Now is the time for an optimistic vision of life's destiny – in this world, and perhaps far beyond it. We need to think globally, we need to think rationally, we need to think long-term – empowered by twenty-first-century technology but guided by values that science alone can't provide.
On the Future is a fairly slim book (just over 200 small pages before endnotes), and ultimately, it doesn't have much to say about our near future that I haven't read before. Author Martin Rees concludes his overview of the imminent threats to humanity (and his globalist solutions) with a plea for greater scientific knowledge among the masses, and if more people pick up this kind of easy reading primer on current scientific issues, then I suppose Rees is meeting his own brief; even if it doesn't quite satisfy my own curiosity.
Our planet, this “pale blue dot” in the cosmos, is a special place. It may be a unique place. And we are its stewards in an especially crucial era. That is an important message for all of us – and the theme of this book.Oddly, Rees is both the scientist famous for giving humanity 50/50 odds of suffering a massive bioterror attack by the year 2020 (Rees ultimately accepted Steven Pinker's wager against the eventuality), and in this book, he comes across as totally optimistic that science can save us from the problems that science has created. Global Warming, Nuclear Threats, Pandemics, Overpopulation and Feeding the World; science and technology will provide the solutions (even as Rees suggests we learn some restraint). And even if we can't quite save this planet for human occupation, Rees enthuses about the future of humanity as self-aware, self-replicating AI sent off into the cosmos to explore and colonise the universe. Call me old-fashioned, but the elimination of “wetware” doesn't sound like a rosy future for humanity. Yet what really made me uncomfortable were Rees' frequent urgings for a global response to economic disparity:
The plight of the “bottom billion” in today's world could be transformed by redistributing the wealth of the thousand richest people on the planet. Failure to respond to this humanitarian imperative, which nations have the power to remedy, surely casts doubt on any claims of institutional moral progress.Rees suggests some new global organisations – which can neither be run as democracies nor dictatorships, but some agreed upon third way – could take the place of nation states and control the rate of technological development, respond to the “disruptions” of hackers and mass migration due to poverty, and presumably, relieve the top thousand richest people of their wealth. On the other hand, Rees thinks it better for private investors to take over space travel, and even, for emerging scientists to set up private labs, “If enough make this choice, it will erode the primacy of research universities and boost the importance of 'independent scientists' to the level that prevailed before the twentieth century – and perhaps enhance the flowering of genuinely original ideas”. And yet, what private companies or individuals will take these risks if their profits can be redistributed away from them? Rees' thoughts flow to their (il)logical end:
The digital revolution generates enormous wealth for an elite group of innovators and for global companies, but preserving a healthy society will require redistribution of that wealth. There is talk of using it to provide a universal income. The snags to implementing this are well known, and the societal disadvantages are intimidating. It would be far better to subsidise the types of jobs for which there is currently a large unmet demand and for which pay and status is unjustly low.He's talking about nannies, gardeners, butlers, and caregivers; the kind of “personal services” that “rich people value”. Not only will the lower classes have these subsidised, unlikely-to-be-replaced-by-robots, jobs, but everyone else can live like millionaires. (So do the nannies, gardeners, butlers and caregivers get nannies, gardeners, butlers and caregivers of their own?) I don't disagree that income disparity – especially from a global perspective – is a pressing issue, but I think I would have liked this book better if Rees had stuck to the science.
Later chapters (which Rees admits might be self-indulgent) are on the nature of reality and whether God is needed to explain Creation, and he ends with his plea for more scientific literacy among the masses. Overall, this reads like a catalogue of the ideas that are rattling around the head of a deep thinker, and some resonated with me while others didn't. There's certainly value in reading even those ideas that one doesn't agree with and I'm satisfied to have been exposed to a different point of view.
