What if This is the Best it Gets?
There's an assumption common, I think, to everyone raised in the West, and perhaps everyone born: problems have solutions. We take it as given that problems, even if not yet solved, are in principle soluble, and no matter where you find yourself on the political spectrum, this assumption undergirds your conviction. Whether you think government is the solution or the problem, you're still thinking in terms of problems and solutions.
A question: What if we've solved all the problems that are soluble? Is it possible that we've gone to the limit of what human intelligence can achieve? Is it possible that we can't really make any more significant scientific breakthroughs, that human societies can't develop much beyond a certain point of development, that we're not capable of achieving something much beyond what we've already achieved? What if the remaining questions are just too hard for us?
I'm looking at my cat--who is beautiful and perfect, and highly intelligent for a cat, but not capable of composing lyric poetry. It is beyond her capacity. It is not what she is given to do. It is ridiculous to expect it.
What if achieving anything more requires gifts that we as a species simply don't have?
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Oct '10
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
Wasn't this kind of talk common in the 1970s, as well as the 1930s? I don't see any signs of this myself.
Apr '11
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
Claire, I must admit that I'd never thought that. I had always assumed that every problem has a solution - if not from human ingenuity, then ultimately God had a solution. To think otherwise depresses me and takes away any joy from the future. Do I sound naive?
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
Was it? I'd be curious to see examples. It would have been a reasonable thing to say about politics and economics in the 30s, but surely not about science.
Oct '11
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
Practically, I think it would mean a move from theory to application. If we know the limits of research, we would then start applying it to everyday life. So I think for the average person, things would continue to get better, at least right away.
Emotionally, we might lose hope, but we'd also feel some relief. Progress is exhausting. I was reading a Men's Health at the dentist a while back that asked "Are You In the Best Shape of Your Life?" I was in my best shape my sophomore year of college. I can maybe achieve it again, but probably not. It's a bit depressing knowing I won't run as fast as I used to, or achieve as much for my efforts, but I'm not under any pressure to run faster or be as much. I imagine it might be what people feel when they climb Mount Everest, looking down and thinking "This is as high as it gets." It might be depressing, but it might also be closure. They touched on some of this sentiment in the movie As Good As It Gets.
At least we would know we're not God.
Apr '11
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
Claire, one other thing I'd like to ask you if I may - what are your views towards God? I know your father (whose intellect I greatly admire) is agnostic or atheist. I think one's view of God might influence one's views of the limits of mankind.
I am a Christian and believe that we are created with amazing potential, being made in the "likeness of God". That likeness I believe is manifested in creativity and the ability to communicate (and other attributes) which I believe could be developed way beyond what they have been. On the other hand, our fallen (sinful) nature alway hampers us and spoils much of what we do.
May '10
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
The feline has not developed any further since it has no aspirations beyond primal instinct. The cat of the 21st Century is content to be in the same place as the cat of the 1st Century because no animal other than man thinks in the abstract. It can not conceive of space travel or curing disease and therefore would make no attempt at either.
America used to do great things when it thought about what was possible. Now we are bogged down by what is convenient, what buys votes and what consolidates political power. Crippled by this European disease we have become a small people regulated to small thoughts.
Oct '10
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
Claire Berlinski, Ed.
Was it? I'd be curious to see examples. It would have been a reasonable thing to say about politics and economics in the 30s, but surely not about science. · Nov 8 at 9:46pm
You may be right about science and the 1970s/30s. I thought you meant all three, science, politics, and economics. Still, I see a lot of evidence of scientific progress (especially in biosciences). When it comes to practical, real-world problems I think we do a pretty good job. I doubt we'll ever figure out how gravity works, but when it comes to important issues we humans seem to do pretty well.
Oct '10
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
Claire Berlinski, Ed.
Was it? I'd be curious to see examples. It would have been a reasonable thing to say about politics and economics in the 30s, but surely not about science. · Nov 8 at 9:46pm
Reaching back, the Patent Office was to be closed as everything worthwhile had already been invented in a earlier century. The perpensity for humans to adapt and grow is evident. One does not want to think some pinnacle has been reached in current porgress, save it feels like the human inventive spirit has just run out of gas or support.
Aug '10
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
People have been predicting the slowing of invention ever since 1843, when the head of the patent office told the president that he expected the rate of new patents to slow down because the easy stuff had been invented.
Rest assured, the pace of innovation is actually accelerating, not declining. Among the fields that are ripe for major breakthroughs and/or commercialization of new products:
That just scratches the surface, and doesn't include Rumsfeld's 'unknown unknowns' - the technologies of the future we can't even guess at yet because we haven't discovered the basic science behind them.
Don't worry - the world 20 years from now will be as different from today as today is from 1990.
Oct '10
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
"What if the remaining questions are just too hard for us?"
Are there a finite number of questions? Are there a finite number of problems? I think not.
Is there an answer for every question? Is there a solution for every problem? Not if there is an infinite number of questions and an infinite number of problems.
Apr '11
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
Claire Berlinski, Ed.
Was it? I'd be curious to see examples. It would have been a reasonable thing to say about politics and economics in the 30s, but surely not about science. · Nov 8 at 9:46pm
What kind of benefits do you expect from science? I'm pretty sure that the next iPhone will be even more charming than the current. I'm also pretty sure that we'll have made little progress regarding the nature of the soul when that model comes out. The Club of Rome, Paul Erlich, and similar voices were saying in the 70s that people's quality of life would dramatically decline (as your post does seem to suggest), despite the high likelihood of an improved version of Pong being developed. When the copper ran out, people wouldn't be able to play, anyway.
Apr '11
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
Not to worry, humans are the smartest things around at the moment but not for long. Memory density (as well as computational power, and other technology figures of merit) has increased by a factor of a million in the last thirty years and shows no signs of slowing down. (If you plot memory density wrt time on a log scale the curve is virtually a straight line) Google 'Moore's Law' and 'Ray Kurzweil' for more information on the subject.
Here is one of Ray's predictions (via Wikipedia, but based on extending the Moore's Law trend line)
2045: The Singularity
I think that technology will continue to increase exponentially and that advances in computer intelligence will have major implications for society and our abilities to solve our own problems long before 2045. You can see the very beginnings of the man/machine trend already with all of the social networking, ubiquitous mobile devices, iPads, laptop computers, etc.
Oct '10
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
James Of England
What kind of benefits do you expect from science? I'm pretty sure that the next iPhone will be even more charming than the current. I'm also pretty sure that we'll have made little progress regarding the nature of the soul when that model comes out. The Club of Rome, Paul Erlich, and similar voices were saying in the 70s that people's quality of life would dramatically decline (as your post does seem to suggest), despite the high likelihood of an improved version of Pong being developed. When the copper ran out, people wouldn't be able to play, anyway. ·
That sounds a lot like the "total factor productivity has stagnated since the 70s" crowd. Just because human progress refuses to be what we want it to be, doesn't mean it isn't happening. IPhones have a huge impact on the lives of the people who use them; they are immensely productive devices--you can use them for everything from taking notes in class to navigating traffic (and of course all the normal entertainment stuff people do with them). Did you know that IPads are being widely adopted by the medical profession?
Feb '11
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
Your cat isn’t capable of writing lyric poetry, but neither is your cat capable of regarding this as a problem.
There may come a time when the abilities of cats just aren’t up to dealing with the problems cats encounter, but this will not be a consequence of their having solved all the problems they are in principle capable of solving.
Some problems may not be soluble for human beings. Some of those insoluble problems may be our downfall. But nature has an overabundance of problems to throw at us. Ages and ages before we can ever exhaust all the soluble problems, we will run into the one or two fatal, insoluble problems.
Aug '10
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
Aside from new breakthroughs and new products, a big change we're going to see in the next decade will be the result of convergence. The internet, cell phones, tablet computers, GPS, cars, and other internet-enabled devices are starting to talk to each other, and that change is going to accelerate. This will enable whole new ways of organizing work, recreation, and society.
Nanotechnology alone could bring a materials revolution bigger than the one that occurred from the discovery of plastics. Carbon nanotubes are incredibly strong - orders of magnitude stronger than anything we have today. Strong enough to enable a 'space elevator' that could make access to space nearly free.
Carnegie Mellon just announced a breakthrough in carbon nanotube based solar cells. This new material is flexible and semi-transparent, and could be used as cloth in clothing or sandwiched inside double-pane windows, or placed on a hard substrate and used for making solar shingles. The next time you reshingle your house, you might be doing it with shingles that, when locked together on the roof, generate a significant portion of your electricity. Your next tent might generate its own light.
The best is yet to come.
May '10
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
Well, if scientific progress enabled humans to live in perpetuity and to conquer all diseases and disorders, then any additional breakthroughs would, by my standards, be trivial in comparison.
Oct '10
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
People think the IPhone and IPad (and similar devices) are toys. That's because in Western society we're used to advances in productivity (our standard of living) coming from fixed physical capital investment (new factories and new machines), not service sector productivity.
People forget that we have a service economy now, and these days productivity gains come from process and service innovation much more often than clever new robot-run factories. The IPhone and IPad may seem like toys, but they're very useful toys for making people more productive. Nurses, secretaries, retailers, small businessmen doing inventory--productivity gains in these groups matter much more than productivity gains in manufacturing, yet almost no one pays attention to this. After all, manufacturing represents only 10% of our GDP.
May '10
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
You're right in principle it's possible that at some point humans will reach the limit of our cognitive abilities, and the limits of the cognitive abilities of machines we are able to design to think for us. We will, possibly, not have the cognitive ability to design a machine that can design a machine, ad infinitum, with any more cognitive ability beyond a certain limit. This is consistent with Thomas Sowell's constrained vision and the finite capacity of the Earth to support human civilization.
But I don't think we're anywhere near that point, as many previous commenters have effectively pointed out.
Of course, history is not monotonic, "progress" is not inevitable, and human achievement is not one-dimensional. There are many ways in which human societies are advancing (communication, data processing and storage, travel, safety) and probably many ways in which we are regressing (academia, religion, morality, personal responsibility, finance).
Assuming we continue to regress in so many ways, we'll have plenty of opportunities to reinvent the wheel.
Edited on Nov 8, 2011 at 10:59pmFeb '11
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
I think all the optimism could be seriously misplaced. Technology needs to be maintained. We have satellites and cables connecting us to each other in wonderful ways. But a convergence of a few disasters could set us off on a downward spiral.
Are the dangers of an EMP attack real? If so, it is difficult to imagine the survivors of such an attack managing successfully to maintain modern technology in their scramble to survive.
Is there any reason to think that the more biomedical technology advances, the easier it will be for madmen to manufacture biological weapons?
Is there any evidence that society is capable of embracing an oppressive, anti-liberal regime? And, if so, do we expect that the deadly fruits of such a regime could not only stifle technological progress but nullify progress that has already been achieved (can the lights go out in a country that once had electricity)?
Aug '10
Re: What if This is the Best it Gets?
This sounds an awful lot like the attitude behind environmentalism, which seeks "sustainability"--defined basically as not allowing ourselves to do anything technological that we can't continue to do forever--because it can't imagine the solution to emerging problems, notwithstanding that we've always solved such problems in the past. The entire technological history of the human race is one unsustainable development after another, and it is our nature to find solutions as they become necessary. I'll bet on that continuing forever.
It is possible for human ingenuity to be limitless, in the sense that it will never bump up against a brick wall and cease to grow, yet be limited, in the sense that it cannot achieve the utopia of having solved all problems. This is in part because the number of problems to be solved is itself infinite, as new ones are being created as fast as the solutions are.