of discussing your data under a new light, nobody wants to see your study published. Only experiments that produced seemingly opposite results of previously published studies get a chance to be published. Here, the lack of replication makes the experiment interesting.

The other big problem is that experiments that produce negative findings or 'null results', that is, that do not demonstrate any experimental effect, are also difficult to publish (unless they show lack of replication of a previously published, important finding).

These two practices combined make it very difficult to figure out—on the basis of the literature alone—which results are solid and replicable and which results are not. And that's clearly a problem.

Some have argued that to fix this problem we should publish all our negative results and publish positive results only after replicating them ourselves. I think that's a great idea, although I don't see the life science and biomedical community embrace this idea anytime soon. But let me give you some practical examples as to why things are rather messed up in the life science and biomedical literature and how they could be fixed.

One of the most exciting recent developments in human neuroscience is what is called 'non invasive neuromodulation.' It consists of a number of techniques using either magnetic fields or low currents to stimulate the human brain painlessly and with no or negligible side effects. One of these techniques has been already approved by FDA to treat depression. Other potential uses include reducing seizures in epileptic patients, improving recovery of function after brain damage, and in principle even improving cognitive capacities in healthy subjects.

In my lab, we are doing a number of experiments using neuromodulation, including two studies in which we stimulate two specific brain sites of the frontal lobe to improve empathy and reduce social prejudice. Every experiment has a rationale that is obviously based on previous studies and theories inspired by those studies. Our experiment on empathy is based mostly on our previous work on mirror neurons and empathy. Having done a number of studies ourselves, we are pretty confident about the background on which we base the rationale for our experiment. The experiment on social prejudice, however, is inspired by a clever paper recently published by another group using also neuromodulation of the frontal lobe. The cognitive task used in that study shares similarities with the cognitive mechanisms of social prejudice. However, here is the catch: We know about that published paper (because it was published!) but we have no idea whether a number of groups attempted to do something similar and failed to get any effect, simply because a negative finding does not get published. We also can't possibly know how replicable is the study that inspires our experiment, because replication studies don't get easily published. In other words, we have way more unknowns that we would like to have.

Publishing replications and negative findings would make it much easier to know what is empirically solid and what is not. If twenty labs perform the same experiment, and 18 get no experimental effects, while the remaining two get contrasting effects, and all these studies are published, then you know there isn't much to be pursued in that line of research by simply reading the literature. But if 14 labs get the same effect, three get no effect, and three get the opposite effect, it is likely that the effect demonstrated by fourteen labs is much more solid than the effect demonstrated by three labs.

In the current publishing system, it is complicated to achieve these conclusions. One way of doing it, is to pool together experiments that share a number of features. For instance, our group and others have investigated mirror neurons in autism and concluded that mirror neuron activity is reduced in autism. Some other groups failed to demonstrate it. The studies that show mirror neuron impairment in autism largely outnumber the studies that fail to show it. In this case, it is reasonable to draw solid conclusions from the scientific literature. In many other cases, however, as in the example of neuromodulation of the frontal lobe and social prejudice, there is much uncertainty due to the selectivity regarding what gets published and what is left out.

The simplest way to fix this problem is to evaluate whether a study should be published or not only on the basis of the soundness of its experimental design, data collection and analysis. If the experiment is well done, it should be published, whether it is a replication or not, no matter what kind of results it shows. A minority in the life science and biomedical community are finally voicing this alternative to the current dominant practices in scientific publishing. If this minority eventually becomes a majority, we can finally have a scientific literature that can be evaluated in quantitative terms (x number of studies show this, while y number of studies show that), rather than in qualitative terms (this study shows x, but that study shows y). This approach should finally make it even more difficult for irrational claims (denial of evolution or climate change, the most dramatic examples that come to mind) to pretend to be 'scientific'. It would also limit the number of 'controversies' in life science to those issues that are truly unclear, saving all of us time that we spend arguing on things that should have been settled already by the empirical data.

One of the things that worries me the most is the growing incidence of stress in our society. Over the last 30 years, self-reported stress levels have gone up 25 percent for men and 18 percent for women. Stress is a big contributor to the increase of diabetes, heart disease and obesity. So it's a much bigger problem than most people realize, but thankfully there does seem to be a growing awareness of the destructive power and cost of stress—in terms of both dollars and lives. Stress wreaks havoc not just on our relationships, our careers and our happiness, but also on our health. On the collective level, the price we're paying is staggering—stress costs American businesses an estimated $300 billion a year, according the World Health Organization. This is partly because stress was also the most common reason for long-term health-related absence in a survey conducted by CIPD, the world's largest human resources association. 

In the U.S., 36 million adults suffer from high blood pressure that isn't being controlled even though 32 million of them are receiving regular medical care. And nearly as many Americans—over 25 million—have diabetes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 75 percent of health care spending is for chronic diseases that could be prevented. This is one reason why health care costs are growing exponentially: spending rose 3.8 percent in 2010 and 4.6 percent in 2011.



The easier, healthier and cheaper way to treat stress is to deal with its causes instead of its effects. The good news is that we know what to do: practices like mindfulness, meditation, yoga and healthy sleep habits have proven extremely successful in combating stress. And awareness of the benefits of stress reduction is spreading, from the classrooms of the Harvard Business School, where students learn to better understand their emotions, to major corporations around the world which have added meditation, mindfulness training and yoga to the workplace. Olympic athletes have made napping and stress reduction part of their daily routine. Veterans, and the medical professionals who treat them, are increasingly embracing yoga as an effective way to navigate the consequences of PTSD.



Plus, new high-tech tools are making it possible for individuals to take more and more control of their own health. The first wave of connecting technology hyper-connected us to the entire world—but, in the process, often disconnected us from ourselves. That's why I'm so excited about the new wave of technology that reconnects us to ourselves. For example, a robust market of wearable devices has emerged, monitoring everything from activity and food intake to weight and sleep. Thirty million wearable devices were shipped in 2012, and 80 million are on track to ship in 2016—by which time consumer wearables will be a $6 billion market. These many innovations are signals of a significant change in attitude about the role technology can, and should, be playing in our lives.

My worry? Losing touch.

Biologists at the University of Newcastle, UK, recently published a report claiming fingers wrinkling in a long bath was a sign of evolutionary advantage. The prune-like transformation provided the digits with a better grip. More than help to grasp the soap, this skin puckering suggested a matter of survival as our Mesolithic ancestors foraged for food in rivers and rock pools.

That widely-reported reminder of our evolved capabilities helped assuage my own real worry—call it, perhaps, a haptical terror—about losing touch with the physical world. What was the future for fingers, as tools, in the digital age? Where the latest interface is a touch which is smooth and feather-light, where the human to machine commands are advancing to be spoken, or breathed, or blinked, even transmitted by brain waves, would finger-work be the preserve of artists and childs-play? Fingers could still form churches and steeples, and all the peoples, be in the play of poets, peel an orange. But in the digital age would there be pages still to turn, tendrils to be untangled, a place for hard key-strokes, not simply passing swipes?

After all, the digit, birth-marked with its unique code, is our security guard, a hush as much as the finger placed to the mouth.

But the fingers are fighting back.

We are encouraged to wield kitchen tools, find grandma's sewing box. To beat eggs, pound dough, and ice cakes, to join knitting circles, to plunge our hands into landscape to pick wild food. Things are still palpable; real book sales are encouraging and we are still hooked on marginalia, and turning down the corner of a page.

A few weeks ago I visited the Florida house where Jack Kerouac wrote Dharma Bums in an ecstatic burst of typing over eleven days and nights. In this refuge from New York critics of 'On the Road', his fingers translated brain to hand to brain, synapses sizzling from caffeine and Benzadrine. In these wooden rooms nearly 60 years later could be heard the distinctive sound of a metal typewriter. Not Jack's ghost pounding out but the latest writer-in-residence, a young woman in her 20s, who, it transpired, had arrived from Ohio with both a laptop and a vintage manual typewriter, to know what it felt like.

This essay began with the proverbial note sketched out by hand on the back of an envelope. My fingers then picked out the words on my smartphone. My worry had been that these two processes, necessary to shape and synthesise, were somehow conflicted. I worried about our grip on technology. But the wrinkling of our fingers reminds that we engage with the evolved, and the still evolving.

Most of the smart people I know want nothing to do with politics. We avoid it like the plague—like Edge avoids it, in fact. Is this because we feel that politics isn't where anything significant happens? Or because we're too taken up with what we're doing, be it Quantum Physics or Statistical Genomics or Generative Music? Or because we're too polite to get into arguments with people? Or because we just think that things will work out fine if we let them be—that The Invisible Hand or The Technosphere will mysteriously sort them out?

Whatever the reasons for our quiescence, politics is still being done—just not by us. It's politics that gave us Iraq and Afghanistan and a few hundred thousand casualties. It's politics that's bleeding the poorer nations for the debts of their former dictators. It's politics that allows special interests to run the country. It's politics that helped the banks wreck the economy. It's politics that prohibits gay marriage and stem cell research but nurtures Gaza and Guantanamo.

But we don't do politics. We expect other people to do it for us, and grumble when they get it wrong. We feel that our responsibility stops at the ballot box, if we even get that far. After that we're as laissez-faire as we can get away with.

What worries me is that while we're laissez-ing, someone else is faire-ing.

What should we be worried about? Pick your poison, or poisons. There's no shortage: just read the front page of any major newspaper or watch the network and cable news shows. And if you are concerned that you haven't worried about the right things, or enough things, stop fretting. There are surely others who have it covered.

Ever since the phrase "the age of anxiety" entered the lexicon, each generation has claimed they have more to worry about than the previous one. But the fact is, anxiety is part of the human condition. It's the price we pay for having brain that makes predictions about things that haven't happened, the ability to see a future that is not necessarily foretold by the past.

Though we are an anxious species, we aren't all equally anxious. We each have our set point of anxiety—a point towards which we gravitate. Ever notice how short lived is the calm that results from eliminating a source of worry? Get rid of one, and pretty soon something else takes its place, keeping each of us hovering around our special level of worry.

Anxiety can be debilitating. But even those who don't have an anxiety disorder still have stuff circling through their synapses that sometimes interferes with life's simplest chores. We don't necessarily want to get rid of anxiety altogether, as it serves a purpose—it allows us to focus our energy on the future. What we should worry about is finding some way to use rather than be used by our anxiety.

We should be worried that science has not yet brought us closer to understanding cancer.

In December, 1971, President Nixon signed the National Cancer Act, launching America's "War on Cancer." Forty-odd years later, like the costly wars on drugs and terror, the war on cancer has not been won.

According to the National Cancer Institute, about 227,000 women were diagnosed with breast cancer in the US in 2012. And rates are rising. More women in America have died of breast cancer in the last two decades than the total number of Americans killed in World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, combined.

But military metaphors are not appropriate to describe the experience of having, treating, or trying to cure the disease. Science isn't war. What will lead us to progress with cancer aren't better metaphors, but better advances in science.

Why, 40 years after this war was declared, has science not led us to a cure? Or to a clearer understanding of causes, prevention? Or to simply more effective and less horrific forms of treatment?

Even so, now is the best time ever to be diagnosed with cancer. Consider the progress made in breast cancer. A generation ago, women diagnosed with breast cancer would have had a prognosis that entailed a much greater likelihood of an earlier death, of more disfigurement, and a much lower quality of life during and after treatment.

Treatment-related side effects such as "chemobrain" are only just now being recognized as a scientifically valid phenomenon. A generation ago, breast cancer patients were told the cognitive impairment they experienced during and after chemotherapy was "all in their heads," if you will.

Sure, there has been progress. But how much, really? The best that evidence-based medicine can offer for women in 2013 is still poison, cut, burn, then poison some more. A typical regimen for hormone-receptive breast cancer might be chemotherapy, mastectomy and reconstruction, radiation, at least 5 years of a daily anti-estrogen drug, and a few more little bonus surgeries for good measure.  

There are still no guarantees in cancer treatment. The only certainties we may receive from our doctors are the kind no one wants. After hearing "we don't really know" from surgeons and oncologists countless times as they weigh treatment options, cancer patients eventually get the point. They really don't know.

We're still using the same brutal chemo drugs, the same barbaric surgeries, the same radiation blasts as our mothers and grandmothers endured decades ago—with no substantially greater ability to predict who will benefit, and no cure in sight. The cancer authorities can't even agree on screening and diagnostic recommendations: should women get annual mammograms starting at 40? 50? Or no mammograms at all? You've come a long way, baby.

Maybe to get at the bottom of our worries, we should just "follow the money." Because the profit to be made in cancer is in producing cancer treatment drugs, machines, surgery techniques; not in finding a cure, or new ways to look at causation. There is likely no profit in figuring out the links to environmental causes; how what we eat or breathe as a child may cause our cells to mutate, how exposure to radiation or man-made chemicals may affect our risk factors.

What can make you even more cynical is looking at how much money there is to be made in poisoning us. Do the dominant corporations in fast food, chemicals, agri-business, want us to explore how their products impact cancer rates? Isn't it cheaper for them to simply pinkwash "for the cause" every October?

And for all the nauseating pink-ribbon feel-good charity hype (an industry in and of itself!), few breast cancer charities are focused on determining causation, or funneling a substantial portion of donations to actual research and science innovation.

Genome-focused research holds great promise, but funding for this science at our government labs, NIH and NCI, is harder than ever for scientists to secure. Why hasn't the Cancer Genome Atlas yielded more advances that can be translated now into more effective therapies?

Has the profit motive that drives our free-market society skewed our science? If we were to reboot the "War on Cancer" today, with all we now know, how and where would we begin?

The research and science that will cure cancer will not necessarily be done by big-name cancer hospitals or by big pharma. It requires a new way of thinking about illness, health, and science itself. We owe this to the millions or people who are living with cancer—or more to the point, trying very hard not to die from it. 

I know, I am one of them.

One might have supposed the fact that we live in relatively quiet suburb of an average galaxy in an apparently uniform universe 14 billion years after the big bang would not be large source of worry. However, lately it has been worrying me.

 Thanks to the two pillars of 20th century physics, relativity and quantum mechanics, we are by now familiar with the fact that the information we can obtain about the universe is limited by our particular circumstances. But these don't really put strict limits on what is ultimately empirically knowable.

There may be, however, new limits looming on our ultimate ability to probe nature—made manifest because of the truly remarkable successes of physical theory and experiment in the past 50 years—due to the accident of the circumstances in which we find ourselves living, which could, at least in principle, change the way fundamental science may progress in the future.

In the first places, current physical theories suggest that our universe is probably not unique. Well beyond our ability to directly probe, there may be an infinity of universes, with differing laws of physics, and perhaps different characteristics of space and time. This is not necessarily a problem if we are interested in understanding the nature of our particular universe.

But it could be that the laws of physics are probabilistic, and there is no fundamental reason why they are what they are in our particular universe. But—just as an epidemiologist studying a single patient can say little about what may be the cause of some condition, because it may be impossible to know what is normal and what is not—if we can study only one universe (our own), then we may never be able to directly empirically determine if fundamental laws are indeed fundamental, or just an accident of our circumstances. It is possible that we might be smart enough to derive a theory that explains precisely how the laws of physics are distributed across universes, and what the probability that our laws are what they are. But it is equally plausible that without access to a larger sample set we may never know.

It gets worse. Because we have discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, the longer we wait, the less we will see of our universe. Eventually all the galaxies we now see will disappear, and even the evidence of the big bang itself will disappear. While I have argued, unsuccessfully, to Congress that this means we should do cosmology while we have a chance, it does mean that we cannot necessarily take comfort in the presumption that if we and our intelligent successors keep working long enough, nature will reveal more of her secrets.

Actually, the very cause of the acceleration of our universe may be forever impossible to pin down. If empty space has energy, then this energy can cause the observed acceleration of the universe. But as there is no known laboratory experiment that can probe this energy, the only way we may be able to probe it is to observe the expansion of the universe over time. A constant rate of acceleration is consistent with a fundamental energy in empty space, but it is also consistent with a host of other possible sources of trapped energy in some otherwise invisible fields. We may have no way of knowing. And if it is really associated with the properties of empty space, we may never know why, because that too may be an accident, with different energies in different universes. With just a single universe to probe, we may never know.

And, as long as one is in the mood for worrying, even the remarkable apparent discovery of the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider, which validates the most remarkable intellectual journey humans have ever embarked upon, may yield frustration on the horizon. So far, just the Higgs has been seen. But the standard model has a host of weirdnesses and a plethora of physics ideas have been proposed to explain them. Most of these ideas suggest some other new physics that will be seen at the LHC. But what if the Higgs is all that is seen? Then we will have no guidance on where to turn to resolve the underlying puzzles of the standard model. If nature is not kind, it is possible that the resolution of these problems may be at a distance and energy scale that is simply unattainable, either because of practical physical constraints, or the constraints of small-minded politicians.

Perhaps then, at the extremes of scale empirical science will reach its limits, and we will be reduced to arguing about what is plausible, rather than testing our ideas. I hope not, and I wouldn't bet on it either. After all, every time we do open a new window on the universe we are surprised, and there are many windows left to open. But worrying does help prepare the mind.

I should conclude by stressing do not believe that any of these possible limits will lead to the end of science itself, or even the end of physics, as some naysayers have proposed in the past. There are enough remarkable and perplexing aspects of the universe we can measure to keep us going for a very long time. 

There are many things we know to worry about. Some are very likely events, but by themselves not existential threats to civilization. Others could easily destroy civilization and even life on earth—but the chances of such disasters occurring in the near historical future seem to be vanishingly small.

There is a known possibility that stands out for being both likely in the next few decades and capable of destroying our civilization. It's prosaic and banal, something dismissed by many as a danger that the twentieth-century confronted and definitively rejected: That is war between great nations, especially when fought under a doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

Arguments against the plausibility of MAD warfare are especially believable these days: MAD war benefits no one. Twentieth century USA and USSR, even in the depths of the MAD years, were sincerely desperate to avoid tipping over into MAD warfare. That sincerity is a big reason why humanity got through the century without general nuclear war.

Unfortunately, the twentieth century is our only test case, and the MAD warfare threat has characteristics that made surviving the twentieth century more a matter of luck than wisdom.

MAD involves very long time scales and very short ones. At the long end, the threat is driven by social and geopolitical issues in much the same way as with unintended wars of the past. At the other extreme, MAD involves complex automation controlling large systems, operating faster than any real-time human response, much less careful judgment.

Breakers (vandals, griefers) have more leverage than Makers (builders, creators), even though the Makers far outnumber the Breakers. This is the source of some of our greatest fears about technology—that if weapons of mass destruction are cheap enough, then the relatively small percentage of Breakers will be sufficient to destroy civilization. If that possibility is scary, then the MAD threat should be terrifying. For with MAD planning, it is hundreds of thousands of creative and ingenious people in the most powerful societies—many of the best of the Makers, powered by the riches of the planet—who work to create a mutually unsurvivable outcome! In the most extreme case, the resulting weapon systems must function on the shortest of time scales, thus moving the threat into the realm of thermodynamic inevitability.

For the time (decades?) in which we and our interests are undefendable and still confined to a volume smaller than the scope of our weapons, the threat of MAD warfare will be the winner in rankings of likelihood*destructiveness.

There's a lot we can do to mitigate the threat of MADness:

A resurrection of full-blown MAD planning will probably be visible to the general public. We should resist arguments that MAD doctrine is a safe strategy with regard to weapons of mass destruction.

We should study the dynamics of the beginning of unintended wars of the past, in particular World War I. There are plenty of similarities between our time and the first few years of the last century. We have much optimism, the feeling that our era is different ... And what about entangling alliances? Are there small players with the ability to bring heavyweights into the action? How does the possibility of n-way MADness affect these risks?

With all the things we have to worry about, there is also an overwhelmingly positive counterweight: billions of good, smart people and the databases and networks that now empower them. This is an intellectual force that trumps all institutions of the past. Humanity plus its automation is quite capable of anticipating and countering myriad possible calamities. If we can avoid blowing ourselves up, we will have time to create things so marvelous that their upside is (worrisomely!) beyond imagination.

One iconic image expresses our existential condition: the pale blue dot. That photograph of Earth the Voyager 1 spacecraft took in 1990 from 6 billion kilometers away told us how small we are. What worries me is that dot may be all we ever have, all we can command, for the indefinite future. Humanity could become like rats stuck on the skin of our spherical world, which would look more and more like a trap.

Imagine: we've had our burgeoning history here and used up many resources…so what happens when they run out? Valuable things like metals, rare earths, fertilizers and the like are already running low. More things will join the list.

Voyager has flown outward for over 35 years, huge return on the taxpayers' investment. It is the first probe to leave the solar system and is the farthest man-made object from Earth. Voyager is now exploring the boundary between our little solar system and the vast interstellar space beyond.

It can instruct us still, about our more pressing problems, as Sagan pointed out: "Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot."

They fought over resources we could exhaust within the next century or two. Voyager's perspective also suggests an answer: there's a whole solar system out there. Sagan pondered that aspect, too: "There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet."

That is still true, but the vast solar system can help us. I worry that we will miss this opportunity.

After all, great civilizations have turned away from horizons before. In the 1400s China stopped trading and exploring in Africa and Arabia out of concern that this introduced unsettling elements into their society. Their 9-masted ships were a hundred meters long, and carried animals like giraffes back to China to amuse the emperor. China could have found America and ruled the oceans, but it chose to stay home.

We may be entering a similar age. This century will doubtless see our population rise from its current 7 billion souls to 9 or 10 billion. Climate change will wrack economies and nations. The bulk of humanity has large economic ambitions that will strain our world to satisfy. With the USA imitating Europe in its evolution into an entitlement state, it will have less energy to maintain world order. Amid constant demands for more metals, energy, food and all the rest, it seems clear we can expect conflicts among those who would become "momentary masters of a fraction of a dot."

But we can see in our skies the resources that can aid the bulk of humanity. With entrepreneurs now pulsing with energy, we have plausible horizons and solutions visible. SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation), founded by former PayPal entrepreneur Elon Musk, now delivers cargo to the International Space Station. SpaceX became the first private company to successfully launch and return a spacecraft from orbit on 8 December 2010, and Musk remarked on his larger agenda, the economic opening of space, "We need to figure out how to have the things we love, and not destroy the world."

The black expanses over our heads promise places where our industries can use resource extraction, zero-gravity manufacturing, better communications, perhaps even energy harvested in great solar farms and sent down to Earth. Companies are already planning to do so—

Bigelow Aerospace (orbital hotels), Virgin Galactic (low Earth orbit tourism), Orbital Technologies (a commercial manufacturing space station), and Planetary Resources, whose goal is to develop a robotic asteroid mining industry.

Barely visible now is an agenda we can carry out this century to avoid calamity, those rivers of blood, and anguished need. We Americans especially know from history how to open new territory.

Historically, coal and the railroad train enabled much of the industrial revolution. Both came from the underlying innovation of steam engines. Coal was the new wonder fuel, far better than wood though harder to extract, and it made continental scale economies possible. Synergistically, coal drove trains that in turn carried crops, crowds and much else.

A similar synergy may operate to open the coming interplanetary economy, this time wedding nuclear rockets and robotics. These could operate together, robot teams carried by nuclear rockets to far places, and usually without humans, who would compromise efficiency. Mining and transport have enormously expanded the raw materials available to humanity, and the rocket/robot synergy could do so again. As such fundamentals develop in space, other businesses can arise on this base, including robotic satellite repair/maintenance in high orbits, mining of helium 3 on the moon, and metal mining of asteroids. Finally, perhaps snagging comets for volatiles in the outer solar system will enable human habitats to emerge within hollowed-out asteroids, and on Mars and beyond.

Nothing has slowed space development more than the high price of moving mass around the solar system. Using two stages to get into Low Earth Orbit may make substantial improvements, and beyond that the right answer may lie in nuclear rockets. These have been developed since the 1960s and could be improved still further. Lofting them into orbit "cold"—that is, before turning on the nuclear portion—may well erase the environmental issues. Fuel fluids can be flown up separately, for attachment to the actual rocket drive. Then the nuclear segment can heat the fuel to very high temperatures. Economically this seems the most promising way to develop an interplanetary economy for the benefit of humanity.

Such ideas have been tried out in the imaginative lab of science fiction, exploring how new technologies could work out in a future human context. Kim Stanley Robinson's 2012 visionary novel, 2312, portrays such a solar system economy. Another 2013 anthology, Starship Century, has more chapter and verse on this. Our reborn entrepreneurial space culture emerged from an earlier epoch that saw space as the inevitable next horizon. The fresh industrial reality is already making a larger cultural echo in novels, films and much else. It's a space era again.

Sagan spoke often of how the view from space gave us perspective on our place in the cosmos. That started with Apollo 8's 1968 swing around our moon and its backward look at the Earth. Many felt, looking at those photos, that future exploration of space should focus on ways to protect Earth and to extend human habitation beyond it. Sagan had the idea of turning Voyager to look back at ourselves, and tried to tell us to take the larger perspective in his Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.

Babylonian astrologers thought the stars governed our fates. A thousand years ago, societies were largely religious and prayed to the skies for their salvation. We can seek our futures there now as well. And an age might come when we shall govern the fate of stars.

There are no cathartic moments in evolution. There are plenty in faith and ideology. With the former being a mostly private affair in modern society and the latter a remnant of the 20th century one should not have to worry about the lure of catharsis anymore. Still there it is, keeping those shut doors to irrational groupthink a tiny crack open.

It might not be possible to ever get rid of this powerful lure though. In the Western world this mindset has been embedded in the cultural DNA too deeply. There is no art form that has not built-in mechanisms that simulate catharsis. Most have been derived from religion.

Take the best-known and powerful of examples—Beethoven's 9th symphony. There are very good reasons, why this work is performed whenever there is the need to soothe a grieving collective or to enhance a moment of national unity. After the attacks of September 11 there were countless performances of the piece worldwide. The divided Cold-War-Germany played it, whenever sports teams of both parts joined forces. The European Union has chosen the choral "Ode to Joy" from the fourth movement as her anthem.

It is easy to hear how this works. The overall key of the 9th is the tragic D-minor. Over the course of an hour this somber mood is lifted slowly, until the fourth movement breaks into the jubilant chorus based on Friedrich Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy". This is solid 19th century instant catharsis. And there is no doubt, where this joy comes from. The key part of the poem starts "Joy, beautiful spark of Gods".

Just like Beethoven's 9th resorts to the dynamics of a church service withs a sermon promising a rapture-like end to all worries, even pop culture riffs on the spiritual lift. Take a great Rock or Soul song or concert. In the perfect case there will be an exhilarating opening, after which the rhythm will slow down below the speed of a heartbeat. If the drumming and the groove are convincing, the human pulse will adapt. Step by step the music will accelerate the rhythms speed up past the regular heartbeat. Lighting, movement and volume will help to create a state of ecstasy. Those tricks are borrowed from faiths like Voodoo or Baptism. Ever wonder why U2 concerts are always experiences as such an ecstatic event? They openly borrow from the traditions of Catholicism.

The same leitmotifs of catharsis can be found in literature, theatre and film. The classic three act drama still taught in film school is built like a holy book: setup, conflict, resolution. In narrative art catharsis isn't even a reference. When Aristotle came up with the structure of tragedy in the 4th century B.C., the catharsis of the audience's emotions was his outspoken goal.

The urge to experience catharsis is of course so strong, because it always embodies salvation. After the rapture there is paradise. This dynamic even transcended to the scientific. What else would the singularity moment be, but a technological rapture that absolves humanity from being the ultimate responsible party on this planet?

The problem with catharsis though is that it will always remain an empty promise. There is no paradise, no salvation, no ultimate victory. Progress is a tedious process of trial and error, no matter if it is biological, scientific or social. If one or all work towards an unobtainable goal, much effort is wasted and the appearance of false prophets almost a given. Catharsis thus becomes the ultimate antagonist of rational thinking. If there is paradise in the beyond, why bother with the here and now.

There will be no way to change our mental blueprint though. The simulation of catharsis is the very way we enjoy art, music, stories, even sports. Every joke's punch line, every hook of a song promises this tiny moment of release. That is all there is after catharsis. To ask one to refrain from giving into this urge would lead to joyless forms of Puritanism. If aware of the patterns and dynamic of catharsis though, it is possible to see the thresholds of escapism. 

Take a potato from a bag of potatoes. Look at it closely. Yes, that's right, you really have to do this exercise. Now put it back with the other potatoes, mix them up and see if you can find it again. Easy? Now try this with oranges. Still easy? Now recruit a friend, and describe, draw or even photograph the potato in enough detail for them to pick it out. Or the orange.

There is a weed with a pink flower growing in my flower border, and something very similar with a yellow flower growing in the wall. These are fumitory (Fumaria officinalis) and corydalis (Pseudofumaria lutea), wild flowers of the poppy family, and yes, the field guide tells me former is commonly found in cultivated ground, and the latter in limestone walls. To identify exactly which of the 12 or so UK fumitories I am holding in my hand requires me to consider the precise descriptive language of botany, and count and measure inflorescences, peduncules and sepals. The field guide helpfully provides hand drawn coloured illustrations, black and white diagrams of flower parts, and a backwards look-up key ("If the inflorescence is shorter than the peduncle and … then it is a … ") to supplement the textual descriptions.

Once upon a time such observation, description and illustration was the bread and butter of professional and amateur scientists. My eight volume flora, on heavy paper with lovely illustrations that are now collectors' items, was well-thumbed by the original owner, a nineteenth century lady of leisure. It claims to be written for the "unscientific", but the content differs from a modern flora only by the inclusion of quantities of folklore, anecdotes and literary references.

Darwin's books and letters are full of careful descriptions. The amateur struggling with a field guide may take comfort reading how he frets over the difference between a stem with two leaves and a leaf with two leaflets. Darwin seems to have had a soft spot for fumitories, giving wonderfully detailed descriptions of the different varieties, whether and under what conditions they attracted insects, and how the geometry and flexibility of the different parts of the flower affected how pollen was carried off by visiting bees. He was looking for mechanisms that ensured evolutionary variability by making it likely that bees would occasionally transfer pollen from one flower to another, giving rise to occasional crosses—analysis later reflected in the Origin of Species.

Shakespeare and his audiences not only knew their weeds, they knew their habitats too, and the difference between arable land and permanent pasture. In Henry V we hear how wartime neglect has changed the countryside, so that arable land left fallow has been taken over by darnel, hemlock and fumitory, and in the un-mown meadows, "hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies and burs" have replaced cowslip, burnet and clover. Gardeners everywhere will sympathise.

Google can give a happy hour or so tracking down references to fumitory: online data sources allow the capture and analysis of images, sightings and geographic and other data in a way never before possible, informing the creation and testing of broader scientific hypotheses. But the analysis is only as good as the input provided—citizen science projects founder if the citizens are unable to do more than record a "pink flower" and a blurred mobile phone image. No amount of image analysis or data mining can yet take the place of the attention and precision practiced by Darwin and thousands of other professional and amateur naturalists and ecologists.

So let's hear it for observation and description. Fumitory and corydalis may be for the advanced class. Start with the potato.

If the Edge is the Third Culture (scientists and other thinkers communicating new ideas about the world directly to the general public), and if the rest of the scientists and the so-called literary intellectuals are the first two cultures, as proposed by C.P. Snow, then there is also another culture whose impact is growing fast enough that it can justifiably be called The Fourth Culture. This "culture" is not really new.

In the past we would have simply called it Popular Culture and then dismissed it as a world of mostly superficial entertainment with only a certain segment of the population caught up in it (that segment not considered intellectual or influential). But now this Popular Culture is Internet-driven and global and as a result has become pervasive, and its growing influence does not allow us to dismiss it so easily.

The Internet (and its associated media/communication entities, especially cell phones and cable TV) empowers the Fourth Culture. And it is no longer concerned only with pop music, movies, TV, and video games. It now includes religion and politics and almost everything that touches people in everyday life. It is a bottom-up "culture" with a dumbing-down effect that is likely to have repercussions.

We should be worrying about a growing dominance of the Fourth Culture and how it may directly or indirectly affect us all. Because of its great communication capabilities, and its appeal to people's egos, their sexuality, their prejudices, their faith, their dreams, and their fears, the Fourth Culture can easily shape the thoughts of millions. It promotes emotion over logic, self-centeredness over open-mindedness, and entertainment value and money-making ability over truth and understanding. And for the most part it ignores science.

The primary use of the Internet is still for entertainment, but that alone is a matter of concern. As more and more of the population fills more and more hours of the day with entertainment, this leaves fewer hours for activities that promote intelligence, compassion, or interest in anything that falls outside their own Internet-dominated microcosms. When a person's "accomplishments" in life and self-image become focused on things like scoring the most kills in a video war game or being able to see their favorite rock star in person or having their favorite sports team win a game (all possible before the Internet, but now carried to much greater extremes), what passion is left for the real world, for a job or for the problems of fellow human beings. [Would it be taking the point too far to suggest a parallel with the Romans keeping the masses distracted from dealing with real-world problems by enticing them into the Colosseum and other huge arenas to watch spectacles involving gladiators battling to the death, executions, animal slayings, and dramas depicting famous battles? Such spectacles became an essential feature of social life and politics in the Roman world.]

The Fourth Culture is probably not a threat to science—there is too much money being made from science (and its resulting technology) for science to disappear. We are not trying to improve the science and math scores of our students so we can produce more scientists. There will always be those children born with the boundless curiosity about how the world works that leads them into science or some other analytical type of work. The reason we want to do a better job of educating our children in science is to make them better citizens. Our citizens need to see the world and its problems through the eyes of science. They must be able to recognize logical approaches to trying to solve problems, and not be blinded by religious views, myths, or bogus fears (promoted by opponents to a particular course of action).

Nowhere does the Fourth Culture cause more concern than in how it affects who we select as our leaders using a now handicapped democratic system. How the products/results of science are used is now often in the hands of decision makers who do not understand science. Some of them actually think science is bad and that carefully studied and proven theories are no different than religious dogma.

We want elected officials to be intelligent people who care about doing what is best for all the people of the nation (or the world). But elected government positions are the only jobs that have no required criteria that prospective candidates must meet (other than a minimum age, and for President being born in the U.S.). Candidates for elected office do not need to have a college degree or success in business or any verifiable achievements in order to be elected.

They simply need to convince people to vote for them, by whatever emotional means their campaign teams can come up with. Because of the Fourth Culture it has become easier to elect uninformed and even stupid candidates through emotional manipulation in the form of appeals to religion, patriotism, class distinctions, ethnic biases, etc. (all fueled by huge amounts of money, of course). Superficial sound bites and campaign ads that look like movie trailers win out over carefully thought-out logical discourse.

The Press, once called the fourth branch of a democratic government because it kept the other three branches honest, is now just "the media" and has distressingly lost much or even most of it watch-dog capabilities. In an attempt to survive financially in this Internet-dominated media world, the press has: cut back newsrooms, relied more on unsubstantiated sources from the Internet, treated pop stories as news (reducing the space devoted to important stories, especially scientific stories), and allowed even the most idiotic and abusive comments to be left on their websites (in the name of free speech, but really to have as many comments as possible to prove to advertisers that their websites are popular).

We had hoped that the Internet would be a democratizing force. We had hoped that it would give everyone a voice and bring to light new ideas and new approaches to solving serious problems. To some degree it has and it still may do a lot more. But the Internet has also given a voice to the ignorant. A voice they never had before. A loud and emotional voice. We can hope that the effects of the growing influence of the Fourth Culture do not turn out to be destructive on a large scale, but it is something worth worrying about and it is worth looking for ways to reduce its impact. And it is one more reason why expanding the Third Culture is so important.

As someone fairly committed to the death of our solar system and ultimately the entropy of the universe, I think the question of what we should worry about is irrelevant in the end. Also, before reaching that conclusion, natural selection eventually corrects for perturbations that threaten the stability of environments. Nature will find a way and ultimately all things will cease to be. So I could be glib and simply recommend, "Don't worry, be happy." Of course, we are not wired that way and being happy requires not worrying. My concern then, rather than worry, is how we go about science and in particular the obsession with impact.

Up until the last century, science was largely the perogative of the independently wealthy who had the resources and time to pursue their passions for discovery. Later, large commercial companies would invest in research and development to gain the edge over competitors by innovating. The introduction of government funding for science in the early part of the 20th century was spurred by wars, economic depression and disease. This not only broadened the scope of research by enabling much larger projects that were not motivated simply by profit, but it created a new profession of the government funded scientist. The end of the 20th century in the UK was the golden period for funding. Since then, there has been significant shrinkage in the West at least, of support for research in science. Today it is much harder to attract funding for research as Governments grapple with the world recession. Unless of course, if that research generates economic wealth.

It used to be the case that for a research grant application, it was expected that the results of any output would be disseminated in the form of publications or presentations at conferences which could be covered in a sentence or two. In the UK today and I expect this also true in the US, a significant proportion of the application must address something called "pathways to impact." What does that mean exactly? According to the UK research councils' own guidelines, it has to be a "demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy. Impact embraces all the extremely diverse ways in which research-related knowledge and skills benefit individual, organisations and nations by: fostering global economic performance, and specifically the economic competitiveness of the UK; increasing the effectiveness of public services and policy; enhancing quality of life, health and creative output." This is not simply a box-ticking exercise. Next year as part of the nationwide assessment of UK research known as the Research Excellence Framework (REF), impact features prominently in the equation.

What's the problem you might ask? Taxpayer's money funds research and they need a return on their investment. The first major problem is that it shifts the agenda away from scientific discovery the application of science. I have witnessed in my own department in the past ten years that those who work on theoretical science are not as successful as those who work on application. Moreover, that application is primarily motivated by economic goals. Universities are being encouraged to form partnerships with industry to make-up for the reduction in government funding. This is problematic for two reasons: the practices and agendas of industry conflict with those of the independent researcher and second, many important innovations were not conceived as applications and would probably not have emerged in an environment that emphasized commercial value. I would submit that focusing on impact is a case of putting the cart before the horse or at least not recognizing the value of theoretical work. We would be wise to remember Francis Bacon's advice that serendipity is a natural consequence of the pursuit of science.

Also many of us work in areas that are difficult to fit into the impact framework. My own research is theoretical. When I am asked to provide a pathway to impact statement, I rely on my experience and enjoyment of public lectures because frankly, the things that interest me do not obviously translate into impact that will foster economic performance. However, public engagement can be problematic especially when addressing issues of concern. Most members of the general public, and more importantly the media that inform them, are not familiar with either the scientific method or statistics. This is one reason why the public is so suspicious of scientists or finds them frustrating because they never seem to give a straight answer when asked to comment on some pertinent topic such as vaccination or health risks. Most non-scientists do not understand explanations that are couched in terms of probability or the complexity of multi-factorial interactions. Each week we see headlines such as "X causes cancer" or the discovery of "Genes for X" which reflect this need to simplify scientific findings.

Finally, most academics themselves have fallen foul of the allure of impact. Every science journal has an impact factor which is a measure of how often articles are cited. It is a reasonable metric but it creates a bias in the scientific process to prioritize those studies that are the most extraordinary. As we have witnessed in the past few years, this has led to the downfall of several high profile scientists who lost their jobs because they fabricated studies that ended up in high impact journals. Why did they do this? For the simple reason that you need impact in order to be a success. My concern is that impact is incompatible with good science because it distorts the process by looking for the immediate payoff and to hell with caution.

Maybe my concern is unwarranted. Science is self-correcting and when the world comes out of recession, we should see a return to the balance between theory and application. Maybe I should have been more alarmist. That way I am sure that I would have made more impact.

Mark Twain explained that good intentions lead to good consequences half of the time. They lead to bad consequences half of the time also. Were he around today he would agree that the social media are obviously well intentioned and that their good consequences need no further discussion. However, Twain would realize that he left out an even more common outcome of good intentions: good and bad consequences at the same time. I will discuss what I fear we lose when interaction between people is shrunk to a disembodied voice, and worse, a throwaway electronic twittering of words and acronyms.

The sharing of information is the least of what people do when they speak with each other. Far more, speech is a rehearsal of what the listener already knows or has no interest in knowing (technically "phatic" speech). Yet people all over the world seek out "phatic" conversation for its own sake, and research has clearly shown that after a chat, however vacuous, the participants not only feel better, but also feel better about each other. How does that come to pass?

Protracted face-to-face interaction is one of the few human behaviors not seen even in rudiment among other species of animal. Its evolutionary advantage is as a mechanism for bonding, parent with child, partners with each other. The entrainment into amicable conversation implements the bonding; eye contact, attention to facial expression (smile? smile fading?) and an automatic entrainment of body rhythms, a matching of speech intonation, unconscious mimicry of each other's postures and gestures, all well documented, which is underwritten by an outpouring of oxytocin. Vigilant anticipation of the other's body language and continual adjustments of one's own demeanor in response, make for an outcome of a higher order, aptly called "intersubjectivity" or "extended mind". Minds previously each preoccupied with their own concerns defer to the other's topic of interest, so as to arrive at a more shared and unified perspective on the object of attention or the topic of debate. Indeed, the harmony goes beyond the concrete and the conceptual. It ranges into the emotions, as one person's insistent bleak ruminations diffuse and scatter as their mind mingles with the mind of an intimate or congenial companion.

How to transcend the two-dimensional talking heads staring hopefully from their television perches into the void? Key to the enriched face-to-face communication is that it happens up close and personal, within arm's length, so that mutual touch is possible. The impoverished response elicited by a posting of good or bad news on Facebook or Twitter; OMG, CUTE!, how cool! etc., squanders the opportunity for interpersonal warmth, an embrace, admiring a ring, a diploma, a baby, and the attending reminiscences, the anticipations and sharing of feelings in depth, that happen when two people face each other, lock eye contact and experience the reality of each other. Evolution notoriously has no foresight, nor is it embodied, but if it were, it would be spinning like a top in its grave as LOL supplants the joy of present laughter. What a waste!

Staples of contemporary interaction have the effect, perhaps intended, of distancing and alienating: the elevated podium, the massive executive desk that separates the speaker and the spoken to, the dimmed lights as power point takes over from the human speaker and no one looks at anyone else. As for the written word, text and prose become inert "content" and the healer is relegated to insurance "provider" status in the mercantile jargon of the day. Then come the on-line courses capped by on-line diplomas absent any person-to-person teaching. There is no opportunity for the student to participate in an instructor's inspiration with an excited interpersonal to and fro that sharpens the understanding of both parties of the idea at issue. The speaker (writer) and the listener (reader) both face a void. No one is there to talk with.

Humans can do better than that. The entrainment of body rhythms has consolidated the loyalty of and the shared mindset of groups perhaps since times prehistoric; the rhythm of synchronous marching feet, the ritual chant, the dance around the cauldron complete with boiled missionary. Between individuals, the salute, and adding touch to the multimodality interpersonal mix, the handshake, high five, couples dancing. Whether the objective is to promote military discipline, adherence to a sect or religious persuasion, faith healing, rhythmically entrained behavior is the catalyst and the glue. When the goal is to inculcate irrational and counterintuitive beliefs, this is more successfully done by rhythm and group ritual than by strenuous verbal persuasion. Of such is the Collective, otherwise known as the in-group, for better or for worse.

I fear that weakening, if not completely relinquishing, the compelling attraction that is inherent in entraining with others both physically and mentally will leave people alone even as their tally of "friends" increases. I also fear that the flight from closeness to "individualism" will foster ever more vehement and destructive untrammeled self-expression, as the hobgoblins emerge from the shadows into the spotlight of the Internet and into explosive mayhem in the real world.

Until about 15 years ago, it was widely assumed that the majority of brain development occurs in the first few years of life. But recent research on the human brain has demonstrated that many brain regions undergo protracted development throughout adolescence and beyond in humans. This advancement in knowledge has intensified old worries and given rise to new ones. It is hugely worrying that so many teenagers around the world don't have access to education at a time when their brains are still developing and being shaped by the environment. We should also worry about our lack of understanding of how our rapidly changing world is shaping the developing teenage brain.

Decades of research on early neurodevelopment demonstrated that the environment influences brain development. During the first few months or years of life, an animal must be exposed to particular visual or auditory stimuli for the associated brain cells and connections to develop. In this way, neuronal circuitry is sculpted according to the environment during 'sensitive periods' of brain development. This research has focused mostly on early development of sensory brain regions. What about later development of higher-level brain regions, such as prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex, which are involved in decision-making, inhibitory control and planning, as well as social understanding and self-awareness? We know these brain regions continue to develop throughout adolescence. However, we have very little knowledge about how environmental factors influence the developing teenage brain. This is something that should concern us.

There is some recent evidence from the Dunedin Longitudinal Study that adolescence represents a period of brain development particularly sensitive to environmental input. This study reported that persistent cannabis use in adolescence had long-lasting negative consequences on a broad spectrum of cognitive abilities later in adulthood. In contrast, this was not the case if cannabis use started after the age of 18. Could the same be true for other environmental factors? Alcohol, tobacco, drug-use, diet, medication, Internet usage, gaming… these are all likely to affect the developing brain. The question is how, and we simply don't know the answer.

There's a lot of concern about the hours some teenagers spend online and playing video games. But maybe all this worry is misplaced. After all, throughout history humans have worried about the effects of new technologies on the minds of the next generation. When the printing press was invented, there was anxiety about reading corrupting young people's minds, and the same worries were repeated for the invention of radio and television. Maybe we shouldn't be worried at all. It's possible that the developing brains of today's teenagers are going to be the most adaptable, creative, multi-tasking brains that have ever existed. There is evidence—from adults—that playing video games improves a range of cognitive functions such as divided attention and working memory as well as visual acuity. Much less is known about how gaming, social networking and so on, influence the developing adolescent brain. We don't know whether the effects of new technologies on the developing brain are positive, negative or neutral. We need to find out.

Adolescence is a period of life in which the brain is developing and malleable, and it represents a good opportunity for learning and social development. However, according to Unicef, 40% of the world's teenagers do not have access to secondary school education. The percentage of teenage girls who have no access to education is much higher, and yet there is strong evidence that the education of girls in developing countries has multiple significant benefits for family health, population growth rates, child mortality rates, HIV rates as well as for women's self-esteem and quality of life. Adolescence represents a time of brain development when teaching and training should be particularly beneficial. I worry about the lost opportunity of denying the world's teenagers access to education.

We are surrounded by complexity. Issues that demand our attention—ranging from health-care reform, climate change or the Arab Spring—have a historical context, multiple viewpoints, clashes of diverse and deep values, and a bewlidering set of players with their own agendas.

The news provides a tremendous source for what is happening right now: who made what speech, what the result of the vote was, what the latest paper said, how many people died etc. While never perfect, the news industry mostly delivers on it's duty to provide information on what is 'new', and with the advent of social media platforms and aggregators like Google News, it has never been easier to stay up-to-date.

But much of what is needed to understand a situation is not new. Instead, deeper knowledge of the context is needed to inform an understanding of why the present events have come to pass. The present situation in Afganistan makes no sense at all without an appreciation of the culture and history of the region. The latest pronoucement of a future climate impact makes no sense unless you understand how we know anything about how the climate system operates and how it has changed already. Understanding the forces driving the Arab Spring requires a background in the breakup of the Ottoman empire and the responses to the colonial adventurism that followed. Unfortunately this context is not in the least bit newsworthy.

The gap between the new and the old is widening and that should be profoundly worrying. It is as if we have a populace that is well informed about the score of a game, but without any knowledge of the rules, and worse still no effective direction to find credible sources to explain them. It is perhaps no surprise that public discussions often devolve to mere tribalism. It is far easier to base decisions on who supports what than to delve into an issue yourself.

Any efforts that can be made to make it easier to access depth and context must therefore be applauded and extended. New online tools can be developed to scaffold information by providing entry points that are appropriate for any level of knowledge. 'Context' buttons alongside online searches could direct the interested to the background information.

But unless we start collectively worrying about this, nothing will change and our society's ability to deal with complexity in a rational way will continue to decline.

We are being inundated every day with computational findings, conclusions, and statistics. In op-eds, policy debates, and public discussions numbers are presented with the finality of a slammed door. In fact we need to know how these findings were reached, so we can evaluate their relevance, their credibility, resolve conflicts when they differ and make better decisions. Even figuring out where a number came from is a challenge, let alone trying to understand how it was determined.

This is important because of how we reason. In the thousands of decisions we make each day, seldom do we engage in a deliberately rational process anything like gathering relevant information, distilling it into useful knowledge, and comparing options. In most situations standing around weighing pros against cons is a pretty good way to ensure rape pillage and defeat, either metaphorical or real, and miss out on pleasures in life. So of course we don't very often do it, and instead we make quick decisions based on instinct, intuition, heuristics, and shortcuts honed over millions of years.

Computers, however, are very good at components of the decision making process that we're not: they can store vast amounts of data accurately, organize and filter it, carry out blindingly fast computations, and beautifully display the results. Computers can't (yet?) direct problem solving or contextualize findings, but for certain important sets of questions they are invaluable in enabling us to make much more informed decisions. They operate at scales our brains can't and make it possible to tackle problems at ever greater levels of complexity.

The goal of better decision making is behind the current hype surrounding big data, the emergence of "evidence-based" everything—policy,—medicine,—practice,—management, and issues such as climate change, fiscal predictions, health assessment, even what information you are exposed to online. The field of statistics has been addressing the reliability of results derived from data for a long time, with many very successful contributions (for example, confidence intervals, quantifying the distribution of model errors, and the concept of robustness).

The scientific method suggests skepticism when interpreting conclusions, and a responsibility to communicate scientific findings transparently, so others may evaluate and understand the result. We need to bring these notions into our everyday expectations when presented with new computational results. We should be able to dig in and find out where the statistics came from, how they were computed, and why we should believe them. Those concepts receive almost no consideration when findings are publicly communicated.

I'm not saying we should independently verify every fact that enters our daily life—there just isn't enough time, even if we wanted to—but the ability should exist where possible, especially for knowledge generated with the help of computers. Even if no one actually tries to follow the chain of reasoning and calculations, more care will be taken when generating the findings when the potential for inspection exists. If only a small number of people look into the reasoning behind results, they might find issues, provide needed context, or be able to confirm their acceptance of the finding as is.  In most cases the technology exists to make this possible.

Here's an example. When news articles started appearing on the world wide web in the 90's I remember eagerly anticipating hot-linked stats—being able to click on any number in the text to see where it came from. More than a decade later this still isn't routine, and facts are asserted without the possibility of verification. For any conclusions that enter the public sphere, it should be expected that all the steps that generated the knowledge are disclosed, including making the data they are based on available for inspection whenever possible, and making available the computer programs that carried out the data analysis—open data, open source, scientific reproducibility.

Without the ability to question findings, we risk fooling ourselves into thinking we are capitalizing on the information age when we are really just making decisions based on evidence that no one, except perhaps the people who generated it, actually has the ability to understand. That's the door closing.

How often does science fail to deliver? How often should it fail? Should we be worried about the failure rate of science?

Much has been made recently of all the things that science has predicted and which haven't come true. This is typically presented as an indictment of science and sometimes even a reason not to put so much faith in it. Both of these are wrong. They are wrong on the statistics and they are wrong on the interpretation.

The statistical error arises from lumping together scientific predictions that are different in kind. For example, the covers of post war popular science and technology magazines are full of predictions of amazing developments that were supposed to be just around the corner—floating airports, underground cities, flying cars, multilayer roadways through downtowns, etcetera ad nauseum. Very few (maybe none) of these wild predictions came to pass, but what was the chance they would? They were simply the unbridled imaginings of popular science writers or graphic artists looking for a dramatic cover or story that would sell magazines.

You can't lump these predictions in the same bin with more serious promises like the eradication of cancer. One sort of prediction is just imaginative musing, the other is a kind of promissory note. Artificial intelligence, space travel, alternative energies, and cheaper more plentiful food are all in this second category. They cost money, time and resources and they are serious activities; the speculations of science fiction writers don't have any cost associated with them.

But of course not all the serious promises have worked out either. The second error, one of interpretation, is that we have therefore squandered vast sums of public money and resources on abject failures. To take one case, the so called War on Cancer, where we have spent 125 billion dollars on cancer research since then President Richard Nixon "declared war" on this disease 42 years ago in 1971. The result: over the same 42 year period some 16 million people have died from cancer, and it is now the leading cause of death in the US. Sounds bad, but in fact we have cured many previously fatal cancers and prevented an unknowable number of cases by understanding the importance of environmental factors (asbestos, smoking, sunshine, etc.).

And what about all the ancillary benefits that weren't in the original prediction—vaccines, improved drug delivery methods, sophisticated understanding of cell development and aging, new methods in experimental genetics, discoveries that tell us how genes are regulated—all genes not just cancer genes—and a host of other goodies that never get counted as resulting from the war on cancer. Then there is the unparalleled increase in our understanding of biology at every level—from biochemical cascades to cell behavior, to regulatory systems to whole animals and people, and the above mentioned effects of the environment on health. Is anybody tallying all this up? I'd venture to say that, all in all, this cancer war has given us more for the dollars spent than any real war, certainly any recent war.

Much of science is failure, but it is a productive failure. This is a crucial distinction in how we think about failure. More importantly is that not all wrong science is bad science. As with the exaggerated expectations of scientific progress, expectations about the validity of scientific results have simply become overblown. Scientific "facts" are all provisional, all needing revision or sometimes even outright upending. But this is not bad; indeed it is critical to continued progress. Granted it's difficult, because you can't just believe everything you read. But let's grow up and recognize that undeniable fact of life—not only in the newspapers, but in scientific journals.

In the field of pharmacology, where drugs are made, we say that the First Law of Pharmacology is that every drug has at least two effects—the one you know and the other one (or ones?). And the even more important Second Law of Pharmacology is that the specificity of a drug is inversely proportional to the length of time it is on the market. This means, in simpler terms, that when a drug first comes out it is prescribed for a specific effect and seems to work well. But as time passes and it is prescribed more widely and taken by a more diverse population, then side effects begin showing up—the drug is not as specific to the particular pathology as was thought and it seems to have other unexpected effects, mostly negative. This is a natural process. It's how we learn about the limitations of our findings. Would it be better if we could shortcut this process? Yes. Is it likely we'll be able to? No—unless we would be content with trying only very conservative approaches to curing diseases.

So what's the worry? That we will become irrationally impatient with science, with it's wrong turns and occasional blind alleys, with its temporary results that need constant revision. And we will lose our trust and belief in science as the single best way to understand the physical universe (which includes us, or much of us). From a historical perspective the path to discovery may seem clear, but the reality is that there are twists and turns and reversals and failures and cul de sacs all along the path to any discovery. Facts are not immutable and discoveries are provisional. This is the messy process of science. We should worry that our unrealistic expectations will destroy this amazing mess. 

The movie Idiocracy was hardly academy award material, but it began with an interesting premise: Given that there is no strong selection for high IQ in the modern world, less intelligent people are having more children than are more intelligent people. Extrapolating that trend for 500 years, the movie's producers depicted a world populated by numbskulls. Is this a possibility?

There are several causes for concern. To begin with, it is a correct assumption that natural selection is largely agnostic with regard to intelligence. We large-brained hominids like to think that all the information-crunching power in our hypertrophied cortexes will eventually allow us to solve the big problems of modern times, allowing our descendants to persist into the distant future. But it ain't necessarily so. Dinosaurs were a lot smarter than cockroaches, and Australopithecines were Einsteinian by comparison, yet the roaches have had a much longer run, and are widely expected to outlast Homo sapiens.

And consider a few more historically local phenomena:

1.   Even correcting for other factors, people living in larger families have lower IQs.

2.   In the modern world, less educated people reproduce earlier, and have larger families than highly educated people.

3.   Less educated people are more likely to hold conservative religious beliefs than are more educated people.

4.   Conservative religiosity is associated with opposition to birth control and abortion. Jason Weeden has data suggesting this—is in fact close to the heart of the split between the liberal left and the conservative right.

5.   Some conservative religions, such as the LDS church, actively encourage large families.

6.   Other conservative religions, such as the Roman Catholic church, indirectly encourage large families by forbidding most means of family planning.

7.   Larger families are likely to be poorer, and poverty triggers earlier puberty and earlier reproduction (a good deal of recent research suggests that this phenomenon is linked to biological life history patterns, and that it unfolds independent of any normative inputs from religions or local culture). All of these factors combine to ensure that poorer less educated young people are more likely to stay that way, and produce the next (slightly larger) generation of poor less educated young people.

8.   Well-educated intellectual types have smaller families these days, and because highly educated women wait longer to begin reproduction, often miss their fertile window, and have no children.

During the 20th century, IQ tended to generally increase (a phenomenon dubbed the "Flynn Effect" after the researcher who discovered it). Various hypotheses have been advanced for this phenomenon, including better education and smaller families. But the factors I listed above could set a course in the opposite direction, flip-flopping the Flynn effect.

And there is another potential ironic twist. If the population of less educated religiously conservative individuals increases, and continues to vote as they have been voting, funding for education and scientific research is also likely to decrease. A less educated population could contribute not only to an upward shift in population size, but also to a downward economic spiral, for reasons linked to some fascinating findings by Heiner Rindermann and James Thompson.

These researchers examined the economic consequences of variations in a IQ across 90 countries, analyzing the average IQ of each country's population as a whole, as well as the average IQ of the "intellectual elite" (the top 5% of the population), and the lowest 5% of the population. Just as countries differ in their distribution of wealth, they also differ in their distribution of IQ. Canada and the U.S., for example, are identical in the IQ of their smartest people (120), but the lowest 5 percent of Canadians are 5 points smarter than the lowest 5 percent of Americans (75 vs. 80).

Rindermann and Thompson's analyses led them to this conclusion: Having a high IQ intellectual class—lots of people with accomplishments in science, math, technology and engineering—translated directly into more wealth for a country. To put it into purely economic terms, an increase of 1 IQ point among average citizens increases a country's average GDP by $229, whereas an increase of 1 IQ point in the intellectual elite is worth $468.

A high-performing intellectual class was also associated with better-developed and freer economic and political institutions, which in turn encouraged more development of the country's "cognitive resources," in what Rindermann and Thompson called a "virtuous cycle." The free climate becomes a catalyst for creative productivity among the high IQ innovators, who are thus liberated to rethink older ways of doing things, and to expand into new scientific arenas. This in turn inspires new technologies, as well as newer and more efficient ways of doing business, and a better climate in which to grow the next generation of innovators.

So to the extent that a growing anti-intellectual portion of the population manages to cut funds for education and for scientific research, they effectively cut off the system that feeds what has been the world's most productive "human capital" machine. According to my colleagues from other countries, the American educational system has a reputation as unimpressive up through the university level, but is regarded as the top of the heap when it comes to training at the highest level—with people around the world desperate to come to the United States to get the best Ph.D training on the planet. Thus, slashing funding for higher education and scientific research (much of which is conducted by our best Ph.D. students at major universities), seems like a policy destined to undermine the country's economic health in long-lasting ways.

Policies that undercut the intellectual upper crust therefore undermine economic growth, and indirectly contribute to the economic threat that inspires poorer less educated people to reproduce earlier and more prolifically. 

Thinking about children, as I do for a living, and worrying go hand in hand. There is nothing in human life so important and urgent as raising the next generation, and yet it also feels as if we have very little control over the outcome. The British prime minister Stanley Baldwin once accused the press of having "power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages." Perhaps it's appropriate that the prerogative of the mother is just the opposite of the harlot's, we moms have responsibility without power—a recipe for worry if ever there was one. But, as a scientist as well as a mother, I worry that much of our current worry about children is misdirected. We worry a lot about the wrong things and we don't worry nearly enough about the right ones.

Much modern middle-class worry stems from a fundamentally misguided picture of how children develop. It's the picture implicit in the peculiar but now ubiquitous concept of "parenting." As long as there have been homo sapiens there have been parents—human mothers and fathers, and, others as well, have taken special care of children. But the word "parenting" first emerged in America in the twentieth century, and only became common in the 1970s.

This particular word comes with a picture, a vision of how we should understand the relations between grown-ups and children. "To parent" is a goal-directed verb. It describes a job, a kind of work. The goal is to shape your child into a particular kind of adult—smarter or happier or more successful than others. And the idea is that there is some set of strategies or techniques that will accomplish this. So contemporary parents worry endlessly about whether they are using the right techniques and spend millions of dollars on books or programs that are supposed to provide them.

This picture is empirically misguided. "Parenting" worries focus on relatively small variations in what parents and children do —co-sleeping or crying it out, playing with one kind of toy rather than another, more homework or less. There is very little evidence that any of this make much difference to the way that children turn out in the long run. There is even less evidence that there is any magic formula for making one well-loved and financially supported child any smarter or happier or more successful as an adult than another.

The picture is even more profoundly misguided from an evolutionary perspective. Childhood itself is one of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings—we have a much longer childhood than any other primate. This extended childhood seems, at least in part, to be an adaptation to the radically increased variability and unpredictability of human environments. The period of protected immaturity we call childhood gives humans a chance to learn, explore, and innovate without having to plan, act and take care of themselves at the same time. And empirically, we've discovered that even the youngest children have truly extraordinary abilities to learn and imagine, quite independent of any conscious parental shaping. Our long protected childhood, arguably, allows our distinctive human cognitive achievements.

The evolutionary emergence of our extended childhood went hand in hand with changes in the depth and breadth of human care for children. Humans developed a "triple threat" when it comes to care. Unlike our closest primate relatives, human fathers began to invest substantially in their children's care, women lived on past menopause to take care of their grand-children, and unrelated adults—"alloparents"—kicked in care, too. In turn, children could learn a variety of skills, attitudes, knowledge and cultural traditions from all those caregivers. This seems to have given human children a varied and multifaceted cognitive tool-kit that they could combine, revise, and refine to face the variable and unpredictable challenges of the next generation.

So the evolutionary picture is that a community of caregivers provide children with two essential ingredients that allow them to thrive. First, adults provide an unconditionally nurturing and stable context, a guarantee that children will be safe and cared for as children. That secure base allows children to venture out to play, explore, and learn, and to shape their own futures. Second, adults provide children with a wide range of models of acting in the world, even mutually contradictory models of acting. Children can exploit this repertoire to create effective ways of acting in often unpredictable and variable environments, and eventually to create new environments. This is very different from the "parenting" picture, where particular parental actions are supposed to shape children's adult characteristics.

This leads me to the stuff that we don't worry about enough. While upper middle-class parents are worrying about whether to put their children in forward or backward facing strollers, more than 1 in 5 children in the United States are growing up below the poverty line, and nearly half the children in America grow up in low-income households. Children, and especially young children, are more likely to live in poverty than any other age group. This number has actually increased substantially during the past decade. More significantly, these children not only face poverty but a more crippling isolation and instability. It's not just that many children grow up without fathers, they grow up without grandparents or alloparents either, and with parents who are forced to spend long hours at unreliable jobs that don't pay enough in the first place. Institutions haven't stepped in to fill the gap—we still provide almost no public support for childcare, we pay parents nothing, and child-care workers next to nothing.

Of course, we've felt the moral intuition that neglecting children is wrong for a long time. But, more recently research into epigenetics has helped demonstrate just how the mechanisms of care and neglect work. Research in sociology and economics has shown empirically just how significant the consequences of early experience actually can be. The small variations in middle-class "parenting" make very little difference. But providing high-quality early childhood care to children who would otherwise not receive it makes an enormous and continuing difference up through adulthood. In fact, the evidence suggests that this isn't just a matter of teaching children particular skills or kinds of knowledge—a sort of broader institutional version of "parenting." Instead, children who have a stable, nurturing, varied early environment thrive in a wide range of ways, from better health to less crime to more successful marriages. That's just what we'd expect from the evolutionary story. I worry more and more about what will happen to the generations of children who don't have the uniquely human gift of a long, protected, stable childhood.

Are we about to see advances in mathematics come to an end? Until last year, I would have said no. Now I am not so sure.

Given the degree to which the advances in science, engineering, technology, and medicine that created our modern world have all depended on advances in mathematics, if advances in mathematics were to come to an end, then it's hard to see anything ahead for society other than stagnation, if not decline.

How likely is this to occur? I don't know. The escape clause in this year's Edge Question is that word "should." Had the question been, "What are we worried about?" I suspect any honest answer I could have given would have focused on personal issues of health, aging and mortality; mathematics—dead or alive—would not have gotten a look in.

Sure, there are many things going on in society that disturb me. But it's an inevitable consequence of growing older to view changes in society as being for the worse. We are conditioned by the circumstances that prevailed during our own formative years, and when those circumstances change—as they must and should, since societies are, like people, living entities—we find those changes disconcerting. Things inevitably seem worse than they were during our childhood years, but that reflects the fact that, as children, we simply accepted things the way they were. To let a disturbed sensation as an adult turn into worry would be to adopt an unproductive, ego-centric view of the world.

That said, we are reflective, rationale beings that have some degree of control of our actions, both individual and collective, and it's prudent both for ourselves and for others, including our descendents, to read the signs and try to judge if a change in direction is called for.

One sign I came across unexpectedly last year was a first hint that mathematics as we know it may die within a generation. The sign was, as you may suspect, technological, but not the kind you probably imagine.

Though the 1960s and 70s saw an endless stream of commentators lamenting that the rise of calculators and computers were leading to a generation of mathematical illiterates, all that was happening was a shift in focus in the mathematics that was important. In particular, a high level of arithmetical ability, which had been crucial to successful living for many centuries, suddenly went away, just as basic crop-growing and animal rearing skills went away with the onset of the industrial revolution. In the place of arithmetic skills, a greater need for algebraic thinking arose. (The fact that, in many cases, that need was ill met by being taught as if it were arithmetic, does not eliminate the new importance of algebraic skills in today's world.)

On the other hand, there is no denying that advances in technology change the kind of mathematics that gets done. When calculating devices are available to everyone on the planet (North Korea excepted), which is almost certainly going to occur within the next ten years or so, the world is unlikely to ever again see the kinds of discoveries made in earlier eras by mathematical giants such as Fermat, Gauss, Riemann, or Ramanujan. The notebooks they left behind showed that they spent many, many hours carrying out long hand calculations as they investigated primality and other properties of numbers. This led them to develop such a deep understanding for numbers that they were able to formulate profound conjectures, some of which they or others were subsequently able to prove, a few that remain unproved to this day, the Riemann Hypothesis being the most notable.

There are likely to be properties of numbers that will never be suspected, once everyone has access to powerful computing technology. On the other hand, there is also a gain, since the computer has given rise to what is called Experimental Mathematics, where massive numerical simulations give rise to a different kind of conjecture—conjectures that likely would not have been discovered without powerful computers. (I described this recent phenomenon in a book with Jonathan Borwein a few years ago.)

So, technology can certainly change the direction of mathematical discovery, but can it really cause its death? In September last year, I caught the first glimpse of how this could occur. I was giving one of those (instantly famous) Stanford MOOCs, teaching the basic principles of mathematical thinking to a class of 64,000 students around the world.

Since the course was on university-level mathematical thinking, not computation, there was no possibility of machine-graded assignments. The focus was on solving novel problems for which you don't have a standard procedure available, in some cases constructing rigorous proofs of results. This kind of work is highly creative and intrinsically symbolic, and can really be done only by covering sheets of paper (sometimes several sheets of paper) with symbols and little diagrams—sometimes using notations you devise specially in order to solve the problem at hand.

In a regular university class, I or my TAs would grade the students' work, but in a MOOC, that is not feasible, so I made use of a method called Calibrated Peer Evaluation, whereby the students graded one another's work. To facilitate the anonymous sharing of work, I asked students to take good quality smartphone photos of their work, or scan their pages into PDF, and upload them to the course website, where the MOOC software would organize distribution and track the grades.

Very early one, a few students posted questions on the MOOC discussion forum asking if they could type up their work in LaTeX, a mathematical typesetting program widely used in advanced work in mathematics, physics, computer science, and engineering. I said they could. In fact, I had used LaTeX to create all of the MOOC resources on the website, to create the weekly assignment sheets, and to self-publish the course textbook.

Now, LaTeX is a large, complex system with an extremely long and steep learning curve, so I was not prepared for what happened next. From that first forum post on, hardly anyone submitted their work as an image of a handwritten page! Almost the entire class (more precisely, the MOOC-typical ten percent who were highly active throughout the entire course) either went to tortuous lengths to write mathematics using regular keyboard text, or else mastered sufficient LaTeX skills to do their work that way. The forum thread on how to use LaTeX became one of the largest and most frequently used in the course. I shudder to think of the amount of time my students spent on typesetting; time that would have been far better spent on the mathematics itself.

We have, it seems, become so accustomed to working on a keyboard, and generating nicely laid out pages, we are rapidly losing, if indeed we have not already lost, the habit—and love—of scribbling with paper and pencil. Our presentation technologies encourage form over substance. But if (free-form) scribbling goes away, then I think mathematics goes with it. You simply cannot do original mathematics at a keyboard. The cognitive load is too great.

The increasing availability of pens that record what is being written may, I suppose, save the day. But that's not substantially different from taking a photo or scan of a page, so I am not so sure that is the answer. The issue seems to be the expectation that our work should meet a certain presentation standard. In a world dominated by cheap, sophisticated, presentation technologies, paper-and-pencil work may go the way of the DoDo. And if that happens, mathematics will no longer advance. As a living, growing subject, it will die. RIP mathematics? Maybe. We will likely know for certain within twenty years.

Imagine that a young, white man has been falsely convicted of a serious crime and sentenced to five years in a maximum-security penitentiary. He has no history of violence and is, understandably, terrified at the prospect of living among murderers and rapists. Hearing the prison gates shut behind him, a lifetime of diverse interests and aspirations collapses to a single point: He must avoid making enemies so that he can serve out his sentence in peace.

Unfortunately, prisons are places of perverse incentives—in which the very norms one must follow to avoid becoming a victim lead inescapably toward violence. In most U.S. prisons, for instance, whites, blacks, and Hispanics exist in a state of perpetual war. This young man is not a racist, and would prefer to interact peacefully with everyone he meets, but if he does not join a gang he is likely to be targeted for rape and other abuse by prisoners of all races. To not choose a side is to become the most attractive victim of all. Being white, he likely will have no rational option but to join a white-supremacist gang for protection.

So he joins a gang. In order to remain a member in good standing, however, he must be willing to defend other gang members, no matter how sociopathic their behavior. He also discovers that he must be willing to use violence at the tiniest provocation—returning a verbal insult with a stabbing, for instance—or risk acquiring a reputation as someone who can be assaulted at will. To fail to respond to the first sign of disrespect with overwhelming force, is to run an intolerable risk of further abuse. Thus, the young man begins behaving in precisely those ways that make every maximum security prison a hell on earth. He also adds further time to his sentence by committing serious crimes behind bars.

A prison is perhaps the easiest place to see the power of bad incentives. And yet in many other places in our society, we find otherwise normal men and women caught in the same trap and busily making life for everyone much less good than it could be. Elected officials ignore long-term problems because they must pander to the short-term interests of voters. People working for insurance companies rely on technicalities to deny desperately ill patients the care they need. CEOs and investment bankers run extraordinary risks—both for their businesses and for the economy as a whole—because they reap the rewards of success without suffering the penalties of failure. Lawyers continue to prosecute people they know to be innocent (and defend those they know to be guilty) because their careers depend upon winning cases. Our government fights a war on drugs that creates the very problem of black market profits and violence that it pretends to solve….

We need systems that are wiser than we are. We need institutions and cultural norms that make us better than we tend to be. It seems to me that the greatest challenge we now face is to build them. 

I worry that we don't really understand quantum phenomena. We have a successful theory—quantum mechanics, which has passed every experimental test since it was formulated in 1926 and which is the foundation for our understanding of all of physics—except gravity. It is the basis of new technologies of quantum information and computation which are presently under intensive development. Still, I don't believe quantum mechanics gives a complete description of nature. I strongly believe there is another, truer description, waiting to be discovered.

A large part of the reason is that quantum mechanics only gives probabilistic predictions for the results of experiments. Atoms and molecules come in discrete states, with distinct energies. These distinct states are the basis for our understanding of chemistry. When an atom or molecule transitions between these states, they emit or absorb photons to make up the jump in energy. Quantum mechanics provides probabilities for these different transitions to occur. These probabilities can be compared with rates measured by experiments done on many systems at a time.

But consider a particular individual atom which decays at a particular instant from one excited state to a lower energy state. Quantum mechanics provides no precise prediction as to when that instant will be, nor does it provide any basis for an explanation of why it happens when it does. I believe there must be a reason why every individual event happens, and that if we understood it we could make a theory to predict in principle when each atom transitions. That is to say, I want a theory of quantum phenomena that goes beyond quantum mechanics.

The people who originally formulated quantum mechanics did not claim it gave a complete description of physical reality. Bohr, Heisenberg and their followers explained that there were two kinds of processes in nature—ordinary processes and measurement processes. To distinguish them they divided the world in two. On one side of the divide is the quantum system we want to describe. On the other side is our world, populated by people, measuring instruments and clocks. These are to be described by old fashion Newtonian physics. A measurement process happens when the two worlds interact and the probabilities describe outcomes of these interactions. Quantum mechanics, they argued, gives no description or account of what goes on in the purely quantum world. It is a tool for discussing the probabilities for different outcomes of interventions we make on a quantum system.

But surely we and our measuring systems are made of atoms and so are part of the quantum world. In that case, shouldn't it be possible to put everything into the quantum side of the division and treat ourselves and our tools as quantum systems? When we try to do this we get no account of experiments giving definite results and no predictions of probabilities for those results. To make sense of this is called the measurement problem and it has been under contention for eight decades.

One response is the many worlds interpretation which claims that reality is vastly bigger than the world we observe and contains an infinitude of histories, one for every sequence of outcomes for which quantum mechanics predicts probabilities. The world we experience is only one of these histories.

I do not believe in this vast expansion of reality. I believe there is only one real world in which there are definite outcomes of experiments, in which only one history is realized of the may possible.

Many other resolutions have been offered to account for the fact that quantum mechanics does not give an account of individual phenomena. Perhaps logic could be changed so that it becomes no longer possible to express our perplexity. Perhaps quantum mechanics describes, not nature, but only the information that an observer may gather about a physical system by doing experiments.

But there is another possibility: that quantum mechanics does not provide an explanation for what happens in individual phenomena because it is incomplete, because it simply leaves out aspects of nature needed for a true description. This is what Einstein believed and it is also what de Broglie and Schroedinger, who made key steps formulating the theory, believed. This is what I believe and my lifelong worry has been how to discover that more complete theory.

A completion of quantum mechanics which allows a full description of individual phenomena is called a hidden variables theory. Several have been invented; one which has been much studied was invented by de Broglie in 1928 and reinvented by David Bohm in the 1950s. This shows its possible, now what we need to do is find the right theory. The best way to do that would be to discover a theory that agreed with all past tests of quantum mechanics but disagreed about the outcomes of experiments with large, complex quantum devices now under development.

We know that such a theory must be radically non-local, in the sense that once two particles interact and separate, their properties are entangled even if they travel far from each other. This implies that information as to the precise outcomes of experiments they may be each subject to has to be able to travel faster than light.

This means that a complete theory of quantum phenomena must contain a theory of space and time. As a result I've long believed that the task of completing quantum mechanics and the challenge of unifying quantum mechanics with spacetime are one and the same problem. I also see the problem of extending our understanding of physics at the cosmological scale to be the same as discovering the world behind quantum mechanics.

Many physicists accept quantum mechanics as a final theory and attempt to solve the open problems in physics and cosmology, such as unification and quantum gravity, within the existing framework of quantum physics. I worry that this is wrong and cannot succeed, because quantum mechanics itself must be radically deepened and completed to make further progress in our understanding of nature.

Although he is not widely known, Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) is one of the most important twentieth-century writers, whose thinking remains fundamental for the twenty-first century. I believe we should be worried about his relative obscurity, since he discusses with great insight what seem to me to be the most important issues surrounding globalisation: homogenisation and extinction. His theory of the 'creolization of the world' pertains to questions of national identity in view of the colonial past that characterises his Antillean identity. He broaches the urgent question of how best to escape the threat of cultural homogenisation, and how we can work to sustain the positive force of creolisation— a plurality of cultures— within the terms of an ongoing global exchange.

Global homogenisation is a tendency that Stefan Zweig had already observed in 1925, when he wrote in Die Monotonisierung der Welt (The Equalization of the World) that:

Everything concerning the outer life form becomes homogeneous; everything is evened to a consistent cultural scheme. More and more countries seem to be congruent, people acting and living within one scheme, more and more cities becoming similar in their outer appearance … More and more the aroma of the specific seems to evaporate.

The forces of globalisation are impacting on the world of art at large, and on exhibition curating specifically. There has been great potential in the new global dialogues of the last couple of decades, some of it realised, but there has also been the persistent danger that the homogenising influences of globalisation will make differences disappear. I worry about this, and so I read Glissant every morning when I wake up. He anchors my thoughts regarding producing shows internationally—encouraging me to listen to and learn from whatever culture I may be working within. Since time is losing its local variety to a global speed that leaves no room for individual pace, to curate time, and to locate forms of resistance to the homogenisation of time, has become as important as to curate and resist the homogenisation of space.

Cultural homogenisation is nothing less than cultural extinction. As the art historian Horst Bredekamp writes in his book Theorie des Bildakts (Theory of Picture Acts), in today's globalised war iconoclastic acts have become a prominent strategy—the public extinction of monuments and cultural symbols, such as the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban. Through the mass media, war thus becomes a globalised image war that crosses the borders of territories, and persists after the event, functioning as legitimation for military action and diplomatic policy.

Scientists today are increasingly debating the possibility of the extinction of human civilisation, and even of the species itself. The astronomer Martin Rees talks about 'Our Final Hour' and questions whether civilisation will survive beyond the next century. The spectre of extinction is felt across the humanities, too. For philosopher Ray Brassier, the inevitable fact of our eventual extinction grounds the ultimate meaninglessness of human existence, and thus for him the only proper response for philosophy is to embrace and pursue the radically nihilistic implications of this most basic insight. As he writes in his book Nihil Unbound (2007): 'nihilism is … the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which … is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the "values" and "meanings" which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable'.

Most would stop short of this absolute nihilism, and there are of course other places to look —sources of hope and meaning. The artist Gustav Metzger, for instance, has made extinction a central theme of his practice. In works that make use of his enormous archive of newspapers, he stresses the point that the prospect of human extinction is continually raised in the innumerable little extinctions that continuously occur in the world. By re-presenting newspaper stories on the subject of extinction, Metzger highlights the problem of our collective attitude of resignation in the face of the sheer regularity of this disappearance, and our apparent powerlessness to halt it.

Marguerite Humeau is a young artist whose work reaches back to before the dawn of human history itself. In what the historian Eric Hobsbawm might have called 'a protest against forgetting', she is engaged in a project to reconstruct the vocal cords of extinct animals from prehistory—mammoths, dinosaurs and others – as a way to bring the sounds of the past back to life. Like Metzger's works, her acts of remembrance contain a warning of a future potentially lying in wait. Humeau's work also makes plain the complex technology that enables her research, a strategy that points to our collective dilemma: that it has required immense scientific and technological advances for us to become aware of our plight, technologies that are very often also at the heart of the problem.

Gerhard Richter says that art is the highest form of hope. I would add that art is the primary form of resistance to homogenisation and extinction. To quote Zweig again: 'art still exists to give shape to multiple ways of being'. 

More than ever we depend on the successful cooperation of nations on planetary scale decisions. Many of today’s most dire problems cannot be solved by actions taken within single countries, but will only find solutions if the global community joins forces in a collective action. More often than not, however, global cooperation is failing, even if the problem is well defined, and the options for action fairly well understood. Why? One answer that comes to mind very easily is that humans’ narrow pursuit of their own interests will trump any possibility for collective action. This explanation is as insufficient as it is pessimistic. If this was the heart of the problem, failure would be inevitable. We are not going to change human nature in time.

The good news is that inherent human self-interest, while not exactly making things easy, is not the only reason global cooperation is failing. As well as inherently self-interested, humans, turns out, are also inherently cooperative. From an early age, children are able and, even more importantly, highly motivated to interact with others in order to accomplish common goals. Kids enjoy cooperating. Moreover, other primates seem to share many of the basic abilities necessary for cooperation. Hence, cooperation appears to have been part of humans’ biological history for a long time, and many of the necessary abilities and motivations heritable. Even human adults choose cooperation over defection unless they are given too much time to think about it. When making decisions quickly, people’s gut reaction is to cooperate. The point is that we cooperate much more than we might predict based on self-interest alone. Cooperation is as much part of human nature as is self-interest. So the fact that global cooperation is failing is not a foregone conclusion. The challenge is to build a context for global cooperation that brings out the cooperative side in us.  

The bad news is that we have no idea how to do that. That’s because we don’t know how cooperation works when you go from small groups of people to a planetary level. We lack the knowledge for successful intervention. We come to this problem at crunch time with empty hands. We should worry about that. 

What we do know is how to build a context that promotes cooperation amongst limited groups of individuals (local cooperation). For example, local cooperation works well when the chance for reciprocation is high and the cooperators trust each other. Individuals cooperate better when the channels for communication are effective, the cooperators think of themselves as similar to each other and the system allows for cheaters to be punished. What we don’t know is how these factors operate in a global cooperation scenario. But isn’t global cooperation just like local cooperation except with lots more individuals? Can’t we just take what we know about local cooperation and extrapolate to a group of 7 billion? The reason global cooperation fails could simply be that reciprocation, trust, communication, punishment, and inter-individual similarity are all compromised on that scale. If this was the heart of the problem, again, failure would be inevitable. Luckily it isn’t. Because that’s not how global cooperation works. 

Yes, no one can hide from the consequences of failing global cooperation. Yes, everybody will in some way become part of global solutions. But what is the actual scale at which global cooperation happens? Global cooperation involves multiple layers of decision-making instances. Decisions are frequently delegated to representatives of larger communities to coordinate action at local, regional, national and global levels. Thus, while the consequences of what we call “global cooperation” are in fact global, the decision-making process itself is done in relatively small groups of people. So why does it not work? What are the differences between local cooperation as we know and experience it every day and global cooperation, if the size of the group of cooperators is roughly the same? 

The difference is that the individuals that are interacting in a global cooperation scenario respond to a different, more complex problem space. International representatives that carry out the bulk of negotiations interact in principle like individuals, but they simultaneously carry the burden of speaking for a much larger constituency. These people act both as members of a small group of experts and as representatives of the interests of thousands or millions of people. The interests of the masses are one of the factors taken into account by those making decisions on their behalf. This added layer of responsibility might fundamentally change the structure of cooperation. We desperately need to know how. 

Besides their own and their constituents’ stakes in mitigating global climate change, these representatives also have to worry much more about the popularity of their decisions than is typical in every-day local cooperation. While everyone worries to some extent about the social consequences of their decisions, the career of the representatives in global cooperative scenarios depends on their popularity - the re-election problem. The consideration of re-election seriously narrows any representative’s decision space in an already increasingly difficult scenario. Hence the institutions we built to succeed in solving local cooperative dilemmas are potentially inadequate for global cooperation.  

While we understand local cooperation quite well, the factors mentioned above, and likely many others, turn global cooperation into another beast all together. While we battle to strap a saddle on its back, the chances of success are minimal unless we learn how humans interact in these new and extraordinary scenarios and use that information to build structures for global cooperation that bring out the cooperative side of human nature.  

Until a few generations ago, the human species was dealing with the following question: Do we have what it takes to survive? We answered that question with the invention of heat, plumbing, medicine and agriculture. Now we have the means to survive, but do we have the will?

This is the 800-pound question in the middle of the room. 

The Edge Question this year is to identify new worries, but I was not aware that we were running short of things to worry about. Just the reverse—I think we already have too many threats to keep us up at night. And that's what worries me. It seems like we have entered a new age of anxiety. If the problem was internal it could be treated with anti-anxiety drugs. Unfortunately, the problem is external in the form of the ever-expanding list of fears that science is able to generate and the media are happy to amplify. Bad news sells. We listen more carefully to news reports about a possible blizzard than to a forecast of mild and sunny weather. And so the Science/Media complex is happy to feed our fears with all kinds of new threats.

I worry that the number of things we need to worry about keeps growing. The Science/Media complex is highly inventive at discovering all kinds of threats to our food and our water supplies. They are delighted to warn about the deterioration of the environment, declining fertility rates, new carcinogens, physical and mental health issues, and so on. The more novel the threat, the better because new dangers avoid any tendency we have to habituate to scare stories after they've been broadcast for awhile. Very few old worries get retired. A few diseases may get conquered, such as smallpox. But even there the Science/Media complex is able to keep us worried that terrorists might get hold of smallpox samples or recreate the disease in a lab and wreak havoc on a world that no longer gets smallpox immunization, so our vulnerability to smallpox may be increasing, not shrinking.

I worry that the shrillness of worries keeps increasing. In a sea of worries, a new worry can only stand out if its consequences are almost apocalyptic. If it doesn't threaten our civilization it won't get much air time. The pressure is on scientists and media specialists to show that the new issue is not only dangerous, it is highly dangerous. It cannot be merely contagious. There has to be a possible means for it to mutate or perhaps attach itself to a common vector, posing the threat of a deadly new plague. And shrillness isn't only about the consequences of the threat, it is also about the necessity of acting immediately. To command our attention, the Science/Media complex has to show that this new problem needs to jump to the top of our priority list of worries. The threat has to be close to reaching a tipping point, beyond which it will become uncontrollable.

And I worry about the proposed remedies for each new danger. To be worth its salt, a new threat has to command rapid and extreme reactions. These reactions have to start immediately, eliminating our chance to evaluate them for unintended consequences. The more over-the-top our fears, the more disproportionate the reactions and the greater the chances of making things worse, not better.

I hesitate to raise the issue because I'm just adding to the problem but I do think it is something worth worrying about and I don't see any easy way to counter this new age of anxiety. The Science/Media complex keeps ramping up, continually finding novel dangers. It keeps finding more threats to keep us up at night—and then we have to worry about the consequences of sleep deprivation. It never stops.

As I get older, I no longer slam the door on Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons. Nor do I point to the large icon of the winged St John of Patmos (putative author of the Book of Revelations) at the head of the stairs and claim, falsely, to be Bulgarian Orthodox—I find it hard to keep a straight face. The last pair of young mid-West Mormons, clinging to each other in the alien country of Europe, had clearly heard of neither Bulgaria nor Orthodoxy.

My change of heart crystallized when two Jehovah's Witnesses knocked and asked whether I was optimistic. A genuine smile crossed my face as I affirmed that I was. The one in charge (the other being the apprentice, as is usual) whipped out a copy of The Watchtower, the front cover of which showed a spectacular mushroom cloud emblazoned with the headline 'Armageddon!' He suggested that my casual optimism might be misplaced.

I began to see his point, though not from his point of view. Armageddon for Jehovah's Witnesses immediately precedes the Last Judgement and is the prophesied final battle against the Anti-Christ. It probably takes its name from the ancient city of Megiddo, Israel—an Old Testament byword for big, locally apocalyptic battles. Thutmosis III of Egypt put down a Canaanite rebellion there in 1457 BC, and in 609 BC the Egyptians again triumphed, defeating the Iron Age Judeans. Megiddo is a doubly strategic location: locally, it controls the route from the eastern Mediterranean coast at Mount Carmel through to the Jordan Valley; regionally, it occupies a relatively narrow tract of habitable land that bridges Africa and Eurasia.

Neolithic farmers first settled Megiddo itself around 7000 BC, but the area was occupied far earlier. Excavations at the rock shelter at Qafzeh have produced stone tools, pigment-stained shell ornaments, and the ceremonial burials of over a dozen people, dating to 92,000 years ago. The nearby cave of Tabun contains tools from Homo erectus that date to half a million years ago and, from around 200,000 years ago onwards, the remains of Neanderthals, a different human species who eventually came into competition with groups of anatomically modern Homo sapiens filtering northwards out of Africa at around the time of the Qafzeh burials.

These facts about our evolutionary and cultural prehistory, established by international transdisciplinary scientific projects, are utterly rejected by fundamentalists. Archbishop Ussher of Armagh claimed that Adam and Eve, the first people, were made directly by God on the sixth day of Creation, late October 4004 BC (only to be driven from Paradise on Monday 10th November of the same year). By the Witnesses' calculations, the world is more than a whole century older, with Adam created in 4129 BC. But neither understanding leaves time for the early farming phase of Megiddo. Or for biological evolution. Or plate tectonics. Or anything, really, that has been established empirically by the historical sciences.

If this were simply a disagreement about the scale of the past or the processes that operated in it, it might be little more than a frustration for archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists. But it seems to me that belief in a fixed and recent start to the world is invariably matched by belief in an abrupt and (usually) imminent end. The denial of antiquity, and of Darwinian evolution, psychologically defines the form and scope of any imagined future. And that has implications for the way individuals and communities make decisions about resource management, biodiversity, population control and the development of technologies.

None of those things matter to Armageddonists. By Armageddonist, I mean an adherent—irrespective of fine-grade distinctions in the eschatologies or 'end times thinking' of particular religious faiths—of the idea that (i) everything will be miraculously solved at some definite point in the (near) future; (ii) the solution will create eternal winners and losers; and (iii) the only real concern in life is which side we find ourselves on when battle (however concrete or abstract) commences. A coming Battle of Armageddon is anticipated by Jehovah's Witnesses, the Islamic Ahmadiyya community, the Seventh Day Adventists, Christian dispensationalists, Christadelphians and members of the Bahá'i faith. More broadly, the idea of apocalyptic renewal at 'the end of days' is shared by the Church of Latter Day Saints, Islam, Judaism, and most other religions (with the noteworthy exception of Zen Buddhism).

Obviously, moral distinctions should be made between religionists who blow people up and stone apostates to death, and those who do not. There is also a distinction between faiths that reject science wholesale, and those that do not. The Catholic Church has long eschewed burning heretics in the auto-da-fé, and it never rejected Darwin's view of human evolution: already in 1868, John Henry—later Cardinal—Newman found it potentially compatible; positive acceptance has emerged gradually since 1950. But Catholicism retains a firm belief in a precisely delimited future leading to the Last Judgement. The Pope's opposition to contraception connects to this: the globe does not need to be sustainable in perpetuity if all will be renewed.

Admittedly, scientists can be as good as priests at scaring people into despairing visions of the end of the world. If they do, they should not be surprised when people are attracted by options that include salvation. But faced with claims that run counter to empirical evidence, those of us of an Enlightenment disposition can never afford to appease, to relativize, or to bow to 'religious sensitivities', whether through misplaced tact or (more honourably, given the penalties now on display in some jurisdictions) a sense of self preservation. The science-deniers will show no reciprocal respect to reason.

We should be worried about Armageddon not as a prelude to an imaginary divine Day of Judgement, but as a particular, maladaptive mindset that seems to be flourishing despite unparalleled access to scientific knowledge. Paradoxically, it may flourish because of this. Ignorance is easy and science is demanding; but, more tellingly, being neither tribal nor dogmatic, science directly challenges ideologues who need their followers to believe them to be infallible. We should not underestimate the glamour and influence of anti-science ideologies. Left unchecked, they could usher in a new intellectual Dark Age.

And this is what has happened in Nigeria, whose populous north now languishes under the baleful Islamist ideology of Jama'atu Ahlus-Sunnah Lidda'Awaiti Wal Jihad, known more pithily as Boko Haram (loosely 'Books are Forbidden'). Boko Haram maintains that we inhabit a flat, six-thousand-year-old earth, and that the disc-shaped sun, which is smaller, passes over it daily. Heresy (such as belief in evolution, or that rain is predicated on evaporation) can lead to a judgment of apostasy, which is punished by death. Reason having fled, the people are increasingly struggling with malnutrition, drought and disease. But that, too, feeds back into the ideology: in their death notes, the bomb-murderers of Boko Haram articulate detailed visions of the rewards of an afterlife that must seem tragically attractive.

These days when I stand at the doorstep with a winged apocalyptic evangelist behind me and an anoraked one before me, I feel obliged to put over a scientific view of the world, civilly, firmly, clearly. Even with optimism. After all, I am not so in thrall to Armageddon as to think that a coming intellectual Dark Age, even a global one, would last forever. 

Worry itself may be well worth worrying about. Not just for the standard reason that there is an optimal range of worry: too much or too little is inimical to health. But rather because worry poses a question for science that—to use a distinction introduced by Chomsky—is a mystery rather than a problem. The question is simple: What is worry?

A short answer is that worry is a state of anxiety coupled with uncertainty about present or anticipated problems.

This answer can be fleshed out with details of the biological correlates of worry. Briefly, when we worry and experience psychological stress there is activation of the anterior cingulate cortex and orbito-frontal cortex of the brain, which interact with each other and with the amygdala. The amygdala interacts with the hippocampus and other subcortical structures, which in turn control the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus controls the autonomic nervous system, which governs the release of epinephrine and acetylcholine, and the HPA axis, which governs the release of cortisol into the bloodstream. In short, when we worry there is an impressively complex array of interacting neural and endocrine activities that engages the whole person, brain and body. The correlation between worry and this complex biological activity is systematic and predictable.

Most of us know worry in a different way—not as a complex biological activity but rather as an unpleasant conscious experience. The experience of worry can vary from mild, as when we worry whether to take an umbrella; through deeply troubling, as when we worry over choosing a treatment for cancer; to near insanity, as when Lady Macbeth exclaims "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!—One; two; why then 'tis time to do't; —Hell is murky! —Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier and afeard?" Worry, as a conscious experience, prompts us to react, sometimes with unproductive nervous activity, other times with productive problem solving, and occasionally with compensating humor: "I'm not afraid of death," said Woody Allen, "I just don't want to be there when it happens."

Worry, then, is Janus-faced, having two complex aspects: biology and conscious experience. To answer the question "What is worry?" requires that we unite these two aspects. And therein lies the mystery.

It is natural to assume that the neural and endocrine correlates of worry are in fact the cause, or basis, of the conscious experience of worry. A scientific theory, under this assumption, should explain precisely how these biological correlates cause, or give rise to, the varied and nuanced conscious experiences that we call worry. The problem is that there is no such theory. The mystery is that, to date, there are no remotely plausible ideas.

Which is not to say there are no ideas. There are many. Perhaps certain oscillatory patterns of activity in the right neuronal circuits, certain quantum states in the right neuronal microtubules, certain degrees of informational complexity in the right reentrant thalamo-cortical loops, or certain functional properties of the right cortical and subcortical brain areas, are responsible for causing, or giving rise to, the conscious experience of worry.

These are interesting ideas to explore. But taken, in their present state, as scientific theories they bring to mind a well-known cartoon in which two geeks stand before a chalk board on which are scribbled nasty equations, followed by the phrase "and then a miracle occurs," followed by more nasty equations; one geek says to the other, "I think you should be more explicit here in step two." Unfortunately, this is the state of each idea. A reentrant thalamo-cortical loop achieves the right informational complexity … then a miracle occurs … then the conscious experience of worry results. Microtubules enjoy the right quantum states … then a miracle occurs … then the experience of worry results. There is no explanation of how or why the conscious experience of worry appears, much less why this experience has precisely the qualities it does. No one can make the leap from biology to conscious worry without waving a magic wand at precisely the point one had hoped for an explanation.

This worrisome predicament has prompted desperate responses. Perhaps conscious worries are an illusion; there are no such things, and we have been worrying over nothing. Or perhaps conscious worries are real and caused by biology, but evolution has not equipped us with the concepts we need to understand how; if so, then the biological provenance of worry will remain a mystery to us, at least until we chance upon a mutation that endows the needed concepts.

What should we be worried about? This Edge question itself implies an assumption that worry has causal powers—that if, for instance, we worry about the right topics then this worry might prompt productive problem solving.

But does the conscious experience of worry really have causal powers? If we answer yes, then we must explain how its causal powers are related to those of biology. Once again, we face an unsolved mystery. So, many biologists answer no. They assume, that is, that the brain somehow causes conscious worries, but that conscious worries, and conscious experiences more generally, cause nothing. This successfully exorcises the mystery of causation, only to introduce another mystery: How and why did conscious experiences evolve? Natural selection can only select among traits that have causal consequences for fitness. If conscious experiences have no causal consequences, then a fortiori they have no consequences for fitness, and thus are not subject to natural selection. Thus the experience of worry is not a product of natural selection—a worrisome conclusion.

So what should we be worried about? We should be worried about what we're really doing when we worry. Unless, of course, there are no worries or worries do nothing. If there are no worries, then there is nothing to worry about, and it makes no sense even to advise "Don't worry, be happy." If there are worries, but they do nothing, then you can worry or not as you please, it makes no difference. But the worry is that there really are worries, that worries really do something, and that what they are, how they arise, and what they can do is, for now, a mystery.

I worry about worry. Specifically, is our worry directed at the right targets?

The adaptive value of worry is that it helps us to avoid death without having to experience it first. But worry can only save us when targeted towards actual threats, and only by eventually eliciting action (in the form of avoidance). Although worry seems to be caused by external factors, it is not. The neural worry engine is always on, searching for its next target (like Freud's free-floating anxiety).

The ancestral environment probably "tuned up" our worry engines, since individual differences in levels of worry show significant heritability (around 50%), and are normally distributed (i.e., most people experience moderate rather than minimal or excessive worry). This bell-shaped distribution implies that over generations, those who worried too little died (or were eaten), while those who worried too much failed to live (or reproduce). Thus, our forebears' menu of environmental threats likely selected an "optimal" level of worry.

Less appreciated is the notion that the ancestral environment selected not only the level, but also the most compelling targets of worry. Consider common targets of phobias, such as public judgment, snakes, spiders, and heights. Unless you live in the jungles of New Guinea, these are probably not the existential threats that deserve the energy of your worry engine. In fact, leading causes of death in the United States typically involve more "boring" fates like heart disease, cancer, stroke, and accidents; encouraged by more proximal causes including smoking, alcohol consumption, poor diet, lack of exercise, cars, and firearms. This "worry gap" between imagined and actual threats implies that our worry is often misdirected towards the wrong targets.

My metaworry (or worry about worry) is that actual threats are changing much more rapidly than they have in the ancestral past, which could widen the worry gap. Humans have created much of this environment with our mechanisms, computers, and algorithms that induce rapid, "disruptive," and even global change. Both financial and environmental examples easily spring to mind—witness crashes of global finance bubbles and the palpable rise in global temperature over the past decade. Not only are these changes rapid with respect to an evolutionary timeframe, but they plausibly result from human causes. I worry that our worry engines will not retune their direction to focus on these rapidly changing threats fast enough to take preventative action.

One could try to close the widening worry gap with actionable data. Personal change is one option. Drawing from targets described above, if we could calculate the relative risk of death by snakes, spiders, cars, and guns, we could theoretically compare the discrepancy between the ranks of what we actually worry about (e.g., spiders) and what statistically causes more deaths (e.g., cars). Then we could try to swap our lower ranked worry with a higher ranked worry. One could even sketch the outlines of software that facilitates more optimal reallocation of worry (I'm looking at you, mobile application developers). As long as we're going to worry about something, it might as well actually threaten our existence.

Another option for closing the worry gap involves policy change. Governments undoubtedly collect valuable data on the relative potency of various threats, so as to direct their limited resources towards reducing the most pressing dangers. But information alone is not enough—it must motivate behavioral change. Thus, laws (with enforceable sanctions) are sometimes necessary to transform this information into action. Unfortunately, in the case of global threats, governments must coordinate their laws. This is not impossible. It has happened in the past, when governments came together to ban chlorofluorocarbons in order to stop atmospheric ozone depletion. It may happen in the future with respect to carbon sequestration and global climate change. But it requires a massively coordinated and continued effort.

For both personal action and public policy, I am advocating metaworry rather than hyperworry. Hyperworry feeds on itself. Escalating worrying about worrying could fuel a positive feedback loop, ending in a fearful freeze. Since the brain has limited energy, we should probably view worry as a resource to be conserved and efficiently allocated. Beyond increasing the level of worry, metaworry here implies redirecting worry based on incoming information. Turning our ancient worry engines in new directions may be difficult, but not impossible.

Consider laws requiring the use of seatbelts while driving. What I find miraculous is not that these laws have become mandatory in most American states, nor even that they reduce fatalities as predicted based on studies of crash test dummies and cadavers, but rather that the laws now grab me at a visceral level. Twenty-five years ago, I would never have thought twice about driving without a seatbelt. Now, when I am unable to buckle my seatbelt, I feel uneasy, anxious, and tense. In a word, I worry—and seek to close the gap.

I worry about the prospect of collective amnesia. 

While access to information has never been so universal as it is now—thanks to the Internet—the total sum of knowledge of anything beyond the present seems to be dwindling among those people who came of age with the Internet. Anything beyond 1945, if then, is a messy, remote landscape; the centuries melt into each other in an insignificant magma. Famous names are flickers on a screen, their dates irrelevant, their epochs dusty. Everything is equalized.

The stunning historical blankness students from the world over display when they arrive at college can be explained. For one, a confusion has set in with regard to what should be taught at school. The canon—in any country—is now considered by many who are supposed to teach it an obsolete, "imperialist" weapon to be shunned, not an expandable, variable set of works that have passed the test of time, and from where to begin the learning process. Chronology is moot: instead, students can pick general themes, analyse perspectives and interpretations. History certainly needs to remain a thoughtful enterprise—one would not want it to turn back into a list of dates, monarchs and battles. But because the laudable emphasis on questioning has taken the place of teaching questionable facts, temporal continuities have been lost, and students have few guides other than the Internet that has become their reference—their ersatz library.

And so there's the rub of technology. Those who are coming of age today are challenged by the inventions from which their elders reap benefit: Facebook disperses everyone's attention but captures theirs in a particularly intense way. Wikipedia is a useful shortcut that can be used by all as a starting-point for proper research; but students use it as if it constituted all research. Without a background in leafing through books, learning in the old analog way how to gauge relevance, hierarchy, accuracy and cross-references, students arrive at college unable to know where to begin their education and so where to place themselves within the wider world—confused about what constitutes the beginning of knowledge. A few do learn how and what to ask, and may find the guidance to delve into the world's histories, acquiring a sense of perspective and of what it really means to know that one doesn't know. But for a majority, the gaps will persist into maturity, unidentified and unplugged.

Certainly, worries emerge whenever technology changes the mode of cultural transmission. Though there might be a correlation between the acceleration of technological transformations and the speed at which the past recedes, one should not forget that the fear of forgetting—indeed—was strong when printing became common. If forgetfulness has increased, it is not because of new technology per se but despite it: it is because curricular fashions are mimicking Internet entropy rather than providing the centripetal force needed to turn the young into its informed users. As it is, ours is an age of information glut, not deep knowledge.

The very way in which science is practiced, for instance, rewards short-term memory combined with a sense that the present exists for the sake of the future. Ten-year-old scientific papers are now ancient—after all, over a million new papers are published each year. As a result, some groundbreaking work from the 1920s in, say, zoology, lies forgotten, and produced in new labs as if it had never been done before. Almost everything is archived; but nothing can be found unless one knows to look for it. Many may be reinventing the wheel, unaware that the historical permafrost is full of treasures.

The same applies to the longer history of science, the history of art, the history of philosophy, and political and economic history (some of our present woes arguably arise out of the historical myopia of economists). References to early modernity have become a highly specialized affair, hard to place in chronology. For many, and not only for students, history is of the modern, not of what precedes the modern, when science was magic, all art was the same and all politics autocratic: history is not so much simplified as disappeared. There are pockets of awareness, pre-modern eras considered fascinating by a "general public" and picked up by Hollywood—for the West, these would include, say, ancient Egypt, Greco-Roman antiquity, the "Middle Ages", the Renaissance, the Moghuls in India, the American Civil War, the French Revolution. But each is viewed as a self-contained epoch—easily skippable episodes in the potentially entertaining soap opera or costume drama that is the history of the world. And so, deeper questions of historiography cannot even begin to be addressed.

Of course, history is still researched, written, read by enough individuals that the discipline as such survives. The sum of historical knowledge has always been held by a small number of educated people, at any given time; and this has not changed. But our world is geared at keeping up with a furiously paced present with no time for the complex past; and the fact that a very large number of literate people with unprecedented access to advanced education and scanned sources has no sense of what the world was like only yesterday does point to the possibility of eventually arriving at a state of collective amnesia. We risk remaining stuck within a culture where everyone ignores the sundry causal connections that make the present what it is, happy to focus on today's increasing complexity—as if a blank slate favored creativity and innovation.

There is a way out: by integrating the teaching of history within the curricula of all subjects—using whatever digital or other means we have to redirect attention to slow reading and old sources. Otherwise we will be condemned to living without perspective, robbed of the wisdom and experience with which to build for the future, confined by the arrogance of our presentism to repeating history without noticing it.

More than 50 years have passed since CP Snow gave the Rede Lecture at the Senate House in Cambridge University. It was May 7th 1959 when he aired his worry that the majority of his colleagues in the humanities were scientifically illiterate, and that the majority of his colleagues who were scientists were disinterested in literature. His worry was that two cultures had emerged, and they were getting more and more unable to understand each other. By way of a graphic illustration, Snow argued that scientists would struggle to read a Charles Dickens novel, whilst most humanities professors would be unable to state the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He wrote "… the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had."

Snow was by training a scientist, who had turned his hand to writing novels, illustrating that rare breed of person who attempts to straddle both cultures. In response, in 1962, Cambridge professor of literature FR Leavis' scathingly wrote of Snow's lack of ability as a novelist, in an effort to rubbish his 'two cultures' argument. Leavis' attack was rightly dismissed as an 'ad hominem'. But was Snow right?

If he was, then given the remarkable rate of progress in science over the last 50 years, the gulf between these two cultures could have been getting wider. On the other hand, through the efforts of John Brockman and other literary agents and publishers who have encouraged scientists to communicate to the wider public, creating the so-called the 'third culture', science is now very accessible to non-scientists. So has the gap between Snow's two cultures become wider or narrower?

I think the answer is both. The gap has narrowed thanks to wonderful books like Steve Pinker's The Language Instinct—it should now be virtually impossible for a linguist to see language just as a product of culture, and instead to also see it as also a product of our genes. His book epitomizes what the 'third culture' should be like, illustrating the complex interplay between biology and culture in producing human behavior. Scientists find the idea of a biology-culture interaction unsurprising—almost truistic. As a psychologist, I can think of few if any examples of human behavior that are entirely the result of culture, and I make the assumption that most people interested in human behavior adopt the same moderate position of acknowledging a biology-environment interaction. To be a hard-core biological determinist, or a hard-core social determinist, seems extreme.

I studied Human Sciences in Oxford in the 1970s, which some people joked was right in the middle of the Banbury Road, the Department of Social Anthropology being on one side of the street, and the Department of Biological Anthropology on the other. The Human Sciences students felt like bilingual children who could not only switch between the two cultures as appropriate, but automatically thought about topics in a multi-disciplinary way, even if their academic 'parents' in each department rarely crossed the road to learn about the other's culture. I would like to think that we've come a long way, and that there is now rich interchange between disciplines, at least in the study of human behavior.

But I worry that the gap between C.P. Snow's two cultures has in some areas remained as wide as ever, and may even have widened. By way of illustration, consider the field of sex differences in the mind. My own view is that research into sex differences teaches us two things: First, one cannot infer what kind of mind a person will have purely on the basis of their sex, since an individual may be typical or atypical for their sex. Indeed, to do so would be stereotyping and sexist, prejudging a person because they are male or female. Second, where one finds sex differences on average when comparing groups of males and groups of females, these differences are likely to reflect a mix of causal factors, from parenting styles and peer group influences through to the amount of testosterone the foetus produces in the womb and the effects of sex-linked genes.

However, even today, it is still possible to find academics claiming that there are no universal sex differences, for example in language, on the grounds that any sex differences in language and communication are either culture-specific, or do not replicate. Such claims effectively reduce sex differences in language to peculiarities of a particular culture or a particular experiment, thereby needing no reference to biology. Whilst I would agree that the similarities in men's and women's conversational styles are greater than are the differences, but when it comes to children's language acquisition, my reading of the evidence is that the differences on average between boys' and girls' language development are non trivial and likely to be universal. Here are just two pieces of experimental evidence:

First, typical girls on average show faster growth in the size of their vocabulary than typical boys. This is seen in a large Russian study of 550 girls and 487 boys, age 18-36 months, mirroring patterns found in a different culture, England. Second, boys' rate of stuttering and other speech problems is at least twice as high as girls'. This is revealed in an even larger dataset from the National Survey of Children's Health that sampled over 91,000 children age 3 – 14 years old across the US, including children of different ethnic backgrounds. Social determinists might want to take the data from such studies and try to explain it purely in terms of post-natal experience; but since mutations in genes (such as GNPTAB and CNTNAP2) have been associated with stuttering and language impairment, it is likely that individual differences in typical language development (including typical sex differences) will also turn out to have a partly genetic basis.

No one denies the important role that experience and learning play in language development. What worries me is that the debate about gender differences still seems to polarize nature vs. nurture, with some in the social sciences and humanities wanting to assert that biology plays no role at all, apparently unaware of the scientific evidence to the contrary. If he were still alive today, CP Snow might despair as I do that, despite efforts to communicate the science to a wider public, the field of sex differences remains an example of a domain where the two cultures remain separated by a deep chasm. 

We should be worried about the consequences of our increasing knowledge of what causes disease, and its consequences for human freedom. It's exciting that we can figure out what kind of diet and behavior will keep most people well, and it's good to use that knowledge.

But that raises the question of who bears the responsibility if people don't... Indeed, does society have the right to interfere beforehand, precisely because society bears some of that responsibility, if only by assuming the burden of health care costs.

It calls to mind the medical of irony of the cure being worse than the disease, or the immune reaction worse than the pathogen.

In this case, the trigger is our increasing knowledge of how we make ourselves sick—or how we can keep ourselves healthy: proper diet, regular exercise, no smoking, limited drinking, sufficient sleep.... In other words, it's becoming pretty clear that a squeaky-clean lifestyle (and just for good measure, add in avoidance of stress) is the key to good health for most people, and to reducing medical costs dramatically for society as a whole.

In addition, we are increasing our knowledge of genetics and specific markers for susceptibility to disease. There are certain people with genetic predispositions to certain conditions who need to take additional measures to stay healthy. Over time, we will know more of these specific correlations, and be able to identify—if we want—people with increased predisposition to certain diseases—and there fore increased responsibilities?

The thing to worry about is how society handles this knowledge, both in general and for the specific people who carry extra burdens. We all know of artists and others who were at least somewhat crazy. Many of them avoided treatment for fear—justified or not—of losing their creative gifts. Other people simply want to be themselves, rather than some medicated version.

And while much medical knowledge may be true, not all of it is... Certainly, it keeps changing! Many drugs and other medical treatments don't do much; others cause collateral damage. How much is an extra month of life worth if you're diminished by the side effects of life prolongation?

In short, the notion of unpredictable health catastrophes is giving way to something closer to flood plains. People are rightly asking whether society should pay to protect people who live in predictably dangerous areas, refuse to wear helmets while riding motorcycles, and so on. But when somebody actually undergoes such a catastrophe, even a predictable one, attitudes change, and the government offers disaster relief.

Such rare occasions are becoming more common.

So the questions are: What duty do we have to live properly? What responsibility do we have for the consequences if we do not? How much can we blame on our parents, or society, or whomever—and even so, what responsibilty do we bear? Should society pay for prevention but not for remediation of avoidable outcomes? Should we force special responsibilities on people with particular vulnerabilities?

These questions aren't new, but they will become more urgent as we get better at predicting or avoiding outcomes.

There are no simple answers to define or to allocate responsibility. That's why we should be worried.

Within a hundred years, unless we make some major research breakthroughs, you are going to die. Before then, you'll get to watch many of the friends and family you love go through the process of decay, infirmity, and death—their personalities and all their memories gone forever. Witnessing this process over and over, we know it is nature's way, but it is horrible, tragic, and heartbreaking. The prospect of our own personal death is so terrifying that most people aren't willing to confront it honestly. To stare into the void, and know—truly know—that our existence will shortly end… as natural as it is, we are not emotionally or intellectually equipped to accept it. Instead, most people lie about it to themselves and others.

The greatest lie ever told was that there is a mystical afterlife. This lie has been used for millennia to steel the courage of young men before sending them to kill and die in wars. Even worse, most people lie to themselves when confronting suffering and loss, with stories of a better life after this one, despite there being no credible evidence for any such thing.

But why is it so damaging to share and believe pleasant fantasies of an afterlife when nonexistence is both too horrific to confront and inevitable? It is damaging because it leads to bad decisions in this life—the only one we have. Knowing that our lives are so short makes each moment and each interaction more precious. The happiness and love we find and make in life are all we get. The fact that there is no supernatural being in the universe that cares about us makes it that much more important that we care about each other.

Because most people lie to themselves about death instead of worrying about it, we are neglecting a radical possibility brought by advancing technology: our imminent nonexistence might not be as inevitable as we think. There is no reason from physics why our healthy human lives cannot be radically extended by thousands of years or longer. It is just a tricky engineering problem. But for various psychological, social, and political reasons, we're not working very hard on it.

There are, of course, some arguments against extending life. The most common argument is that old age and death are natural. But all diseases cured by technology, including polio, smallpox, and leprosy, were natural but clearly not desirable. Nature can be beautiful but also horrible, and we have been able to alleviate some of that horror through science and technology. The second most common argument is that dramatically extended human lifespans would put an unsustainable strain on the environment.

But a person becoming immortal would put no greater strain on the environment than having a child. Also, a rejuvenated person requires less expensive medical treatment than a person disabled by the decay of aging, and is more motivated to take care of the future environment because the chances are greater they'll be living in it. A third argument against curing aging is that all attempts at significantly extending human lifespan have failed. This is true, but this was the same argument why the sound barrier couldn't be broken, before Chuck Yeager went rocketing through it.

Even if the probability of quickly finding a technological method to delay or reverse senescence is low, we have been devoting far too little effort to it. After all, no matter what else we might achieve with our work in life, we soon won't be around to enjoy it. There are other problems on the planet to worry about, but none more personally important. And yet, despite this motivation, there is very little money being spent on longevity research. Because there is no history of success, and because of widely held religious beliefs, government won't fund it. And because achieving success will be difficult, and the marketplace is flooded with false claims, industry has little interest in solving the problem. Although the profit could be astronomical, there is no easy path to attain it, unlike for cosmetic improvements. Over a hundred times more money is spent on R&D for curing baldness than for curing aging. We may someday find ourselves with extended lifespans as an unintended side effect of taking a pill that gives us fuller hair.

This absurd situation is typical for high-risk, high-reward research in an area without an established record of success. Even with strong motivation, financial support is nearly nonexistent. Scientists working on life extension often lack for equipment or a livable salary, and risk their careers by conducting oddball research that repeatedly fails. The problems are hard. But even with limited resources, a handful of scientists are devoting their lives to the pursuit, because of what's at stake. Success will require research on a similar scale as the Manhattan Project, but government and industry won't be supporting it. The greatest hope is that private individuals will step forward and fund the research directly, or through organizations established for that purpose. Maybe an eccentric, farsighted billionaire will want a chance at not dying. Or maybe many people will contribute small amounts to make it happen. This is being done, to some extent, and it gives me hope.

Personally, I know I am not so different than other people. I also have a very difficult time accepting mortality. When I think about all who have and will be lost, and my own impending nonexistence, it makes me ill. It's entirely possible that the hope I have for a technological solution to aging and death is biased by my own aversion to the abyss. Being realistic, given our current rate of technological advance, although I'm hopeful that radical life extension will happen before I die, I think it's more likely that I'll just miss it. Either way, whether aging is cured within my lifetime or afterwards, it won't happen soon enough. Good people are suffering and dying, and that needs to change in a way that's never been done before.

I am not really worried about the bad things that science might do to society; I'm happy to put aside fears about nuclear power, genetically modified foods, or even the publication of viral genetic sequences. Instead, I am much more worried about the bad things that society might do to science, and I think we should all be.

Lately, I've been seeing what seem like a lot of alarming and non-beneficial interventions by government in science—from laws prohibiting the CDC from analyzing the epidemiology of gun violence, to laws requiring the teaching of 'intelligent design' to our children, to laws governing stem cell science, to laws affecting climate science. Politicians and pundits take to the Internet and television, like priests of old, to scornfully denounce science in ways that sound almost Medieval to my ears.

Of course, ever since the Inquisition summoned Galileo, social, political, and religious considerations have affected the conduct of science. Actually, ever since Archimedes was paid to design weapons of war, social considerations have had this effect. Indeed, we could trace such effects as far back as we have records. It has always been the case that social forces have shaped scientific inquiry—what we study, how we study, why we study, who gets to study.

Nevertheless, though science has always been "socially constructed," this fact has only been explicitly characterized in the last few decades. We can now understand how scientists of centuries past could hold views (and even make "objective" observations) that were not only clearly wrong, but also clearly driven by ideology or culture. Views ranging from the phrenological causes of crime to the medical diagnosis of escaped slaves as suffering from the "disease" of "drapetomania" have all been given a scientific gloss.

But we should be really worried about this age-old and unavoidable intrusion of sociopolitical forces at the present historical moment because our health, security, and wealth depend so much on progress in science, and in ways that are not appreciated widely enough, in my judgment. How we shape science affects our collective well being.

The deep origins of economic growth are not entirely clear. One possibility is that the ultimate root of economic growth is something very fundamental within us; I remember once chatting with Nobel-winning economist Daniel McFadden about this topic, and he laconically observed—as an initial stab at an explanation—simply that "People like to shop." Another possibility is that the straightforward, inexorable rise in population size is the key driver of economic growth. When there are more people, there is more demand, more supply, and a bigger economy. A related and more intriguing idea is that, though population size might rise linearly, the complexity of social interactions (e.g., the number of possible social ties in a population) rises super-linearly with population size, and this complexity itself may be at the root of innovation and creativity, which in turn could drive economic growth. Finally, another stream of thought holds that the key driver of economic growth is not the growth in people, but rather the endless and cumulative growth in knowledge. Science and invention make us richer, and the pace of scientific discovery has been objectively surging for the last 200 years, coincident with, or causally in advance of, economic growth.

Hence, we should pay attention when science (and, relatedly, science education) becomes a plaything of politicians, or when science comes to be seen like any other interest group (the same as farmers or bankers) rather than as something altogether different. We should be worried that political interference in, and even antipathy to, science harms us all.

I am not suggesting that scientists should be cut off from society, free from moral scruples or collective oversight. But I am saying that seeing science as arbitrary or threatening and seeing scientists as (merely) self-interested—and using these excuses to restrict scientific inquiry or to distort scientific findings—is dangerous. It's like seeing those who advocate for more, better-paid judges as being like any other venal lobbying group. The administration of justice and the conduct of science generate benefits for us all.

A discomfiting irony here is that increasing amounts of government support and societal oversight are actually required, in many ways, given changes in how science is done in the 21st century. Long gone are the days when lone scientists with modest resources (Newton, Darwin, Curie, Cavendish, Cox) could make major discoveries. Doing the best science increasingly requires large-scale resources and inter-disciplinary teams.

Combine a natural change in the type and complexity of problems scientists are tackling with the size of the inter-disciplinary groups needed to tackle them, and the amount of resources required, and we have no choice but to rely on broad social support and the public purse if we are to do our work. And so political considerations are unavoidable. I don't actually think we would want—nor could we even have—unfettered, unexamined, unchecked, or insular scientific inquiry.

So there is no way out of the conundrum. To those who would say that I want it both ways—that I want the public to support science, to be invested in it, and to revere it, but also to butt out—my answer is yes, I do. I want that very much, and we should all be very worried if politicians and the public are losing sight of the fact that scientific inquiry is a public good. 

We all live in communities of fate; our fates are entwined with others in ways we perceive and ways we cannot. Our individual and group actions often have consequences, sometimes unforeseen, that affect others in significant ways. Moreover, there are those, beyond our families, with whom we feel entangled, whose interests and welfare we perceive as tied to our own. In the lingo of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), "an injury to one is an injury to all." Self-evidently, who is included in the "one" and who in the "all" differs among us, and therein, I shall argue, lies the rub.

How we understand our community of fate matters for the perils the world faces today and into the future. The fact that so many people choose to live in ways that narrow the community of fate to a very limited set of others and to define the rest as threatening to their way of life and values is deeply worrying because this contemporary form of tribalism, and the ideologies that support it, enable them to deny complex and more crosscutting mutual interdependencies—local, national, and international—and to elude their own role in creating long-term threats to their own wellbeing and that of others. Climate change and religious zealotry are among the well-documented examples of individual and small group actions that have significant spillover effects. Perhaps most alarming is our collective failure to incorporate not only future generations but also our future selves into our communities of fate. "The end of history illusion," recently documented by Daniel T. Gilbert, Jordi Quoidbach, and Timothy Wilson, reveals how deep the problem runs. The implications for almost all public policies are enormous.

But there is hope. It is possible to expand the community of fate well beyond the network of those we personally know. We make decisions all the time that have consequences for others; there is now evidence that if we understand those consequences and expand our community of fate, we might actually make different choices. For example, we purchase goods because they are cheap but fail to acknowledge that they may embody labor that is badly paid or treated. As research by Michael Hiscox and Jens Hainmueller details, more information and a different framing can transform the consumption patterns of at least some buyers.

Jaron Lanier, in Edge, argues that the "new moral question" is whether our decisions are self-interested or take others into account. Who an individual includes in her community of fate or what Lanier labels "circle of empathy" is a moral question, yes, but it is also an empirical question. Organizational and institutional factors can explain variation and transformation in the community of fate. They can enable individuals to revise their beliefs and understandings of the consequences of their actions and, in some instances, to change the boundaries of their communities of fate.

Of critical importance are the governance arrangements of the group and the procedures for enforcing them. All groups have rules and norms that define membership and appropriate behavior; membership organizations, including government, codify those rules and norms into formal institutions. How the community of fate—and not just membership—is defined requires a leadership (or set of officials) committed to a set of principles that they are willing to uphold in unforeseen circumstances, punishment of violations that make these commitments credible, and provision of services, security, and other benefits members expect.

But the community can be narrow or broad. To expand the community of fate beyond the actual members of the given organization depends on the desire and capacity of leadership and key members to convince the rest that their welfare is tied up with a larger set of others, often unknown others. Success is further contingent on the provision of new information in a context of strong and potential challenge to its veracity. Organizations most effective in expanding the community of fate are those that allow members to question what they are being told and to seek additional information, if need be. In practice, this implies some form of participatory governance or bottom-up democracy.

The broadening of the community with whom individuals feel solidarity and mutual interdependence, is generally the result of factors that promote collective action: incentives, punishments, monitoring, and interaction over time. But, with a push from the behavioral economists, we now recognize the equal importance of appeals to fairness and the creation of emotional attachments. At least some people, some of the time, will make individual sacrifices in order to combat unfairness. And what Elisabeth Wood labels "the pleasure of agency" can motivate actions that serve a larger whole or a longer term set of interests. As Ernst Fehr, Samuel Bowles and others find, implicit and emotional incentives can lead to complementarities rather than substitution of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.

So, the good news is that communities of fate can be expanded to include strangers and future generations as well as friends. But there is a problem here—and two additional sources of worry. First, we are far from figuring out how to use our scientific knowledge about our mutual interdependencies to make more people aware of their shared welfare. How do we extend what we have learned from the lab and case studies to a larger set of institutions and organizations? Second, and even more troubling, the mechanisms that draw people out of their narrow self-serving behavior can be used for good or ill. Terrorists and other zealots, of the religious, nationalist, and political kind, believe they are serving a larger collective good, at least for those within their definition of the collective to be served, and many sacrifice for their cause. How do we inhibit these types groups and promote the governments and organizations that serve a more fully encompassing public? That is, indeed, a problem worth worrying about. 

The last decades have seen fantastic advances in machine learning and robotics. These are now coupled with the availability of huge and varied databases, staggering memory capacities, and ever-faster and funkier processors. But despite all that, we should not fear that our Artificial Intelligences will soon match and then rapidly outpace human understanding, turning us into their slaves, toys, pets or puppets.

For we humans benefit from one gigantic, and presently human-specific, advantage. That advantage is the huge yet nearly invisible mass of gradually accrued cultural practices and innovations that tweak and pummel the inputs that human brains receive. Those gradually accrued practices are, crucially, delicately keyed to the many initial biases, including especially biases for sociality, play and exploration, installed by the much slower processes of biological evolution. In this way a slowly accumulated mass of well-matched cultural practices and innovations ratchets up human understanding.

By building and then immersing ourselves in a succession of designer environments, such as the human-built worlds of education, structured play, art, and science, we restructure and rebuild our own minds. These designer environments are purpose-built for creatures like us, and they 'know' us as well as we know them. As a species, we refine them again and again, generation by generation. It is this iterative re-structuring, and not sheer processing power, memory, mobility, or even the learning algorithms themselves, that is the final (but crucial) ingredient in the mental mixture.

To round it all off, if recent arguments due to Cecilia Heyes are correct, many of our capacities for cultural learning are themselves cultural innovations, acquired by social interactions, rather than flowing directly from biological adaptations. In other words, culture itself may be responsible for many of the mechanisms that give the cultural snowball the means and momentum to deliver minds like ours.

Why does this mean that we should not fear the emergence of super-intelligent A.I. anytime soon? The reason is that only a well-structured route through the huge mass of available data will enable even the best learning algorithm (embodied perhaps in multiple, active, information-seeking agents) to acquire anything resembling a real understanding of the world—the kind of understanding needed to even generate the goal of dominating humankind.

Such a route would need to be specifically tailored to the initial biases, drives, and action capacities of the machines themselves. If the slow co-evolution of body, brain, biases, and an ever-changing cascade of well-matched cultural practices is indeed the key to advanced cognitive success, we need not fear the march of the machines. For the moment, there is simply nothing in the world of the A.I.s that looks set to provide that kind of enabling ladder.

"Deep Learning" algorithms are now showing us how to use artificial neural networks in ways that come closer than ever before to delivering learning on a grand scale. But we probably need "deep culture", as well as deep learning, if we are ever to press genuine hyper-intelligence from the large databases that drive our best probabilistic learning machines.

That means staged sequences of cultural practices, delicately keyed to the machines' own capacities to act and to communicate, and tuned to the initial biases and eco-niche characteristic of the machines themselves. Such tricks ratchet up human understanding in ways that artificial systems have yet to even begin to emulate. 

It is increasingly clear that human intuitions—particularly our social and moral intuitions—are ill-equipped to deal with the rapid pace of technological innovation. We should be worried that this will hamper the adoption of technologies that might otherwise be of practical benefit to individuals, and of great benefit to society.

Here's an example: For quite some time it has been possible for my email provider to generate targeted advertisements based on the content of my email. But it can now also suggest a calendar entry for an upcoming appointment mentioned in an email, track my current location as the time of the appointment approaches, alert me about when I should leave, and initiate driving directions that will get me there in time.

When talking about these services, it feels natural to say that Google "reads my email" and that it "knows where I have to be." We can't help but interpret this automated information through the lens of our social intuitions, and we end up perceiving agency and intentionality where there is none.

So even if we know for a fact that no human eyes have actually seen our emails, it can still feel, well... creepy. It's as if we're not quite convinced that there isn't someone in the back going through our stuff, following us around, and possibly talking about us behind our back. It is no surprise that many view these services as a "violation of privacy," even when there is no agent that is doing the "violating." Yet the adoption of these technologies has suffered for these reasons.

These social intuitions interfere with the adoption of technologies that offer more than mere convenience. For instance, the technology for self-driving cars exists now, and offers the promise that thousands of lives might be saved each year because of reduced traffic collisions. But the technology depends fundamentally on the ability to track one's precise location at all times. This is just "creepy" enough that a great deal of people will likely actively avoid the technology and opt for the riskier option of driving themselves.

Of course, we are not necessarily at the whims of our psychological intuitions. Given enough time we can (and do) learn to set them aside when necessary. However, I doubt that we can do so quickly enough to match the current speed of technological innovation.

My spelling has deteriorated as automated spell checking has improved. With a smartphone at my fingertips, why bother doing multi-digit multiplication in my head? And I can't say whether GPS and navigation software have made my mental maps any more or less accurate.

These are just some of the skills that have been partially outsourced from many minds, thanks to recent technological advances. And it won't be long before important aspects of our social and intellectual lives follow suit. As interfaces improve and barriers between mind and machine break down, information of all kinds isn't simply at our fingertips, but seamlessly integrated with our actions in the world.

Forfeiting skills like spelling, navigation, and even certain kinds of social knowledge to our gadgets doesn't worry me much. What does worry me is the illusion of knowledge and understanding that can result from having information so readily and effortlessly available.

Research in the cognitive sciences suggests that people rely on a variety of cues in assessing their own understanding. Many of these cues involve the way in which information is accessed. For example, if you can easily ("fluently") call an image, word, or statement to mind, you're more likely to think that you've successfully learned it and to refrain from effortful cognitive processing.

Fluency is sometimes a reliable guide to understanding, but it's also easy to fool. Just presenting a problem in a font that's harder to read can decrease fluency and trigger more effortful processing, with the surprising consequence—for example—that people do better at logical deduction and tricky word problems when the problems are presented in a font that's harder to read. It seems to follow that smarter and more efficient information retrieval on the part of machines could foster dumber and less effective information processing on the part of human minds.

Consider another example: educational psychologist Marcia Linn and her collaborators have studied the "deceptive clarity" that can result from complex scientific visualizations of the kind that technology in the classroom and on-line education are making ever more readily available. Such clarity can be deceptive because the transparency and memorability of the visualization is mistaken for genuine understanding. It isn't just that when the visualization is gone the understanding goes with it, but that genuine understanding is never achieved in the first place.

People suffer from illusions of understanding even in the absence of fancy technology, but current trends towards faster, easier, and more seamless information retrieval threaten to exacerbate rather than correct any misplaced confidence in what we truly comprehend. These trends also threaten to undermine some natural mechanisms for self-correction. For example, people are often more accurate in assessing their own understanding after explaining something to someone else (or even to themselves) or after a delay. Removing social interaction and time from informational transactions could therefore have costs when it comes to people's ability to track their own understanding.

Are technological advances and illusions of understanding inevitably intertwined?

Fortunately not. If a change in font or a delay in access can attenuate fluency, then a host of other minor tweaks to the way information is accessed and presented can surely do the same. In educational contexts, deceptive clarity can partially be overcome by introducing what psychologist Robert Bjork calls "desirable difficulties," such as varying the conditions under which information is presented, delaying feedback, or engaging learners in generation and critique, which help disrupt a false sense of comprehension. And some of the social mechanisms that help calibrate understanding, such as explanation, can be facilitated by the marriage of information technologies and social media.

But avoiding illusions of understanding, and the intellectual hubris they portend, will require more than a change in technology: it will require a change in people's expectations and behaviors. We have to give up on the idea that fast and easy access to information is always better access to information.

I have been predicting this for a number of years. But now it is really happening, and at a truly amazing, historically unprecedented speed: The number of untested, but freely available psychoactive substances is dramatically rising. In the European Union new drugs were detected at the rate of roughly one per week during the previous year, according to the EMCDDA– Europol 2011 annual report on new psychoactive substances, released on 26 April 2012.

A total of 49 new psychoactive substances were officially notified for the first time in 2011 via the EU early-warning system. This represents the largest number of substances ever reported in a single year, up from 41 substances reported in 2010 and 24 in 2009. All in all this means 164 new drugs since 2005—but also that the annual record has now been broken for three years in a row.

All of the new compounds reported in 2011 were synthetic. They are cooked up in underground labs, but increasingly organized crime begins to develop the market and import them, for example from China. Almost nothing is known about pharmacology, toxicology, or general safety; almost all of these substances have never been tested in vivo or in animal models. This makes the situation difficult for medical staff at psychiatric emergency units, with kids coming in tripping on substances the names of which doctors have never even heard during their university education. The doctors have not heard of these substances because the substances did not yet exist while the doctors were being trained.

I sometimes naively tend to assume that in the end most of these substances will turn out to be rather benign, but even for "Spice Drugs" (that is, synthetic cannabinoids sprayed on herbal smoking mixtures, often marketed as "Legal Highs") deaths and serious heart problems have now already been reported in young, healthy adolescents.

Last October a 21-year old in New Orleans died from taking only one single drop of 25-I (25I-NBOMe), a new synthetic hallucinogenic drug. In the USA, at least 3 more deaths from this new phenethylamine (originally discovered in Germany) have been reported from Minnesota and North Carolina, with victims being 17, 18 and 25 years old.

Everybody knows about acute adverse reactions, psychotic effects, addiction—we do have some cultural experience. But what about long-term effects such as early-onset cognitive decline, say, a somewhat steeper slope as in normal ageing? Unexpected carcinogenic agents? It would take us very long to discover and verify such effects.

Does anybody remember Thalidomide? The situation is now completely out of hand. And it is a complicated situation: We might ban (or attempt to ban) early generations of substances with low health hazard profiles, creating a psychopharmacological arms race, leading to a replacement by ever new and potentially more dangerous compounds.

 In 2011, the list of substances registered was dominated by synthetic cannabinoids (23 new compounds on the market) and synthetic cathinones (8 new molecules). They now represent the two largest drug groups monitored by the European early warning system and make up around two-thirds of the new drugs reported last year – but, of course, this may change soon. The War on Drugs has failed, but the process of scientific discovery is going on. The number of substances in the illegal market will increase, and perhaps altogether new categories of drugs will emerge – plus the corresponding "neurophenomenological state-classes", as I like to call them.

What are the main causal factors that have brought about this development?

First, it is a combination of scientific progress and human nature: Fundamental research, for example in neuropharmacology, simply moves on, new knowledge and newly developed technologies meet age-old human desires for spiritual self-transcendence, hedonism and recreation. Plus greed.

For me, new psychoactive substances are a paradigm example how neurotechnology turns into consciousness technology (I like to call it "phenotechnoloy"). Low-level, nuts-and-bolts molecular neuropharmacology creates not only new forms of subjective experience, but also high-level effects for society as a whole. Invisible risks. New industries. Emerging markets.

The second causal factor is the Internet. An "internet snapshot" conducted in January 2012 resulted in 693 online shops offering at least one psychoactive substance or product, rising from 314 in January 2011 and 170 in January 2010.

Recipes for many of these new illegal substances, as well as first-person reports about the phenomenology associated with different dosages, are available on the Internet—easily accessed by the alternative psychotherapist in California, the unemployed professor of chemistry in the Ukraine, or the Chinese mafia. And now the sheer, increasing speed at which new drugs appear on the market makes all established procedures obsolete.

But there is at least one deeper reason for the situation we will have to face in the decades to come: Half a century ago the Western world deliberately opted for a culture of denial and repression. In the Sixties, we first witnessed a semisynthetic psychedelic drug of the ergoline family spread around the world, with millions of new users, and a new generation of underground chemists. The appearance of LSD was a historically new situation.

We might perhaps have had a chance to deal with the challenge then, rationally, based on ethical arguments. The really difficult, and most important, task would have been to honestly weigh the psychological and social risks against a general principle of liberty and the intrinsic value of the experiences resulting from one or another altered brain state. But we decided to push it underground and look the other way. Half a century later, a globalized and scientifically well-informed underground chemistry strikes back. More kids are going to die. It would be starry-eyed optimism to think that we can still control the situation. 

We have nothing to worry about but worry itself. This has always been true.

Marshall McLuhan said that "electric circuitry is Orientalizing the West." Let's hope that the Internet finishes that job any day now. Its next move is clearly to abolish the ghastly Western idée fixe that even a pixel of freedom or insight is gained in the miserable practice of worrying, in the chronic braincell-bruising overexercise of our lizard impulses to fight or flee.

Networked computing and digital experience has decentralized the self. It has found the hallucinatory splendor in the present moment. It has underscored our fundamental interdependence.

And in its gentle way it has also satirized the stubborn Western notion of separation. The digital revolution—with all its holy artifacts—has made manifest, jubilant and even profitable the vision of the Buddha and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and all the world's mystics, two-bit and Stanford-chaired alike: We are one. Limiting beliefs about the past and the future destroy our lives. Only mindful acceptance of present reality can bring peace and inspire wise action.

So build a bomb shelter. Send money to people who lack it. Triple-encrypt and judiciously backup every J. Crew promotional email you receive, lest Internet terrorism befall us. Hustle to keep your kids on or off the Internet, eating organic or local or nothing at all. Take these actions, or none. Just don't worry about them. There is nothing to worry about, and there never was.

For many years overpopulation was the ur-worry. The prospect of too many people on a finite planet stood behind common environmental worries from pollution to global warming. Significant numbers of educated couples skipped having children at all, or no more than one, so they would do their part in preventing overpopulation. In China, having a single child was a forced decision.

While the global population of humans will continue to rise for at least another forty years, demographic trends in full force today make it clear that a much bigger existential threat lies in global underpopulation.

That worry seems preposterous at first. We've all seen the official graph of expected human population growth. A steady rising curve swells past us now at 7 billion and peaks out about 2050. The tally at the expected peak continues to be downgraded by experts; currently U.N. demographers predict 9.2 billion at the top. The peak may be off by a billion or so, but in broad sweep the chart is correct.

But curiously, the charts never show what happens on the other side of the peak. The second half is so often missing that no one even asks for it any longer. It may be because it's pretty scary news. The hidden half of the chart is that it projects a steady downward plunge toward fewer and fewer people on the planet each year—and no agreement on how close to zero it can go. In fact, there's much more agreement about the peak than about how few people there will be on the planet in a 100 years.

A lower global population is something that many folks would celebrate. The reason it's scary is that the low will keep getting lower. All around the world, the fertility rate is dropping below replacement level, country by country, so that globally there will soon be an unsustaining population. With negative population growth, each generation produces fewer offspring, who produce fewer still, until there are none. Right now, Japan's population is way below replacement level, as is most of Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Former Soviet Republics, and some Asian countries. It goes further: Japan, Germany and Ukraine have absolute population decline; they are already experiencing the underpopulation bomb.

The shocking news is that the developing world is not far behind. While they are above replacement level, their birthrates are dropping fast. Much of Africa, South America, the Mideast, and Iran have rapidly dropping fertility rates. The drop in fertility has recently stalled in some sub-Saharan African nations but, that's because development there has stalled. When development resumes, fertility will drop again—because fertility rates are linked to urbanity. There is a deep feedback cycle: The more technologically developed a society becomes, the fewer offspring couples will have, the easier it is for them to raise their living standards, the more that progress lowers their desire for large families. The result is the spiral of modern technological population decline—a new but now universal pattern.

All that it would take to break this downward spiral is that many women living in cities all around the world decide to have more than two children in order to raise the average fertility level to 2.1 children. That means substantial numbers of couples would have to have three or four children in urban areas to make up for those with none or only one. It possibly could become fashionable to have four kids in the city. The problem is that these larger families are not happening anywhere where the population has become urban, and urbanity is now the majority mode of the population and becoming more so. Every developed country on the planet is experiencing falling birth rates. The one exception has been the U.S. because of its heavy immigration, primarily because of Catholic Hispanic immigrants, but even that is changing. The most recent report shows that the birth rates of Hispanic immigrants in the U.S. is dropping faster than ever. Soon the U.S. will be on par with the rest of the world, with plunging birth rates.

To counter this scary population implosion, Japan, Russia, and Australia pay bonuses for newborns. Singapore (with the lowest fertility rate in the world) will pay couples $5,000 for a first child and up to $18,000 for a third child—but to no avail; Singapore's rate is less than one child per woman. In the past, drastic remedies for reducing fertility rates were difficult, but they worked. Drastic remedies for increasing fertility don't seem to work, so far.

Our global population is aging. The moment of peak youth on this planet was in 1972. Ever since then the average age on Earth has been increasing each year, and there is no end in sight for the aging of the world for the next several hundred years! The world will need the young to work and pay for medical care of the previous generation, but the young will be in short supply. Mexico is aging faster than the U.S., so all those young migrant workers who seem to be a problem now will soon be in demand back at home. In fact, after the peak, individual countries will race against each other to import workers, modifying immigration policies, but these individual successes and failures cancel out and won't affect the global picture.

The picture for the latter half of this century will look like this: Increasing technology, cool stuff that extends human life, more older people who live longer, millions of robots, but few young people. Another way to look at the human population in 100 years from now is that we'll have the same number of over-sixty-year olds, but several billion fewer youth.

We have no experience throughout human history with declining population and rising progress (including during the Black Plague years). Some modern countries with recent population decline have experienced an initial rise in GDP because there are fewer "capitas" in the per-capita calculation, but this masks long-term diminishment. But there can always be a first time! 

Here is the challenge: This is a world where every year there is a smaller audience than the year before, a smaller market for your goods or services, fewer workers to choose from, and a ballooning elder population that must be cared for. We've never seen this in modern times; our progress has always paralleled rising populations, bigger audiences, larger markets and bigger pools of workers. It's hard to see how a declining yet aging population functions as an engine for increasing the standard of living every year. To do so would require a completely different economic system, one that we are not prepared for at all right now. The challenges of a peak human population are real, but we know what we have to do; the challenges of a dwindling human population tending toward zero in a developed world are scarier because we've never been there before. It's something to worry about.

Arthur C. Clarke famously observed that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That's what I'm worried about.

2001 has come and long since gone. Once upon a time we were going to live in a science fiction future, with visions of flying cars, wrist communicators, and quantum teleporters. Oh, wait, all of that stuff is here. You can today buy cars with wings, smartphone watches, and, for those so inclined, single-photon sources to make entangled pairs. But the future brought the past with it. We can now create life from scratch, and model the global climate, yet battles rage over the teaching of evolution or human impact on the environment that Darwin or Galileo would recognize as challenges to the validity of the scientific method.

There is a cognitive dissonance in fundamentalists using satellite phones in their quest for a medieval society, or creationists who don't believe in evolution receiving a flu shot based on genetic analysis of seasonal mutations in influenza virus. These are linked by workings that are invisible: deities behave in mysterious ways, and so do cell phones.

We're in danger of becoming a cargo cult, living with the inventions of Ancestors from a mythical time of stable long-term research funding. My word processor is good enough—I don't need radical innovation in text entry to meet my writing needs. The same may be happening to us as a society. If the technologies that are already available can provide adequate food, shelter, heat, light, and viral videos of cute kittens, invention is no longer the imperative for survival that it once was.

The risk in seeing advanced technology as magic is failing to see where it comes from. The ability to distinguish which is which matters for recognizing the difference between progress and nonsense. We do have magic spells—I'm sure that Gandalf would be impressed by our ability to teach sand to play chess (in the form of silicon transistors), or be terrified by our ability to destroy a city with a lump of (uranium) metal. But these incantations came from building predictive models based on experimental observations, not declarations of beliefs. Accepting the benefits of science without having to accept the methods of science offers the freedom to ignore inconvenient truths about the environment, or the economy, or education. Conversely, anyone who's done any kind of technical development has had to confront an external reality that doesn't conform to personal interpretation.

Rather than seeking to hide the workings of technology, we should seek every opportunity to expose it. The quest for technologies that work like magic is leading to a perverse kind of technical devolution. Mobile operating systems that forbid users from seeing their own file systems, touch interfaces that eliminate use of fine motor control, cars that prevent owners from accessing maintenance data—these all make it easier to do easy things, but harder to do hard things.

The challenges that we face as a planet require finding highest rather than lowest common denominators. Learning curves that progress from simple to difficult skills should be sought, not avoided. My understanding is that wizards must train for years to master their spells; any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

Every day, as Science Editor of The New York Times, I think about how we convey increasingly complex science to the general public. How do we explain the apparent discovery of the Higgs boson and help our readers understand what an enormous, astonishing—even beautiful—discovery it is.

Luckily, here at the Times, we have writers like Dennis Overbye, who not only deal every day with the science of the cosmos, but who can write about it with the poetry it often deserves.

But luck is an important ingredient here. The Times remains committed to a deep coverage of science. But such a commitment feels increasingly lonely. Over the past several years, I have watched science and health coverage by general-interest newspapers shrink. As a health and science editor, I used to pick up other major newspapers with trepidation, knowing there might be a good story we missed or an important angle that we overlooked. The Times had serious competition.

Today, sadly, that is most often not the case. Coverage of health and science in general-interest newspapers has declined dramatically. Reporters whose work I have long admired have moved on to other things or retired or been fired, as science staffs have been slashed. True, there are many, many more good websites and some excellent blogs that cover a wide range of science topics, but most are aimed at smaller segments of readers, who search out information focused in specific areas. Some general interest papers in other countries continue to value science coverage, but unless you're a reader with access to those publications that doesn't help much.

Something quite serious has been lost. And, of course, this has ramifications not only for the general level of scientific understanding, but for funding decisions in Washington—and even access to medical care. And it's not good for those of us at The Times, either. Competition makes us all better.

This decline in general-interest science coverage comes at a time of divergent directions in the general public. At one level, there seems to be increasing ignorance. After all, it's not just science news coverage that has suffered, but also the teaching of science in schools. And we just went through a political season that saw how all this can play out, with major political figures spouting off one silly statement after another, particularly about women's health. Here at the Times we knew the scientific discourse on these topics had gotten so ridiculous—and dangerous—that we launched a team of reporters on a series we called "Political Science," with a string of stories that tried to set the scientific record straight.

But something else is going on, as well. Even as we have in some pockets what seems like increasing ignorance of science, we have at the same time, a growing interest of many. It's easy to see, from where I sit, how high that interest is. Articles about anything scientific, from the current findings in human evolution to the latest rover landing on Mars, not to mention new genetic approaches to cancer—and yes, even the Higgs boson—zoom to the top of our newspaper's most emailed list.

We know our readers love science and cannot get enough of it. And it's not just our readers. As the rover Curiosity approached Mars, people of all ages in all parts of the country had "Curiosity parties" to watch news of the landing. Mars parties! Social media, too, has shown us how much interest there is across the board, with YouTube videos and tweets on science often becoming instant megahits.

So what we have is a high interest and a lot of misinformation floating around. And we have fewer and fewer places that provide real information to a general audience that is understandable, at least by those of us who do not yet have our doctorates in astrophysics. The disconnect is what we should all be worried about.

Still, I should also take a moment to mention a few things that I am actually worrying less about. And this, too, is a bit of a contradiction. In some cases, in my dozen or so years in the Science Department here at the Times, I have watched as our readers—all of us actually—have become more sophisticated.

Misunderstanding and hype have not gone away. But over the last decade, we all have gained a more nuanced understanding of how our medical-industrial complex operates—and the money that often drives it.

And we have a clearer understanding of the complexity of common diseases, from mental illness to heart disease to Alzheimer's. We have reached a common understanding that there is no magic bullet to fix such diseases or even address the problems in our health care system.

While we still have a long way to go, the conversation is beginning to change in these areas and others. The constant drumbeat about obesity is, as we reported recently, showing some signs of having an impact: obesity rates are edging downward in children. We all understand, too, that medicine has gotten too expensive and that there is a lot of overtreatment going on in this country. Again, we have moved past the point of thinking there are quick solutions to these issues. But more people are talking about such topics—at least a little here and there—without so much shouting about death panels.

In at least few of these areas, I am, when I think about it, oddly hopeful.

The most worrying aspect of our society is the low index of suspicion that we have about the behavior of normal people. In spite of the doctrine of original sin that permeates Christianity, the assumption most of us hold about most people in everyday life is that they are not, on the whole, criminals, cheats, mean-spirited, selfish, or on the lookout for a fast buck. Bad behavior is seen as something to be noticed, reported on, and analyzed, whereas people who do not lie and cheat are taken for granted. Good behaviour is seen as the default mode for humans, and bad behaviour is seen as 'aberrant', even though from self-knowledge as well as experiments like Stanley Milgram's, we know that 'normal' people are not always saints.

This unwillingness to believe the worst of people permeates society and harms us in all sorts of ways. The most egregious current example, of course, is bankers and financiers, who have shown that only the most severe constraints on their activities would stop them filching our purses, and grabbing huge salaries or severance payments which are usually rewards for failure. And it is precisely those constraints that the institutions resist most strongly, promising after each one of their crimes is exposed, that self-regulation will prevent the next. But any daily newspaper will show countless examples of individuals who demonstrate that when they (we?) can get away with it, they will.

There is much psychological research into the nature of evil. This usually starts from the basis that people are naturally good, and tries to explain why some people depart from this 'norm'. Isn't it time we took the opposite view and looked into why some people, perhaps not many, are 'good'? If you look hard, you can find examples of these. Whistleblowers, for example, who cannot stand by while bankers fiddle, doctors cover up mistakes, priests abuse children, or statesmen cheat on their expenses. Paradoxically, instead of their good deeds being welcomed whistleblowers are often ostracized, even by people whose behavior is not—at least overtly—meretricious, but who feel that reporting illicit behavior is itself distasteful. 

Just as there is emerging evidence of a biological basis for political beliefs, left wing versus right wing, perhaps we should be looking for a biological basis of goodness. So many of the world's problems have at their root the propensity of humans, and indeed nations, to behave in ways which try to maximize benefits to themselves at the expense of others. Even attempts to instigate solutions to climate change are bedeviled by personal and corporate selfishness.

What we should be worried about, therefore, is that science is missing out on a possible alternative solution to many of our problems—it should be considering how to make more people 'good' rather than trying to understand what makes people 'bad'.

Like many other neuroscientists, I receive my weekly dose of bizarre e-mails. My correspondents seem to have a good reason to worry, though: they think that their brain is being tapped. Thanks to new "neurophonic" technologies, someone is monitoring their mind. They can't think a thought without it being immediately broadcasted to Google, the CIA, news agencies worldwide, or… their wife.

This is a paranoid worry, to be sure—or is it? Neuroscience is making giant strides, and one does not have to be schizophrenic to wonder whether it will ever crack the safety box of our minds. Will there be a time, perhaps in the near future, where our innermost feelings and intimate memories will be laid bare for others to scroll through? I believe that the answer is a cautious no—at least for a while.

Brain imaging technologies are no doubt powerful. Over fifteen years ago, at the dawn of functional magnetic resonance imaging, I was already marveling at the fact that we could detect a single motor action: any time a person clicked a small button with the left or right hand, we could see the corresponding motor cortex being activated, and we could tell which hand the person had used with over 98% accuracy. We could also tell which language the scanned person spoke. In response to spoken sentences in French, English, Hindi or Japanese, brain activation would either invade a large swath of the left hemisphere, including Broca's area, or stay within the confines of the auditory cortex—a sure sign that the person did or did not understand what was being said. Recently, we also managed to tell whether an adult or a child had learned to read a given script—simply by monitoring the activation of the "visual word form area", a brain region that holds our knowledge of legal letter strings.

Whenever I lectured on this research, I insisted on the limitations of our methods. Action and language are macro-codes of the brain, I explained. They mobilize gigantic cortical networks that lay centimeters apart and are therefore easily resolved by our coarse brain imagers. Most of our fine-grained thoughts, however, are encrypted in a micro-code of sub-millimeter neuronal activity patterns. The neural configurations that distinguish my thought of a giraffe from my thought of an elephant are minuscule, unique to my brain, and intermingled within the same brain regions. Therefore, they would forever escape decoding, at least by non-invasive imaging methods.

In 2008, Tom Mitchell's beautiful Science paper proved me partially wrong. His research showed that snapshots of state-of-the-art functional MRI contained a lot of information about specific thoughts. When a person thought of different words or pictures, the brain activity patterns they evoked differed so much that a machine-learning algorithm could tell them apart much better than would be expected by chance. Strikingly, many of these patterns were macroscopic, and they were even similar in different people's brains. This is because, when we think of a word, we do not merely activate a small set of neurons in the temporal lobes that serves as an internal pointer to its meaning. The activation also spreads to distant sensory and motor cortices that encode each word's concrete network of associations. In all of us, the verb "kick" activates the foot region of the motor cortex, "banana" evokes a smell and a color, and so on. These associations and their cortical patterns are so predictable that even new, untrained words can be identified by their brain signature.

Why is such brain decoding an interesting challenge for neuroscientists? It is, above all, a proof that we understand enough about the brain to partially decrypt it. For instance, we now know enough about number sense to tell exactly where in the brain the knowledge of a number is encrypted. And, sure enough, when Evelyn Eger, in my lab, captured high-resolution MRI images of this parietal-lobe region, she could tell whether the scanned person had viewed 2, 4, 6 or 8 dots, or even the corresponding Arabic digits.

Similarly, in 2006, with Bertrand Thirion, we tested the theory that the visual areas of the cortex act as an internal visual blackboard where mental images get projected. Indeed, by measuring their activity, we managed to decode the rough shape of what a person had seen, and even of what she had imagined in her mind's eye, in full darkness. Jack Gallant, at Berkeley, later improved this technique to the point of decoding entire movies from the traces they evoke in the cortex. His reconstruction of the coarse contents of a film, as deduced by monitoring the spectator's brain, was an instant YouTube hit.

Why, then, do I refuse to worry that the CIA could harness these techniques to monitor my thoughts? Because many limitations still hamper their practical application in everyday circumstances. First of all, they require a ten-ton superconducting MR magnet filled with liquid helium—an unlikely addition to airport security portals. Furthermore, functional MRI only works with a very cooperative volunteer who stays perfectly still and attends to the protocol. Total immobility is a must. Even a millimeter of head motion, especially if it occurs in tight correlation with the scanning protocol, can ruin a brain scan. In the unlikely event that you are scanned against your will, rolling your eyes rhythmically or moving your head ever so slightly, in sync with the stimuli, may suffice to prevent detection. In case of an electro-encephalogram, clenching your teeth will go a long way. And systematically thinking of something else will, of course, disrupt the decoding.

Finally, there are limitations arising from the nature of the neural code. MRI samples brain activity at a coarse spatial scale and in a very indirect manner. Every millimeter-sized pixel in a brain scan averages over the activity of hundreds of thousands  – of neurons. Yet the precise neural code that contains our detailed thoughts presumably lies in the fast timing of individual spikes from thousands of intermingled neurons—microscopic events that we cannot see without opening the skull. In truth, even if we did, the exact manner in which thoughts are encoded still escapes us. Crucially, neuroscience is lacking even the inkling of a theory as to how the complex combinatorial ideas afforded by the syntax of language are encrypted in neural networks. Until we do, we have very little chance of decoding nested thoughts such as "I think that X", "My neighbor thinks that X", "I used to believe that X", "he thinks that I think that X", "it is not true that X", and so on.

There is no guarantee, of course, that these problems will not be solved­—next week or next century, perhaps using electronic implants or miniaturized electro-magnetic recording devices. Should we worry then? Millions of people will rejoice instead. They are the many patients with brain lesions, whose lives may soon change thanks to brain technologies. In a motivated patient, decoding the intention to move an arm is far from impossible, and it may allow a crippled quadriplegic to regain his or her autonomy, for instance by controlling a computer mouse or a robotic arm. My laboratory is currently working on an EEG-based device that decrypts the residual brain activity of patients in a coma or vegetative state, and helps doctors decide whether consciousness is present or will soon return. Such valuable medical applications are the future of brain imaging, not the devilish sci-fi devices that we wrongly worry about.

Humans are today something we have never been before: a global geologic force. This epoch, which begins around 1800, has been called the Anthropocene and is characterized by steep line graphs that look like Mount Everest sliced in half: human population, water use, biodiversity loss, nitrogen run off, atmospheric carbon dioxide, etc.

The data irrefutably establish humans as the dominant driver of environmental change, which is something that should worry us all. But we should also be worried that framing humans as the dominant driver of change will lead to further negative change, which I am calling the "Anthropocebo Effect".

The effects of cultural framing are everywhere. The Placebo Effect (experiencing the positive effects of an inert pill) occurs only in cultures that believe taking a pill can cure an illness. The even stranger Nocebo Effect, where just mentioning the side effects makes them more likely to occur, shows the power of the mind. 

The Anthropocebo Effect is then a psychological condition that exacerbates human-induced damage—a certain pessimism that makes us accept human destruction as inevitable.

Science helps shape how we see ourselves. Words also matter to perception, and perception matters to behavior.  Consider what the theory of natural selection did to our view of humans in the biological world.  We should be worried about the new era of Anthropocene—not only as a geological phenomenon, but also as a cultural frame.

Worrying is a worry. Identifying a serious problem and taking rational action to analyze and mitigate it: excellent behavior. Identifying a serious problem, taking what steps you can to mitigate it, and recognizing that you can't do more: excellent behavior.

But worrying about things is a modern passion. To worry properly, you should worry in groups, large groups; you should identify something that could happen but doesn't have to; you should forget to read Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow; and you should proceed to dwell on the topic, seeking to promote anxiety for yourself and especially for others; you should be very sure not to engage in rational (especially quantitative) analysis or heed the work of those who do; and you should abstain from all action that might make the problem go away.

Your anxiety will in the end go away, because the problem will most likely go away; or perhaps your fear will come true and you'll be in a different place; or else you'll be dead. You will have maximized your unhappiness and stress levels and, with luck, those of others, with nothing to show for it otherwise. 

The ancients knew this behavior, of course, and the Greeks called it deisidaemonia and the Latins superstitio. They used those words to bracket behavior that led to no good. We've borrowed the latter word but applied it narrowly, to activities where anxiety cringes before the imagined divine. The ancients didn't need a broader category because the ubiquitous divine could be blamed for anything. We haven't got a better word yet to describe and deplore generalized cringing before what our own imaginations show us. We could use one. In the meantime, a broad awareness of the cultures and deeds of people and nations in our time and all the times before that we know of can be an excellent remedy for worry and an instigation to rational behavior.

There will be a lot of other essays on this typically intriguing Edge question that invoke worry and use the word easily—so should we be worried about that? Here's the test I would use to decide: If what my colleagues in these pages are talking about is evidence-based, especially quantitative, peer-reviewed or peer-reviewable, and has the effect of increasing our understanding and moving people towards appreciation of intelligent actions we can take as individuals or society, I'm not going to call that worry. And there will be a lot of it.

But if it's about the comet ISON veering off its path and plunging to Earth and there's nothing we can do about it—that's a worry we should worry about. 

Arthur Miller wrote that "an era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted". Economic growth, the central illusion of the age of capital, may be ending.

Growth underpins every aspect of modern society. Economic growth has become the universal solution for all political, social and economic problems, from improving living standards, reducing poverty to now solving the problems of over indebted individuals, businesses and nations.

All brands of politics and economics are deeply rooted in the idea of robust economic growth, combined with the belief that governments and central bankers can exert substantial control over the economy to bring this about. In his 1929 novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald identified this fatal attraction: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.

In reality, economic growth is a relatively recent phenomenon.

It took approximately five centuries (from 1300 to 1800) for the standard of living, measured in terms of income per capita, to double. Between 1800 and 1900, it doubled again. The twentieth century saw rapid improvements in living standards, which increased by between five or six times. Living standards doubled between 1929 and 1957 (28 years) and again between 1957 and 1988 (31 years).

Between 1500 and 1820, economic production increased by less than 2% per century. Between 1820 and 1900, economic production roughly doubled. Between 1901 and 2000, economic production increased by a factor of something like four times.

Over the last 30 years, a significant proportion of economic growth and the wealth created relied on financialisation. As traditional drivers of economic growth, such as population increases, new markets, innovation and increases in productivity waned, debt driven consumption became the tool of generating economic growth. But this process requires ever increasing levels of debt. By 2008, $4 to $5 of debt was required to create $1 of growth. China now needs $6 to $8 of credit to generate $1 of growth, an increase from around $1 to $2 of credit for every $1 of growth a decade ago.

Debt allows society to borrow from the future. It accelerates consumption, as debt is used to purchase something today against the promise of paying back the borrowing in the future. Growth is artificially increased by spending that would have taken place normally over a period of years being accelerated because of the availability of cheap money. With borrowing levels now unsustainable, debt engineered growth may be at an end.

Growth was also based on policies that led to the unsustainable degradation of the environment. It was based upon the uneconomic, profligate use of mispriced non-renewable natural resources, such as oil and water.

The problem is the economic model itself. As former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker observed on 11 December 2009: "We have another economic problem which is mixed up in this of too much consumption, too much spending relative to our capacity to invest and to export. It's involved with the financial crisis but in a way it's more difficult than the financial crisis because it reflects the basic structure of the economy." The simultaneous end of financially engineered growth, environmental issues and the scarcity of essential resources now threatens the end of an unprecedented period of growth and expansion.

Policy makers may not have the necessary tools to address deep-rooted problems in current models. Revitalized Keynesian economics may not be able to arrest long-term declines in growth as governments find themselves unable to finance themselves to maintain demand. It is not clear how if, at all, printing money or financial games can create real ongoing growth and wealth.

Low or no growth is not necessarily a problem. It may have positive effects, for example on the environment or conservation of scarce resources. But current economic, political and social systems are predicated on endless economic expansion and related improvements in living standards.

Growth is needed to generate higher tax revenues, helping balance increased demand for public services and the funds needed to finance these.

Growth is needed maintains social cohesion. The prospect of improvements in living standards, however remote, limits pressure for wealth redistribution. As Henry Wallick, a former Governor of the US Federal Reserve, accurately diagnosed: "So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differential tolerable." 

The social and political compact within democratic societies requires economic growth and improvements in living standards. Economic stagnation increases the chance of social and political conflict. Writing in The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred, Niall Ferguson identified the risk: "Economic volatility matters because it tends to exacerbate social conflict….periods of economic crisis create incentives for politically dominant groups to pass the burdens of adjustment on to others… social dislocation may also follow periods of rapid growth, since the benefits of growth are very seldom evenly distributed….it may be precisely the minority of winners in an upswing who are targeted for retribution in a subsequent downswing".

Politicians, policy makers and ordinary people do not want to confront the possibility of significantly lower economic growth in the future. Like Fitzgerald's tragic hero Gatsby, the incredulous battle cry everywhere is: "Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!" But as philosopher Michel de Montaigne asked: "How many things we regarded yesterday as articles of faith that seem to us only fables today?"

A recent book The World Without Us was based around a thought experiment–what would a world bereft of humans revert to. We should be worried about what a world without growth, or, at best, low and uneven rates of growth will look like.

Human systems of transportation and energy, construction and commerce, a scientific consensus tells us, are degrading the global systems that support life on our planet. This damage poses a massive long-term threat to life as we know it. And yet these changes are too macro or micro to be noticed directly. The amygdala tunes out.

That indifference to danger bespeaks a blindspot built into the brain. Our neural system for threat was attuned to dangers of the Pleistocene: the rustling in the thicket that might signal a predator lurking. But we have no perceptual apparatus, nor circuitry for alarm, that tunes us to the dangers we now face as a species.

The brain's perceptual mis-alignment in recognizing dangers has reached an historic danger point. The human gene pool was robust enough to survive the failure of people in the Middle Ages to see the dangers in rats and fleas as vectors for the Black Plague. But today our collective blindspot has set in motion long-term dynamics in geophysical systems like the carbon cycle that will have devastating impacts not just on humans, but on the survival of countless other species—and will take hundreds of years to reverse.

Much of the ongoing damage stems from systemic side-effects of our industrial platforms. For instance, we make concrete, bricks, glass and steel by heating ingredients at very high temperatures for long periods—a technology with roots in the Bronze Age. When these methods were developed no one saw the coming of the current Anthropocene Age, where human activity pushes systems like the nitrogen and carbon cycles toward the brink.

Now that we can conceptualize the dangers we face, ideally we would put on the brakes. The failure of global meetings at Kyoto and Copenhagen to come to international agreements on slowing global is but one symptom of our blindspot at play. But a purely intellectual understanding of a danger does not mobilize our motivational systems that well.

I happened to attend a closed-door meeting of the heads of sustainability for more than two dozen global companies. Each made a report of what they were doing in their supply chains to combat global warming—a surprisingly encouraging list. But all were agreed that there was a common obstacle to pushing much further: customers do not care.

To be sure, there are more and more signs that clever ways around our blindspot can be found. For instance, an industrial ecologist at the Harvard School of Public Health has developed "handprints." Instead of tracking all the bad news about our carbon footprint, Handprinter puts a positive spin on our environmental impacts, tracking all the good we do. The program lets you measure every action you take that lowers your carbon footprint, and encourages you to keep growing that number.

A proposed handprinter mobile app would allow you "to interpret your positive impacts in terms of the number of hours or days in which you are living net-positively; use your phone to see the actions other users are taking; you and your friends will be able to keep track of the impact you're having as a group. What's the total collective handprint of your family, neighborhood or school?"

Recently I browsed an upscale magazine that touts life's luxuries. The Christmas issue featured 21 "ultimate gifts," including a personally designed fountain pen for $275,000, and a custom-built backyard theme park, including a full-size steel roller coaster, for $20 million plus upkeep.

That same week saw the failure of Handprinter to raise funds for that mobile app on the website Kickstarter. Price: $30,000.

Albert Einstein once said that the unleashed power of the atom "has changed everything" save our modes of thinking, "and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."

Effective worrying focuses our attention on a genuine threat and leads to anticipating solutions and implementing them. Neurotic worrying just loops into repetitive angst.

 I'll dial down my worry the day Handprinter not only gets funded, but goes viral—and that backyard theme park gets recycled.

Although life as we know it gets a lot of flack, I worry that we don't appreciate it enough and are too complacent about losing it.

As our "Spaceship Earth" blazes though cold and barren space, it both sustains and protects us. It's stocked with major but limited supplies of water, food and fuel. Its atmosphere keeps us warm and shielded from the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays, and its magnetic field shelters us from lethal cosmic rays. Surely any responsible spaceship captain would make it a top priority to safeguard its future existence by avoiding asteroid collisions, on-board explosions, overheating, ultraviolet shield destruction, and premature depletion of supplies? Yet our spaceship crew hasn't made any of these issues a top priority, devoting (by my estimate) less than a millionth of its resources to them. In fact, our spaceship doesn't even have a captain!

Many have blamed this dismal performance on life as we know it, arguing that since our environment is changing, we humans need to change with it: we need to be technologically enhanced, perhaps with smartphones, smart glasses, brain implants, and ultimately by merging with super-intelligent computers. Does the idea of life as we know it getting replaced by more advanced life sound appealing or appalling to you? That probably depends strongly on the circumstances, and in particular on whether you view the future beings as our descendants or our conquerors.

If parents have a child who's smarter than them, who learns from them, and then goes out and accomplishes what they could only dream of, they'll probably feel happy and proud even if they know they can't live to see it all. Parents of a highly intelligent mass murderer feel differently. We might feel that we have a similar parent-child relationship with future AIs, regarding them as the heirs of our values. It will therefore make a huge difference whether future advanced life retains our most cherished goals.

Another key factor is whether the transition is gradual or abrupt. I suspect that few are disturbed by the prospects of humankind gradually evolving, over thousands of years, to become more intelligent and better adapted to our changing environment, perhaps also modifying its physical appearance in the process. On the other hand, many parents would feel ambivalent about having their dream child if they knew if would cost them their lives. If advanced future technology doesn't replace us abruptly, but rather upgrades and enhances us gradually, eventually merging with us, then this might provide both the goal retention and the gradualism required for us to view future technological life forms as our descendants.

So what will actually happen? This is something we should be really worried about. The industrial revolution has brought us machines that are stronger than us. The information revolution has brought us machines that are smarter than us in certain limited ways, beating us in chess in 2006, in the quiz show "Jeopardy!" in 2011, and at driving in 2012, when a computer was licensed to drive cars in Nevada after being judged safer than a human. Will computers eventually beat us at all tasks, developing superhuman intelligence?

I have little doubt that that this can happen: our brains are a bunch of particles obeying the laws of physics, and there's no physical law precluding particles from being arranged in ways that can perform even more advanced computations.

But will it happen anytime soon? Many experts are skeptical, while others such as Ray Kurzweil predict it will happen by 2030. What I think is quite clear, however, is that if it happens, the effects will be explosive: as the late Oxford mathematician Irving Good realized in 1965 ("Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine"), machines with superhuman intelligence could rapidly design even better machines. In 1993, mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge called the resulting intelligence explosion "The Singularity", arguing that it was a point beyond which it was impossible for us to make reliable predictions.

After this, life on Earth would never be the same, either objectively or subjectively.

Objectively, whoever or whatever controls this technology would rapidly become the world's wealthiest and most powerful, outsmarting all financial markets, out-inventing and out-patenting all human researchers, and out-manipulating all human leaders. Even if we humans nominally merge with such machines, we might have no guarantees whatsoever about the ultimate outcome, making it feel less like a merger and more like a hostile corporate takeover.

Subjectively, these machines wouldn't feel like we do. Would they feel anything at all? I believe that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed. I therefore think it's likely that they too would feel self-aware, and should be viewed not as mere lifeless machines but as conscious beings like us—but with a consciousness that subjectively feels quite different from ours.

For example, they would probably lack our strong human fear of death: as long as they've backed themselves up, all they stand to lose are the memories they've accumulated since their most recent backup. The ability to readily copy information and software between AIs would probably reduce the strong sense of individuality that's so characteristic of our human consciousness: there would be less of a distinction between you and me if we could trivially share and copy all our memories and abilities, so a group of nearby AIs may feel more like a single organism with a hive mind.

In summary, will there be a singularity within our lifetime? And is this something we should work for or against? On one hand, it could potentially solve most of our problems, even mortality. It could also open up space, the final frontier: unshackled by the limitations of our human bodies, such advanced life could rise up and eventually make much of our observable universe come alive. On the other hand, it could destroy life as we know it and everything we care about.

It's fair to say that we're nowhere near consensus on either of these two questions, but that doesn't mean it's rational for us to do nothing about the issue. It could be the best or worst thing ever to happen to life as we know it, so if there's even a 1% chance that there'll be a singularity in our lifetime, I think a reasonable precaution would be to spend at least 1% of our GDP studying the issue and deciding what to do about it. Yet we largely ignore it, and are curiously complacent about life as we know it getting transformed. What we should be worried about is that we're not worried. 

In post-Olympic Great Britain, everyone is still basking in the glory of last summer's crop of sporting superheroes. Thanks to Bradley Wiggins, Jessica Ennis, Mo Farah and all the other British medalists there's overwhelming support for the view that the Games were great value, despite the huge cost of around £9 billion. But, by comparison, how many heroes of this year's science does anyone remember? Answer: British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, and for work he did half a century ago.

This worries me because science needs heroes for the same reason as the Olympics. If we abandon our heroes, we make science insipid. And if it's boring, science loses support and funding. Yet we need science to inspire and engage ordinary people more than ever before because, through technology, it's the most powerful force acting on today's culture. What a difference it would make to how science is regarded by the public if we had a few more contemporary scientific heroes.

But it's becoming harder to find them. One reason is that traditional accounts of scientific discovery have been so flawed that the very idea of a hero has fallen into disrepute. These accounts tend to elevate a few brilliant men into geniuses, but consign the rest—including almost all women—to oblivion. Historians of science have made much of how the record has been egregiously distorted by individuals seeking to lionize disciplines and glorify nations.

They emphasise that discovery is a story of many participants, not of lone heroes or "eureka" moments. I don't disagree. Scientists are engaged in a great cooperative venture, one in which they build on the hard work of their predecessors, their peers and their competitors. The problem is that, when taken to extremes, this view can give the impression that science is carried out by a vast and faceless army which explores the infinite parameter space of possible experiments or theory, where breakthroughs are inevitable and individual endeavour counts for little.

A second force undermining heroes comes from the relentless rise of big science. Some 10,000 visiting scientists, half of the world's particle physicists, come to CERN in Geneva to join forces in their research. The members of the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium came from a vast array of institutions. The follow up Encode analysis of the genome relied on more than 440 scientists. Even maths, traditionally a lonesome profession, is becoming more collaborative, thanks to Cambridge mathematician Tim Gower's Polymath Project.

Because of the rise of collaborative science and the efforts of historians are heroes doomed to go extinct?

I hope not. As Hollywood already knows, we are hard-wired to appreciate narratives based on individuals. This was vividly shown by the 1944 study by psychologists Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel in which people were shown an animation of a pair of triangles and a circle moving around a square. Participants told stories about the circle and the little triangle being in love, the big-bad grey triangle trying to steal away the circle, how they embraced and lived happily ever after, and so on.

Recently, brain scans by Chris and Uta Frith of University College London, and Francesca Happe of King's College, revealed activation in temporoparietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex during these scenarios. What is remarkable is that the same brain network is engaged whether considering moving shapes or the mental states of others. There is a human predilection to make narratives out of whatever we see around us, to see agency in a dark shadows and messages in the stars. In these patterns we can find heroes too. The stories that create heroes are important because they cement reputations, crucial for the evolution of cooperation, through a mechanism called indirect reciprocity.

Yes, the reality of the story of a scientific development is always more complex than heroic stories suggest. But we have to be pragmatic when it comes to presenting the 'truth' of a scientific advance to a general audience. This is not a choice between telling people the complete, nuanced, complex story behind a breakthrough and telling tales. When it comes to the public, it is usually a choice between saying nothing of interest or giving an engaging, heroic account. When it comes to selling the magic of science we need to accept that the most powerful way is through heroic stories. 

Moreover, when taken to extremes, the collectivist view can be trite. Every time I drink a great cup of coffee I could thank the farmers in Colombia who grew the beans, those in Brazil who provided the lush green fields of swaying sugar cane used to sweeten the beverage, or the herdsman in Devon who milked the cows so my pick-me-up could be decorated with a little froth. I could also thank the nuclear power workers who provided the electricity to heat my drink, the person who had the bright idea of drinking a beverage based on roasted seeds in the first place, or who patented the first espresso machine. I could go on and list all those hundreds of people who worked in supply lines that straddle the planet to bring the energy, information and ingredients together. I prefer to thank the barista since our amazing ability to cooperate is a defining characteristic of human society and it's a given that many others were involved in almost everything we do.

You are going to complain that hero worship can distort our picture of the way science is done. Yes it can. But the public is sophisticated enough to know that real life is always more complicated than the spectacle of an athlete standing on the podium. Nobody pretends otherwise. In the Paralympics, the heroes routinely thanked their family, sponsor, trainers, friend who paid for driving lessons, sports psychologists, sports scientists and so on for their gold medals. We all know that but that does not diminish the impact of winning a Gold.

You are going to complain that all I am really saying is that we need heroes because the public is slow on the uptake. Not at all. It is just that I believe in talking to people in a language they understand and in a way that ensures that they will be receptive. We need convenient truths that can convey the kernel of science to a general audience without exhaustive emphasis on the collective aspects of discovery, let alone recourse to calculus, jargon and dense descriptions.

Scientists routinely use metaphors to communicate complex ideas and, by the same token, you need heroic characters as metaphors to convey the broad sweep of scientific developments. The point is that heroes work as viral transmitters of science in the crowded realm of ideas. That is important because we need as many people as possible to know what science is about if modern democracy is to function. 

That is why, ultimately, we should be worried about the decline of heroes of science. The culture of scepticism, testing and provisional consensus-forming in scientific research is the most significant achievement of our species and it is time that everyone understood that (OK, it's going to be hard when it comes to the politicians). The real issue is not whether or not we should have heroes—of course we should—but how to ensure that they tell a reasonably truthful story about that amazing and supremely important endeavour we know as science.

Ever since the philosophers David Hume and G. E. Moore identified the "Is-Ought problem" between descriptive statements (the way something "is") and prescriptive statements (the way something "ought to be"), most scientists have conceded the high ground of determining human values, morals, and ethics to philosophers, agreeing that science can only describe the way things are but never tell us how they ought to be. This is a mistake.

We should be worried that scientists have given up the search for determining right and wrong and which values lead to human flourishing just as the research tools for doing so are coming online through such fields as evolutionary ethics, experimental ethics, neuroethics, and related fields. The Is-Ought problem (sometimes rendered as the "naturalistic fallacy") is itself a fallacy. Morals and values must be based on the way things are in order to establish the best conditions for human flourishing. Before we abandon the ship just as it leaves port, let's give science a chance to steer a course toward a destination where scientists at least have a voice in the conversation on how best we should live.

We begin with the individual organism as the primary unit of biology and society because the organism is the principal target of natural selection and social evolution. Thus, the survival and flourishing of the individual organism—people in this context—is the basis of establishing values and morals, and so determining the conditions by which humans best flourish ought to be the goal of a science of morality. The constitutions of human societies ought to be built on the constitution of human nature, and science is the best tool we have for understanding our nature. For example:

• We know from behavior genetics that 40 to 50 percent of the variance among people in temperament, personality, and many political, economic, and social preferences are inherited.

• We know from evolutionary theory that the principle of reciprocal altruism—I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine—is universal; people do not by nature give generously unless they receive something in return.

• We know from evolutionary psychology that the principle of moralistic punishment—I'll punish you if you do not scratch my back after I have scratched yours—is universal; people do not long tolerate free riders who continually take but never give.

• We know from behavioral game theory about within-group amity and between-group enmity, wherein the rule-of-thumb heuristic is to trust in-group members until they prove otherwise to be distrustful, and to distrust out-group members until they prove otherwise to be trustful.

• We know from behavioral economics about the almost universal desire of people to trade with one another, and that trade establishes trust between strangers and lowers between-group enmity, as well as produces greater prosperity for both trading partners.

These are just a few lines of evidence from many different fields of science that help us establish the best way for humans to flourish. We can ground human values and morals not just in philosophical principles such as Aristotle's virtue ethics, Kant's categorical imperative, Mill's utilitarianism, or Rawls' fairness ethics, but in science as well. Consider the following example of how science can determine human values.

Question: What is the best form of governance for large modern human societies? Answer: a liberal democracy with a market economy. Evidence: liberal democracies with market economies are more prosperous, more peaceful, and fairer than any other form of governance tried. Data: In their book Triangulating Peace, the political scientists Bruce Russett and John Oneal employed a multiple logistic regression model on data from the Correlates of War Project that recorded 2,300 militarized interstate disputes between 1816 and 2001. Assigning each country a democracy score between 1 and 10 (based on the Polity Project that measures how competitive its political process is, how openly leaders are chosen, how many constraints on a leader's power are in place, etc.), Russett and Oneal found that when two countries are fully democratic disputes between them decrease by 50 percent, but when the less democratic member of a county pair was a full autocracy, it doubled the chance of a quarrel between them.

When you add a market economy into the equation it decreases violence and increases peace significantly. Russett and Oneal found that for every pair of at-risk nations they entered the amount of trade (as a proportion of GDP) and found that countries that depended more on trade in a given year were less likely to have a militarized dispute in the subsequent year, controlling for democracy, power ratio, great power status, and economic growth. So they found that democratic peace happens only when both members of a pair are democratic, but that trade works when either member of the pair has a market economy.

Finally, the 3rd vertex of Russett and Oneal's triangle of peace is membership in the international community, a proxy for transparency. The social scientists counted the number of IGOs that every pair of nations jointly belonged to and ran a regression analysis with democracy and trade scores, discovering that democracy favors peace, trade favors peace, and membership in IGOs favors peace, and that a pair of countries that are in the top tenth of the scale on all three variables are 83% less likely than an average pair of countries to have a militarized dispute in a given year.

The point of this exercise, as further developed by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, is that in addition to philosophical arguments, we can make a scientific case for liberal democracy and market economies as a means of increasing human survival and flourishing. We can measure the effects quantitatively, and from that derive science-based values that demonstrate conclusively that this form of governance is really better than, say, autocracies or theocracies. Scholars may dispute the data or debate the evidence, but my point is that in addition to philosophers, scientists should have a voice in determining human values and morals.

"How else can one threaten other than with death? The interesting, the original thing would be to threaten someone with immortality." Jorge Luis Borges' response to the thugs in the Argentine Junta combines guts and fear in equal measure. He did not so much fear torture in this world as much as a life continuously reexamined and reappraised throughout the ages.

We should all heed his warning as we are all rapidly becoming immortal though electronic tattooing. As we all post more and more information on who we are, what we do, like, dislike, think, and say, a big data portrait emerges that gets ever harder to lose, modify, erase. In a big data world we don't just leave breadcrumbs behind, we voluntarily and involuntarily leave giant, detailed pointillist portraits of our everyday.

It used to be only royalty, presidents, mega stars, and superstar athletes who had every aspect of their daily lives followed, analyzed, scrutinized, criticized, dissected. Now ubiquitous cameras, sensors, tolls, RFIDs, credit cards, clicks, friends, and trolls describe, parse, analyze our lives life minute by minute, day by day, month by month. Habits, hatreds, opinions, desires, are recorded and will be visible for a long, long time. What you wore and ate, with whom and where, what you said and did, where you slept…There is more than enough data and inside dirt on almost all of us to enable a weekly Page 6 embarrassment, a People magazine hero profile, and a detailed biography, bitter and sweet.

Few understand how recently the shift to ubiquitous and permanent recording occurred. High definition video was expensive and cumbersome; that is why you do not see hundreds of September 11 real time video on YouTube. Hand held, hi-def movie cameras, ubiquitous and cheap today, were not widely available in 2001. It used to be most of the street cameras were posted and hosted by gated communities, store owners, police or traffic authorities. Not only have these security cameras gotten more and more effective, a single D.C. camera issued 116, 734 tickets in less than two years, but video cameras of all types became almost disposably inexpensive. So cheap, high-def cameras and sensors have spread like bedbugs; we are surrounded by thousands of cameras operated by endless security groups, cabs, home monitors, someone's phone, babysitters, dashboard-mounted car cams, beach boardwalk promoters, surfers, marketers, "citizen" news makers, weather bugs, and dozens of other folks with faint excuses to film permanently. It is not just the filming itself that is the game changer; rather it is the almost negligible cost of archiving. This used to be expensive enough that tape was simply over recorded, after a few minutes or hours. Now all is kept. We now see and know each other in ways previously unimaginable. (Just browse the hundreds of rapidly breeding reality TV channels and millions of YouTube posts.)

Every time we blog, charge, debit, Tweet, Facebook, Google, Amazon, YouTube, LinkIn, Meetup, Foursquare, Yelp, Wikipedia, we leave electronic nuggets, some more visible than others, of who we are, whom we are with, and what we like or are interested in. In a sense, we electronically tattoo ourselves, our preferences, our lives, in a far more comprehensive and nuanced way than any inked skin.

Trivially easy to apply, seemingly innocuous, initially painless, these frequent electronic tattoos are long lasting and someday will portray you as an almost saint or a serious sinner or both. Electronic tattoos are trivially easy to copy, reproduce, spread, store. They will long outlive your body. So in a sense, they begin to fulfill Borges' greatest fear, they begin to make one immortal.

Tattoos are serious commitments. Every parent knows this. Often kids do not. Once inked, a tattoo is a lifelong commitment to a culture, cause, person, passion, hatred, or love. One cannot belong to certain tribes or gangs without a public billboard that promises till death do us part. Sometimes, once inked, there is no hiding and it is hard, if not impossible, to change sides. Whether on a beach, bed, classroom, job, or cell every pair of eyes judges and thinks it knows who you are, what you believe in, whom you play with. Tattoos publicly advertise fidelity, dedication, love, hate, and stupidity. That which, after a few tequilas in Vegas, may have seemed a symbol of never ending romance can become a source of bitter conversations during a future honeymoon. Now multiply that embarrassment, disclosure, past history a thousand fold using electronic tattoos… (Type "high schoolers" into Google and the first four search hints to appear are "making out," "grinding," "in bikinis," and "kissing." Eventually, do you really want to see the detailed video of future grandma without gramps?)

Immortality and radical transparency have consequences. We are at immediate risk of having the world know what we do, what we did, as ever more available for scrutiny from our peers, rivals, bosses, lovers, family, admirers, as well as random strangers. SceneTap cameras let you know, at any given minute, how many people are in dozens of Boston bars, the male female ratio, and average age. This will soon seem quaint. Facial recognition technologies enable you, with a 90%+ accuracy to use a smart phone to identify someone standing behind a bar. Add name recognition and location to your phone and likely you can quickly access a series of details on whether that cute person over there has any criminal convictions, where she lives, what her property is worth, how big a mortgage, Yelp preferences, Google profile, Facebook status, Tweets, reunion notes, criminal records…

These overall records of our lives will be visible, accessible, hard to erase for a long, long time. It is so painless, so easy, cheap and trivial to add yet another digital tat to our already very colorful and data filled electronic skin that we rarely think about what it might meant, teach, say about us in the long term. So we have already covered our bodies, our images, ourselves, in far more detail than even the most tattooed person on the planet.

And even if you acted impeccably, according to today's norms and customs, electronic immortality still presents enormous challenges. Religions, ethics, customs, and likes change. What is currently deemed criminal, wrong, or simply distasteful may be quite different from what successor generations believe is just and correct. Knowing vaguely that great Greek philosophers sexually consorted with young boys is different from having direct access to lurid tapes during history class. Detailed visuals on how the Founding Fathers treated their slaves might seriously affect their credibility. Today's genetics has already uncovered and detailed Thomas Jefferson's peccadilloes. Were today's technologies and detailed histories available a few centuries ago, likely we would have far fewer recognized Saints.

Likely some things we do as a matter of course today will seem barbaric, criminal, or merely rude to classrooms full of future high schoolers trolling through huge databases of lives. On the other hand, many daily acts may seem heroic and valiant sacrifices to perhaps ever more selfish and media aware generations.

In 1867, Dostoevsky on a visit to the cathedral in Basel, was transfixed by Holbein's portrait of the dead Christ. According to his wife's diary, he climbed on a chair to look more closely at the painting and remained for a good half hour, taking in every detail. Two years later, in his novel The Idiot, he was able to give an uncannily accurate description of the painting, as if he had photographed it in his mind.

In 2012 of course we would not need to go to such trouble. We could snap the painting on an iphone, and summon it up later on the retinex display. Actually we wouldn't have to visit Basel. We could check it out on "Google images" back home. And while we're at it, we would only have to type in "Dostoevsky + Holbein" to find this anecdote confirmed at a dozen sites.

One-touch knowledge can be an enormous boon. Yet I worry that in raising us all to a plane of unprecedented genius, it is creating a drearily level playing field. When each of us can learn so much, so easily, in the same way as everybody else, we are in danger of becoming mere knowledge tourists, hopping from attraction to attraction at 30,000 feet without respecting the ground that lies between. One-step travel is a boon as well. But when everyone finds themselves going to the same places, when it's the arrival and not the journey that matters, when nothing whatever memorable happens along on the way, I worry that we end up, despite our extraordinary range of experience, with less to say.

In the old days, when, like Dostoevsky, we had to work at it, the learning we accumulated, however eccentrically, was both valued and valenced. The landscape of our knowledge had mountains and valleys, flat sands and gushing geysers. Some parts of this territory we had explored for ourselves, others we were guided to and paid for, others we might have chanced on by luck. But however we came by them, we were proud to know the things we did. They were the presents we brought to the table of intellectual debate. In argument we could reveal them when and if we chose, we could put everything out front, we could pretend ignorance, and play hard to get.

We should worry that this dimension of individual intelligence is disappearing, and with it that flirtatiousness that leads to the marriage of ideas. Soon no one will be more or less knowledgeable than anyone else. But it will be knowledge without shading to it, and, like the universal beauty that comes from cosmetic surgery, it will not turn anyone on. 

On April 5, 2010, deep in the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, a spark ignited a huge explosion that rumbled through the tunnels and killed 29 miners—the worst mining disaster in the US in 40 years. Two weeks later, the Deepwater Horizon, a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, went up in flames, killing 11 workers and creating the biggest oilspill in history. Though these two disasters seem to be completely unrelated, in truth, they had the same underlying cause: capture.

There are federal agencies that are supposed to prevent such disasters, organizations that regulate industry. Agencies like the Mine Safety and Health Administration (which sets the rules for mines) and the Minerals Management Service (which set the rules for offshore drilling) are supposed to constrain businesses—and to act as watchdogs—to force everyone to play by the rules. That's the ideal, anyhow.

Reality's quite a bit messier. More often than not, the agencies are reluctant to enforce the regulations that they themselves create. And when a business gets caught breaking the rules, the regulatory agencies tend not to impose penalties that amount to more than a slap on the wrist. As a result, the watchdogs are toothless. Companies like Massey Energy (which ran Upper Big Branch) and BP (which ran the Deepwater Horizon) flout the rules—and when disaster strikes, everybody wonders why regulators failed to take action despite numerous warning signs and repeated violations of regulations.

In the 1970s, economists, led by future Nobel laureate George Stigler, began to realize that this was the rule, not the exception. Over time, regulatory agencies are systematically drained of their ability to check the power of industry. Even more strikingly, they're gradually drawn into the orbit of the businesses they're charged with regulating—instead of acting in the public interest, the regulators functionally wind up as tools of the industry they're supposed to keep watch over. This process, known as "regulatory capture," turns regulators from watchdogs into lapdogs.

You don't have to look far to see regulatory capture in action. Securities and Exchange Commission officials are regularly accused of ignoring warnings about fraud, stifling investigations into wrongdoing, and even actively helping miscreants avoid paying big fines or going to jail. Look at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's enforcement reports to see how capable they are of preventing energy companies from violating nuclear powerplant safety rules again and again. Regulatory capture isn't limited only to the US. What caused the Fukushima disaster? Ultimately, it was a "breakdown of the regulatory system" caused by "[a] reversal of the positions between the regulator and the regulated," at least according to a report prepared by the Japanese Parliament. The regulator had become the regulated.

Regulatory capture is just a small part of the story. In my own profession, journalism, we like to think of ourselves as watchdogs, fierce defenders of the public good. But we, too, are being captured by the industries we're supposed to keep watch on. There's journalistic capture just as there's regulatory capture. It's most marked in fields such as tech reporting, business reporting, White House reporting—fields where you're afraid of losing access to your subjects, where you depend on the industry to feed you stories, fields where your advertising revenue comes from the very people you're supposed to critique. In all of these fields, you can find numerous reporters who are functionally controlled by the people they're supposed to keep watch over. Even in my own beat (especially in my own beat!), science reporting, we're captured. The elaborate system of embargoes and privileged press releases set up by scientific journals and scientific agencies ensures that we report not just what they want, but how and when they want it. We've unwittingly shifted our allegiance from the public we're supposed to serve to the people we're supposed to investigate.

Capture is a bigger threat than even Stigler first realized. Any profession that depends to some degree on objectivity, and whose work affects the fortunes of a group of people with power and money, is subject to capture. Science, a field in which objectivity is paramount, is far from immune. There's evidence that medical researchers who take money from industry tend see the natural world in a more positive light: in their experiments, drugs seem to work better, patients seem to survive longer, and side effects seem to be less dangerous. Yet few scientists, even those taking tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from drug companies or medical device manufactures, think that they serve any master but Truth with a capital T.

That's what worries me the most about capture: you never know when you're a captive.

I used to worry that our mathematical and physical descriptions of the universe grow forever, but our brains and language skills remain entrenched. Some of our computer chips and software are becoming mind-numbingly complex. New kinds of mathematics and physics are being discovered or created all the time, but we need fresh ways to think and to understand.

I used to worry that we will understand less and less about more and more. For example, in the last few years, mathematical proofs have been offered for famous problems in the history of mathematics, but the arguments have been far too long and complicated for experts to be certain they are correct. Mathematician Thomas Hales had to wait five years before expert reviewers of his geometry paper—submitted to the journal Annals of Mathematics—finally decided that they could find no errors and that the journal should publish Hale's proof, but only with the disclaimer saying they were not certain it was right! Moreover, mathematicians like Keith Devlin have admitted in The New York Times that "the story of mathematics has reached a stage of such abstraction that many of its frontier problems cannot even be understood by the experts."

Israeli mathematician Doron Zeilberger recently observed that contemporary mathematics meetings were venues where few people could understand one another, nor even made an attempt, nor even cared. The "burned out" mathematicians just amble from talk to talk where "they didn't understand a word." Zeilberger wrote in 2009, "I just came back from attending the 1052nd AMS [American Mathematical Society] sectional meeting at Penn State, last weekend, and realized that the Kingdom of Mathematics is dead. Instead, we have a disjoint union of narrow specialties… Not only do [the mathematicians] know nothing besides their narrow expertise, they don't care!" Incidentally, Zeilberger considers himself to be an ultrafinitist, an adherent of the mathematical philosophy that denies the existence of the infinite set of natural numbers (the ordinary whole numbers used for counting). More startlingly, he suggests that even very large numbers do not exist—say numbers greater than 10 raised to the power of 10 raised to the power of 10 raised to the power of 10. In Zeilberger's universe, when we start counting, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., we can seemingly count forever; however, eventually we will reach the largest number, and when we add 1 to it, we return to zero!

At the risk of a further digression into the edges of understanding, consider the work of Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki. Some of his key proofs are based on "inter-universal Teichmüller theory." As he develops future proofs based on this mathematical machinery, which was developed over decades in many hundreds of pages, how many humans could possibly understand this work? What does it even mean to "understand" in contexts such as these? As mathematics and subatomic physics progresses in the 21st century, the meaning of "understanding" obviously must morph, like a caterpillar into a butterfly. The limited, wet human brain is the caterpillar. The butterflies are our brains aided by computer prosthetics.

Should we be so worried that we will not really be able to understand subatomic physics, quantum theory, cosmology, or the deep recesses of mathematics and philosophy? Perhaps we can let our worries slightly recede and just accept our models of the universe when they are useful. Today, we employ computers to help us reason beyond the limitations of our own intuition. In fact, experiments with computers are leading mathematicians to discoveries and insights never dreamed of before the ubiquity of computers. Computers and computer graphics allow mathematicians to discover results long before they can prove them formally, and open entirely new fields of mathematics. American educator David Berlinski once wrote, "The computer has… changed the very nature of mathematical experience, suggesting for the first time that mathematics, like physics, may yet become an empirical discipline, a place where things are discovered because they are seen." W. Mark Richardson fully understands that scientists and mathematicians must learn to live with mystery. He wrote, "As the island of knowledge grows, the surface that makes contact with mystery expands. When major theories are overturned, what we thought was certain knowledge gives way, and knowledge touches upon mystery differently. This newly uncovered mystery may be humbling and unsettling, but it is the cost of truth. Creative scientists, philosophers, and poets thrive at this shoreline."

We—scientists and the world in general should be worried because:

Science has become increasingly narrow-minded—materialistic, reductionist, and inveterately anthropocentric: still rooted, philosophically, in the 18th century.

Science is increasingly equated with high tech. "Vocation" used to mean a deep desire to engage and seek out the truth, insofar as human beings are able. Now it means getting a job with Monsanto.

Britain's Royal Society has become a show-case for high-tech, and high tech is perceived as the means the generate wealth—and this is deemed to be "realistic": the way of the world; not only acceptable, but virtuous.

Science, in short, is in danger of losing its integrity and its intellectual independence—of becoming the handmaiden of big business and the most powerful governments. Since we cannot assume that increasing wealth and top-down technical control are good for the human race as a whole, or for our fellow creatures, science for all its wonder and all its achievements is in danger of becoming the enemy of humankind.

Worst of all perhaps is that those in high places—both in science and in politics—don't seem to realize that this is happening. They do not listen to criticism. "Public debate" means a one-way flow of information de haut en bas. The status quo for all its obvious flaws and indeed its horrors is seen as "progress". But those who are doing well out of it, including those intellectuals who have chosen to go along with the act, cannot even begin to consider that they could be wrong.

All this, by all measures, is a tragedy.

In the early 1980s I was worried that the computer revolution was going to reinforce and amplify the divide between the (well-to-do, Western) technocrats and those around the world who couldn't afford computers and similar high-tech gadgetry. I dreaded a particularly malignant sorting of the haves and havenots, with the rich getting ever richer, and the poor being ever more robbed of political and economic power by their lack of access to the new information technology. I started devoting some serious time and effort to raising the alarm about this, and trying to think of programs that would forestall or alleviate it, but before I'd managed to make any significant progress, the issue was happily swept out of my hands by the creation of the Internet. I was an Arpanet user, but that certainly didn't help me anticipate what was coming.

We've certainly seen a lot of rich technocrats getting richer, but we've also seen the most profoundly democratizing and leveling spread of technology in history. Cell phones and laptops, and now smart phones and tablets, put worldwide connectivity in the hands of billions, adding to the inexpensive transistor radios and television sets that led the way. The planet has become informationally transparent in a way nobody imagined only forty years ago.

This is wonderful, mostly. Religious institutions that could always rely in the past on the relative ignorance of their flock must now revise their proselytizing and indoctrinating policies or risk extinction. Dictators face the dire choice between maximal suppression—turning their nations into prisons—or tolerating an informed and well-connected opposition. Knowledge really is power, as people are coming to realize all over the world.

This leveling does give us something new to worry about, however. We have become so dependent on this technology that we have created a shocking new vulnerability. We really don't have to worry much about an impoverished teenager making a nuclear weapon in his slum; it would cost millions of dollars and be hard to do inconspicuously, given the exotic materials required. But such a teenager with a laptop and an Internet connection can explore the world's electronic weak spots for hours every day, almost undetectably at almost no cost and very slight risk of being caught and punished. Yes, the Internet is brilliantly designed to be so decentralized and redundant that it is almost invulnerable, but robust as it is, it isn't perfect.

Goliath hasn't been knocked out yet, but thousands of Davids are busily learning what they need to know to contrive a trick that will even the playing field with a vengeance. They may not have much money, but we won't have any either, if the Internet goes down. I think our choice is simple: we can wait for them to annihilate what we have, which is becoming more likely every day, or we can begin thinking about how to share what we have with them.

In the meantime, it would be prudent to start brainstorming about how to keep panic at bay if a longterm disruption of large parts of the Internet were to occur. Will hospitals and fire stations (and supermarkets and gas stations and pharmacies) keep functioning, and how will people be able to get information they trust? Cruise ships oblige their paying customers to walk through a lifeboat drill the first day at sea, and while it isn't a popular part of the cruise, people are wise to comply. Panic can be contagious, and when that happens people make crazy and regrettable decisions. As long as we insist on living in the fast lane, we should learn how to get on and off without creating mayhem.

Perhaps we should design and institute nationwide lifeboat drills to raise consciousness about what it would be like to have to cope with a long term Internet blackout. When I try to imagine what the major problems would be and how they could be coped with, I find I have scant confidence in my hunches. Are there any experts on this topic?