Imagined Worlds

One-line summary:  The author applies the lessons of the evolution of science, technology, and society to the extrapolation of society in the future, and concludes (among other things) that proactive positive guidance based on ethics will be necessary to avoid science-induced calamity.
 

Main Points

• Endemic short-term-only planning has been worsened by the widespread failure of long-range socialist plans.  Historically, only the voices of science and religion have linked us with both ancestors and descendants, so that's where we must look for guidance when peering into the future.

 Successful Technologies

• Smeed's Law: You can either get something done or take credit for it, but not both.
• Successful technologies have been driven by pragmatism, vision, amateur enthusiasm or entrepreneurial spirit, rather than by ideology.  They have caught on because of "market pull" not "ideological push".  Examples:
• Commercial aviation by planes vs. airships (British Navy)
• Commercial aviation by small prop planes vs. jets; British Comet was ideologically geared to demonstrate technological superiority, whereas Boeing 707 was designed to be economically feasible
• Large ocean liners: Queen Mary breaking speed records was "an unfortunate accident" that was a side effect of having to design large enough to realize the economy of scale.
• Politicians gain renown by saying "the buck stop here"--making a possibly bad decision is better than none.  Engineers gain it by saying "better safe than sorry".
•  Ideological technologies are often characterized by (a) designed by political committee; (b) artificially not allowed to fail even when they have technologically failed.

Successful Science

• Contrast "Napoleonic" (rigid, organized, big-project, big-management) vs. "Tolstoyan" (small, nimble, creative chaos, anarchic) approach to science.  Some sciences are now coming full circle, having started Tolstoyan, been "established" as Napoleonic, and reverting to Tolstoyan in the face of uncertain funding or bad public opinion influencing politicians:
• The space program: commercial spinoff technologies have made cheap COTS-based missions possible (e.g. Mars Explorer); lack of big funding has made them necessary
• Radio astronomy: digital signal processing and fast cheap computers allow "anyone" to analyze data; the bottleneck now is just gathering it.
• (soon?) molecular biology; information science is providing the analytical tools, but we lack the tools for the "Tolstoyan renaissance" (my phrase) since currently no cheap way to gather genetic data.
• Particle physics; small, cheap accelerators may come back into vogue, as the "big science" projects such as SSC are axed
• Contrast "concept driven" scientific revolution (eg traditional Kuhn view of quantum mechanics revolution) with "tool driven" revolution, in which the availability of a new tool (a) fundamentally changes the way the science is done, (b) makes it accessible on an unprecedented scale.
• Including biology, physics of various kinds, mathematics, particle physics with cheap accelerators

Good and Bad Science and Technology

• G.H. Hardy's view: science accentuates distinction between advantaged and disadvantaged, or more directly contributes to destruction of human society.
• Author: science is evil when its products tend to do this.  Its products can be used for good, but a free-market economy won't have this result since the people likely to be able to pay for the new benefits will be the patrons.  Proactive ethical guidance is needed.
• Most profound shocks will come from bioengineering and genetic engineering, esp. as they merge with data processing.  Those able to afford eugenic enhancement, ectogenesis, etc. will drive its implementation, pay for it, and thus distance themselves further from those who can't.  The end result of the process is social revolution.
• Historically, "ordinary people" have resisted homogenizing effects of technology; as a crowd, people are averse to logic and discipline, which is also why most dogmatic totalitarian regimes don't last more than one generation (i.e. enough to grow a generation of rebels).
• Samuel Gompers (founder of AFL): first "pragmatist" pro-labor activist; realized Americans didn't want "social revolution", just economic success and a more comfortable lifestyle.  His philosophy reflects the lesson that pragmatism works better than ideology, both for creating technology and for effecting social justice.  Author claims that doctrinaire free-market capitalism in the aftermath of WWII were the beginning of the end for Gompers's progress, because "in a society without social justice and with a free market ideology, guns, greed and jails are bound to win".
• Religion should be enlisted since in the past it has had a profound role in shaping people's ethics.

Flaws/Comments

• I can't agree with the argument for religion, even though very little time is spent on it.  Institutional religion has too many ill side effects and it's not clear the "ethics" part can be cleanly separated out, but the author doesn't mention this problem at all.
• Various ramblings on the future (10, 100, 1K, 10K, 100K, 1M years) are fairly pedestrian.  The Gaia stuff is illogical--author argues that perhaps our future on Earth depends on "understanding and preserving Gaia", but by definition Gaia preserves itself and it is only we who are at risk.  This argues for either adapting to Gaia or regulating it, not "preserving" it.
• One interesting proposition: if humans become a transplanetary/immortal/etc race and eventually speciate, the "original humans" could stay on Earth and foster and preserve "traditional human values".  Unfortunately the author never suggests how to answer the question of what "traditional human values" are.
• Some good anecdotes and large-scale lessons, but on the whole, rambling and to be taken with major grains of salt, since the hypotheses proposed (about social justice, the ethical role of religion vs. its power to stifle inquiry, etc.) are worth a book in themselves.