And now for something completely different.
There is a marvelous website I heartily recommend: edge.org. The Canberra Times dubs it "The most stimulating English-language reading to be had from anywhere in the world.”
The site has been around for 25 years, serving as an idea exchange for the world's scientists.
To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.
One of the marvelous traditions of this site is the “Annual Question” to the Edge Community. The always provocative responses are published in book form (and online) and make for a fascinating read. Unfortunately this tradition ended in 2018 with What Is The Last Question? when they apparently ran out of questions.
Here I would like to highlight the question from 10 years ago (2013) , “ What *Should* We Be Worried About?” asking scientists what worries you, but may not be on the popular radar yet. The responses reveal some remarkable prescience. Ten years down the road most of the concerns remain or have been validated.
Below are brief summaries of a few of the responses. I encourage you to look at the entire set. Individual responses/essays are only a page or two and it's easy to bounce around to topics you find of interest - a browser’s delight. All of the highlighted essays below have a link to the full response. All the 2013 responses are here: What Are You Worried About 2013 responses
Keep in mind that these concerns were proffered ten years ago.
In "What Me , Worry?", a scientist for genomic sciences cautions against future plagues.
"Avoidance of vaccination creates a public health hazard. It is not a civil liberty issue. The un-vaccinated coupled with antibiotic resistance and decreased animal habitats ... could take humanity back to the pre-antibiotic era. I thought we learned these lessons after global pandemics such as the Plague and the outbreak of 1918 flu that killed 3% of the population, but clearly without modern science and medicine we will be destined to relive history. "
In “Losing Our Hands?” a Professor of Psychology worries we are losing manual skills.
“I don't mean that someone is going to come and chop our hands off. I mean that we are unwittingly, but eagerly, outsourcing more and more of our manual skills to machines. Our minds are losing touch with our bodies and the world around us, and being absorbed into the evolving techno-sphere… manual skills are really not just about hands; they are about the way our brains and hands interact…. We can see the loss of these skills in the obvious fact that fewer people now learn them… Opting out to become 'self-sufficient' is even more hopeless than it was in the 1970s … Could we turn our key-pressing, screen swiping hands to feeding ourselves? I don't think so.”
In "Unmitigated Arrogance", a Professor of Psychology worries about the potential for manipulation of the population by the arrogant self promoters.
"I worry about the recent epidemic of lying and cheating that has infected public discourse in a diversity of domains. The psychological mechanism that motivates and facilitates these corrupt behaviors is hubristic pride—the emotional feeling of arrogance, egotism, and superiority that drives people to brag, lie, cheat, and bully others to get ahead. ... authentic pride motivates hard work, persistence, and empathic concern for others, hubristic pride motivates hostility, aggression, intimidation, and prejudice.
People who frequently feel hubristic pride are narcissistic, but have low self-esteem and a proneness to shame. ... This means constantly finding new ways of self-promoting, self-enhancing, and derogating others. And, as a side effect, hubristic pride makes them feel invincible, convincing them that they can get away with their abhorrent behaviors. ... By encouraging, or at least enabling, others' arrogance, we nurture the pride that can lead to large-scale deception and even crime, and further increase the gap between true accomplishments and just rewards.
In “Worrying About Children” a Berkeley Psychologist worries about neglected children.
“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. … 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, and with parents who are forced to spend long hours at unreliable jobs that don't pay enough in the first place. ... we still provide almost no public support for childcare, we pay child-care workers next to nothing. … 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 … 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.”
In "The Complex, Consequential, Not-So-Easy Decisions About Our Water Resources", the Chief Strategy Officer for the Nature Conservancy worries that we do not know how to deal with the inevitable water crisis.
"We should be worried about the state of water resources. I doubt there is a single current affairs publication that has not addressed this "global water crisis". On balance they raise legitimate concerns. ... We must change the way in which we use water, doing more with less. Unfortunately we do not have a great track record in increasing resource productivity. ... Reams have been devoted to rousing alarms about the global water crisis, but the barrier to effective action is not one of conviction, but of complexity. It is frightening that—outside of a restricted circle of practitioners—we have been unable to develop a fact based, practical way of debating water issues in public."
In "Computer-Generated Fascism", a writer and Futurist warns of the rise of fascism.
"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…. 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."
In “Presentism”, a French researcher worries about 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 before 1945, if then, is a messy, remote landscape; ... 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.”
In “A World of Cascading Crises“, a Futurist worries about over-reaction and false anxieties.
“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…The public's view of violence is a good example. 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. … 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. 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.”
In “Where Did You Get That Fact?”, a Professor of Information Technology worries about verification.
“ 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 ... 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. .. 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. .. 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.”
In “Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Words“, a Professor of Cognitive Science worries about the effects of censorship.
“ The United States Supreme Court, 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." … 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 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. “
In “Danger from Aliens”, an senior SETI astronomer worries about an invasion from outer space.
“The recent reset of the long-count Maya calendar didn't end the world. But there are serious scientists who worry that Armageddon could soon be headed our way, although from a different quarter—an attack by malevolent, extraterrestrial beings…. It all sounds like shabby science fiction, but even if the probability of disaster is low, the stakes are high. Consequently, some cautious researchers argue that it's best to play safe and keep our broadcasts to ourselves. Indeed, they urge a world-wide policy of restraint and relative quiet. They would forbid the targeting of other star systems with transmissions of greater intensity than the routine radio and television that inevitably leak off our planet… There's a serious flaw in this apparently plausible reasoning. Any society able to do us harm from the depths of space is not at our technological level. We can confidently assume that a culture able to project force to someone else's star system is at least several centuries in advance of us."
In “We Don't Do Politics“, an artist/composer worries that smart people want nothing to do with politics. “...we don't do politics. We expect other people to do it for us, and grumble when they get it wrong.“
In “The Under-Population Bomb“, a Wired editor worries about the impact of under-population. “Population is expected to peek by 2050 and then rapidly decline. 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.”
In “Big Experiments Won't Happen“, a Harvard physicist worries that long-term research investments will not be made. “We need to know what the universe is telling us. Some of the best new ideas come from trying to explain mysterious phenomena.”
In "The Danger of Inadvertently Praising Zygomatic Arches", Stanford wild-man Robert Sapolsky worries about free will. Note - he has a fascinating book on stress - Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.
In “The Rise of Anti-Intellectualism and the End of Progress”, Tim O’Reilly worries about the rise refusal to accept scientific knowledge. “... it's at least as probable that as we fail to find those solutions quickly enough, the world falls into apathy, disbelief in science and progress, and after a melancholy decline, a new dark age.”
In "Science by (Social) Media“, a Harvard Business School prof worries about knowledge by tweet
"For example - red wine linked to longevity. Is that enough information? ... 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 “Posthuman Geography“, a MIT researcher worries about “robosourcing”.
"If every conceivable job can be done better by a special-purpose machine, what are the implications for our economic systems and the definition of a “job”. “... I have little doubt that the next paradigm of civilization will be a change for the better. I'm not worried about that. But the transition from here to there might be painful if we don't develop some idea of what we're getting into and how it might be managed.”
In “The Fragility of Complex Systems“, a Life Sciences professor worries about the fragility of markets, transportation, internet, energy grids, ...
“Complex systems like the markets, transportation, and the Internet seem stable, but their complexity makes them inherently fragile. Because they are efficient, massive complex systems grow like weeds, displacing slow markets, small farmers, slow communication media, and local information processing systems. When they work they are wonderful, but when they fail we will wonder why we did not recognize the dangers of depending on them.”
In “Global Greying“, a journalists worries about aging populations.
“… out of the 9 billion people expected when the Earth's population peaks in 2050, the World Health Organization expects 2 billion—more than one person in five—to suffer from dementia. Is any society ready for this?”
In “Is Idiocracy Looming“, a professor of Psychology worries about intelligence trends. See Luke Wilson movie.
In “The Death of Mathematics“, a Stanford mathematician worries about the future of mathematics.
“.. 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.” [Editor note: A man after my own heart.]
And finally, if you made it this far, a couple of hopefuls ...
In "The Gift of Worry", a Maryland professor offers a different point of view.
"Worry is a kind of thought and memory evolved to give life direction and protect us from danger. Without its nagging whispers, we would be prone to a reckless, Panglossian lifestyle. … Worry contributes life's "to do" list, but its relentless prompts are unpleasant and we work to diminish them by crossing items off the list. The list is constantly fine-tuned and updated. As life's problems are solved, topics of worry are extinguished, or if a dreaded event does not occur or becomes obsolete, we substitute new, more adaptive topics of concern. The bottom line? Stop worrying about worry. It's good for you.
In "There's Nothing to Worry About, and There Never Was", a NYT columnist reassures.
"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."
All this is a bit humbling as I have been mostly worrying how I'm going to get the leaves off my yard.
Copyright © 2023 Dave Hoplin
Appendix: Here are a few other edge.org challenges over the years.
> This Explains Everything
> This Will Make You Smarter
> Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?
> This Will Change Everything
> What Have You Changed Your Mind About - and Why?
> What are you Optimistic About?
> What is Your Dangerous Idea?
> What Do You Believe is True Even Though You Can’t Prove It?
> What’s The Most Important Invention in the Past 2000 Years?
> What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?
> What Do You Think About Machines That Think?
