Props of science: will scientific and technological progress stop? Is it possible to stop scientific progress by ethical prohibitions.
Scientific and technological progress is a brand new, shiny high-tech shackle, although it makes human life easier, but does not free from greed, envy, anger, loneliness, fear and other monsters hiding among the intricacies of nerve networks, like spiders, and, accordingly, phenomena, which they generate. However, to the question: “Should scientific and technological progress be stopped?”, I will answer unequivocally: no. Why? Now I will explain.
Let's start with the fact that, obviously, scientific and technological progress does not have a specific goal and, in general, a goal as such. Goal-setting is a property of a person, but not of society, in the same way, the elements of a system have their own goals, and their totality is completely different. It is impossible to personify social phenomena like our ancestors covered with dust of centuries, erroneously or intentionally, in order to gain hope for an imaginary forgiveness that endows nature with reason. Scientific and technological progress is rather a consequence of human activity, a layering of derivatives of greed and vanity, delusions and madness, sometimes philanthropy and scientific blindness, which does not have a solid core. Not a beam, not even a broken line, but a discordant mountain of human ideas. They are united only by the fact that every invention and idea is born into the world by the desire for profit, and not only material. Benefit here should be understood as something that can bring satisfaction to a person. Thus, it is quite difficult to determine where scientific and technological progress leads, it seems to me, it is almost impossible.
If we nevertheless decide to maintain scientific and technological progress, we need to know what we are giving up and what we are gaining. First of all, progress entails the emergence of tools that greatly facilitate human life, such as the latest devices for diagnosing diseases, prostheses, electricity, etc. In addition, the accumulation of wealth is accelerating, which increases the amount of goods available to a person. However, an increase in the number of goods leads to an increase in desires and needs: today a person can no longer do without a smartphone and constant access to information. Do not forget about the improvement of weapons, killing machines. Again, two sides.
This begs the question: is it possible to stop scientific and technological progress at all? Of course you can. It is enough just to destroy all the people to the last. A trifling task. No other way. After all, invention, collection, systematization and accumulation of information are almost fundamental properties of a person. Even without idealizing human nature and considering people exclusively as social animals, it is easy to see the benefit in science and technology. Simplifying the process of obtaining food, providing more reliable protection of the population from external threats and other civilized delights turn a person into the "king of beasts". So how can people turn down such a huge advantage? Therefore, as long as there is a person, there is scientific and technological progress. In addition, people compete not only with the environment, but also with each other. How can one state capture more territories and become even richer? Invent better weapons, of course. How to increase the competitiveness of a product by reducing the cost of its production? Invent new means of production, of course. Endless struggle, competition will not let scientific and technological progress stop and will start it again and again.
So, scientific and technological progress is an inevitable process that necessarily accompanies the development of mankind in time. Creation is a fundamental property of human nature, the existence of which is determined by competition, as it helps to gain an advantage over other people in the struggle for a better life, in modern conditions. Therefore, it is not possible to stop scientific and technological progress, even if there is an urgent need for it.
We have not learned how to protect ourselves from earthquakes and hurricanes, travel faster or live longer. But it's nothing...
The 21st century turned out to be completely different from the forecasts of fifty years ago. There are no intelligent robots, no flying cars, no cities on other planets. Worse, we are no closer to such a future. Instead, we have iPhone, Twitter and Google, but is this an adequate replacement? However, they still use the operating system that appeared in 1969.
More and more people are beginning to suspect that something is wrong. One gets the impression that technological progress, if not stopped, then at least failed. Frivolous gadgets change like clockwork every month, and significant problems, the solution of which seemed close and inevitable, are forgotten for some reason. Writer Neil Stevenson has tried to articulate these doubts in his article "Innovative Fasting":
“One of my first memories is sitting in front of a bulky black and white TV and watching one of the first American astronauts go into space. I saw the last launch of the last shuttle on a widescreen LCD panel when I was 51 years old. I have watched the space program decline with sadness, even bitterness. Where are the promised toroidal space stations? Where is my ticket to Mars? We are unable to repeat even the space achievements of the sixties. I'm afraid this indicates that society has forgotten how to cope with really difficult tasks.
Stevenson is echoed by Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and Facebook's first outside investor. An article he published in the National Review is bluntly titled "Future's End":
“Technological progress is clearly lagging behind the lofty hopes of the fifties and sixties, and this is happening on multiple fronts. Here is the most literal example of progress slowing down: our movement speed has stopped increasing. The centuries-old history of the rise of ever faster modes of transport, which began with sailboats in the 16th and 18th centuries, continued with the development of railways in the 19th century and the advent of automobiles and aviation in the 20th century, was reversed when the Concorde, the last supersonic aircraft, was scrapped in 2003. passenger plane. Against the background of such regression and stagnation, those who continue to dream of spaceships, vacations on the moon and sending astronauts to other planets of the solar system seem to be aliens themselves.
This is not the only argument in favor of the theory that technological progress is slowing down. Its supporters offer to look at least at computer technology. All fundamental ideas in this area are at least forty years old. Unix will be 45 years old in a year. SQL was invented in the early seventies. At the same time, the Internet, object-oriented programming and a graphical interface appeared.
In addition to examples, there are also numbers. Economists evaluate the impact of technological progress on the rate of growth in labor productivity and changes in the gross domestic product of countries where new technologies are being introduced. Changes in these indicators during the 20th century confirm that the suspicions of pessimists are not unfounded: growth rates have been falling for several decades.
In the United States, the impact of technological change on gross domestic product peaked in the mid-1930s. If US labor productivity continued to grow at the rate set in 1950-1972, then by 2011 it would have reached a value that is one third higher than in reality. In other countries of the first world, the picture is about the same.
“It is not so much the slowdown in growth after 1972 that is to be explained, but the reasons for the acceleration that occurred around 1913 and ushered in the glorious sixty-year period between the First World War and the early seventies, during which productivity growth in the United States outstripped anything observed before or after those times."
Gordon believes that the surge was caused by a new industrial revolution that took place during this period. The end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century saw electrification, the spread of internal combustion engines, breakthroughs in the chemical industry, and the emergence of new types of communication and new media, in particular cinema and television. Growth continued until their potential was used up to the end.
But what about electronics and the Internet, which have become truly massive only in the last twenty years? From Gordon's point of view, they had a much smaller impact on the economy than electricity, internal combustion engines, communications and chemicals - the "big four" of the industrial revolution of the early 20th century - and therefore much less important:
“The Big Four has been a much more powerful source of productivity growth than anything that has emerged in recent times. Most of the inventions that we see now are "derivatives" from old ideas. VCRs, for example, brought television and cinema together, but the fundamental impact of their introduction cannot be compared to the effect of the invention of one of their predecessors. The Internet, too, basically leads to the replacement of one form of entertainment by another - and nothing more.
Peter Thiel is of the same opinion: the Internet and gadgets are not bad, but by and large they are still small things. This idea is succinctly expressed in the motto of his investment firm Founders Fund: "We dreamed of flying cars, but got 140 twitter characters." A column in the Financial Times, co-written by Thiel and Garry Kasparov, expands on the same idea:
“We can send photos of cats to the other side of the world using our phones and watch old movies about the future on them, while being in a subway built a hundred years ago. We can write programs that realistically simulate futuristic landscapes, but the real landscapes around us have hardly changed in half a century. We have not learned how to protect ourselves from earthquakes and hurricanes, travel faster or live longer.”
On the one hand, it is difficult to disagree with this. Nostalgia for a simple and optimistic retro future is completely natural. On the other hand, the complaints of pessimists, despite the numbers and graphs they cite, do not fit well with the crazy reality outside the window. It really doesn't look much like the dreams of the sixties, but the resemblance to outdated dreams is a dubious criterion for determining value.
Ultimately, futuristic spaceships and flying cars are pretty simple ideas. Both are just extrapolations into the future of what existed in the past. A flying car is just a car, and a starship with Captain Kirk at the head is a fantastic variation on a World War II warship.
— Autonomous self-driving cars capable of driving on ordinary roads without human assistance are successfully being tested. Local governments in the United States are already debating what to do with them: driverless cars do not fit well into normal traffic rules.
— The lion's share of stock exchange operations are not carried out by people, but by special programs that make thousands of transactions per second. At this speed, they are uncontrollable, so most of the time they act on their own. Unforeseen combinations of algorithms have already led to instant market crashes, and even lengthy investigations do not always find the cause of what happened.
- The main weapon of the United States in the Middle East has quietly become unmanned aerial vehicles controlled by satellite from another continent. And this is the technology of the nineties. In laboratories, autonomous robots are being tested with might and main - both flying and ground.
- Google has released electronic glasses that automatically find and show the user the information that, in their opinion, is most useful to him at the moment. In addition, the glasses are able to record everything that he sees at any time. Oh yes, they also have a built-in voice translator for many languages.
- 3D printers, on the one hand, have fallen in price to such a level that almost everyone can buy them, and on the other hand, they have reached a resolution at which it is possible to print objects with details of about 30 nanometers. In order to photograph printed matter, an electron microscope is required.
“The very idea that an ordinary video cable can hide inside a full-fledged, but very small computer running Unix, until recently would have seemed absurd. Now this is a reality: it is easier for developers to take a ready-made single-chip system than to develop a specialized microcontroller.
This is not a list of the most amazing things, but only what lies on the surface itself. In fact, this list can be continued indefinitely - especially if, in addition to information technologies that are close to us, we touch on biotechnology, materials science and other rapidly developing fields of knowledge that are not very clear to a person from the street.
Boring? This is because the big is seen from a distance, and we got to the very epicenter. Habit prevents us from noticing how strange things are going on around us.
To call all this trifles that do not deserve special attention, as Thiel does, will not work. Each of these inventions, no matter how frivolous at first glance, has (or at least can have) a huge impact on the way people live.
See for yourself. What will be the impact of the spread of Google Glass? Even if you do not take into account the fact that they are constantly studying their owner in order to better understand what information and when he may need it (and this in itself is a very interesting direction in the development of interfaces), remember the camera built into the glasses. Add to it facial recognition and Internet search - and think about how this will affect the daily life of the user of such a device. And the possibility of creating a continuous video archive of one's own life (this is also called lifelogging)? It is no coincidence that some are already sounding the alarm and calling for a ban on Google Glass - realizing that if such a device becomes popular, it will be harder to ignore than mobile phones today.
The self-driving car is also a blow to the traditional way of life. All the consequences that the general availability of such technology can lead to are difficult not only to enumerate, but also to predict. Here are a couple of popular predictions. First, a self-driving car does not have to wait for the driver in the parking lot. It may well serve not one, but several people. This, in turn, will lead to a complete change in the very approach to car ownership. Secondly, robots behave on the road much more accurately than people. This means that hundreds of thousands of accidents per year, ending in the death of people, can be forgotten. Finally, do not forget about the time that people spent behind the steering wheel. It will be freed up for other activities.
Even such an ordinary thing as a cable with a built-in computer is not a trifle at all. There are no trifles in such cases at all. The effect of reducing the cost of existing technology is often completely unpredictable and can outweigh the effect of new inventions. What will be the consequences of further reductions in the cost and power consumption of single-chip computers that can run Unix? Read about ubiquitous computing and sensor networks.
Mobile phones, which Thiel dismissed so easily, do indeed allow you to "send photos of cats to the other side of the world." But not only cats. With the same ease, they allow gigabytes of classified information to be copied and published on the Internet, causing an international diplomatic scandal. And frivolous means of communication like Facebook, Blackberry text messaging, and Twitter with its 140 characters reduce the complexity of mass communication by reducing the need to consciously organize joint actions of groups of people. Even the iPhone, the exemplary symbol of mindless consumerism, turns out to be a very important milestone upon closer inspection: it was he who spurred the development of a new generation of computers after a quarter of a century of stagnation.
Why is this not reflected in economic indicators? Most likely, it finds, but not as expected by economists. Previous industrial revolutions led to increases in productivity and the emergence of new industries. This one, on the contrary, makes entire industries unviable and pushes a lot of things out of the money economy.
The producers of easy-to-copy content were the first to feel this - the music industry, the media, book publishers, Hollywood. Their business models are devoured on both sides by widespread illegal copying and a huge number of amateurs who suddenly have the opportunity to compete on equal terms with professionals for the attention of viewers.
Look in the folders where you keep pirated movies and music and calculate how much you would have to shell out for their legal versions. This is the amount that economists failed to take into account when they calculated the gross domestic product per capita. The value of the product that you have consumed has not been diminished by the fact that you have not paid a penny for it, but it has been taken out of the brackets of the economy.
Every successful technology company wipes out the potential profits of thousands of competitors in the same market by traditional methods. Craigslist almost single-handedly ruined the paid classifieds market that had fed American newspapers for a hundred years. No traditional encyclopedia can compete with Wikipedia, which formally is not even a commercial organization. AirBnB is knocking the chair out from under the hotel industry (only in some niches so far, but it will be), and Uber has made life much more difficult for traditional taxis. And so on and so forth.
Meanwhile, industrial robots, which have been delayed due to the availability of cheap labor in Southeast Asia, are becoming more attractive. Foxconn, one of China's largest electronics makers, is threatening to replace hundreds of thousands of workers with machines. If things go like this, the labor market will follow other markets that are being killed by new technologies, and economists will have to invent some other economy.
At least then, for sure, no one will come to complain that progress has ended. It didn't end, it just went the wrong way.
"TOMORROW". Our guest today is Sergey Zagatin, editor-in-chief of the Internet newspaper Zhurnalistskaya Pravda. The topic of our conversation is the technological singularity. In the West, over the past decade, this philosophical concept, the author of which is the American inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil, has been very actively promoted. He once said that soon, literally in 2030, some kind of super-entity should arise, a surrogate for the all-planet superintelligence. Kurzweil saw such a singularity in the image of artificial intelligence, an all-pervading network, a kind of intelligence that will replace everything in the future - culture, science, history, the meaning of the future, after which humanity should move to some secondary role, giving way to the further evolution of an artificial super-entity, as biological life itself at one time was subordinated to the human mind.
But speaking about such a singularity and its objective prerequisites, we must also say something else: at this moment, a gaping emptiness arises in the goal of mankind. Because it turns out that artificial intelligence should not only work for us, but also “there are all the goodies”: and not only in the material sense (here, most likely, no one will die of hunger), but first of all - in part development and evolution. It turns out that humanity at the moment of singularity suddenly realizes itself secondary and unnecessary. What is your opinion: how will scientific and technological progress develop in the near future, which, it seems, should lead us to these gaping peaks? And how possible is the Kurzweil singularity at all - are we not inventing ourselves again a false “god from the machine”?
Sergey ZAGATIN. Let's say right away: Raymond Kurzweil was by no means the "inventor" of the technological singularity. They started talking about it as a philosophical concept back in the 1970s and 80s against the backdrop of the successes of science and technology - when it became clear that each next human invention requires less and less time to create, implement and widely disseminate. This is generally a feature of any non-equilibrium thermodynamic systems that develop with an evolutionary crisis. And in general, humanity is not unique here - the singularity can be described both by the process of sudden crystallization of a supercooled liquid, and by the process of a nuclear explosion as a result of a chain reaction. The mathematical and philosophical picture will be the same: first, exponential development, then a gap and a crisis comparable in suddenness to an explosion, and then a transition to a different state, atypical from the point of view of the previous development of events. Therefore, observing such an explosive growth of technology throughout the 20th century, the concept of technological singularity was recognized and described quite a long time ago, long before Kurzweil. Here he acted rather as a popularizer of the “boring” philosophical ideas of Prigogine, Forrester or Meadows.
"TOMORROW". But there have always been critics of the singularity idea. I remember that in the 90s, against the backdrop of the collapse of the USSR, a different concept even prevailed in the Western world - they say, "everything has stopped, there will be no more revolutions." Francis Fukuyama then wrote a programmatic book with such criticism - The End of History, in which he said that nothing else would happen in the world.
Sergey ZAGATIN. Well, I must say, no one really believed in the “end of history” even then. Indeed, in the 1990s, the NTP did not stop at all, rather, on the contrary, it went by leaps and bounds. It was then that everyone realized that Moore's law was in effect, which showed a doubling of the number of transistors in processors every few years. Everything in that period, as it should be within the framework of an evolving non-equilibrium system, developed. There were very great achievements in science and technology - despite the apparent calm in world politics. And, as a result, the end of the story turned out to be a fiction. History lived up to all expectations - and went forward again. Rather, the world then overestimated some other aspects of development - for example, we remember what overheated expectations were about the role of the Internet in business, sales and everyday life.
"TOMORROW". Yes, "the refrigerator will ring the iron and arrange how to iron the pants."
Sergey ZAGATIN. Exactly. This approach ended in the collapse of dot-coms, about which now many Apple or Elon Musk fans don’t know anything, because then they literally “went to the potty,” after all, this happened back in the late 1990s. And it is precisely because of this that I will criticize the “inevitability” of the technological singularity. Because the exponential graph itself looks beautiful, but there are a couple of things that make this technological singularity a pipe dream. This is my main fear that “we built and built”, but in the end we built not a singularity, but a “civilization of threes”.
"TOMORROW". That is, we were dumb before the arrival of the singularity? But this must be proven. They will object to us: “we studied well at school, what are you telling us about C students!”.
Sergey ZAGATIN. Maybe everyone studied well at school, but in total we built a civilization of C students, because many engineering solutions, for example, of the 1980s, seem now to be an unattainable peak. What single scientists did, armed only with a slide rule and a simple calculator, today entire research institutes with 3D modeling programs and supercomputers cannot repeat. That is, the abundance of artificial intelligence rots our natural intelligence - just look at the development of programming itself, when we went from machine codes and assembler to object-oriented programming, moreover, purely visual: “took, dragged, clicked”. For a visual interface, you can put any "man from the street", even a trained monkey - and they will be "programmers" by today's standards. But all such unfortunate programmers, compared to the monsters of the 1980s of training, are pure three-year-olds, they would not have been allowed to the computers of that time, and they would not have understood how to work with them.
"TOMORROW". Okay, but sometimes they say: “Okay, we have a lot of Cs, but in general we have become smarter, we have become more powerful. Our civilization has such superpowers that even C students will suit us! We will put them like monkeys on buttons to press, and in another place we will put creators such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk. And they'll come up with something new." Such a scenario is even possible - or not?
Sergey ZAGATIN. Let's immediately put the situation on the "sinful earth". None of the ones you listed are any “creator” - they, like Kurzweil, only took ready-made concepts and “pushed” them to people, the same “triple” users, for whom a smartphone is a scientific and technological revolution. Therefore, let's be honest: today's Western civilization has largely lost its historical goal, replacing it with beautiful pictures and videos. Where did all the gigahertz and terabytes that became possible after the computer revolution of the 1980-2000s go?
For example, now everyone is fussing with the idea of a reusable first stage in a launch vehicle, which Musk is pushing to the market. But at the same time, few people asked themselves: are there any reserves at all in the very concept of launching into orbit on chemical propulsion? After all, by and large, vertical takeoff on a chemical rocket exhausted itself back in the 80s, Musk today is doing what they did on the Space Shuttle, designing it in the 70s. There are many alternative concepts for launching cargo into near-Earth orbit: launch platforms with electromagnetic acceleration, a “space tram” with holding a tunnel through the atmosphere with superconducting magnets, there are engine projects for three media - but these are not projects for Musk, he understands that in such projects, he has no competence. He's a PR manager, not an engineer. So he takes the designs from the 1970s and sells them back to the C's. At the same time, in Russia, such an engine for three media, which operates in the troposphere, in the stratosphere and in space, has actually been created - this is the Solodovnikov engine. He is being brought up and tested - and I have no doubt that in the current situation the Ministry of Defense will "press" him. This will be both innovation and revolution - and not all Musk's fashion projects.
"TOMORROW". But now the question arises: do people actually want to go to space? The same people, even though we call them “C”s, say: we need cats, we need Kardashian or Lopez bulges, go away with your space!
Sergey ZAGATIN. No, people want to go to space, people dream of space. It is these feelings that Musk exploits - after all, he understands a lot about advertising and the mass unconscious. But the problem is that he's doing it for the needs of a generation spoiled by computer games, a generation of C's with clip thinking. Who are used to the fact that every space station has a brothel and a bar, as we are always shown in American fiction. And therefore, in the Musk project with a brothel and a bar, you need to fly to Mars. This was seriously written in his presentation. Musk takes into account the mass unconscious and the level of consciousness of the masses - to explain to these people that there is physics, there is mathematics, there are a lot of restrictions in flight, when you will not be up to the bar - it is quite difficult. For example, I have a large number of friends - Tesla fans, fans of electric cars. I'm already tired of listening: "electric cars will change the world, they are environmentally friendly, they charge quickly ...". I begin to explain that Tesla has more than 10,000 AA lithium batteries, in the manufacture of which every conceivable environmental standard is violated, they are made in China, pouring all the waste into a nearby river. Not to mention how stupid the concept of such a battery from separate “fingers” looks on a serial electric car.
And then I ask a simple question: guys, let's take the New York metropolitan area. For example, out of 20 million inhabitants, at least 150 thousand have decided to buy an electric car. A car is built to be driven. Right? And now imagine how 150,000 users simultaneously plug their Tesla into a 40-amp outlet. We multiply 40 amperes by 150 thousand such happy owners.
"TOMORROW". And we get a completely insane figure.
Sergey ZAGATIN. We get that the one-time consumption in the city increases by 20%. Blackout. Not only New York takes off, but also Canada, because it is very busy there.
"TOMORROW". Well, so they promise us that Kurzweil's superintelligence will be responsible for everything, and not the "triple" dispatcher. And the superintelligence will say: "you - charge, and you - wait."
Sergey ZAGATIN. All superintelligence is broken down by the fact that Manhattan and the Bronx are actually powered by one 380-volt power line, and there is nowhere to put new generating capacities and power lines. This means that it is necessary to include the most severe administrative resource - but how can this be done in modern America, which is all built on the primacy of "unlimited freedom"? After all, there is no Stalin there, but there is a mass of well-armed mentally unstable men who know their rights. Therefore, the question of even 150,000 electric vehicles in a single New York is a question of hundreds of billions of dollars. Therefore, this is not a program of action, but a simulation of moving forward. That is why I say that the technological singularity does not come and will not come, because in the modern world we see in many ways the simulation of activity, and not the creation of a new one. Remember the magazine "Technology - Youth" of the 80s?
"TOMORROW". “Technology for youth”, “Young technician”, “Chemistry and life”, “Science and life”…
Sergey ZAGATIN. Every year, every month then in "Technology - Youth", until the collapse of the USSR, they published a message about more and more high-temperature superconductivity. Then there was a massive revolution in superconducting ceramics - and by all accounts, we should have superconducting ceramics at room temperature today. But the world has come up against two points: the physical limitations of the very high-temperature conductivity and ... the misuse of funds allocated for science. There were a lot of publications about this, where they analyzed the total inefficiency of the grant system, which was decided to “move science forward” just at the end of the 1980s.
And there are many such examples. There is a well-known story with the American agency DARPA, which frightened the townsfolk with terrible running robots, which they created for eight years, and then closed the project due to internal problems, primarily organizational ones. And in Russia, the same problem was solved in a year and a half with much less funding.
Or, for example, the concept of the terrible destroyers of the Zamvolt type, which the Pentagon frightened the world with recently. Like, we will build 30 stealth destroyers that will approach the coast and mow everything 300 km inland with a strike of electromagnetic guns. The problem here is in the very concept of the “invisible destroyer” with an electromagnetic gun that completely unmasks it, the very first shot of which can be aimed at the destroyer even from the Moon, even from Jupiter. The concept is completely contrary not only to physics, but also to common sense - and this is again billions and billions of dollars. And the Zamvolts did it because it was “beautiful” and “cool”, someone in the Pentagon liked to shoot at the Russians from over the horizon in their dreams. Such a beautiful future of the nation can be shown!
But with superconducting ceramics... What is superconducting ceramics? These are, first of all, superaccumulators. What are superaccumulators? A large degree of freedom for any individual.
"TOMORROW". And yet, the question is: who ruined superconducting ceramics: “triples”, misuse of funds, or some kind of “elite conspiracy” that you hinted at?
Sergey ZAGATIN. The background and the plot are not so important - the result is important. Today we have neither high-temperature superconductivity nor superaccumulators. Instead, people are being sold smartphones and electric cars that will not change the world in any way - because they simply cannot. And most of the scientific research now is, in fact, a device from a Soviet joke - a “nichevometer”. After all, real equipment looks unsightly, so in order for the inspection commission to be filled with the importance of the moment, in the USSR, a remote control with buttons and lights, a device with arrows were often put on display for such equipment. And now in science only this props have remained. This is sad.
"TOMORROW". Okay, let's assume that Western civilization has indeed reached a dead end. But there are the Chinese, they seem to be building some kind of alternative model to the Western world under the strict guidance of the Communist Party of China? They have Soviet-style five-year plans with clear objectives. To what extent is the Chinese structure of society, consciousness, ready to pick up the fallen banner of the Western world, which is already lying, and the trio have let it into the “litter for cats”?
Sergey ZAGATIN. It's generally difficult. According to my feelings, the most creative nation of the East is, of course, the Koreans. Today, the same Samsung has moved from copying to expansion, to the development of its own unique technologies. A very interesting question is what will happen to the Korean nation if the North and the South unite, converge. Because, speaking about the South, which created Samsung, Daewoo and a huge number of other creative mega-corporations, we must not forget that the North, in conditions of complete isolation and total blockade, was able to create missile weapons and a nuclear bomb - projects no less ambitious and no less technological.
On the other hand, the Chinese, of course, have a huge potential for industriousness, a powerful industrial and scientific potential, which they are now actively building up, trying to make up for almost half a century behind Russia and the West. Of course, one cannot take and develop a scientific school in two years. But they have a systematic understanding of what they will do next, a planned economy, an emphasis on science and industry, a northern ally in Russia, which will help China in resources and technology - in exchange for Chinese goods.
"TOMORROW". And this northern ally... When we say that Russia has its own path, its own history, its own approach, we always count on the uniqueness of the Russian people, the Russian character. But, on the other hand, we clearly see that the new generation, which was brought up in large metropolitan areas and especially, unfortunately, in both cosmopolitan capitals, is extremely westernized. It's all in the already mentioned "seals", in the worship of Musk and Apple, they are the ideal Russian "triples". Does Russia still have a unique essence of its own - or in the Russian bins are only "nichevometrs" on the ruined ruins of mega-aggregates of the Soviet era?
Sergey ZAGATIN. The issue is that Russia has now become part of the global world. It's pointless to deny it. We are so intertwined with the West that even attempts to rock the Russian boat from the western side look quite idiotic - it is not Russia that suffers from them, but in many respects it is the West. On the other hand, this is also a danger for Russia: we have always had our own distinctive technological culture, which is now also intertwined with the Western one and draws in not only the best of it, but also all Western vices. Here we must take into account that we historically grew up with the West in fact on the same roots, and it depends on ourselves how critically we will perceive a branch of humanity that is related to us, but still separate from us. This is already a question of the reasonableness of the filter, which would pass all the best, but delay vices and errors.
"TOMORROW". Does this mean that there is still hope for the world, and for Russia in particular, to survive the future singularity and not slide into the “new Middle Ages”, trying to hide from the inevitable, producing a “generation of threes”? After all, usually those people who criticize the Kurzweil singularity do not believe in technological progress, they immediately say: “there is no progress”, “everything is going downhill, and especially in Russia”. Like, we are sliding into the new Middle Ages, where new landlords will monitor their serfs, but already through smartphone applications. What can we expect in 10-15 years?
Sergey ZAGATIN. I think we need to survive this inevitable crisis of the next 10-15 years with honor and common sense, taking into account all the problems that I already mentioned in our conversation. When the current global project collapses, Russia needs to win, with people who will be ready to stand apart from the ruins of the old world, and who will have more of their own competencies than a “solid C grade”. There will be enough C students in the new world without them. And we are now creating a fortress of Eurasia both politically and economically. That is, two-thirds of the world's population - this will be the largest market.
"TOMORROW". But for this it will be necessary to take India and China into these "two-thirds", right?
Sergey ZAGATIN. Yes, Russia needs to rely not only on itself, but also on other Eurasian countries, on India and China. Russia may well become a super-arbitrator in such a new world - namely, a "judge", but by no means a "taskmaster" or "boss". After all, the Russians have never built relations with the outside world from a position of strength - this is our uniqueness and our chance in the world of the future. And there the singularity will come, but here we will already think together how to survive it. It will be interesting, that's for sure.
Interviewed by Alexey Anpilogov
Alexey Anpilogov
According to the forecasts of a number of scientists, civilization is on the verge of a technological leap that can lead to a global catastrophe. Progress has become so rapid that we simply do not have time to learn new things. And in the period from 2020 to 2040, technologies will be obtained over which a person can generally lose control. Here are the most likely scenarios for such a "end of the world."
The robots are coming!
In the WEF report, one of the main risks of the XXI century. called the development of robotics. For economists, this causes a real panic: people will begin to lose their jobs en masse. There are forecasts that almost every second specialty is threatened by automation, and, say, in Russia, cars by 2024 will leave every fourth inhabitant unemployed. Recently, a Russian bank announced that thanks to the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, it will be able to free up about 3,000 jobs. The technology that threatens us with unemployment is called machine learning. AI, analyzing arrays of accumulated data, is able to self-learn and imitate human thinking. And robots are superior to people in endurance, accuracy and speed of action, they do not allow marriage. They are ready not only to stand behind the conveyor, but also to take away jobs from teachers, doctors, cashiers, waiters, policemen, lawyers, accountants. There will be millions of dissatisfied people on the street. But that's not the worst...
“Due to the fact that AI will be able to self-learn indefinitely, and its power will grow like an avalanche, it will create its own mechanisms of influence on the world,” I am convinced Alexey Turchin, futurist, researcher of global risks. - It will not be difficult for him to take control of any computer networks, including government control systems and the Internet. It is possible that in the course of rapid development, he will begin to perceive people as a threat - a person simply will not be in his system of values. And he'll find a way to get rid of us. For example, with the help of controlled robots. Therefore, one of the tasks of scientists is to prevent the very appearance of an artificial superintelligence that is unfriendly to people.”
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greenhouse disaster
The past 2016 was the warmest year in the history of climate observations: the average temperature of the Earth's surface was almost a degree higher than in the middle of the last century!
Most scientists believe that the cause of global warming (during the 20th century the temperature of the lower layers of the atmosphere rose by 0.8 ° C, which is very fast for natural processes) is human activity. Technological progress is associated with more and more fuel combustion, and it increases the content of greenhouse gases (water vapor, carbon dioxide and methane) in the atmosphere, which lead to an increase in temperature. And although now the threat does not seem significant to us, the rate of heating is increasing year by year. Climatic anomalies provoke migration and social cataclysms - people in some regions of the Earth are gradually deprived of food and water. It is worth thinking about the fate of the descendants: due to climate change, many biological species, including humans, may disappear in 200-300 years!
One of the hypotheses describing how this will happen is proposed by the Russian scientist, physicist Alexei Karnaukhov. “As soon as we started talking about global warming and the greenhouse effect, I decided to use equations to describe the relationship between the content of carbon dioxide in the air and temperature,” he says. - It was a traditional study, and I first used the term "catastrophe" in a mathematical sense. But when he built the model, he gasped: the word took on a literal meaning. With continued emissions into the atmosphere over the next two or three centuries, the temperature on Earth will rise by hundreds of degrees!”
Warming causes an avalanche-like effect: carbon dioxide and methane begin to be released from natural "storages" (the ocean, the earth's crust, permafrost, etc.), which makes it even warmer, and the process becomes irreversible. Calculations show that the planet's climate system is capable of moving into a new stable state in a couple of centuries. The temperature will be like on Venus: +500 °C. Life on Earth will become impossible.
gray slime
This scenario has been described Eric Drexler, nanotechnology pioneer, even 30 years ago. Miniature (cage-sized) robots made from nanomaterials go out of control and fill the entire planet, devouring biomass and turning it into gray goo.
“We are talking about nanorobots capable of self-reproduction, i.e., creating their own copies. Scientifically, they are called replicators, explains Alexey Turchin. - The most attractive environment for them is biomass, since it contains both carbon and energy that can be extracted through oxidation. Calculations show that uncontrolled nanorobots can process the entire biomass of the Earth (including people) in just two days! Mechanisms invisible to the eye, out of control, can covertly attack people, injecting them with toxins or penetrating the brain. Imagine that they fell into the hands of terrorists. What will it turn into?
The development of nanorobots is now being studied at specialized scientific conferences. Sooner or later they will appear. The trend is obvious: military equipment (combat drones, for example) is becoming smaller and smaller, and it is from this industry that the most promising scientific ideas and developments come out.
Fresh news on the topic: scientists from Bristol have created a robot that can eat living organisms and receive the energy it needs due to this. It is going to be used to clean water bodies. But what if he does not stop at eating bacteria and duckweed?
Virus in the garage
If at school you had an A in biology, and now you have a few hundred dollars in your pocket, you can set up a mini-laboratory in your garage or shed, including for creating new viruses. Biohacking is a hobby of independent amateur scientists that can turn into a new pandemic and infect all of humanity.
At the origins of the movement was U.S. postgraduate physicist Rob Carlson. He dreamed of making biotechnology accessible to the general public and was the first to set up a laboratory at his home. The example turned out to be contagious. Now biohackers are creating glowing yogurts, looking for a formula for a promising biofuel, and studying their own genomes. All the necessary equipment (including synthetic DNA samples) is bought via the Internet, and microscopes are made from cheap webcams.The problem is that the genetic codes of many viruses are freely available on the World Wide Web - Ebola, smallpox, Spanish flu. And if you wish, you can move from studying E. coli taken from your toilet bowl to constructing living cells with any given properties - viruses, bacteria, deadly pathogens. It is one thing to do this for fun and curiosity, and quite another for the purposes of blackmail and intimidation. Futurologists do not exclude such a scenario of the “end of the world”, when an illness that will wipe out a significant part of humanity will come from the laboratory of an amateur biologist.
In the US, the problem was recognized 10 years ago. The FBI has created a unit to counter biohacking. Biohackers have to explain what exactly they are doing and for what purpose.
Progress Savior
The same experts make a reservation: if humanity prevents the man-made "end of the world", then by the middle of the 21st century. it will enter a qualitatively new stage of evolution. Progress and technology will give people more freedom, bring an abundance of cheap goods and services. Yes, and the person himself will become different, sort of like ... not quite a person.
Cyborg or superhuman?
While some scientists are scaring the invasion of robots, others are arguing that machine intelligence, on the contrary, will save the economy. Automation makes goods cheaper, increases purchasing power, and creates jobs in other industries. In addition, robots take on routine work, and where creativity is needed, they cannot replace a person.
However, the person himself is increasingly merged with computer systems. This process cannot be stopped. “Already now there are services that predict our desires, and in the future everyone will have a personal electronic assistant,” I am sure Pavel Balaban, Director of the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. - Our brain will be maximally combined with a computer and various devices. Because of this, the speed of assimilation of new knowledge and the volume of memorized will increase. Cognitive abilities will increase and even additional sense organs will appear!
So, devices have been created that help to consider what lies outside the visible spectrum that we are used to. For example, to see what the food on the plate or the medicine in the package consists of. The Japanese implanted an apparatus for observing infrared and ultraviolet radiation. Our scientists from St. Petersburg have written a program that turns thoughts into music.
Human-robot fusion is already happening - in the form of "smart" prostheses and suits that increase muscle strength; all kinds of chips implanted under the skin and in the brain. For example, in the United States they made transferable tattoos, with which you can control your smartphone and computer, store and transfer data arrays. There is a forecast that by 2040 man and machine will become one: our body will be able to take any form formed by a cloud of nanorobots, and organs will be replaced by cybernetic devices.
Doctor in your pocket
“Smart” patches have already been developed that continuously measure blood glucose levels, and stickers that administer the necessary medications to the patient through the skin. There are implants that inject the drug into the body in portions, either according to a pre-compiled program, or according to a signal from outside.
Among the technologies that will have the greatest impact on our lives in the coming years, scientists name methods for diagnosing mental illness by speech and wearable biochemical laboratories on chips that will detect diseases at the earliest stages. Handheld devices will be able to diagnose diseases that are difficult to detect in the early stages - primarily cancer.
Nanorobots are being developed that can heal the body from the inside (for example, purify the blood) and even perform surgical operations! Russian scientists are even ready to give sight with the help of light-sensitive bacteria to completely blind people.
Cheap and environmentally friendly
Soon a person will learn to keep environmental pollution under control - sensitive sensors are being created for this. But the search for a new type of fuel is still necessary: from hydrocarbons in the XXI century. will have to refuse.
From January 1, all trains in Holland run on ... wind energy. No, they are not sailing - they are powered by electricity generated by wind turbines. One such “mill” provides a 200-kilometer train run for an hour.
A consortium to promote hydrogen as the fuel of the future was presented at the Davos Forum. It is absolutely environmentally friendly - when it is burned, water is formed. Maritime transport is gradually switching to hydrogen and liquefied gas, and in 2017 Germany will launch the world's first passenger train powered by hydrogen fuel. In developed countries (in Russia too), work is underway to create unmanned vehicles - a robomobile. It will most likely be electric. Modern electric cars already at the production stage are made with the expectation of autonomy. There is a forecast that people will soon stop buying cars and will use robot taxi services - this will be more cost-effective.
Church opinion
Vladimir Legoyda, Chairman of the Synodal Department for Church Relations with Society and the Media:
If the invention of electricity has become an absolute boon for man, then whether the information and technological breakthrough of recent years has become it is a big question. Today, both manual laborers and so-called white-collar workers are under attack. The Church will remind about the significance of a person, about what is the main thing in life.
