Institute For The Future

Future of science and technology workshop 5: Introductions

Larry Smarr (UCSD): Working on infrastructures to promote cross-disciplinary, academic-industry research; looking out at the future of the Internet and its uses. UCSD has two extremely wired buildings capable of supporting 1200 people (the buildings will have as much bandwidth as all cable modems in the US).

 

How I think about the future: In 1992, none of his circle expected the Web-- a humbling experience; tries to attract the smartest people.

Wildcard: There's a serious possibility of worldwide pandemic that kills hundreds of millions of people in the next 20 years. The biggest impact would be gigantic disruptions in world trade.

 

Jody Ranck (IFTF): Senior researcher on global health issues, with background in anthropology and public health, and work on risk and imbalances in biomed research (90% of money goes to solving problems affecting 10% of people).

 

Wildcard: HIV vaccine has low probability of success (>5% over 50 years), but would be a world-changer.

 

Keith Devlin (Stanford): Mathematician, NPR's "Math Guy," cofounder of Media X (virtual enterprise, no physical infrastructure, interdisciplinary work that improves disciplines, novel funding structure).

 

How I think about the future: 50 years from now, the field of mathematics will look dramatically different: in the future you'll get prizes for things that would get you kicked out of a department today.

Wildcard: Nonzero probability that the US will cease doing serious research in science and technology, and no longer be a country in which science and technology are part of our common culture.

 

James Lemke (): Physicist and serial entrepreneur: 6 companies in information storage, telecom, energy.

 

Central problem with the energy crisis is energy storage: if we don't build thousands of gigawatt nuclear power plants, and rely on alternative energy, we need to solve the storage problem.

Widcard: If we can pull of fusion energy, our looming energy crisis ends. Also very pessimistic about overpopulation and resource consumption (we'd need the equivalent of three Earths to maintain our current consumption levels).

 

Burton Richter (director emeritus, SLAC): Elementary particle physicist, now in the energy business for the last 7 years.

 

"I'm both an optimist and pessimist about our energy future." Tokamaks won't be scalable; we need something seriously new. In the long run, everything is going to be derived from the sun; but in the next 50 years, we'll need a mix of conservation, alternative sources (but note the energy storage problem!), nuclear, and clean coal.

Wildcard: We have no idea how the brain really works.

 

Jaron Lanier (): Computer science and math background, led National Tele-Immersion Initiative. Feel the bar to make telecommunications work is high, but now reachable. if we reach it, it'll transform energy consumption, travel, real estate, and provide a firewall against pandemics (arguments that were articulated as far back as 1927). Also interested in why hardware gets better and software gets worse when they get bigger and more complex-- a hobby that has some implications for neuroscience.

 

How I think about the future: The basic paradigm for thinking about nature hasn't changed in the last 50 or so years; nothing has happened to equal quantum mechanics, DNA, population genetics, etc.. When does this happen?

Wildcard: "We get another scientific revelation on the order of what we saw at the start of the 20th century." A new theory of quantum gravity with practical applications (a theory of quantum gravity that reconciles quantum mechanics and relativity, and lets us do something).

Population problem isn't just growth, but fastest growth among fundamentalist communities.

Has never seen a climate in DC as hostile to science as today.

 

Vivian Siegel (PLS): Cell and developmental biologist by training, edited Cell, now at Public Library of Science. Asking what big questions is cell biology are now doable.

 

The ways people do science have changed a lot-- from individual to collaborative mode, real-time data sharing is more prevalent: formal publication (stories about an experiment) will be displaced by more real-time interaction.

Wildcard: "Combination of stem cell work, understanding how the brain works, and understanding lifespan will lead to the possibility of something close to immortality for the very, very rich." This could create a permanent class of wealthy, powerful people living through scores of generations.

 

Stephen Schneider (Stanford): Started out in plasma physics, moved into climate change. In this field, that the game is precautionary decision-making rather than prediction.

 

Disconnects with politics and decision-making: What we do in the next 50 years will shape what happens in the following 250 years. Climate science is best at long-term, global change, worst at short-term, regional change. Academics have to learn to evaluate decision-making as well as they do disciplinary knowledge.

Change in values such that commons, nature, fairness become coequal component with competition, winning.

Wildcard: Good to eliminate private financing of political campaigns; bad would be civil war in America over values.

 

Max Bernstein (NASA Ames): Astrobiologist and chemist.

 

Concern about creating antibiotic resistant bacteria. Social fracturing combined with other factors may lead to population decline, smaller cities.

Wildcard: Asteroid impact comparable to the one that took out the dinosaurs. "Though seeing how we're in the midst of a mass extinction, animals wouldn't consider this such a bad thing."

 

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